Thucydides

Front matter

Pee okiN ey

Frederick R,

Wulsin oe a re a ts

Preface To The American Edition

Tue History of the Peloponnesian War, while in the original it has unique claims on the careful study of the classical and philological scholar, is of hardly less interest to the general reader. It is a model work, both for precision and for conciseness. Its details of place and person, time and number, are so minutely accurate, that one need never drop the thread of continuous narrative for a single moment. The story carries within itself full evidence of its authenticity. The author, himself an actor in the events which he records, and conversant with many of the leading persons concerned in them during the twenty years and more which the history covers, evidently put on record little or nothing which had not fallen within his own personal knowledge, or been learned directly from the actors or sufferers. His, too, is the most transparent of all histories. He employs no pigments; he is perfectly dispassionate. The few transient glimpses that he gives of himself dispose us to regard him as just and humane; but he manifestly thought his own moral portraiture out of place in the narrative, and sedulously kept himself in the background.

vi PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

This work has, as we think, its highest value as a chapter in the history of civilization considered independently of literary and artistic culture. ‘The Periclean age has left monuments of genius which succeeding times have copied and emulated, but never equalled. The inquiry naturally suggests itself, whether the manners and morals of the age, especially of the Athenian people, had been moulded or essentially modified by the liberal culture, attained in a transcendent measure by the few, and largely accessible to the many. Im this field of inquiry Thucydides is, undoubtedly, the most trustworthy witness extant, however willingly the partial Philhellene would set aside his testimony.

It would be presumptuous to criticise, and superfluous to commend Professor Jowett’s Translation. Every Greek scholar is fully aware of his eminence —it is hardly too much to say pre-eminence — both as a translator and as a critic. The English edition from which this reprint is made is in two volumes, — the second (referred to in the Introduction) consisting of critical notes, valuable, indeed intelligible, only to the Greek scholar, and to him only with the Greek text in hand. The present publication has for its sole design to place the great work of Thucydides within easy reach of those who can, or will, read it only in English. The first volume, therefore, alone is reprinted. The sheets have been carefully compared, and brought into entire conformity, with the English edition.

A. P. PEABODY.

CAMBRIDGE, Jan. 19, 1883.

Introduction

THE text which has been followed in this translation (except where a departure from it is indicated at the foot of the page) is that of the first smaller edition of Poppo (18438-1851), which adheres more closely to the authority of the MSS. than the later edition begun by Poppo and continued by Stahl. It was originally intended that the work should contain a series of essays on subjects connected with Thucydides. But the ‘accomplishment of this part of the design has been unavoidably delayed. The writer hopes to complete what is wanting in the course of a year or two.

He gratefully acknowledges the valuable help of more than one friend; first, and above all, of W. H. Forbes, Fellow of Balliol College, who during several years has been his unwearied and disinterested fellowlaborer in a long and necessarily tedious work. Few persons take as much conscientious pains about their own writings as he has taken about those of another. To his admirable scholarship is due mainly the degree of accuracy which the translator has been able to attain; and he is indebted to him for many excellent remarks and suggestions. The essay on Inscriptions vii

Vill INTRODUCTION.

in the second volume has been in great measure compiled from data which he has collected and analyzed. The translator will always reckon the days which they have passed together in the study of Thucydides to haye been among the happiest and most useful of his life.

To his friend Professor Campbell of St. Andrews, besides many other obligations, his best thanks are due for the correction of several errors in the notes.

The full and well-arranged index to the text is the work of Mr. Matthew Knight, who has given an amount of thought and care to it rarely bestowed on such ungracious tasks.

