Thucydides

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Ancient Classics for English Readers

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(SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES.)

Chapter 1

THUCYDIDES.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

It has been remarked already, in one of the earlier volumes of this series, that when we use the word "ancient" of the Greek and Roman writers, we are employing a term which, from one point of view, has a very unequal application. It is not altogether a question of date which makes a writer ancient or modern. It is the position which he occupies in the cycle of the national literature, if his country has ever reached a high pitch of civilisation, which marks his thoughts and diction as recent or archaic. Our Anglo-Saxon historians and the Arthurian romances are in this sense far more ancient than Horace or Cicero. "There is, in fact," says Dr Arnold, "an ancient and a modern period in the history of every people: the ancient differing, and the modern in many essential points agreeing with, that in which we now live. Thus the largest portion of that history which we commonly call ancient is practically modern, as it describes society in a stage analogous to that in which it now is; while on the other hand, much of what is called modern history is practically ancient, as it relates to a state of things which has passed away. Thucydides and Xenophon, the orators of Athens, and the philosophers, speak a wisdom more applicable to us politically than the wisdom of even our own countrymen who lived in the middle ages; and their position, both intellectual and political, more nearly resembles our own." More than this, there are cases in the literature of the same people, in which a single generation marks the step from the old to the new. Herodotus and Thucydides were almost contemporaries: between the probable dates of their birth there was an interval of scarcely thirteen years. But the distance between them, as writers of history, is not to be measured by a chronological table. In Herodotus we have the ancient chronicler, with all his charms and with all his defects. He is at once story-teller, geographer, antiquarian, and traveller; at times he seems to assume the licence allowed to story-tellers, and attributed somewhat unfairly to travellers, of preferring the picturesque and the marvellous to the baldness of fact. But we have to remember that the readers (or, perhaps, to speak more correctly, the hearers) of his day looked for this kind of intellectual entertainment, and had a far more ready appreciation of the legend which magnified the national heroes, and the tale which described the wonders of strange lands and peoples, than of the painful accuracy of impartial history.

When we turn from the pages of Herodotus to those of Thucydides, the change is wonderful. The latter writer is fully conscious of it himself; he feels that he is the teacher of a new school. The progress of thought in Greece during a single generation had been greater perhaps than ever before or since. Philosophy, rhetoric, and the drama, had all made vast and rapid strides. And with Thucydides, history, properly so called, began. He treats his predecessors in this line with even scantier courtesy than is usual in such cases. He classes the "story-writer"—there was no word as yet for "historian"—with the poet, as both equally mythical and untrustworthy. He speaks of the "wonderfully small amount of pains with which the investigation of the truth is pursued by most men, who commonly avail themselves of what they find ready to their hand." "Men accept from one another the current report of past events, without putting them to the test of examination, even when they have taken place in their own country." His own method, he assures his readers, shall be something very different indeed. We might well be inclined to smile at the confident self-assertion of the following language, if we did not know that the promise was largely justified by the performance:—

"If, from the evidence here advanced, the reader should conclude that the course of events was on the whole as I have traced it, he would not be far wrong; instead of trusting rather to what poets have sung about them, dressing them out to make them grander than they were, or to what the chroniclers have put together, rather with a view to make their tale pleasant to the ear than accurate in its facts; bearing in mind that such matters cannot be subjected to strict examination, inasmuch as most of them through lapse of time have won their way into the region of fable so as to lose all credit; but holding that they have been traced with sufficient accuracy, allowing for their antiquity, from the best data at our command. And though men always think the war of their own times the most important, so long as they are engaged in it, but when it is over bestow their admiration rather on the wars of the past; still, the war of which I write, if we contemplate its operations and results, will appear the most important of any.

"Now, as to the language used by the several speakers, either when they were preparing for the war or were actually engaged in it, it would have been difficult for me, as to what I heard in person, or for other parties who reported to me from various quarters, to record exactly what was said. But I have set down what each seemed likely to have said as most to the purpose under the circumstances, while adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of the words used. But as to the actions of the war, I have not been content to report them on the authority of any chance informant, or from my own conception of them; but either from personal knowledge where I was present, or after the most careful investigation possible in every case where I gained my information from others. Very laborious were these inquiries; since those who were present in the several actions did not all give the same account of the same affair, but as they were swayed by favour to one side or the other, or as their memory served them. Possibly this avoidance of any fabulous embellishment may make my work less entertaining; but I shall be well content if those shall pronounce my history useful, who desire to gain a view of events as they really did happen, and as they are very likely, in accordance with human nature, to repeat themselves at some future time,—if not in exactly the same, yet in very similar fashion. And it is designed rather as a possession for ever than as a mere prize composition to be listened to for the moment."—(I. 21, 22.)

