THUCYDIDES

(471-400? B. C.)

BY HERBERT WEIR SMYTH

OETHE'S aphorism that the ancients are children is less true of
Thucydides than of any other Greek historian. Herodotus

looked on the world with the open-eyed wonder of the child; Thucydides subjects it to the critical scrutiny of the man. After the age of story-telling, which finds as much delight in its art as in the truth, comes the age of sober investigation. The first step in Greek history was to record the past, the second was to narrate the events of the writer's own time. Thucydides is the first writer of contemporaneous history, as he is the first critical historian in the literature of Europe.

The author of the History of the Peloponnesian War' is our only authority for the few facts that are known concerning his life. He tells us that his father's name was Olorus; that he was a person of local importance from his ownership of mines in Thrace; that he was attacked by the plague which ravaged Athens; and that in 424 his ill success in his military command was the cause of his exile from Athens for twenty years. As one of the generals of the Athenian forces, he was summoned from Thasus by his colleague Eucles to assist him in holding Amphipolis against Brasidas. Though he made. all speed, he failed to reach that city in time to prevent its surrender; while his successful defense of Eion failed to mitigate the anger of his countrymen at the loss of their chief stronghold in the north. It was not till long after Thucydides's death that interest was awakened in the lives of the great literary artists. In order to satisfy the craving for anecdote and novelty, students of literature had to piece out the facts of tradition by fanciful inferences, by confusing persons of the same name, and by downright fabrications in the interest of picturesqueness. This process is illustrated in the story that when Herodotus was giving a public recital of his history at Athens, the youthful Thucydides, as if to presage his future distinction as a historian, burst into tears. "Olorus," said the Father of History, "thy son has a natural impulse toward knowledge." A sifting of the material in the 'Life' by Marcellinus, and in other late writers, yields little that is trustworthy.

Thucydides was born in the deme Halimus, on the coast of Attica, near Phalerum. The date of his birth is uncertain. It was roughly referred to 471 by Apollodorus, who calculated that in 431 the historian would have reached the age of forty,- the period of intellectual prime. By others the date was brought down as low as 454. We must rest content with the historian's statement that at the outbreak of the war in 431 he had attained an age that permitted maturity of judgment. His death probably took place before 399; certainly before 396, since he fails to take account of an eruption of Ætna in that year.

Like Demosthenes and Aristotle, Thucydides had northern nonHellenic blood in his veins. His father Olorus was no doubt an Athenian citizen; but he was a descendant, probably the grandson, of the Thracian prince of that name, whose daughter Hegesipyle became the mother of Cimon by Miltiades, the victor at Marathon. It may not be a fanciful suggestion that a severe love of truth was a part of Thucydides's intellectual inheritance; for he is the only Greek historian who prefers that truth shall be unrefracted by the medium of poetry through which the naïve Hellene loved to view the history of his race. By birth Thucydides was, as we have seen, connected with Cimon, the leader of the aristocracy, whose policy guided Athens until the rise of Pericles. His youth and early manhood may have been spent partly in Athens, and at a time when the city which had taken the lead in rolling back the tide of Persian invasion was filled with the dreams of an external empire and the vision of a new culture in which reason and beauty were to make life richer than it had ever been before; when Sophocles was exhibiting his 'Antigone,' and Pheidias working at the Parthenon; when Pericles was fashioning those ideals which were to make his city renowned as the home of the highest possibilities of his race. The Sophists were grappling with the problem of the relation between words and things; Anaxagoras was opening new vistas to thought, in proclaiming the doctrine that it was mind which created. the order and harmony of the universe. Who the actual teachers of Thucydides were, we do not know; nor did the ancients busy themselves with the question until the 'History' had been canonized in the first century B. C. But we may safely conjecture that the youth felt himself under the spell of the time, and animated by that free intellectual life on which the Athenian State rested its claims to superiority.

When the war broke out in 431, believing that it was to exceed in importance any other known in history, Thucydides set himself to collect the materials for his work,-a determination that shows him to have been rather a man of letters than a man of affairs.