dead in Book 2 portrays a society without conflict or tension, united in pursuit of an ideal, in contrast to
the pathological state of a city like Corcyra, torn apart by civil strife. In general he highlights the
occasions which raise such questions in their most crucial form. In Book 3, for instance, there are three
great set episodes, the question of how Athens should punish the Mytileneans for their revolt, the
question of how Sparta should deal with the captured Plataeans, and the story of the revolution at
Corcyra. In the first, the new morality of empire leads to the conclusion that it is more advantageous to
rule by kindness than by terror. In the second, the representatives of the old morality reject an appeal to
sentiment, and destroy the sacred city of the Persian Wars: they decide to liberate the Greeks through
terror. In the third, Thucydides explores the breakdown of trust and social order when a society is
entirely ruled by the new morality, and the only madness is to be a moderate.
Book 3 is the centre of the original history of Thucydides, which described the first part of the war and
ended at 5.24. Already he has shown himself ambivalent about the desirability of the world he portrays
as reality. In the second half of his work this unease, this sense of an 'anti-Thucydides in Thucydides', is
magnified. The reason lies in the logic of events: if the laws of politics which Thucydides has accepted
are laws of nature, then their full horror will be brought home in the greatest tragedy of all, the
destruction of Thucydides' own city of Athens; and the pessimism of the historian concerning human
nature will be finally justified in that fall. There are strong signs that Thucydides began to articulate the
second half of his history around the conception of a tragedy. In Book 5 the Athenians make an
unprovoked attack on the small island of Melos, and the Melians challenge the morality of their action in
a passage cast in dialogue form: the Athenians respond with the arrogance of a tyrannical city. The
episode in Thucydides is deeply influenced by the literary forms of Greek tragedy, and it also embodies
that deed of pride on the part of Athens which will lead to calamity in the Great Sicilian Expedition of
Books 6 and 7; the story of that expedition itself is told with a passion and an artistry which show
Thucydides' belief that it is the turning-point of the war: his own involvement in the telling of it is all the
more effective for being disguised. We do not know how Thucydides would have ended his story; in
particular we do not know how he would have explained why Sparta did not destroy Athens completely,
as she should surely have done on his theory: the problem for the historian is that history is not capable
of being an artistic unity, it is always being falsified by events. Thucydides' history demonstrates on the
one hand the moral development of an author experiencing the events he describes as a contemporary,
and on the other hand the impossibility of scientific history.
Thucydides' view of history was dominant in antiquity, as it is today. Each society gets the sort of
history it deserves. Machiavellism or Realpolitik is still seen as the only rational response in politics,
even when it leads to self-destruction. That is natural once Thucydides' characterization of history is
accepted, as being the realm of politics and war. The lesson is already there in Thucydides himself, that
a society which lives solely by such criteria will inevitably destroy itself.
Xenophon
History continues, and so must historians: that was the problem of the fourth century. The fact that
Thucydides was unfinished at first made it easier, as the examples of his continuators showed: one could
simply begin 'Some days later', at least attempting to reach the same standards of dispassionate accuracy.