The claim which the writer makes on behalf of his great work, boastful as it might seem, rested on a consciousness of power. He did but anticipate the calm judgment of posterity. Lord Lytton has called it "the eternal manual of statesmen," and the great Earl of Chatham insisted on it as the one Greek book with which, whatever else might be neglected, his son must make himself familiar. Macaulay, who read and reread it while he was writing his own great history, pronounces the author to be, "on the whole, the first of historians:" and his biographer tells us that "the sense of his own inferiority to Thucydides did more to put him out of conceit with himself than all the unfavourable comments bestowed upon him by the newspapers and reviews." The 'History' of Thucy- dides is indeed one of those "possessions for ever" in the great storehouse of literature which has never lost its value. It may be doubted whether even the critical Athenian audience who first heard his manuscript read, were as much impressed by the genius of the author as the world of modern scholars is now, after the lapse of above two thousand years.

It is time to inquire who this great writer was, whose own confidence as to his future rank amongst historians was so largely justified. But here, as is so commonly the case with the early writers with whose names and works we are so familiar, the personality of the man himself escapes us. The days when every author, great or small, was to have his voluminous biography, had not yet come. Two so-called 'Lives' of Thucydides, of comparatively modern date, have come down to us; but they may both be referred to that class of "fabulous" narrative, "constructed to be pleasant," for which he had himself such keen contempt. This much only we can be said to know with any approach to accuracy as to his early life: that he was born about the year 471 B.C.; and that he was of Thracian descent (for his father's name, Olorus, is Thracian), though he was a citizen of Athens. We gather from his own pages that he possessed some hereditary property in gold-mines, in the district of Thrace known as Scapté-Hylé ("the excavated wood"), and that he saw considerable service himself as a divisional commander, in the great war of which he became the historian. He is said to have taken lessons in rhetoric, the popular study of the day, from Antiphon of Rhamnus, the inventor of oratory, as his admirers termed him; and competent critics have traced a correspondence of idioms, which is at least curious, in the extant orations of the master when compared with the set speeches which the pupil introduces so freely into his narrative of the war. He was certainly one of the great orator's warm admirers, for he characterises the defence made by Antiphon, when accused of treason to the State, as the ablest on record. The young Thucydides is also said to have sat with Pericles at the feet of the great philosopher Anaxagoras, the boldest free-thinker of the day; and some hints occur here and there in his history of a contempt for the national superstitions, which are thought to savour of those unpopular opinions which led to Anaxagoras's fine and banishment. He was a sufferer—one of the few who completely recovered—from the great plague which almost depopulated Athens in the second year of the war, and of which he has left us such a full account.

The personal share which he took in the operations of the war, and his conduct as a general, will come before us in their proper place in the course of the history. His failure in the campaign in Thrace against Brasidas, whether it was his fault or only his misfortune, resulted in his banishment from Athens (or perhaps his voluntary exile to avoid a worse sentence) for twenty years. The locality of his exile is uncertain; probably he moved from place to place. Part of the time seems, from some of his own expressions, to have been passed in the Peloponnese, within the borders of his enemies the Spartans; and this gave him the opportunity of judging the remaining operations of the war from the enemy's point of view. "It was my fate," he says, "to be an exile from my country for twenty years after the campaign against Amphipolis; and thus having been cognisant of the operations of both parties, and more especially of those of the Peloponnesians, by reason of my exile, I could calmly and at my leisure learn all I wanted about them." Possibly this kind of neutral position which, as a banished man, the writer held between friend and foe, may have contributed to the impartiality as well as to the accuracy of his narrative. It was no doubt during that long period of enforced leisure that he digested the materials which, as appears from his own statement just quoted, he had already collected, and expanded his original notes (if we may use so modern a term) into a methodical history. But it was probably not completed in its present form until after his return from exile—when Athens had seen her Long Walls destroyed by the Spartans, and these successful rivals had wrested from her the leadership of Greece. Thucydides possibly returned with Thrasybulus when he freed Athens from the tyranny of the Thirty: certainly, from his own expressions, it was after the great war was ended. He is said to have met his death by assassination, either at Athens or in his own domain at Scapté-Hylé. His tomb, with the brief inscription in a single line of verse,—Here lies Thucydides the son of Olorus, of Halimus,"—was for some time shown at Athens. His age at the time of his death is left uncertain—probably about seventy.

