Study guide
History of the Peloponnesian War
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Overview
- Written
- Begun, by the author's own account, when the war broke out in 431 BC; still being revised after 404 BC, and left unfinished
- Genre
- Prose history of a single contemporary war, combining narrative, speeches and analysis
- Language
- Attic Greek prose, famously compressed and difficult, especially in the speeches and the analytic passages
- Length
- Eight books (the division is not the author's but that of later ancient editors); the narrative breaks off in mid-sentence in the winter of 411 BC
- Period covered
- The background of the war from the earliest times, then the war itself year by year, in summers and winters, from 431 to 411 BC
- Setting
- The whole Greek world: Athens and Attica, the Peloponnese, northern Greece and Thrace, the Aegean islands, Ionia, and Sicily
- Narrator
- Thucydides, an Athenian general exiled after failing to save Amphipolis in 424 BC, who speaks of himself in the third person
- Main powers
- Athens and her maritime empire against Sparta (Lacedaemon) and the Peloponnesian League, with Corinth, Thebes, Syracuse and finally Persia drawn in
- Famous set pieces
- The Funeral Oration of Pericles, the plague at Athens, the Mytilenean debate, the civil war at Corcyra, the Melian Dialogue, and the destruction of the Athenian armament in Sicily
- Key themes
- Power and fear; justice against expediency; human nature under pressure; the strengths and failings of democracy; hope, chance and miscalculation; the meaning of words in war
Context
Thucydides, son of Olorus, was an Athenian of wealthy family with connections in Thrace, where his family owned the right to work gold mines. He survived the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC, and in 424 BC he served as one of the city's ten generals. Sent to protect the northern coast, he arrived too late to stop the Spartan commander Brasidas from taking Amphipolis, and was exiled for twenty years. Exile, he says, let him observe both sides of the war. He seems to have returned to Athens after its defeat in 404 BC and to have died a few years later, with his work unfinished.
The war he describes was fought between Athens, a democracy at the head of a naval empire of tribute-paying allies in the Aegean, and Sparta, a land power at the head of the Peloponnesian League. Fighting began in 431 BC, paused with the Peace of Nicias in 421, resumed openly after the Athenian expedition to Sicily (415 to 413), and ended with the surrender of Athens in 404. Thucydides was the first to argue that these twenty-seven years formed one war rather than a series of separate conflicts.
Thucydides wrote in conscious contrast to Herodotus, whose history of the Persian Wars had been recited to audiences a generation earlier. He promises accuracy over entertainment, rejects legend and poetry as evidence, and organises his narrative by campaigning seasons rather than by stories. Yet he is also a great artist. About a quarter of the work consists of speeches, which he openly admits are reconstructions, and his narrative is shaped by recurring ideas about power, fear, hope and human nature that recall the language of tragedy and of the medical writers of his day (Hornblower 1987) (Connor 1984).
The work had little direct imitation in the classical period, though Xenophon's Hellenica takes up the story where it breaks off. It was studied by Roman historians, above all Sallust, and admired as a model of style and political judgment. In the Renaissance it was translated into Latin and then into the vernaculars. The first English version made directly from the Greek was Thomas Hobbes's translation of 1629, published with a preface that presents Thucydides as the most political of historians and a witness to the dangers of popular government; Poetry Codex holds Hobbes's text alongside the Crawley translation used for quotations here (Schlatter 1975).
Richard Crawley's translation (1874) remains one of the most readable English versions and is the basis of the widely used Landmark edition (Strassler 1996). It is accurate in substance but more fluent and Victorian than the Greek. Crawley does not number Thucydides's chapters; references in this guide use the standard book and chapter numbers (2.35 for the start of the Funeral Oration), so that they can be found in any edition.
Plot overview
Book 1 opens with an essay on early Greece designed to prove that this war was the greatest ever fought, followed by a statement of method. Thucydides then narrates the quarrels over Epidamnus, Corcyra and Potidaea that led Corinth to press Sparta for war, the debates at Sparta, a sketch of how Athens grew from leader of the Greek alliance against Persia into an imperial power, and Pericles' advice to refuse Spartan demands. War begins in Book 2 with a Theban attack on Plataea and the first Spartan invasion of Attica. Pericles persuades the Athenians to abandon the countryside and rely on their walls and their fleet.
After the first year, Pericles delivers the Funeral Oration in praise of Athens; soon afterwards the plague breaks out in the crowded city. Pericles dies in 429. In the following years Athens crushes the revolt of Mytilene, reversing a decision to kill its whole male population only after a second debate; Sparta and Thebes destroy Plataea; and civil war at Corcyra reveals what war does to political life. In 425 the Athenians trap and capture Spartan citizens on the island of Sphacteria near Pylos, a stunning blow to Spartan prestige. Sparta replies by sending Brasidas to win over Athens' allies in the north, where he takes Amphipolis. Both Brasidas and the Athenian leader Cleon are killed at Amphipolis in 422, and the Peace of Nicias follows in 421.
The peace is unstable. Alliances shift around Argos, Sparta defeats a coalition at Mantinea in 418, and in 416 Athens demands the submission of the neutral island of Melos; after the Melian Dialogue the Athenians take the island, kill its men and enslave its women and children. In 415 the Athenians vote, against the advice of Nicias and at the urging of Alcibiades, to send a huge expedition to Sicily. Alcibiades is recalled to face charges of sacrilege and escapes to Sparta, where he advises the Spartans to help Syracuse and to fortify Decelea in Attica.
Under the Spartan Gylippus, Syracuse holds out. Reinforcements under Demosthenes fail to turn the tide; the Athenian fleet is defeated in the Great Harbour, and the retreating army is destroyed in 413, with Nicias and Demosthenes put to death and thousands of prisoners left in the stone quarries. Book 8 describes how Athens refuses to give in, while her allies revolt and Persia begins to fund the Spartan navy. In 411 an oligarchic coup replaces the democracy with the Four Hundred, the fleet at Samos stays loyal to democracy and recalls Alcibiades, and the oligarchy is replaced by a broader government of the Five Thousand. The narrative stops abruptly in the same year, seven years before the war's end.
Book by book
Book 1: Method, Causes and the Road to War
Summary
Thucydides introduces himself and his subject, claiming that this war was the greatest disturbance the Greek world had known. To prove it he surveys early Greek history (the so-called Archaeology, 1.2–19): early Greece was poor, unsettled and without capital or sea power, and even the Trojan War was smaller than the poets pretend. He then explains his method (1.20–22): the speeches give the sense of what was said; the narrative rests on careful checking of eyewitness reports; and the work is meant as 'a possession for all time'. He distinguishes the publicly alleged grievances from the real cause, the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta (1.23).