The’ translator has had the advantage of being anticipated by Mr. Crawley, late Fellow of Worcester College, and in part by Mr. Wilkins, Fellow of Merton College. He has not refrained from consulting their translations in several passages, and desires to express his gratitude for the assistance which he has received from them. He has also occasionally referred to the clear and elegant French translation of Bétant, but much more frequently to his invaluable lexicon. The old version of Hobbes, though bearing a famous name, is very rough and inaccurate, and has been sometimes praised a good deal beyond its real merits. An interest would attach to Dr. Smith’s translation, if it could be believed that Lord Chatham (who, it may be remembered, gave special instructions that his son William Pitt should read Thucydides at College) had contributed to the work “the Funeral Oration.” But the hand of the great Orator is nowhere discernible in the performance.

The edition of Dr. Arnold has given a powerful

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INTRODUCTION. ix ee a stimulus to the study of Thucydides in England. Himself inspired with the love of his author, he inspired the love of him in others. He certainly possessed that quality of a Commentator from which an ancient writer gains so much, the gift of intelligent appreciation. He first showed how Thucydides might be translated with elegance and accuracy. Though not a great philologer or a learned inquirer, and adding little to actual knowledge, he created an interest about geography and archeology, and even about the interpretation of difficult passages, such as never existed before among his countrymen. His notes are often models of good English and good sense. It is to be regretted that, amid the variety of his pursuits, he never gained an intimate and idiomatic acquaintance with the language of Thucydides, and never formed a sound notion of textual criticism. He is frequently led away by fanciful comparisons of things Biblical and Classical, of Greek and English constructions, and of events ancient and modern. The influence of Niebuhr over him is perceptible in his speculations about ancient Greek races. But he had a true feeling for Greek history and life, and all students of Thucydides have reason to be thankful to him. When a great man undertakes the office of an interpreter he throws a light upon the page which the merely verbal critic is incapable of communicating, and it would be ungrateful to scan too closely his deficiencies in scholarship.

A new epoch in the knowledge of Thucydides was made by Poppo’s edition, beginning in the year 1815 with * Commentationes Criticae,” and ending in the year 1856 with a “Commentatio de Historia Thucyx : INTRODUCTION.

didis.” The bulk of the work is contained in two volumes of prolegomena, and in eight volumes of text and scholia, and of annotations on them. This grand edition may be criticised on the grounds of old-fashioned scholarship, of imperfect judgment of the MSS., of deficiency in historical imagination, and of immoderate prolixity. But Poppo has the great merit of being almost always right. There is no trace of the mind and genius of Arnold to be discovered in his pages; they are not written in a form either attractive or suggestive to the student of history. Yet the true scholar will look with respect and admiration on the twelve volumes, not merely as a vast thesaurus in which nearly everything illustrative of Thucydides has been accumulated, but because the editor manifests a real insight into the meaning of his author. For Poppo was the first who saw that the language of Thucydides had a law of its own, and was not merely to be judged of by the precepts of grammarians, whether ancient or modern. Taking the accusations of Dionysius of Halicarnassus as his basis, he proceeds to show that the supposed irregularities of Thucydides, the confusions of persons, genders, numbers, voices, moods, tenses, are not real confusions or irregularities, but are attributable to an imperfect or unfixed state of grammar or language, and have a principle underlying them. Hither they follow some analogy or verbal association; or they obey the sequence of thought rather than the rules of grammar; or they are due to some attraction of sound or sense; or they blend the language of poetry and prose at a time when the two were not yet accurately distinguished. Of two legitimate usages,

INTRODUCTION. xi that which afterwards fell into disuse, and which therefore appears to be irregular, is sometimes preferred. Many of the so-called solecisms are at variance, not so much with grammar, as with the practice of later Greek; or, if they are ungrammatical, we must enlarge our notions of grammar that we may be able to embrace them. At the same time it would be maintained by Poppo that Thucydides has rarely, if ever, allowed himself liberties’ not to be found somewhere in other writers. These principles he bases upon a large induction of examples, and partially succeeds by the help of them in emancipating himself and his author from grammatical superstitions.