He left his work unfinished, after all. Something like a fourth part of the period which he intended it to embrace is left untouched. We know it as the 'History of the Peloponnesian War;' but the author did not live even to give it a name. Of the eight "books" into which his early editors have divided it, the seventh is thought never to have received his final corrections—if indeed this does not apply in less degree to the preceding books as well—and the eighth is left imperfect. So imperfect, that ancient literary gossip asserted that the daughter had put it together from her father's notes; whilst in other quarters the authorship was assigned to Xenophon, who has carried on the history where this eighth book leaves it, in his 'Hellenics.' One remarkable point in which the last book, as we have it, differs from the others, is in the total absence of those rhetorical and argumentative speeches which form so important a feature in Thucydides's work. It seems very probable that in all cases the speeches were composed and inserted by the author after the body of the history had been completed, and therefore are not to be found in this last and incomplete portion. It has indeed been asserted that they were here purposely omitted by Thucydides, because the public had pronounced them to be tedious: but such a verdict would scarcely have been in accordance with Athenian taste. It is evident that Thucydides himself, supposing him to have possessed the physical qualifications, would have made a consummate orator. Demosthenes must have held him to have been a master in the art, if there be any truth in the tradition that for his own improvement he had copied out the historian's great work no less than eight times.

It is somewhat remarkable that Thucydides nowhere mentions or alludes to—unless it be under cover of his general strictures on the writers of the past—his great predecessor Herodotus. A story is briefly referred to by Suidas of the boy Thucydides having been present when Herodotus read his history in public at the Olympian games, and that he shed tears of emulation, with the tacit resolve to follow in his steps. But modern criticism has gone so far as to doubt whether he ever read, or heard of, Herodotus's researches. His own death probably very soon followed that of the earlier historian.

Whence he drew his materials, independent of personal memoranda and verbal information from cotemporaries, we can very imperfectly guess. The written authorities must have been few. He mentions only Hellanicus, and of him he has no high opinion. The text of existing treaties, some of which he gives at length, and the memoirs of Cimon and Pericles, would probably be his most trustworthy authorities. It is possible that he may have met with his fellow-exile Alcibiades, and gained personal information from him.

The only division which he has himself made of his work is not into 'books,' as we now have it, but into those periods into which the story of the great struggle between Athens and Sparta, which distracted all Greece for twenty-seven years, naturally falls: First, the ten years from the attack on Platæa by the Thebans (B.C. 431) to the "Peace of Nicias" (B.C. 421); secondly, the next seven years of comparative suspension of hostilities; and lastly, the remaining period of the war—of which, however, he has left the last six years untouched. His work might perhaps be more fitly styled 'Annals' than 'History:' he gives the events of each year separately, dating them by the successive summers and winters. This plan spoils in some degree the effect of the narrative; the scene of operations is continually shifting; and he leaves a campaign or a siege at the very crisis of the interest, in order to bring up his arrears in other quarters. This arrangement has not been strictly adhered to in the following pages.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II.

PRELIMINARY HISTORY.

It will be best to let the historian open his subject in his own words. He gives us no laboured introduction, but announces his theme and purpose, and his motives for undertaking his task, with a dignified simplicity.

"Thucydides of Athens has written the story of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, how they warred with each other; having begun his record from the very outset, expecting it to prove an important war, and more worthy of relation than any that had been before it; forming this opinion both from the fact that both parties were perfectly equipped for it in every way, and seeing all the rest of Greece gathering to one side or the other, either by immediate action or by manifest intention. For this was the most important movement which had yet affected the Greeks, and indeed a large portion of the barbarian nations, and one might even say a great part of the world. For as to the wars which preceded this, and those of still earlier times, to ascertain the facts with any certainty seems impossible through lapse of time. But from such evidence as we have, so far as I am led to believe after carrying my investigations as far back as possible, I do not think they could have been on a very extensive scale, either as to military operations or anything else."