The narrative of the grievances follows. A civil quarrel at Epidamnus draws in Corcyra and its mother city Corinth; Corcyra appeals to Athens, which makes a defensive alliance and fights alongside it at the battle of Sybota (433 BC). Athens then besieges Potidaea, a Corinthian colony in its own empire. At a congress in Sparta (1.67–88), the Corinthians denounce Athenian restlessness and Spartan slowness, Athenian envoys defend their empire, the Spartan king Archidamus urges caution, and the ephor Sthenelaidas carries the vote for war.
A long digression (the Pentecontaetia, 1.89–118) traces the fifty years between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, showing how Athens turned the Delian League into an empire. After further diplomatic exchanges, including stories of the Spartan regent Pausanias and the Athenian Themistocles, both brilliant leaders who ended in disgrace, Pericles advises the Athenians to reject Sparta's ultimatum and sets out a strategy based on sea power and money (1.140–144).
Analysis
The method chapters are among the most discussed pages in ancient literature. Thucydides sets his inquiry against both poetry and the prose chroniclers who aim at pleasing an audience, and he makes an explicit claim for usefulness: since human affairs will recur in similar forms, an exact knowledge of the past will help future readers understand them. The famous distinction between alleged grievances and the 'truest cause' introduces a way of explaining events in terms of underlying forces and collective emotions, above all fear (de Romilly 1963) (Rood 1998).
Book 1 also establishes the work's characteristic form: paired speeches that set out opposing positions. The Corinthians' portrait of the Athenians as restless innovators and the Spartans as complacent conservatives is a national stereotype, but the narrative will largely bear it out. The Athenian envoys at Sparta give the first statement of a doctrine that runs through the whole work: that empire was acquired through fear, honour and interest, and that it is natural for the stronger to rule.
The digressions on Pausanias and Themistocles, written in a more story-telling manner than most of the work, are sometimes thought to show Thucydides competing with Herodotus on his own ground. Together with Pericles' speech they raise a question that the rest of the history explores: what kind of leader can control a powerful state, and what happens when great individuals and their cities part company (Hornblower 1987).
my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said
The statement of method for the speeches. It admits reconstruction while claiming fidelity to the substance; scholars still argue over how these two halves of the sentence fit together.
In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
The most famous sentence in the work. 'Essay' translates a word for a competitive display piece; Thucydides contrasts the oral performances of his rivals with a written work meant to last.
The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.
The 'truest cause'. Crawley's 'made war inevitable' renders a phrase that literally means 'compelled them to war': the language of necessity, which is central to Thucydides's thinking.
they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others
The Corinthians' summary of the Athenian character, the climax of a long contrast with Spartan caution.
Book 2: The Funeral Oration and the Plague
Summary
In 431 BC the Thebans make a night attack on Plataea, an ally of Athens, and are captured and killed. King Archidamus leads the Peloponnesian army into Attica, and the Athenians, on Pericles' advice, crowd into the city behind the Long Walls, watching their land being ravaged. The Athenian fleet raids the Peloponnesian coast in reply.
At the end of the first year, the Athenians hold their public funeral for the war dead, and Pericles delivers the Funeral Oration (2.35–46). Rather than praising the dead men individually, he praises the city for which they died: its democratic constitution, its freedom and tolerance in private life, its openness to foreigners, its love of beauty and wisdom, its daring. Athens, he says, is 'the school of Hellas'. He urges the living to fall in love with the city, consoles the parents, and gives the widows a single, much-debated sentence of advice.
In the second summer the plague breaks out (2.47–54). Thucydides, who caught it himself, describes its symptoms in clinical detail and then its moral effects: despair, the collapse of burial customs, and lawless pleasure-seeking. The Athenians turn on Pericles, who defends himself and his policy in his last speech (2.60–64), telling them that their empire is like a tyranny. He is fined but re-elected, and dies in 429. Thucydides adds his judgment of Pericles and his successors (2.65). The book ends with the siege of Plataea and the naval victories of Phormio in the Gulf of Corinth.
Analysis
The Funeral Oration is the most famous idealisation of democratic Athens, and it has been quoted by statesmen ever since. But its placement is pointed. It is followed immediately by the plague, so that the confident picture of a self-controlled, generous and law-abiding city is set against a description of the same city in collapse. Readers disagree about whether the contrast shows the fragility of the ideal, its falsity, or simply the power of chance over even the best of human arrangements (Loraux 1986) (Ober 1998).
Formally, the oration belongs to a genre (the epitaphios) that praised Athens through its history and its dead. Pericles departs from convention by passing over the city's legendary past and concentrating on the present way of life. His Athens is a city that combines things other states hold apart: wealth and simplicity, intelligence and courage, private freedom and public discipline. The speech's single sentence to the war widows, urging them to be as little talked about as possible, has been read both as a conventional expression of Athenian norms and as a revealing limit of Periclean democracy.
The plague narrative shows Thucydides's debt to Hippocratic medicine: he describes the disease so that it may be recognised if it returns, just as he writes history so that future events may be understood. His account of its moral effects anticipates the later account of civil war at Corcyra. The verdict on Pericles in 2.65, written after the end of the war, praises his foresight and his control of the people and blames his successors for the Sicilian expedition and the final defeat (Gomme 1981).
Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.
Pericles defines democracy. The phrase 'is called' has been taken as a hint that the name and the reality might differ, a hint Thucydides makes explicit in 2.65.
In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas
The oration's most famous claim: Athens as an education to all Greeks. Within a few chapters the plague, and later the Melian Dialogue, will test it.
This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others.
One of the rare moments of personal testimony. Thucydides writes as a survivor and as a clinical observer.
Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them.
The plague dissolves the restraints of religion and law, a theme taken up in the analysis of civil war at Corcyra in Book 3.
In short, what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen.
Thucydides's judgment of Pericles' leadership, one of the most quoted and contested sentences in the work.
Book 3: Mytilene, Plataea and Corcyra
Summary
In 428 BC Mytilene, the chief city of Lesbos and a privileged ally of Athens, revolts. Its envoys plead for Spartan help at Olympia, but Sparta's help is slow, and in 427 Mytilene surrenders to the Athenian general Paches. In anger the Athenian assembly votes to kill all the adult men of Mytilene and enslave the women and children, and sends a ship with the order. The next day many regret the decision and the question is reopened.
