Thucydides was an Athenian who wrote an account of the Peloponnesian War (431404 bc). Very little is known about his personal life - he held a military command in the early years of the war (IV 104), was relieved of his command, and went into exile. He lived to see the end of the war (V 26), but died before he could finish his work which breaks off in mid-sentence in the final chapter. Book I includes matter which bridges the gap from where Herodotus' work ends (478 bc) to where the Peloponnesian War begins. These sections are among the trickiest in Greek historical writing, mostly owing to the way in which Thucydides arranged and composed his material so that his readers would draw (or not draw) certain conclusions. Ernst Badian elucidated Thucydides' methods in a series of articles (see Further Reading), and discussion must now proceed from that seminal work.
A case in point for the way in which Thucydides arranged material to serve a specific argument comes when he dates the Revolt of Naxos and the Battle of the Euryme-don in the mid-460s (Thuc. I 98-100). In his narrative he discusses three events in the following order: the Athenians' attack on Carystus, the Revolt of Naxos, and the Battle of the Eurymedon. But he dates the latter two events relative to the attack on Carystus only: Naxos revolts "after the events" at Carystus, and the Battle of the Eurymedon takes place "also after the events" at Carystus. When Thucydides wishes to express two events' contemporaneity, he does so with the phrase "at (about) the same time" (e. g., I 107), but here he chooses to say something entirely different. The point of his curious phrasing ("also after the events" at Carystus) indicates his departure from a chronologically arranged narrative. Assuming that the correct order of events was Carystus, then Eurymedon, then Naxos, if Thucydides had wished to switch the order of Eurymedon and Naxos without committing himself to an out-and-out lie, the only way to do it was to say that both took place after the attack on Carystus. Thucydides, by removing the Revolt of Naxos from its correct historical context after the Battle of the Eurymedon, made the revolt appear to take place while the war against the Persians was still going on.
He also added a piece of exposition by which he attempted to show that the allies became subjects of Athens through their own grievous fault - rather than through the Athenians' refusal to allow members of the League to leave after it had served its purpose. This view follows naturally from Thucydides' earlier thesis that the Athenians had been passive in their assumption of the leadership of the anti-Persian alliance a few years earlier (see above). Thucydides was, after all, an Athenian; and he was not above repainting his city's history in softer hues.
Athens. That thesis appears to be Thucydides’ personal contribution without any basis in his source material.
World History