Poppo’s edition is eminently distinguished by sobriety of judgment. Trained in the school of Hermann (although the Master in later life forgot his own lesson), he had been early warned against the license of conjectural emendation; and his familiar acquaintance with the language of Thucydides enabled him to see: that conjecture is unnecessary, where a scholar of a more general type would have pronounced against the genuineness of the text. It must be admitted that he has not the gift of clear exposition or of exhibiting the parts of an argument in their true relation to one another; and in winding through the long notes of the larger edition we have sometimes a difficulty in separating his own view from that of others whom he is confuting. But though his meaning is not always apparent on the surface, there is to be found at the bottom good sense and true philological tact. The life-time deyoted by him to the study of Thucydides was by no xii INTRODUCTION.

means wasted, for he restored to a great writer natural principles of interpretation.

Later editors have added comparatively little to him, and would probably have done better if they had followed more closely in his footsteps. The most distinguished of his successors, Classen, while equalling, or perhaps exceeding him, in subtle analysis of the language, falls very far short in soundness of judgment. The translator is nevertheless bound to acknowledge that he is under considerable obligations to his work, as well as to the useful edition of Béhme. Some valuable contributions to the study of Thucydides have been made by the minute learning of Kruger: of these he has also availed himself.

The language of Thucydides presents a curious and interesting problem, because it belongs to a period when the uses of words and constructions were not yet fixed, and an original writer had much greater freedom in varying them than was possible in the Alexandrian times. As centuries went on, “the individual withered” and “the world” of language “was more and more.” There was no force of mind seeking expression for itself, trying experiments, or struggling against the conventionalities which were imposed upon it. The daily practice of oratory, the precepts of a thousand grammarians, reduced the mighty genius of Hellas to the level of a later generation. Men instead of wrestling with language and logic, fell under the dominion of them. No one in the age of Aristotle would have dared to write like Auschylus or Thucydides ; as no one in our own day would attempt to imitate Shakspeare.

INTRODUCTION. xili

Poetry sooner submitted to the yoke than prose, which had hitherto been used only in the current eigoueyn Aéfuc, and was incapable of expressing the higher thoughts of men, in the age when the heaven of abstractions,

“Won from the void and formless infinite,”

was just begining to appear. Thucydides came under the influence of that new intellectual world which broke upon the Greek in the fifth century before Christ, and which is never sufficiently appreciated by us because we have inherited it and habitually live in it. But not at ence was language adequate to receive or take up into itself the ideas which were asking for expression. The forms of speech and writing were slowly adjusted to the mental movement of the age. Words had to be distinguished from things, arguments from fallacies. The grammatical construction and the logical connection of clauses and sentences were still clumsy and irregular, especially in Attic, though the sense of art was not wanting, and the sophist was busy elaborating his new rules and formulas, which had a remarkable fascination for the minds of the Athenians.

Hence we see in the same writer the perfection of art and the greatest want of art, good taste and errors of taste, the meagre and false artificiality of the sophist combined with an antique beauty and masterly power in the delineation of facts. The speeches of Thucydides everywhere exhibit the antitheses, the climaxes, the plays of words, the point which is no point, of the rhetorician, yet retain amid these defectsof form a weight of thought to which xiv INTRODUCTION.

succeeding historians can scarcely show the like. The narrative on the other hand is natural and simple, in the highest degree picturesque and dramatic, often deeply pathetic by its very severity, generally intelligible, and only getting into a tangle when attempting to express political and philosophical reflections, as in the Corcyraean sedition. He who considers that Thucydides was a great genius writing in an ante-grammatical age, when logic was just beginning to be cultivated, who had thoughts far beyond his contemporaries, and who had great difficulty in the arrangement and expression of them, who is anxious but not always able to escape tautology, will not be surprised at his personifications, at his confusion of negatives and affirmatives, of consequents and antecedents, at his imperfect antitheses and involved parentheses, at his employment of the participle to express abstract ideas in the making, at his substitution of one construction for another, at his repetition of a word, or unmeaning alteration of it for the sake of variety, at his over-logical form, at his forgetfulness of the beginning of a sentence before he arrives at the end of it. The solecisms or barbarisms of which he is supposed to be guilty are the natural phenomena of a language in a time of transition; and though not always, as Poppo maintains, common to other Greek writers, yet having some analogy by which they may be defended. They are also to be ascribed to a strong individuality, which subtilizes, which rationalizes, which concentrates, which crowds the use of words, which thinks more than it can express (wellulouévm yao éoe). Dionysius of Halicarnassus is right in attrib-

