History of the Peloponnesian War

“Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta, beginning the account at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past. My belief was based on the fact that the two sides were at the very height of their power and preparedness, and I saw, too, that the rest of the Hellenic world was committed to one side or the other; even those who were not immediately engaged were deliberating on the courses which they were to take later. This was the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” 

These are Thucydides’ opening sentences, in which he explains his primary motive for writing about the war he lived through and served in as an Athenian general: He believed the war to be the most significant conflict in the history of the Hellenic people, specifically because the two main combatants were so powerful and so polarizing. Later in the book, Thucydides will revisit the motif of power as a corrupting and polarizing force.

“In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way—even when these stories concern their own native countries.” 

Here, Thucydides announces himself as skeptical of tradition and of stories from the distant past that cannot be corroborated or evidenced. In Thucydides’ time, people looked to the Olympian gods and the myths associated with them to explain human events and their outcomes. Throughout the book, Thucydides juxtaposes people’s reliance on sacrifices, oracles, and soothsayers with the consequences of human choices and errors and acts of nature, such as earthquakes, floods, and thunderstorms. In addition to questioning tradition, he questions his own leaders and seeks to assess them rationally and empirically.  

“It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology. We may claim instead to have used only the plainest evidence and to have reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate, considering that we have been dealing with ancient history. As for this present war, even though people are apt to think that the war in which they are fighting is the greatest of all wars and, when it is over, to relapse again into their admiration of the past, nevertheless, if one looks at the facts themselves, one will see that this was the greatest war of all.”

In this passage, Thucydides discusses his objection to poets and writers: They are more interested in entertaining their audiences than in telling them the truth. This motif of language or