In the Mytilenean debate (3.36–49), Cleon, the most forceful popular leader, insists that the original decree be carried out: a democracy cannot run an empire if it changes its mind and listens to pity; punishment must be certain to deter revolts. Diodotus replies that the question is not justice but Athenian advantage, and that harsh penalties do not deter people driven by hope and desire; killing the whole population will make future rebels fight to the end and will alienate the common people in the allied cities. Diodotus narrowly wins. A second ship is sent and its crew row through the night, arriving just in time to prevent the massacre.
The Plataeans, besieged since 429, surrender to Sparta in 427. After speeches by the Plataeans and the Thebans (3.53–67), the Spartans ask each prisoner whether he has done Sparta any service in the war, and kill them all. In Corcyra a civil war between democrats and oligarchs, each side calling in Athens or Sparta, ends in massacre (3.70–85). Thucydides reflects on how war and revolution destroy moral language and the bonds of society (3.82–83). The book closes with Athenian campaigns in Sicily and northwestern Greece, where the general Demosthenes is first defeated in Aetolia and then wins a brilliant victory at Olpae.
Analysis
The Mytilenean debate is one of the great political debates in literature. Both speakers argue from Athenian interest; neither appeals primarily to justice or mercy. Cleon presents himself as the enemy of clever speakers while making a highly rhetorical speech; Diodotus admits that an honest adviser in a democracy must sometimes deceive in order to be believed. His analysis of the psychology of risk, in which hope and desire overpower fear, anticipates the Athenians' own conduct in Sicily (Andrewes 1962) (Orwin 1994).
The race of the second ship is narrated with unusual vividness, and the narrow escape shows how close the city came to a catastrophe of its own making. Thucydides immediately sets beside it the fate of Plataea, where no second debate saved anyone: the Spartan question to the prisoners is a judicial farce, and the narrative notes that the Spartans acted largely to please Thebes.
The pathology of civil war at Corcyra (3.82–83) is Thucydides's most general statement about human nature. War is a 'rough master' that strips away the comforts of peace and drags people's characters down to the level of their circumstances. Words change their meaning: rashness is called courage, moderation cowardice. The passage connects the political violence at Corcyra with the moral collapse described in the plague, and it is a key text for anyone studying Thucydides's ideas of causation and his influence on later political thought (Connor 1984).
I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire
Cleon's opening line. Thucydides introduces him as 'the most violent man at Athens', and his speech turns Pericles' imperial realism into a doctrine of terror.
Hope also and cupidity, the one leading and the other following, the one conceiving the attempt, the other suggesting the facility of succeeding, cause the widest ruin
Diodotus' analysis of why deterrence fails. Hope and desire are words that will return at Melos and at the vote for the Sicilian expedition.
the first ship making no haste upon so horrid an errand, while the second pressed on in the manner described
The race between the two ships. The rowers of the second trireme eat at their oars; the first arrives only shortly before them.
war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.
The centre of the Corcyra analysis. The Greek calls war a 'violent teacher', recalling Pericles' claim that Athens was a school.
Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.
The famous observation that civil war corrupts language as well as conduct, followed by a list of virtues renamed as vices and vices as virtues.
Book 4: Pylos, Sphacteria and Brasidas
Summary
In 425 BC an Athenian fleet carrying Demosthenes, sheltering from a storm, fortifies the headland of Pylos on the coast of Messenia, in Spartan territory. The Spartans try to dislodge them and land a force of hoplites on the island of Sphacteria, which the Athenian fleet then cuts off. Sparta offers peace. Cleon persuades the Athenians to demand more, and when the blockade drags on he is manoeuvred into taking command himself. With Demosthenes he lands on the island; light-armed troops wear down the Spartans with missiles, and the survivors, among them about 120 Spartan citizens, surrender (4.29–40).
The surrender stuns Greece, which had believed that Spartans never laid down their arms. Athens holds the prisoners as hostages against further invasions of Attica. In Sicily the Syracusan Hermocrates persuades the Sicilian cities at the congress of Gela to settle their quarrels and keep the Athenians out (4.58–65). Athens tries to take Megara and to invade Boeotia, but is heavily defeated at Delium in 424 (4.89–101).
Meanwhile the Spartan Brasidas marches north to Thrace with a small army of helots and mercenaries, winning over Athenian allies by persuasion and promises of freedom as much as by force. In the winter of 424 he surprises Amphipolis. The Athenian general sent to save it, Thucydides himself, arrives too late, saving only the port of Eion (4.102–108). A one-year truce is agreed in 423, but fighting continues in the north.
Analysis
The Pylos narrative is a study in chance and its exploitation. Thucydides stresses that the Athenians arrived by accident, that a fire on Sphacteria burnt away the woods that had sheltered the defenders, and that the Spartans were unused to fighting light-armed troops. His treatment of Cleon, whose boast that he would bring back the Spartans within twenty days is called 'mad' but comes true, has led many readers to suspect personal animosity. The episode also marks a turning point: Athens, at the height of its success, rejects the Spartan offer of peace (Rood 1998).
Brasidas is in many ways the Spartan counterpart of the Athenian character described by the Corinthians in Book 1: quick, daring and eloquent. His speeches promise freedom to the subject cities, though Thucydides suggests that his words were more seductive than true. His success shows that the Athenian empire was vulnerable on land and that Athens' allies were not uniformly loyal.
Thucydides's account of his own failure at Amphipolis is brief and impersonal, told in the third person like any other event. He neither apologises nor complains, though he stresses the speed with which he acted. The restraint has been read as a demonstration of the impartiality he claims, and also as a subtle self-defence (Hornblower 1987).
their caps would not keep out the arrows, darts had broken off in the armour of the wounded, while they themselves were helpless for offence
The Spartan hoplites on Sphacteria, trained for close combat, are worn down by missiles in the dust of the burnt woods.
the atraktos—that is, the arrow—would be worth a great deal if it could tell men of honour from the rest
A captured Spartan's laconic reply to an Athenian taunt. Atraktos means a spindle, a woman's tool, and was slang for an arrow: the archer's weapon kills brave and cowardly alike.
Thucydides, son of Olorus, the author of this history
The historian enters his own narrative as a general summoned from Thasos to save Amphipolis.
Book 5: Amphipolis, the Peace of Nicias and Melos
Summary
In 422 BC Cleon leads an Athenian force to recover Amphipolis. Brasidas makes a surprise sally and routs the Athenians; both commanders are killed, and the people of Amphipolis honour Brasidas as their founder-hero (5.6–11). With the leading advocates of war on both sides dead, Athens and Sparta make the Peace of Nicias in 421 and a defensive alliance (5.14–24).