INTRODUCTION. XV uting the obscurity of Thucydides to himself as well as to his age; for his contemporaries, Antiphon, Andocides, Lysias, Xenophon, are far from secure. It is a commonplace, but one which cannot be too often repeated, that we must interpret an ancient writer by himself and by his own age, and not by modern notions. We must not add on to him our mysteries and moralities, or translate his confused modes of thought into our more distinct ones (more distinct at least to us). Neither must we measure him by our standards of right and wrong. His range of view may be limited, but we cannot safely enlarge it. Nor can we argue from his inconsistencies or ; omission of details; nor draw inferences from his precise words, because we cannot expect him to use legal accuracy. The whole manner of ancient writing was different from our own; we do not know whether the words or sentences of Thucydides were written down as soon as they occurred to the mind, or were long preserved in the treasure-house of memory. At what time the successive portions of his history were completed must forever remain uncertain to us. The sources from which the ancient historian gathered his narrative are very dissimilar to those which are at the disposal of the modern, the first meagre and oral, the latter often overwhelming the compiler by the very mass of his written and. printed materials. A few ancient inscriptions at Athens or Delphi, the brief narrative of a writer like Hellanicus (i. 97), whom we can easily believe to have been “inaccurate in his chronology,” or of Antiochus the Syracusan (though there is no evidence that he was acquainted with the latter), the witness xvi INTRODUCTION.

to events which was afforded by statues and buildings, such as the “columns taken from sepulchres” which were inserted in the walls of Athens, the decrees of the senate, people, and magistrates, the best old traditions (i. 9 init.) —these are about all the subsidia which Thucydides had to use. Modern history is gathered out of a multitude of books. Thucydides drew his narrative fresh from the lips of men after hearing the different accounts of the contending parties (v. 26 fin.). Whether his views are true or false we can only determine by internal evidence; for it is useless to balance them against ‘the ever-diminishing truth and ever-increasing fiction of a later generation. Nor can we supplement the one by the other. Thucydides may possibly have been unjust to Cleon, but the suspicion is not confirmed by the statement of Marcellinus that Cleon was the proposer of the decree by which he was banished; for such an anecdote is more likely to be invented than not. When, as in modern histories of ancient Greece, the good cloth of Herodotus or Thucydides or Xenophon is patched with the transparent gauze of Diodorus and Plutarch, the whole garment becomes unequal and ragged. There is a special impropriety in combining the fictions of later writers with the narrative of Thucydides, who stands absolutely alone among the historians, not only of Hellas, but of the world, in his impartiality and love of truth.

We must accept ancient historians as they are, with their limited ideas and restricted means of knowledge, with their Hellenic conceptions of morality and of nature. They are disappointing, like the

INTRODUCTION. xvii

Elgin marbles, to those who expect to find in them

‘modern sentimentalism or a modern political philosophy. But, like the Elgin marbles, to those who can appreciate their simplicity, their beauty, their originality, they will seem to be worth all the rest.

There have been many commentaries on the Classics both in ancient and modern times; and a kind of commentary on them is furnished by the ideas which the ancients themselves entertained about their great writers. But most of the ancient commentaries, and some of the modern, rather interpret to us the age in which they were written than the author who is supposed to be illustrated by them. The treatise of Dionysius of Halicarnassus on the style of Thucydides, except in so far as it confirms the text in a multitude of passages, adds nothing to our knowledge of the book; but it throws a striking light on the narrow and feeble intelligence of the Graeco- Roman rhetorician and historian of the first century B.c., and of the world for which he wrote. Early criticism consists almost entirely in adapting the past to the present, in obtruding the notions of a later age upon an earlier one. And it is only by degrees that mankind have been able to exclude the subjective element which is always reappearing, and have learned to interpret an author from himself, or in the study of an age to confine themselves to the range of its ideas.

