THUCYDIDES, historian of the Pelo ponnesian War; born in the deme Halimus most probably in 471 B. C.; was the son of Olorus and Hegesipyle, and was re lated to Miltiades and Cimon. An Athe nian of good family, he must have known Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Phi dias, Protagoras, Gorgias, and possibly Herodotus and iEschylus. He was fur ther possessed, either by inheritance or by acquisition through marriage, of gold mines in that part of Thrace lying oppo site the island of Thasos. We know from himself that he was one of the sufferers from the terrible plague of Athens, and also one of the few who recovered. He held military command, and he had under him an Athenian squadron of seven ships at Thasos, 424 B. c., when he failed to relieve Amphipolis, which fell into the hands of Brasidas. Condemned to death as a traitor, he took refuge in exile and retired to his Thracian estates. His exile enabled him to associate with Pelopon nesians quite as much as with the Athe nians; and he probably spent some time also in Sicily. According to his own ac count, he lived in exile 20 years, and probably returned to Athens after the destruction of its walls, in 404. How or when he died is unknown.
But he did not live long enough to revise book viii. or to bring his history down to the end of the war.
If Herodotus was "the father of his tory," Thucydides was the first of critical historians, and no better account of his methods can be given than is contained in his own words: "Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself or learned from others, of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they re membered or were interested in the ac tions of one side or the other." There is hardly a literary production of which posterity has entertained a more uni formly favorable estimate than the his tory of Thucydides. This high distinc tion he owes to his undeviating fidelity and impartiality as a narrator ; to the masterly concentration of his work, in which he is content to give in a few sim ple yet vivid expressions the facts which it must have often taken him weeks or even months to collect, sift, and decide upon; to the sagacity of his political and moral ob• arvations, in which he shows the keenest, insight into the springs of human action and the mental nature of man; and to the unrivaled descriptive power exemplified in his account of the plague of Athens, and of the Athenian expedi tion to Sicily. Often, indeed, does the
modern student of Greek history share the wish of Grote, that the great writer had been a little more communicative on collateral topics, and that some of his sentences had been expanded into para graphs, and some of his paragraphs into chapters. But this want cannot have been felt by the contemporaries of Thu cydides, while the fate of other ancient historians warns us that had his work, like theirs, been looser in texture, or less severely perfect, it would not have sur vived, as it has done, the wearing in fluence of time, or remained, in its own language, the ktema es aei—the "posses sion for ever"—it has proved to the world.
It has been reserved for the 19th cen tury to impeach the credibility, depre ciate the matter, and to condemn the style of Thucydides. As these indictments, however, usually conclude with the state ment that Thucydides remains neverthe less the greatest of historians, they might here be passed over in silence were it not in the first place that they serve to show that Thucydides' fame is proof against the solvents of modern criticism, and next that they help us to a more complete understanding of the qualities which have given to Thucydides' work such a wonderful hold over the intellects and imaginations of all his readers and critics. The attacks on Thucydides' credi bility have proceeded from Germany, but have met with little acceptance there, and have found only one English-speak ing follower, Professor Mahaffy. The most serious outcome of the aiscussion seems to be that Thucydides' knowledge of the topography of the Plata was de fective, and that his account of the siege is consequently in accordance with the situation rather as he conceived it than as it actually was. But, even if we ac cept this application of the methods of modern criticism, it must not be imagined that those methods have all the same ten dency. On the contrary, the actual treaty which Thucydides quotes in v. 47 has been discovered of late years, and con firms the accuracy and truth of the his torian in a most unexpected and startling manner. The exact amount of accuracy or inaccuracy in Thucydides' account of the siege of Plat= is matter of opinion; his accuracy in the matter of the treaty is not—it is beyond dispute. But, after all, it is not by tests such as these, wel come as they are, that we can form an adequate opinion on the credibility of Thucydides.