Thucydides opens a second preface (5.26), insisting that the peace was not a real peace and that the war lasted twenty-seven years in all; here he mentions his exile. The peace unravels. Corinth and other Spartan allies are dissatisfied, Argos builds a new alliance, and the young Alcibiades, rising in Athenian politics, draws Athens into it. In 418 the Spartans under King Agis defeat the Argive coalition at Mantinea, the largest land battle of the war so far, restoring their reputation (5.63–74).
In 416 the Athenians attack Melos, a Spartan colony in the Aegean that had remained neutral. Before fighting, Athenian envoys meet the Melian magistrates in private. In the Melian Dialogue (5.84–113), the Athenians refuse to discuss justice, insisting that the only question is how the Melians can survive. The Melians appeal to fairness, to hope, to the gods and to Spartan help; the Athenians answer each appeal. The Melians refuse to submit. The city is besieged and taken, the men are killed, and the women and children are sold into slavery (5.116).
Analysis
The Melian Dialogue is the only passage in the work cast as a dialogue rather than in paired speeches, and it is probably the most famous text in Thucydides after the Funeral Oration. The Athenians' claim that 'the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must' has made the dialogue a founding text of political realism. But it is also a dramatic composition: the Athenians insist on cool calculation while ignoring their own exposure to fortune, and their warnings against trusting hope will apply to Athens in Sicily a few chapters later (Macleod 1974) (Bosworth 1993).
Readers have long noticed the juxtaposition of the end of Book 5 with the opening of Book 6. Cornford argued that Thucydides shaped his history like a tragedy, with Melos as the act of hubris and Sicily as the nemesis (Cornford 1907). Most modern scholars reject so rigid a scheme, but the arrangement is clearly deliberate, and the narrator's bare one-sentence record of the massacre leaves the reader to judge.
The rest of Book 5 is often thought unfinished: it contains documents quoted verbatim (treaties and alliances) instead of being worked into the narrative, and it has few speeches. This is one of the main pieces of evidence in the debate about the stages in which Thucydides composed his work (Gomme 1981).
It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis
From the second preface. Thucydides presents exile as an opportunity to see both sides.
right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The Athenian thesis at Melos. Justice, they argue, exists only where power is balanced.
Hope, danger’s comforter, may be indulged in by those who have abundant resources
The Athenians warn the Melians not to trust in hope. In Book 6 the Athenians themselves will vote for Sicily in a mood of soaring hope.
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.
The Athenians extend their law of power to the gods themselves. The passage is a classic statement of a naturalist theory of domination.
put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves
The fate of Melos, told without comment. It is exactly the punishment the Athenians had decided on for Mytilene and then reversed.
Book 6: The Sicilian Expedition Sets Sail
Summary
In the winter of 416/415 BC the Athenians resolve to send a great expedition to Sicily, most of them, Thucydides says, ignorant of the island's size. He surveys the Greek and native settlement of Sicily (6.2–5). In two assemblies Nicias, one of the three appointed generals, argues against the expedition, while Alcibiades speaks for it (6.8–26). Nicias tries to discourage the Athenians by exaggerating the forces needed; instead they vote him all he asks. Everyone, Thucydides says, fell in love with the enterprise.
Before the fleet sails, the Herms (sacred pillars of the god Hermes throughout Athens) are mutilated in a single night, and Alcibiades is accused of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries. The fleet departs in splendour (6.30–32). In Syracuse, Hermocrates warns of the danger and Athenagoras, a popular leader, dismisses it (6.33–41). Thucydides digresses on the murder of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogiton a century before, correcting the popular Athenian story about the end of tyranny (6.54–59). Alcibiades is recalled for trial, escapes, and goes over to Sparta.
At Sparta Alcibiades advises sending a Spartan commander to Syracuse and fortifying Decelea in Attica, and justifies his conduct in a remarkable speech (6.89–92). The Athenians under Nicias and Lamachus win a battle outside Syracuse, then begin to wall off the city. Lamachus is killed. As Book 6 ends, the Spartan Gylippus is on his way to Sicily, and Syracuse is close to surrender.
Analysis
The debate between Nicias and Alcibiades sets caution against ambition, age against youth, and Pericles' advice not to extend the empire during the war against the restless energy that the Corinthians saw as the Athenian character. Thucydides uses the language of erotic desire for the city's mood: the Athenians are in love with distant things. The passage connects with Pericles' call to the citizens in the Funeral Oration to become lovers of their city, and with Diodotus' warning about hope and desire (Kallet 2001) (Connor 1984).
The affairs of the Herms and the Mysteries show a democracy gripped by suspicion and fear of tyranny. The digression on the tyrannicides demonstrates the gap between popular memory and the facts, and implicitly explains how the Athenians' fear of tyranny led them to remove their most able general. Thucydides says in 2.65 that Alcibiades' personal excesses made the people distrust him and that this distrust helped ruin the city.
Alcibiades' speech at Sparta is one of the most brilliant and disturbing in the work. He tells his country's enemies how to defeat it, while claiming that his love of Athens is genuine and that he is simply trying to recover the city that wronged him. His dismissal of democracy as an absurdity, spoken to Spartans, illustrates how individual ambition and political loyalty have come apart.
All alike fell in love with the enterprise.
Thucydides's verb is the vocabulary of erōs. The sentence is followed by the hopes of each age group and class.
by far the most costly and splendid Hellenic force that had ever been sent out by a single city up to that time
The departure of the fleet from Piraeus is described as a spectacle, with the city crowding to the harbour.
there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity
Alcibiades on democracy, addressing the Spartans. The phrase captures the cynicism of a man who had led the Athenian democracy for years.
Book 7: Disaster at Syracuse
Summary
Gylippus reaches Syracuse in 414 BC, organises its defence and blocks the completion of the Athenian wall. Nicias, ill and discouraged, writes a letter to Athens describing the deteriorating position and asking either to be recalled or reinforced (7.11–15). The Athenians send Demosthenes with a second large fleet, and Sparta fortifies Decelea in Attica, which ruins Athenian agriculture and silver mining (7.19, 7.27–28).
Demosthenes attempts a night attack on the heights of Epipolae, which ends in confusion and defeat (7.43–44). He wishes to withdraw at once, but Nicias hesitates; when the decision to leave is finally made, an eclipse of the moon (27 August 413) leads the soldiers and Nicias to delay for a month on the seers' advice (7.50). The Syracusans close the Great Harbour. In the decisive sea battle, watched by the two armies from the shore, the Athenian fleet is defeated (7.59–71).
