Thucydides, Plato, and Hellenistic Literature

Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE), an Athenian general exiled after a military failure in 424 BCE, wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the great conflict between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BCE that he lived through and left unfinished, breaking off in the narrative of 411 BCE. Where Herodotus ranges widely and tolerates the marvelous, Thucydides announces a far stricter method, aiming at a precise, critically verified, strictly political-military narrative free of what he dismisses as the "storytelling" that makes history merely pleasant to hear rather than useful; he claims to have relied on eyewitness testimony, cross-examined for accuracy, and to have composed the numerous speeches in the work, including Pericles's Funeral Oration, as what the speakers "would most probably have said," a methodological statement that has generated enormous debate about how much invention such speeches actually contain. Thucydides's analysis of the war's causes distinguishes between immediate pretexts and the "truest cause," the growth of Athenian power and the fear this produced in Sparta, an approach to structural, impersonal causation that has made the History a foundational text not only for historiography but for later realist political theory. His unflinching account of civil war at Corcyra and of the plague at Athens are further set-pieces often read as meditations on the fragility of civilization under extreme stress.