He proceeds to give a brief summary of the early and half-mythical history of Greece—the first instance of an attempt to apply anything like critical examination to the mass of current legend. That the result should be quite satisfactory is not to be expected: that it should display so much of the true spirit of historical criticism is the wonder. If Thucydides accepts the story of the great Trojan war in all its essentials as an historical fact, he admits no more than all students of history have done until quite a modern date, and what many whose authority is by no means to be despised admit now. He holds that there was a great united expedition of Greeks, led by a real Agamemnon against a real Troy, and that this it was which first drew together the various tribes who occupied the Peloponnese and its neighbourhood, and gave them some kind of national cohesion. He even accepts the muster-roll of ships and men, as given in the Iliad, as an authentic record, and explains the length of the siege by the difficulty of maintaining so numerous a force without detaching a large portion to obtain supplies. But the importance of the expedition and of its operations has been magnified, he has no doubt, by the poets, and he considers it not worthy of comparison with the greater undertakings of later times.

The sketch which he gives of the ages before the Trojan expedition cannot be accepted as much more than a clever guess, to be corrected by later investigations. It was impossible for him, as later historians with their greater advantages have found it, to sift with any very satisfactory result what Mommsen has happily termed "the rubbish-heap of tradition." He regards the Hellas, or Greece, of early times as overrun by migratory and restless tribes, who settled in such districts as they could conquer and hold, until driven out by a stronger people. They occupied, according to his view, rude hill-forts amongst the mountains, difficult of access, while they avoided the plain and the sea-shore, as liable at any moment to the attack of an enemy from land or sea. The most fertile lands—Bœotia, Thessaly, and the Peloponnese generally—were subject to the most frequent changes of inhabitants, because they held out stronger temptation to the invader: while Attica, with its poor and unproductive soil, was left in comparative quiet, and always in the occupation of the same people. Such, as is well known, was always the popular boast of the Athenians—that they were "sons of the soil." Hellen, the son of Deucalion, whence came the name of Hellenes—Pelops, the foreign chief who came from Asia and gave his name to the peninsula—and Minos, king of Crete, who established a navy, put down piracy, and colonised the islands,— are all treated as historical personages, though the distinctly fabulous elements of their story are passed over in silence. It is very possible that, Thucydides, like the Roman historian Livy at a much later date, found the existing national belief in these rather mythical heroes too strong for him to venture upon destructive criticism. To reject them altogether would have been to reject articles of the Greek faith. He may himself have retained a sort of half-conventional belief not only in their personality but in the legends with which it was surrounded.

It is from the return of the Greeks from the expedition to Troy that Thucydides would seem to date the historical annals of Greece. It was eighty years afterwards, according to his reckoning, that the great Dorian migration into the Peloponnese under the "sons of Hercules" took place: then Athens, the headquarters of the Ionian race, sent out her colonies, bearing their generic name, into the coasts and islands of the Archipelago, and so settled the district which went by the name of Ionia; while the Dorians from the Peloponnese threw off their companies of adventurers into Italy, Sicily, and the coasts of further Greece. Then came, as he considers, the advance of civilisation by the founding of navies—notably by the Corinthians, who by their position on the isthmus made their city the natural emporium of Greece; the increase of wealth, and the consequent rise of despotic governments, by the usurpation of some one powerful individual—"Tyrants," as the name went—in the several cities, instead of the old patriarchal and hereditary kings; until the great Dorian state of Sparta, or Lacedæmon, rising to a commanding position by reason of her long-established government, took upon her to vindicate the cause of liberty amongst her neighbours, and "put down the tyrants" in the several weaker states—Athens included. Then came the great Persian war, which had already found its own historian in Herodotus, and on which his successor does not linger. But it was, as he notes, out of the results of this earlier war that the present, of which he is to write, had arisen. Lacedæmon had taken the lead in the second act of the Persian invasion (for the Athenians had abandoned their city at the Persians' approach), and she had thus become, from circumstances perhaps even more than from ambition, the chief of a kind of informal confederacy which embraced most of the Greek states. But Athens was as decidedly superior at sea as Lacedæmon was on land. Hence arose that bitter jealousy of each other—a jealousy strengthened by difference of race, of character, and of national habits—which led to a perpetual condition of hostilities more or less open between themselves and their several allies, from the final repulse of the Persians, B.C. 480, to the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war in 431.

Thucydides will presently give us what he notes as the actual causes of the rupture. But its roots lay deeper than any overt act. Lacedæmon had lost her supremacy over Greece and the islands; and Athens had won it. The history of this momentous change in the international relations of the several Greek states is reserved by our historian for a later page of his work; but it will find its place more conveniently here, when we are considering the remoter causes of the war.