The Athenians abandon their wounded and dead and attempt to march inland (7.72–85). Nicias encourages them; the army is harried by cavalry and missiles. Demosthenes' division surrenders; Nicias' men are slaughtered while trying to drink at the river Assinarus. Nicias and Demosthenes are executed, and the prisoners are kept in the stone quarries of Syracuse in appalling conditions (7.86–87). Thucydides calls it the greatest achievement of the war, glorious for the victors and calamitous for the conquered.
Analysis
Book 7 is often regarded as the summit of Thucydides's art. The narrative slows down as the end approaches, and the battle in the Great Harbour is told largely through the eyes of the spectators on the shore, whose bodies sway with the fortunes of the fight. The description echoes the scene of the fleet's departure in Book 6, when Athens watched from the harbour, and turns the city's confidence into anguish (Rood 1998) (Stahl 2003).
Thucydides's portrait of Nicias is unusually sympathetic: he is pious, honest and brave, yet indecisive and too fearful of the Athenian assembly to take the necessary decision to retreat. His obituary praises his virtue. Many readers have found this tribute at odds with the narrative's evidence of his errors, and the contrast raises the question of how far conventional virtue is of use in the world the history describes.
The language at the end of Book 7 recalls Herodotus and the tragedians: the Athenians are destroyed 'with a total destruction', and few out of many return home. A speech by Nicias insisting that 'men make the city' looks back to the Funeral Oration, in which the city was presented as more than its walls and ships; now the men of the city are dying far from home (Connor 1984).
as the strife was protracted without decision, their swaying bodies reflected the agitation of their minds
The Athenian army watches the battle in the harbour from the shore. Thucydides turns the battle into a tragedy watched by an audience whose own lives are at stake.
Men make the city and not walls or ships without men in them.
Nicias encourages the retreating army. The saying echoes the idea of Athens in the Funeral Oration and anticipates the democratic fleet at Samos in Book 8.
of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved such a fate, seeing that the whole course of his life had been regulated with strict attention to virtue.
Thucydides's epitaph for Nicias. The word for 'virtue' here is aretē, perhaps with the sense of conventional, religious excellence.
their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.
The last sentences of the Sicilian narrative, solemn and almost epic in rhythm.
Book 8: Revolt, Persia and the Four Hundred
Summary
When the news of the disaster reaches Athens, the people at first refuse to believe it, then blame the orators who had urged the expedition, and finally resolve to fight on, economising and building a new fleet (8.1). Allies such as Chios, Miletus and others in Ionia revolt; Sparta, now at sea, begins to negotiate with the Persian satraps Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus for money in exchange for recognising the King's claims to the Greek cities of Asia (8.5–58).
Alcibiades, now distrusted at Sparta, takes refuge with Tissaphernes and hints that he could win Persian support for Athens if the democracy were replaced by an oligarchy. Officers in the fleet at Samos, led by Pisander, take up the plan. In 411 a carefully organised coup at Athens, planned by Antiphon, Phrynichus and Theramenes, uses intimidation and murder to establish the rule of the Four Hundred (8.47–70).
The sailors at Samos refuse to accept the oligarchy, declare themselves the true Athenian democracy, and recall Alcibiades, who prevents them from sailing against Piraeus (8.72–86). The oligarchs quarrel; Euboea revolts; the Four Hundred are overthrown and replaced by the regime of the Five Thousand, which Thucydides praises (8.89–98). The Athenians win a naval victory at Cynossema in the Hellespont. The narrative breaks off in mid-sentence in the winter of 411 (8.109).
Analysis
Book 8 has no direct speeches, and many scholars think Thucydides never revised it into the form of the earlier books. Yet it contains some of his most acute political analysis. He explains how a small, determined minority could overthrow a democracy a century old through fear, secrecy and mutual distrust among its opponents, and he notes how the citizens, each unsure whom to trust, kept silent (Hornblower 2008).
The book's most surprising judgments are his praise of the oligarchic plotter Antiphon as a man second to none in virtue and intellect, and of the mixed constitution of the Five Thousand as the best government Athens had enjoyed in his time. These passages are central to debates about Thucydides's own political views, which seem to favour a moderate rule of the better-off without being simply anti-democratic (Ober 1998).
Book 8 also shows the resilience of Athens. The Spartans prove 'the most convenient' enemies Athens could have had, slow to exploit their chances, while the Athenian navy at Samos becomes a city in itself. The theme of the city made by its men, not its walls, returns in a new and political form.
for a long while they disbelieved even the most respectable of the soldiers
The Athenian reaction to the news from Sicily, a study in collective psychology.
it was no light matter to deprive the Athenian people of its freedom, almost a hundred years after the deposition of the tyrants
Thucydides explains how much talent was needed for the coup of 411, after praising the abilities of Antiphon, Phrynichus and Theramenes.
the Lacedaemonians proved the most convenient people in the world for the Athenians to be at war with
A dry judgment on Spartan slowness, recalling the Corinthian contrast of national characters in Book 1.
the Athenians appear to have enjoyed the best government that they ever did, at least in my time
The historian's verdict on the regime of the Five Thousand, a key text for his political sympathies.
Characters
Athenians
- Thucydides
- The historian, son of Olorus, who appears in his own narrative as a plague survivor and as the general who failed to save Amphipolis in 424 BC. He speaks in the first person about his method and in the third person about his actions. His judgments are rare but weighty, and his presence is felt everywhere in the selection and arrangement of material.
- Pericles
- The leading statesman of Athens at the start of the war, the architect of its strategy of avoiding land battle and relying on the fleet and the empire's revenues. He delivers three speeches, including the Funeral Oration, and dies of the plague in 429 BC. Thucydides praises his foresight and his ability to lead the people rather than follow them.
- Cleon
- The most powerful popular leader after Pericles' death, whom Thucydides describes as the most violent man in Athens. He argues for the execution of the Mytilenean men, takes command at Pylos and succeeds, and is killed at Amphipolis in 422 BC. Thucydides's hostility to him is evident and much discussed.
- Diodotus
- Son of Eucrates, otherwise unknown, who wins the second Mytilenean debate by arguing that clemency serves Athenian interests better than terror. His speech contains a penetrating analysis of hope, desire and the limits of deterrence.
- Nicias
- A wealthy, pious and cautious Athenian general who negotiates the peace of 421 BC and opposes the Sicilian expedition, only to be appointed one of its commanders. His hesitations contribute to the disaster, and he is executed by the Syracusans. Thucydides's obituary praises his virtue.
