Thucydides

Thucydides, son of Olorus, was born in Athens around 460 BC into a wealthy family with Thracian connections and the right to work gold mines on the Thracian coast opposite Thasos. His father's name is Thracian and royal, and he was probably related to Cimon, the great aristocratic general. Of his youth we know nothing except what he tells us: that he began taking notes as soon as the war broke out in 431 BC, because he foresaw that it would be greater than any before it, and that he caught the plague in 430 BC and survived it, which is why his description of the symptoms is so precise.

In 424 BC he was elected one of the ten generals and posted to the north Aegean. When the Spartan commander Brasidas made a surprise attack on Amphipolis, the key Athenian colony on the Strymon, Thucydides sailed from Thasos with seven ships but arrived half a day too late; the city had already surrendered. Athens condemned him to exile. He spent the next twenty years, as he says, away from the city, with leisure to observe events and access to the Peloponnesian side as well as his own, and he seems to have travelled widely, perhaps to Sicily and certainly through the Peloponnese and Macedonia.

He returned to Athens after the amnesty of 404 BC and died some years later, around 400 BC, perhaps violently, with the work unfinished: it stops in mid-sentence in the year 411. Ancient tradition placed his tomb among those of Cimon's family outside the walls. Xenophon and others took up the narrative where he left it.

The «Ιστορίαι», divided into eight books by later editors, tell the story of the Peloponnesian War from its causes to 411 BC. Book 1 explains why Thucydides thinks the war the greatest ever, surveys early Greek history with a sceptic's eye, sets out his method and distinguishes the public grievances from what he calls «the truest cause»: the growth of Athenian power and the fear it inspired in Sparta. He tells the reader that he checked every report, trusted no one's memory, and composed the speeches by keeping as close as possible to what was said while making the speakers say what the occasion demanded.

The set pieces that follow are among the most read pages in Greek. The Funeral Oration of Pericles (2.35–46) is democracy describing itself; the plague of Athens (2.47–54) is a clinical and moral autopsy of a city in panic; the civil war at Corcyra (3.82–83) analyses how words change meaning when a community tears itself apart; the Mytilene debate (3.36–49) argues over whether to massacre a rebel city; the Melian Dialogue (5.84–116) has the Athenians tell a small island that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must; and Books 6 and 7 narrate the Sicilian expedition, from the departure of the fleet to its destruction at Syracuse, as tragedy in prose.

His Greek is famously hard: compressed, abstract, full of antitheses and sentences that break under the weight of their thought. His view of human affairs is unsentimental, with no gods, no omens believed, and human nature as the constant that makes the past useful for understanding the future. That is why he is the ancestor of political realism and of every historian who asks for evidence.

Greek lyceum pupils read Thucydides in the original, usually the Corcyra chapters of Book 3 and extracts from the Funeral Oration, which many find the hardest text of their school years and remember for life. The phrase «κτήμα ες αεί» is used in Modern Greek for anything of lasting value, and «οι ισχυροί κάνουν ό,τι μπορούν και οι αδύναμοι υποφέρουν ό,τι πρέπει» is quoted in every discussion of international politics. Abroad, the «Thucydides trap», coined in the 2010s to describe the danger of war between a rising and an established power, put his name in newspapers again. A learner can walk the Kerameikos in Athens, where the war dead of 431 BC were buried before Pericles spoke, or visit the site of Amphipolis in Macedonia, whose loss cost him his career and gave us the book. The site's C2 exercise on counterfactual history and the pages on Pericles and Herodotus continue the subject.

• He is the only major ancient historian who was also a general in the war he describes, and he lost his command because he arrived at Amphipolis half a day late.
• He caught the plague of Athens and lived, which allowed him to describe the disease from the inside; doctors still debate which illness it was.
• His history breaks off in mid-sentence in 411 BC, seven years before the war ended; Xenophon's Hellenica begins exactly where it stops.
• Thomas Hobbes's first published book, in 1629, was an English translation of Thucydides, whom he called «the most politic historiographer that ever writ».