When the Athenians had returned to their deserted city, they naturally proceeded to rebuild the fortifications which the enemy had destroyed. The Lacedæmonians were jealous. Walled towns, they said, were dangerous things: they might serve an enemy for a base of operations (as Thebes had in the late war), as well as protect their occupants; rather than rebuild their own walls, let the Athenians join in levelling the rest throughout Greece. But the leading man at Athens was still the Themistocles who had laid such stress upon the "wooden walls" in the first Persian invasion: and he was as determined upon retaining the stone walls now. Lacedæmon had no navy, but her infantry were the best in the world, and Athens was not to lie at their mercy—good friends as they seemed just now. He contrived that some months should be occupied in diplomatic messages to and fro: the Lacedæmonian commissioners were fêted and entertained at Athens, but on one pretence or other not allowed to return home with their report. Themistocles himself went as representative of Athens to Lacedæmon, and waited there—"expecting his colleagues," he said—until he heard that the walls were nearly completed. Then he appeared before the Lacedæmonian authorities, and told them plainly how matters stood:—

"Their city was now put in a sufficient state of defence, he said, to protect its occupants: and if the Lacedæmonians or their allies had occasion to send any embassies there in future, let them understand that they were sending them to people who knew what was good for their own interests, as well as for the general interests of Greece. When it had seemed expedient to abandon their city and go aboard their ships, they had found the spirit to do so—without consulting their friends. And in whatever steps they had taken in concert with them, they had shown themselves to have as much sense, they thought, as other people. And at this present time they held it best for their city to have a wall round it, and more to the advantage both of their own citizens and of the allies in general; for it was impossible to give an independent or straightforward vote in council for the public interests unless they stood on equal terms. Either all the confederate cities, then, ought to be unfortified, or they were bound to hold what the Athenians had done to be right."—(I. 91.)

Thucydides does not take upon himself in this place, as in so many others, to give us anything like the actual words of the speaker. He could not do so, of course, from any good authority—unless the speech had been recorded, which is improbable—for Themistocles was long before the writer's own day: and it may perhaps be some testimony to the general faithfulness of his reports of cotemporary speakers, that here he is content with giving us only the general sense. We miss a good deal by not having the shrewdness and irony of the speaker more elaborately conveyed to us in the polished phrases of Thucydides. Need we wonder that the Lacedæmonians, though "they did not give vent to their wrath against Athens openly at the time," never forgot or forgave the quiet mode in which their jealousy had been baffled?

The breach grew gradually wider from other causes. The Lacedæmonian Pausanias, who followed up the campaign by some operations with the combined fleet against the coasts of Asia, was accused of abusing his powers, and even of a leaning to the Persian interests, and was deposed from the command. Many of the allies would not acknowledge his successor, and turned to Athens, with her powerful navy, as the natural leader of Greece, and its protector against foreign invaders. Athens was ready; and their rivals seem to have accepted the change with a good grace, which, under the circumstances, was hardly to be expected, and may be taken as a proof that Pausanias's conduct had become overbearing, and that the feeling against the continuance of the Spartan rule was strong and general.

The Athenians soon arranged that all the allied states should be taxed, either in ships or in money, for the maintenance of a navy for the defence of Greece. Such defence was still a strong necessity; for (though the writer before us does not mention it) we know that the Persian, though driven from Greece itself, still maintained strong garrisons in the coast-towns of Thrace and the Hellespont. This money they took charge of, under the title of "Treasurers of Greece," depositing it in the temple at Delos; whence it was afterwards, and apparently without remonstrance, transferred to the treasury at Athens. Gradually those smaller states which were allies in name became subjects in reality. If they failed to appear with their contingent when summoned,—if they declined to pay arrears of ships or money,—if they gave any cause of offence to their new leaders,—they were declared contumacious, and reduced to a state of undisguised dependency. The islands of Naxos, Thasos, and Eubœa successively revolted and were reduced; and every reduction of an independent ally to the position of a mere tributary increased the power of Athens. And from time to time the sufferers appealed to Lacedæmon for aid, which was given—willingly enough, it may be conceived—whenever there appeared a fair opening for regaining their own ascendancy; so that an intermittent succession of hostilities went on for twenty years. There had grown up in Greece by degrees two great rival interests and systems, of which Athens and Lacedæmon were the centres, each claiming a kind of rule over the subordinate states, and even the right to punish any breach of such relation on their parts. But Athens met with her reverses in turn, when she took part in the internal feuds of the Peloponnese: and when a truce of thirty years was agreed upon between the two great rivals, Athens had to give up the ports she had acquired on the Corinthian gulf, and to lose altogether her hold on the peninsula.