The parentage of Thucydides was such as to place him in a singularly favourable position for the great work to which he afterwards devoted his life. His father Olorus, a citizen of Athens, belonged to a family which derived wealth and influence from the possession of gold mines at Scaptesyle, on the Thracian coast opposite Thasos, and was a relative of his elder namesake, the Thracian prince whose daughter Hegesipyle married the great Miltiades, so that Cimon, son of Miltiades, was a cousin, perhaps first cousin, once removed, of Thucydides. It was in the vault of the Cimonian family at Athens, and near the remains of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, that Plutarch saw the grave of Thucydides. Thus the fortune of birth secured three signal advantages to the future historian: he was rich; he had two homes—one at Athens, the other in Thrace,—no small aid to a comprehensive study of the conditions under which the Peloponnesian War was waged; and his family connexions were likely to bring him from his early years into personal intercourse with the men who were shaping the history of his time.

The development of Athens during the forty years from 471 to 431 was, in itself, the best education which such a mind as that of Thucydides could have received. In the first two decades of his life the expansion and consolidation of Athenian power was proceeding; between his twentieth and fortieth year the inner resources of the city were being applied to the embellishment and ennoblement of Athenian life. As Cimon had been the principal agent in the former period, so Pericles was the central figure of the latter. A consciousness of such periods may be traced in the passage of the Funeral Oration where Pericles refers, first, to the acquisition of empire by the preceding generation, and then to the improvement of that inheritance by his own contemporaries (ii. 36. 5). It is a natural subject of regret, though it is not a just cause of surprise or complaint, that the History tells us nothing of the literature, the art, or the social life under whose influences its author had grown up. The Funeral Oration contains, indeed, his general testimony to the value and the charm of those influences. There we have the very essence of the Athenian spirit condensed into a few pregnant sentences, which show how thoroughly the writer was imbued with thal spirit, and how profoundly he appreciated its various manifestations. But he leaves us to supply all examples and details for ourselves. Beyond a passing reference to public “festivals,” and to “beautiful surroundings in private life,” he makes no attempt to define those “recreations for the spirit” which the Athenian genius had provided in such abundance. No writer of any age, perhaps, has rendered a more impressive tribute to the power of the best art than is implied in the terse phrase of Thucydides, when, speaking of the works which the Athenian daily saw around him, he declares that “the daily delight of them banishes gloom” (ών καθ' ημέραν η τepψις το λvπηpoν iκτrλησσcf). But it is not to Thucydides that we owe any knowledge of the particular forms in which that art was embodied. He alludes to the newly-built Parthenon only as containing the treasury; to the statue of Athene Parthenos which it enshrined, only on account of the gold which, at extreme need, could be detached from the image; to the Propylaea and other buildings with which Athens had been adorned under Pericles, only as works which had reduced the surplus of funds available for the war. Among the illustrious contemporaries whose very existence would be unknown from his pages are the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; the architect Ictinus; the sculptor Phidias; the physician Hippocrates; the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates. If Thucydides had mentioned Sophocles' as a general in the Samian War, it may be doubted whether he would have noticed the circumstance that Sophocles also wrote dramas, unless it had been for the purpose of distinguishing him from a namesake. And, had he lived to carry his story down to the debate in the Athenian ecclesia after the battle of Arginusae, we may conjecture that Socrates, if named at all, would have been barely mentioned as the one prytanis out of fifty who resisted an unconstitutional act,—with some expression, perhaps, of praise, but without any fuller characterization. We think of the countless occasions which Herodotus, if he had dealt with this period, would have found for invaluable digressions on men and manners, on letters and art; we feel the severity of the loss which the reticence of Thucydides has caused to us; and we might almost be tempted to ask whether the more genial, if laxer, method of Herodotus does not indeed correspond better with a liberal conception of the historian’s office. No one can do full justice to Thucydides, or appreciate the true completeness of his work, who has not faced this question, and found the answer to it. It would be a hasty judgment which inferred from the omissions of the History that its author’s interests were exclusively political. Thucydides was not writing the history of a period. His subject was an event—the Peloponnesian War,—a war, as he believed, of unequalled importance, alike in its direct results and in its political significance for all time. To his task, thus defined, he brought an intense concentration of all his faculties. He worked with a constant desire to make each successive incident of the war as clear as possible. To take only two instances: there is nothing in literature more graphic than his description of the plague at Athens, or than the whole narrative of the Sicilian expedition. But the same temper made him resolute in excluding irrelevant topics. The social life of the time, the literature and the art, find no place in his picture simply because they did not belong to his subject. His work was intended to be “a possession for ever.” He could conceive a day when Sparta should be desolate, and when only ruins of Athens should remain. But his imagination never projected itself into a time when the whole fabric of Hellenic civilization should have perished. Could his forecast have extended to an age when men of “barbarian” races and distant climes would be painfully endeavouring to reconstruct a picture of that civilization, —when his own narrative would need the help of sidelights which seemed to him wholly unnecessary,—then, assuredly, he would have added all that such readers could require. But he would not have done this in the manner of Herodotus, by free indulgence in digression; rather he would have gathered up the social and intellectual phenomena of his day in a compact and systematic introduction, specially designed for the non-Hellenic reader.