- Demosthenes
- An inventive Athenian general who fortifies Pylos and, with Cleon, captures the Spartans on Sphacteria. Sent with reinforcements to Sicily, he urges withdrawal in time, but is overruled, and is captured and executed with Nicias.
- Lamachus
- The third general of the Sicilian expedition, a professional soldier who proposes an immediate attack on Syracuse. He is killed early in the siege.
- Antiphon, Phrynichus and Theramenes
- The leaders of the oligarchic coup of 411 BC. Thucydides praises Antiphon's intelligence and virtue, notes Phrynichus' staunchness, and describes Theramenes as able in both counsel and debate; Theramenes later helps to bring down the Four Hundred.
Peloponnesians
- Archidamus
- King of Sparta, an experienced and cautious man who warns his countrymen that the war will be long and that Athens cannot be beaten quickly. He leads the early invasions of Attica, but his advice to prepare before fighting is overruled.
- Sthenelaidas
- Spartan ephor whose short, blunt speech in Book 1 carries the vote for war. His laconic style is set against the long speeches of the Athenians and Archidamus.
- Brasidas
- The most energetic and attractive Spartan commander, who wins over Athens' allies in Thrace by speed, eloquence and moderation and captures Amphipolis. He is killed defeating Cleon there and honoured by the city as its hero-founder.
- Gylippus
- The Spartan commander sent to Syracuse at Alcibiades' suggestion. His arrival turns the course of the siege.
- The Corinthians
- Sparta's most important allies, who press Sparta into the war and describe the contrast between Athenian energy and Spartan caution in their speech of Book 1.
Athenians (and later Sparta and Persia)
- Alcibiades
- A brilliant, ambitious and extravagant aristocrat, ward of Pericles, who promotes the Argive alliance and the Sicilian expedition. Accused of sacrilege, he flees to Sparta and gives the Spartans crucial advice, then moves to the Persian satrap Tissaphernes and finally returns to lead the Athenian fleet at Samos. He embodies the tension between individual genius and political loyalty.
Syracusans
- Hermocrates
- The leading statesman of Syracuse, who urges the Sicilian Greeks to unite against outside intervention at Gela in 424 BC and organises the resistance to Athens. He is in some respects Thucydides's Sicilian counterpart to Pericles.
Persians
- Tissaphernes
- Persian satrap in western Asia Minor who funds the Spartan fleet but deliberately keeps both sides weak, partly on Alcibiades' advice.
Neutrals
- The Melians
- The citizens of a small Aegean island, a colony of Sparta, who refuse to submit to Athens in 416 BC. In the Melian Dialogue their magistrates appeal to justice, hope, the gods and Sparta, and their city is destroyed.
Themes
Power, fear and the 'truest cause'
Thucydides explains the war not by the grievances that were publicly argued but by the growth of Athenian power and the fear it caused in Sparta. Fear is one of the main forces in the work: it drives Sparta to war, it drives Athens to keep its empire, and it shapes the conduct of allies and enemies. The Athenian speakers repeatedly say that empire was acquired out of fear, honour and interest.
This explanatory approach, in which power, fear and interest are treated as constant forces, has made Thucydides a founding figure for political realism. But he is not a simple theorist. The work shows how those forces are expressed through particular decisions, characters and accidents, and how often they lead to disaster (de Romilly 1963) (Lebow 2003).
Justice and expediency
The tension between what is just and what is advantageous runs through the speeches. At Mytilene both Cleon and Diodotus argue from advantage; at Plataea the Spartans act as judges while serving Theban interests; at Melos the Athenians exclude justice from the discussion altogether. Speakers who appeal to justice are usually weak.
Thucydides rarely comments directly. Readers must decide whether the work endorses the logic of power or exposes its costs, and the narrative's arrangement, especially the movement from Melos to Sicily, suggests that the logic of power may destroy those who live by it (Orwin 1994).
Human nature
Thucydides claims that the events he records will recur because human nature remains the same. The plague and the civil war at Corcyra show what happens when the conditions of normal life are removed: law, religion and moral language collapse, and people act on fear and appetite.
This view is not wholly pessimistic. The Funeral Oration, the second ship to Mytilene and the courage of Nicias' retreating army show that human beings are also capable of restraint, generosity and endurance. The point is that these qualities are fragile and depend on circumstances.
Democracy and leadership
The history is in large part a study of a democracy at war. Pericles controls the people by reason and integrity; his successors compete for popularity and make the city's decisions captive to its moods. The assembly is shown deciding to kill the Mytileneans and then changing its mind, voting for Sicily in a fit of enthusiasm, and turning against its own generals.
Yet Thucydides also shows the democracy's resilience after Sicily and its defence by the fleet at Samos. His praise of Pericles and of the Five Thousand suggests that he valued a democracy guided by able and responsible leaders, rather than either democracy as such or oligarchy (Ober 1998).
Hope, chance and miscalculation
Hope (elpis) is a dangerous word in Thucydides. Diodotus says that hope and desire overpower fear; the Athenians warn the Melians not to trust it; and the Athenians themselves vote for Sicily in a mood of soaring hope. Chance (tychē) repeatedly overturns calculation, from the storm that brings the Athenians to Pylos to the eclipse at Syracuse.
Pericles had warned that he feared Athenian mistakes more than the enemy's plans. The history can be read as a demonstration of that warning: the greatest disasters arise not from the enemy's strength but from the Athenians' own misjudgment of their power (Stahl 2003).
Words and deeds
Thucydides constantly sets logos (word, speech, account) against ergon (deed, fact). He begins by contrasting his speeches with the deeds he records; Pericles opens the Funeral Oration by worrying that words cannot match the deeds of the dead; at Corcyra words change their meaning; and speakers like Cleon and Alcibiades use words to manipulate. The work itself is an attempt to give a true account in words of what was done.
Motifs
Paired speeches
Thucydides presents most major decisions through pairs of opposing speeches: Corcyraeans and Corinthians at Athens, Archidamus and Sthenelaidas at Sparta, Cleon and Diodotus on Mytilene, Nicias and Alcibiades on Sicily. The technique, related to the sophistic practice of arguing both sides of a question, lets the reader see the reasoning behind events and the gap between what was expected and what happened.
Summers and winters
From Book 2 onward the narrative is organised by campaigning seasons, each year divided into summer and winter. This annalistic structure was Thucydides's innovation and reflects his claim to precision; it also produces a sense of relentless continuity and frequently interrupts long episodes.