Hitherto each age seems to have required its own interpretation or adaptation of Scripture, or of the Classics, and to have been dissatisfied with that of any other. It may be asked whether, as philology progresses and words are understood to have a fixed meaning —not that “which we bring to them,” but eee xvi : INTRODUCTION.

that which is contained in them — the art of interpretation must be always going on, like the labor of the Danaides, pouring into a sieve knowledge which is perpetually flowing out, and in every generation requiring to be replenished. Must we during every ten or twenty years have new Commentaries on the Gospels and Hpistles, new editions of Homer, Thucydides, Aristotle? No sooner does one appear than it begins to be forgotten, and another is with some anxiety expected. Such a perennial stream of interpretation tends to discredit itself, and may suggest the thought that it would be better to reprint old books instead of writing new ones. But there is really some answer to be made to the objection. In the first place, we have not so completely got rid of the “ subjective ” element as we are sometimes inclined to imagine. And after all the pains and labor which have been bestowed upon them by German and English scholars, we cannot be said even now to have editions of the principal Classics in which nothing is superfluous and nothing wanting. The old failings of the commentator, want of proportion, ostentation of learning, love of emendation, perverse ingenuity, the habit of controversy, still cling to him. Secondly, although many old editions are better than most new ones, the subtle advance of philological criticism, even during the last thirty or forty years, does make the correction of old-fashioned opinions necessary ; there is hardly any book written in this century which does not require such a purgation almost equally with those of preceding centuries. Little if anything can now be added to the sources of our knowledge, but there is a higher standard of evidence by which our

INTRODUCTION. xix materials have to be estimated; and more discrimination is needed in separating what is really certain from matters of opinion and conjecture. All criticism requires to be criticised before we can make a nearer approach to the truth. The traditions of famous scholars have not unfrequently to be repudiated in the light of facts. The wheat has to be separated from the chaff; the voluminous learning of past ages to be recast in easier and more manageable forms. And if Greek literature is not to pass away, it seems to be necessary that in every age some one who has drunk deeply from the original fountain should renew the love of it in the world, and once more present that old life, with its great ideas and great actions, its creations in politics and in art, like the distant remembrance of youth, before the delighted eyes of mankind.

NOTE.

In referring to the dates placed at the head of the English text, it must be remembered that Thucydides’ ‘ year ? or the ‘year of the war” begins about three months after the corresponding year B. C., and about three months before the corresponding Olympic year. For example, the attempt on Potidaea of iv. 135 belongs to 422, not to 423 B. C.; and the treaty of v. 47 to

F : iva ri x ‘ i Ded ed Bibi Ree ae Bein ea ori ieee e 433 et wiles Ath gage YE ieee

‘ P 7 im co op s : ae 2 a medi) ged b4000E 2 , = , hin ae i — ’ eeorets oe = heoe : a ; 7 ae oe

THUCYDIDES.

BOOKST

Tuucypipes, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war in which the Peloponnesians and the Athenians fought against one another. He began to write when they first took up arms, believing that it would be great and memorable above any previous war. For he argued that both states were then at the full height of their military power, and he saw the rest of the Hellenes either siding or intending to side with one or other of them. No movement ever stirred Hellas more deeply than this; it was shared by many of the Barbarians, and might be said even to affect the world at large. The character of the events which preceded, whether immediately or in more remote antiquity, owing to the lapse of time cannot be made out with certainty. But, judging from the evidence which I am able to trust after most careful inquiry,! I should imagine that former ages were not great either in their wars or in anything else.