The biography which bears the name of Marcellinus states that Thucydides was the disciple of Anaxagoras in philosophy and of Antiphon in rhetoric. Such statements were often founded on nothing more than a desire to associate distinguished names, and to represent an eminent man as having profited by the best instruction in each kind which his contemporaries could afford. In this case there is no evidence to confirm the tradition. But it may be observed that Thucydides and Antiphon at least belong to the same rhetorical school, and represent the same early stage of Attic prose. Both writers use words of an antique or decidedly poetical cast; both point verbal contrasts by insisting on the precise difference between terms of similar import; and both use metaphors somewhat bolder than were congenial to Greek prose in its riper age. The differences, on the other hand, between the style of Thucydides and that of Antiphon arise chiefly from two general causes. First, Antiphon wrote for hearers, Thucydides for readers; the latter, consequently, can use a degree of condensation, and a freedom in the arrangement of words, which would have been hardly possible for the former. Again, the thought of Thucydides is often more complex than any which Antiphon undertook to interpret; and the greater intricacy of the historian’s style exhibits the endeavour to express each thought. Few things in the history of literary prose are more interesting than to watch that vigorous mind in its struggle to mould a language of magnificent but immature capabilities. The obscurity with which Thucydides has sometimes been reproached often arises from the very clearness with which a complex idea is present to his mind, and his strenuous effort to present it in its entirety, when the strong consciousness of logical coherence will make him heedless of grammatical regularity. He never sacrifices the thought to the language, but he will sometimes sacrifice the language to the thought. A student of Thucydides may always be consoled by the reflexion that he is not engaged in unravelling a mere rhetorical tangle. Every light on the sense will be a light on the words; and, when, as is not seldom the case, Thucydides comes victoriously out of this struggle of thought and language, having achieved perfect expression of his meaning in a sufficiently lucid form, then his style rises into an intellectual brilliancy—thoroughly manly, and also penetrated with intense feeling—which nothing in Greek prose literature surpasses.

The History shows not only a thorough insight into the political ideas of Pericles, but also a sympathy with him, ' and an admiration for his character, which indicate personal friendship. If, before 431, Thucydides had wished to take a prominent part in the public life of Athens, everything was in his favour. But there is no trace of his having done so; and it is possible that his opportunities in this respect were modified by the necessity of frequent visits to Thrace, where the management of such an important property as the gold mines must have claimed the occasional presence of the proprietor. The manner in which he refers to his personal influence in that region is such as to suggest that he had sometimes resided there (iv. 105. 1). He was at Athens in the spring of 430, when the plague broke out. If his account of the symptoms has not enabled physicians to agree on a diagnosis of the malady, it is at least singularly full and vivid. He had himself been attacked by the plague; and, as he briefly adds, “he had seen others suffer.” The tenor of his narrative would warrant the inference that he had been one of a few who were active in ministering to the sufferers —in that fearful time when religion and morality lost all control over the despairing population of Athens—when all the ordinary decencies of life were set at nought, and when even the nearest relatives failed in the duties of humanity towards the dying.

