Of all the historians of war past or present, the ancient Greek Thucydides, author of theHistory of The Peloponnesian War, is the most celebrated and admired. His book, written in the fifth century BCE, is one of the supreme classic works of Greek and Western civilization that continues to speak to us from across the vast gulf of the past. Over the centuries a universal judgment has come to esteem it as one of the greatest of all histories. The famous nineteenth-century English historian Lord Macaulay, whoseHistory of Englanditself became a classic, declared, “I have no hesitation...

The proud and unparalleled claim that Thucydides made at the beginning of hisHistory of the Peloponnesian Warhas been borne out by time. Of all the world’s historians—whether ancient, medieval, or modern—he has been the most extensively read and studied. From the early nineteenth century onward, the amount of scholarship devoted to him and his epoch-making history has steadily increased and by now far exceeds that dealing with any other historian. What is the explanation of this remarkable fact about a writer born in classical Greece whose work belongs to the very beginning of Western historiography? A...

Thucydides did not give his work a title or call it a history. This term is a later addition and is used in modern translations. He referred to it simply as a writing, probably because the Greek word for inquiry,historia, which Herodotus had used, had not yet become a common term for an inquiry into or a narration of some part of the human past.¹ In the following centuries, Greek, Roman, and subsequent historians appropriated the word “history” for this type of writing, and it became established with this meaning in the various European languages. Similarly, it was not...

Polybius, a Greek historian of the second century BCE and worthy successor to Thucydides, wrote a famous history of the rise of Rome to world power in which he included numerous observations on the requirements of a proper work of history. A point on which he laid great weight was the historian’s obligation to tell not only what happened but why, that is, to explain the causes and reasons. “Nothing is so essential either for writers or for students of history,” he said, “as to understand the causes underlying the genesis and development of any series of events.” He stressed...

No reader of Thucydides’Historywill doubt that he took a keen interest in character and personality, though mainly from a political point of view. In the course of the work he presents a number of prominent men who held leadership positions in Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse before or during the Peloponnesian War. In book 1, for instance, in connection with an issue in dispute between the Spartans and Athenians, he looks back on the careers of two celebrated individuals whom he calls the “most famous Hellenes of their day” (1.138). One of them, the Spartan Pausanias, was the commander...

The gloomy prophesy above, which was fully confirmed by events, was uttered by the Spartan envoy Melesippus after the Athenians refused to receive him on a last mission to persuade them to yield, and while King Archidamus and his Peloponnesian army were already marching to invade Attica. Thucydides began his narrative of the Ten Year or Archidamian War with the opening of the second book and continued it through book 5.25. In the latter passage, while mentioning the accord of 421 that terminated this first period of the war, he also anticipates the short life of the peace treaty and...

The greater part of Thucydides’ fifth book—the shortest in theHistorysave for book 8, which was never finished—describes the fragility of the peace of Nicias, the fighting that occurred between various states in the aftermath of the treaty, and the de facto resumption of the war between Athens and Sparta even before the treaty was publicly declared broken. Some of Sparta’s most important allies, such as Corinth, Megara, and Thebes, who had refused to join in the peace, became disaffected, and its military reputation lay under a cloud because of its loss of Pylos and surrender at...

With this graphic description of the reaction in Athens to the fate of the Sicilian expedition Thucydides begins the eighth book of hisHistory. The same book also rings down the curtain on the entire work, whose narrative stops suddenly in the summer of the year 411.¹ Although the Peloponnesian War continued for another seven years, the great guide who has led us through its preceding events is no longer available to us. It is not known why he left the work unfinished, but this last book contains a number of indications that parts of it were a draft consisting...

In this concluding chapter, we must return to the famous words about his work that Thucydides placed at the beginning of hisHistory. Far from being a vain boast, they proved to be a plain statement of fact. How shall we explain the enduring greatness of his account of the Peloponnesian War? What are the qualities of mind he put into it that give it its distinction as a classic history of the highest rank and one of the preeminent cultural monuments of the fifth-century Greek and Athenian civilization from which it sprang? The answer to these questions, I believe,...