Spectacle and spectators
Crowds repeatedly watch events: the Athenians watch their fields being ravaged from the walls, the city watches the fleet leave for Sicily, and the army watches the battle in the Great Harbour. These scenes give the reader an audience to identify with and turn military history into something close to tragic drama.
National character
Speakers and narrator alike contrast the Athenians, quick, daring and restless, with the Spartans, slow, cautious and conservative. The contrast is tested throughout: Brasidas and the Syracusans show that the Athenian qualities can be learnt and turned against Athens.
Restraint and its collapse
The breakdown of normal restraints, whether in burial practices during the plague, in moral language at Corcyra, or in the treatment of Melos and the prisoners at Syracuse, recurs throughout the work as a measure of what war does to people.
Symbols
The walls
The Long Walls connecting Athens to its port of Piraeus embody Pericles' strategy of making the city an island. Walls appear throughout the work, from the rebuilding of Athens' walls after the Persian Wars to the race to build siege walls at Syracuse. Nicias' saying that men, not walls, make the city gives them their final meaning.
The fleet
Athenian sea power is the basis of the empire and of the democracy, since the poor citizens rowed the ships. The departure of the fleet for Sicily, its destruction in the Great Harbour, and the democratic fleet at Samos in Book 8 trace the fortunes of the city itself.
The plague
The plague is a historical event, but in Thucydides's arrangement it also becomes an image of the city's moral sickness under the pressure of war, set beside the healthy city of the Funeral Oration.
The tomb
From the public tomb of the Funeral Oration, where heroes have the whole earth for their tomb, to the unburied dead of the plague, the Plataeans' appeal to the graves of the Persian War dead and the Athenians who die in the quarries of Syracuse, burial marks the respect a society gives its members and the losses war imposes.
Critical debates
The speeches: record or reconstruction?
In 1.22 Thucydides says that he made the speakers say what the occasion demanded while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of what was actually said. Scholars disagree about which half of this sentence matters more. Some treat the speeches as substantially faithful summaries; others see them as the historian's own compositions, expressing his analysis of the situation in the voice of the speakers.
The speeches share a distinctive style and vocabulary, which suggests heavy authorial shaping. Yet they also differ markedly in tone and argument, and some, like the Melian Dialogue, could not have been heard by Thucydides himself. Most scholars now see them as interpretive reconstructions that combine historical substance with Thucydides's analysis (Gomme 1981) (Hornblower 1987) (Woodman 1988).
The causes of the war
Thucydides distinguishes the alleged grievances (Corcyra, Potidaea) from the 'truest cause', Spartan fear of Athenian power. He gives little space to the Megarian Decree, an Athenian embargo on Megara that other sources, notably the comic poet Aristophanes, present as a major cause of the war.
Some historians argue that Thucydides is right and that the war arose from structural rivalry; others, like de Ste. Croix, defend his account but argue that the responsibility lay with Sparta and its allies; Kagan argues that the war was not inevitable but the result of avoidable choices. The modern 'Thucydides Trap' thesis applies the truest-cause model to contemporary rivalries (Ste 1972) (Kagan 1969) (Allison 2017).
Thucydides on Pericles and democracy
The verdict in 2.65, that Athens under Pericles was a democracy in name but in practice the rule of the first citizen, and that his successors' rivalry for popularity ruined the city, has been read as hostility to democracy as such. Hobbes, who translated the work in 1629, took it that way, and saw Thucydides as a warning against popular rule (Schlatter 1975).
Recent scholars have emphasised the complexity of his position: he admires the democracy of the Funeral Oration and its resilience after Sicily, and his preferred regime, the Five Thousand, is a moderate one. Ober reads him as a critic of democratic decision-making from within the Athenian tradition (Ober 1998).
The Melian Dialogue: realism or tragedy?
International relations theorists often treat the Athenian arguments at Melos as a classic statement of realism. Classicists have generally been more cautious, noting that Thucydides gives the Athenians no direct endorsement, that the dialogue is placed immediately before the Sicilian disaster, and that the Athenians' warnings about hope rebound upon themselves.
Macleod analysed the dialogue's rhetorical form and its self-defeating logic; Bosworth argued that the Athenians are actually trying to persuade the Melians to save themselves; Cornford's older reading saw Melos as the hubris that leads to nemesis in Sicily. Lebow and others read the dialogue as part of a tragic vision of politics (Macleod 1974) (Bosworth 1993) (Cornford 1907) (Lebow 2003).
What was the plague?
Thucydides's description of the plague is detailed enough to have tempted generations of doctors to identify it. Smallpox, measles, typhus and ebola have all been proposed. Page argued that the description was medically precise and that it pointed to measles or something like it (Page 1953).
In 2006 a team led by Papagrigorakis reported DNA evidence of typhoid fever from a mass grave in the Kerameikos dating to the period, but the result has been disputed on methodological grounds, and the disease may have changed since antiquity or no longer exist (Papagrigorakis 2006).
The composition question
Thucydides says he began writing at the outbreak of the war, but the work contains passages written after its end in 404 BC. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars tried to separate early and late layers, asking, for example, whether Thucydides first planned a history of the Ten Years' War and only later decided that it was one twenty-seven-year war.
The unfinished state of Book 5 (with its documents) and Book 8 (without speeches) is the strongest evidence for stages of composition. Most scholars now prefer to read the work as a unity while accepting that it was left unrevised in parts (Gomme 1981) (Connor 1984).
Scientist or artist?
For much of the modern period Thucydides was praised as the model of the scientific historian, objective and accurate. In 1907 Cornford argued that his history was shaped by tragic and mythical patterns, and since the 1980s narratological studies have shown how carefully he arranges his material to guide the reader's judgment.
Connor emphasises how the reader is drawn into the experience of the war; Rood analyses focalisation and narrative order; Woodman argues that ancient historiography was fundamentally rhetorical. Few now doubt that Thucydides was both a careful researcher and a great literary artist; the debate is about how those two roles relate (Cornford 1907) (Connor 1984) (Rood 1998) (Woodman 1988).
Thucydides and modern political thought
From Hobbes to the Cold War and beyond, Thucydides has been read as a political theorist. Students at military colleges read the Melian Dialogue and the Funeral Oration, and statesmen quote them in speeches. Critics warn that such readings simplify a work that presents competing voices and refuses to state its lessons directly.
Greenwood examines how Thucydides has been used and reinvented in different periods, and how his claim to be writing a 'possession for all time' has encouraged readers to find their own situations in his history (Greenwood 2006) (Allison 2017).