The country which is now called Hellas was not regularly settled in ancient times.? The people were

1 Or, connecting oy with moxgdratoy: ‘But after carrying the inquiry to the farthest point at which any trustworthy evidence can be obtained.” 2 Or, taking od m&dae closely together: ‘‘ until recent times,”’

Greatness of the war.

Early condition of Hellas:

"= es ws + .

2 . EARLY INHABITANTS OF HELLAS.

Va migratory, and readily left their homes whenever they readiness of Were overpowered by numbers. There was no comthe early : ° . tribes to merce, and they could not safely hold intercourse with migrate :

thericher one another either by land or sea. The several tribes districts the more un- cultivated their own soil just enough to obtain a mainsome of the tenance from it. But they had no accumulations of poorer, like

A wealth, and did not plant the ground; for, being withmore pros: out: walls, they were never sure that an invader might not come and despoil them. Living in this manner and knowing that they could anywhere obtain a bare subsistence, they were always ready to migrate; so that they had neither great cities nor any considerable resources. The richest districts were most constantly changing their inhabitants; for example, the countries which are now called Thessaly and Boeotia, the greater part of the Peloponnesus with the exception of Arcadia, and all the best parts of Hellas. For the productiveness of the land increased the power of individuals ; this in turn was a source of quarrels by which communities ' were ruined, while at the same time they were more exposed to attacks from without. Certainly Attica, of which the soil was poor and thin, enjoyed a long freedom from civil strife, and therefore retained its original inhabitants. And a striking confirmation of my argument is afforded by the fact that Attica through immigration increased in population more than any other region. For the leading men of Hellas,? when driven out of their own country by war or revolution, sought an asylumat Athens ; and from the very earliest times, being admitted to rights of citizenship, so greatly increased

1 Or, “‘ gave to some communities greater power; this was a source of quarrels, by which they,”’ ete.

2 Or, taking é¢ 7& Ada in another sense: “‘that Attica through immigration increased in population quite out of proportion to her increase in other respects;’’ or, supplying tiv “EiAdda and taking tetoixlag in another sense: *‘ And here is a striking confirmation of my argument that the constant migrations were the cause which prevented the rest of Hellas from increasing equally with Attica. The leading men of Hellas,” ete.

eae ee the number of inhabitants that Attica became incapable k of containing them, and was at last obliged to send out colonies to Ionia.

The feebleness of antiquity is further proved to me 3, by the circumstance that there appears to have been No unity

2 2 ¥, among the no common action in Hellas before the Trojan War, early inabitants :

And I am inclined to think that the very name was %° common name of not as yet given to the whole country, and in fact did Hellenes or

Barbarians ;

not exist at all before the time of Hellen, the son of 0= common Deucalion; the different tribes, of which the Pelasgian /felss Pe was the most widely spread, gave their own names to Wei” different districts. But when Hellen and his sons be-

came powerful in Phthiotis, their aid was invoked by

other cities, and those who associated with them gradually began to be called Hellenes, though a long

time elapsed before the name prevailed over the whole country. Of this Homer affords the best evidence ; for

he, although he lived long after the Trojan War, nowhere

uses this name collectively, but confines it to the followers

of Achilles from Phthiotis, who were the original Hel-

lenes; when speaking of the entire host he calls them

-Danaiins, or Argives, or Achaeans. Neither is there any mention of Barbarians in his poems, clearly because there

were as yet no Hellenes opposed to them by a common distinctive name. Thus the several Hellenic tribes (and

I mean by the term Hellenes those who, while forming separate communities, had a common language, and were afterwards called by a common name),! owing to their weakness and isolation, were never united in any great enterprise before the Trojan War. And they only made

the expedition against Troy after they had gained considerable experience of the sea.

Minos is the first to whom tradition ascribes the 4.

possession of a navy. He made himself master of a Beginnings of civilization ; Minos

1 Or, supplying #AnOévte¢ with both clauses: “those who successively acquired the Hellenic name, which first spread among the several tribes speaking the same language, and afterwards became universal,’’