THUCYDIDES (0ovicv51,6ns), Athenian historian. Materials for his biography are scanty, and the facts are of interest chiefly as aids to the appreciation of his life's labour, the History of the Peloponnesian War. He was anciently believed to have been born in or about 471 B.C., but modern criticism inclines to a later date, about 46o (see Busolt, Gr. Gesch. iii., pt. 2, p. 621). Thucydides' father Olorus, a citizen of Athens, belonged to a family which derived wealth from the possession of gold-mines at Scapte Hyle, on the Thracian coast opposite Thasos. His supposed connection with Miltiades's family was presumed from a similarity of names (Olorus was the name of Miltiades's father-in-law), and rests on no surer evidence. It is plain, too, that the statement that his tomb was at Athens, a statement containing one manifestly anach ronistic detail, is not to be trusted. No one knew where or how he died. Even in antiquity there were three or four legends on the question, all of them obvious guesses. As to the date of his death, it cannot have been very long after his return to Athens either at, or shortly after the time of the Tyranny of the 3o.
The development of Athens during the middle of the 5th cen tury was, in itself, the best education which such a mind as that of Thucydides could have received. The expansion and consolida tion of Athenian power was completed, and the inner resources of the city were being applied to the embellishment and ennoblement of Athenian life (see CIMON ; PERICLES). Yet the History tells us nothing of the literature, the art or the social life under whose influences its author had grown up. The "Funeral Oration" con tains, indeed, his general testimony to the value and the charm of those influences. But he leaves us to supply all examples and de tails for ourselves. Beyond a passing reference to public "festi vals," and to "beautiful surroundings in private life," he makes no attempt to define those "recreations for the spirit" which the Athenian genius had provided in such abundance. He alludes to the newly-built Parthenon only as containing the treasury; to the statue of Athena Parthenos which it enshrined, only on account of the gold which, at extreme need, could be detached from the image ; to the Propylaea and other buildings with which Athens had been adorned under Pericles, only as works which had reduced the surplus of funds available for the war. He makes no reference to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; the architect Ictinus; the sculptor Pheidias; the physician Hippocrates; the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates. Herodotus, if he had dealt with this period, would have found countless occasions for in valuable digressions on men and manners, on letters and art. The difference between the methods of the two historians arises from the fact that Thucydides was writing of events which were con temporary with the audience for which he wrote, whereas Herodo tus dealt with the story of a war which had taken place 3o years before the time of his writing, and of preliminaries of that war which extended into an unstoried past.
The biography which bears the name of Marcellinus states that Thucydides was the disciple of Anaxagoras in philosophy and of Antiphon in rhetoric. There is no evidence to confirm this tradition. But Thucydides and Antiphon at least belong to the same rhetorical school and represent the same early stage of Attic prose. It is probable that both of them were fired with enthusiasm for that Sicilian Greek rhetoric with which Gorgias amazed the Athens of 427. Both writers used words of an antique or decidedly poetical cast ; both point verbal contrasts by insisting on the precise difference between terms of similar import ; and both use metaphors somewhat bolder than were congenial to Greek prose in its riper age. The differences, on the other hand, between the style of Thucydides and that of Antiphon arise chiefly from two general causes. First, Antiphon wrote for hearers, Thucydides for readers; the latter, consequently, can use a degree of con densation and a freedom in the arrangement of words which would have been hardly possible for the former. Again, the thought of Thucydides is often more complex than any which Antiphon un dertook to interpret ; and the greater intricacy of the historian's style exhibits the endeavor to express each thought'. Few things in the history of literary prose are more interesting than to watch that vigorous mind in its struggle to mould a language of mag nificent but immature capabilities. The obscurity with which Thucydides has sometimes been reproached often arises from the very clearness with which a complex idea is present to his mind, and his strenuous effort to present it in its entirety. He never sac rifices thought to language, but he will sometimes sacrifice lan guage to thought. A student may always be consoled by the re flection that he is not engaged in unravelling a mere rhetorical tangle. Every light on the sense will be a light on the words ; and when, as is not seldom the case, Thucydides comes victoriously out of this struggle of thought and language, having achieved per fect expression of his meaning in a sufficiently lucid form, then his style rises into an intellectual brilliancy (thoroughly manly, and also penetrated with intense feeling) which nothing in Greek prose literature surpasses. In one sense, a moral sense, Thucydides is unique among Greek authors. To him the "good" is not a term with the peculiar Greek connotation of it, but one which he uses with the same meaning which it possesses to-day.