Key passages
In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
Thucydides sets his written history against performances designed to please an audience at a single hearing. He claims lasting usefulness because human affairs will recur in similar forms. The sentence has become a motto for the whole discipline of history, though in context it is also a polemical jab at rivals, Herodotus probably among them.
The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.
The 'truest cause' of the war, distinguished from the publicly alleged grievances. It explains the war by an underlying shift in power and the fear it produced, and has become one of the most influential sentences in the study of international relations.
In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas
The climax of Pericles' praise of Athens in the Funeral Oration. Athens is presented as a model for all Greeks, both in its democratic institutions and in the versatility of its citizens. The claim is soon tested by the plague and by the city's conduct as an imperial power.
Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them.
During the plague, the Athenians abandon religious and legal restraints because they expect to die before they can be punished. The passage shows Thucydides's interest in how social norms depend on conditions of normal life, a theme he develops at Corcyra.
For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe.
In his last speech Pericles tells the Athenians that their empire is like a tyranny and that they cannot abandon it without danger. The frank language anticipates the arguments of Cleon and the Athenians at Melos, but Pericles uses it to urge endurance rather than violence.
war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.
From the analysis of civil war at Corcyra. War is a teacher that reduces people to the level of their circumstances. The passage is Thucydides's most general statement about how human nature responds to pressure.
right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The most quoted sentence of the Melian Dialogue. The Athenians claim that justice applies only between equals; between unequals there is only power. Whether Thucydides shares this view, or shows it as the arrogance that precedes Sicily, is one of the central questions of interpretation.
All alike fell in love with the enterprise.
The Athenians vote for the Sicilian expedition. Thucydides uses the language of erotic passion for their mood, recalling Pericles' call to become lovers of the city and Diodotus' warning that desire overrides reason.
Men make the city and not walls or ships without men in them.
Nicias encourages the defeated army as it begins its retreat. The saying expresses an idea of the city as its citizens rather than its physical structures, which looks back to the Funeral Oration and forward to the democratic fleet at Samos.
their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home.
The end of the Sicilian narrative. The language is solemn and almost epic, and it closes the most sustained and moving episode of the work with a reflection on the scale of the Athenian loss.
Questions for study
What does Thucydides mean by calling his work 'a possession for all time', and how does this claim shape the way he writes?
Consider his rejection of poetic and entertaining narrative, his claims about human nature, and his statement of method in 1.20–22.
How does Thucydides distinguish the 'truest cause' of the war from the alleged grievances, and is his explanation convincing?
Compare 1.23 with the narrative of Corcyra and Potidaea and with the speeches at Sparta; think about what he leaves out, such as the Megarian Decree.
Why does Thucydides place the Funeral Oration immediately before the plague?
Compare the ideals of the oration with the behaviour described in 2.53; ask whether the juxtaposition undermines the ideal or shows its vulnerability.
Compare the arguments of Cleon and Diodotus in the Mytilenean debate. Why do both argue from expediency rather than justice?
Look at Cleon's attack on clever speakers and Diodotus' account of hope and desire; consider what the debate shows about democratic deliberation.
What does the analysis of civil war at Corcyra (3.82–83) tell us about Thucydides's view of human nature?
Focus on the image of war as a 'rough master' and on the change in the meaning of words; connect it with the plague narrative.
Is the Melian Dialogue an endorsement or a critique of the Athenians' view of power?
Consider the form of the dialogue, the Athenian arguments about hope and the gods, and its position immediately before the Sicilian expedition.
How does Thucydides present the decision to invade Sicily, and what does it reveal about the Athenian democracy?
Compare Nicias and Alcibiades, the language of love in 6.24, and Thucydides's judgment in 2.65.
How does Thucydides use spectators and spectacle in the Sicilian narrative?
Compare the departure of the fleet in Book 6 with the harbour battle in 7.71 and the retreat in 7.75.
What is Thucydides's judgment of Nicias, and does the narrative support it?
Read his obituary in 7.86 alongside his conduct in the debate, the letter and the delay after the eclipse.
What can we infer about Thucydides's own political views from Book 8?
Consider his praise of Antiphon and of the Five Thousand, his account of the coup, and his treatment of the fleet at Samos; compare with his verdict on Pericles in 2.65.
Further reading
- Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
- Andrewes, A. 'The Mytilene Debate: Thucydides 3.36–49.' Phoenix 16 (1962): 64–85.
- Bosworth, A. B. 'The Humanitarian Aspect of the Melian Dialogue.' Journal of Hellenic Studies 113 (1993): 30–44.
- Connor, W. Robert. Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
- Cornford, Francis M. Thucydides Mythistoricus. London: Edward Arnold, 1907.
- de Romilly, Jacqueline. Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism. Translated by Philip Thody. Oxford: Blackwell, 1963.
- Gomme, A. W., A. Andrewes, and K. J. Dover. A Historical Commentary on Thucydides. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945–1981.
- Greenwood, Emily. Thucydides and the Shaping of History. London: Duckworth, 2006.
- Hornblower, Simon. Thucydides. London: Duckworth, 1987.
- Hornblower, Simon. A Commentary on Thucydides. Vol. 3, Books 5.25–8.109. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Kagan, Donald. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.
- Kallet, Lisa. Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides: The Sicilian Expedition and Its Aftermath. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
- Lebow, Richard Ned. The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- Loraux, Nicole. The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
- Macleod, C. W. 'Form and Meaning in the Melian Dialogue.' Historia 23 (1974): 385–400.
- Ober, Josiah. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
- Orwin, Clifford. The Humanity of Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
- Page, D. L. 'Thucydides' Description of the Great Plague at Athens.' Classical Quarterly n.s. 3 (1953): 97–119.
- Papagrigorakis, Manolis J., Christos Yapijakis, Philippos N. Synodinos, and Effie Baziotopoulou-Valavani. 'DNA Examination of Ancient Dental Pulp Incriminates Typhoid Fever as a Probable Cause of the Plague of Athens.' International Journal of Infectious Diseases 10 (2006): 206–214.
- Rood, Tim. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
- Schlatter, Richard, ed. Hobbes's Thucydides. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975.
- Stahl, Hans-Peter. Thucydides: Man's Place in History. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003.
- Ste. Croix, G. E. M. de. The Origins of the Peloponnesian War. London: Duckworth, 1972.
- Strassler, Robert B., ed. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. New York: Free Press, 1996.
- Woodman, A. J. Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies. London: Croom Helm, 1988.
Written by the Poetry Codex editors. Updated 2026-10-21.