The turning-point in the life of Thucydides came in the winter of the year 424. He was then forty-seven (if his birth has been rightly placed in 471), and for the first time he is found holding an official position. He was one of two generals entrusted with the command of the regions towards Thrace (τα cττ'ι Θράκης), a phrase which denotes the whole Thracian seaboard from Macedonia eastward to the vicinity of the Thracian Chersonese, though often used with more special reference to the Chalcidic peninsula. One reason why Thucydides had been chosen for the post was the local influence which he possessed among the people of the Thracian seaboard, through his family connexions and his ownership of the gold mines. His colleague in the command was Eudes. About the end of November 424 Eudes was in the city of Amphipolis, on the river Strymon. That city was not merely more important to Athens than any other place in the region,—it was the stronghold of Athenian power in the north. To guard it with all possible vigilance was a matter of peculiar urgency at that moment. The ablest of Spartan leaders, Brasidas, was then in Thrace with a Peloponnesian army,—not, indeed, close to Amphipolis, but still within a distance which imposed special caution on Athenian officers. He was in the Chalcidic peninsula, where he had already gained rapid success; and part of the population between that peninsula and Amphipolis was already known to be disaffected to Athens. Under circumstances so suggestive of possible danger, we might have expected that Thucydides, who had seven ships of war with him, would have been near his colleague Eudes, and ready to co-operate with him at a moment’s notice. It appears, however, that, with his ships, he was at the island of Thasos, several miles distant from the Thracian coast. Brasidas, making a forced march from the Chalcidic peninsula, suddenly appeared before Amphipolis. Eudes sent in all haste for Thucydides, who arrived with his ships from Thasos just in time to beat off the enemy from Eion at the mouth of the Strymon, but not in time to save Amphipolis. Only a few hours before, it had capitulated to Brasidas, who had offered exceptionally favourable terms. The profound vexation and dismay felt at Athens found expression in the punishment of the commander who seemed primarily responsible for so grave a disaster. For the next twenty years— i.e., till 404 —Thucydides was an exile from Athens. It is not improbable that the charge brought against him was that of treason (npo8oσιa), for which the penalty was death, and that he avoided this penalty by remaining in banishment. A special psephism is said to have been required before Thucydides could return in 404, which would have been regular if a capital sentence had been on record against him, but not so if he had been merely under sentence of exile. Cleon is said to have been the prime mover in his condemnation; and this is likely enough. Eudes was probably punished also. Grote was the first modern writer to state the reasons for thinking that Thucydides may have been really guilty of culpable negligence on this occasion, and that his punishment— which had usually been viewed as the vindictive act of a reckless democracy—may have been well deserved. Everything turns on the question why he was at Thasos just then, and not at Eion. No one disputes that, after the summons from Eudes, he did all that was possible. It is true that the facts of the situation, so far as we know them, strongly suggest that he ought to have been at Eion, and do not disclose any reason for his being at Thasos. But it is only fair to remember, in a case of this kind, that there may have been other facts which we do not know. There is some presumptive evidence of carelessness; but we can hardly say more than that. The absence of Thucydides from the neighbourhood of Amphipolis at that precise juncture may have had some better excuse than now appears.

From 423 to 404 the home of Thucydides was on his property in Thrace, but much of his time appears to have been spent in travel. He visited the countries of the Peloponnesian allies,—recommended to them by his quality as an exile from Athens; and he thus enjoyed the rare advantage of contemplating the great war from a point of view opposite to that at which he had previously been placed. He speaks of the increased leisure which his banishment secured to his study of events. He refers partly, doubtless, to detachment from Athenian politics, partly, also, we may suppose, to the opportunity of visiting places signalized by recent events, and of examining their topography in the light of such information as he could collect on the spot. The local knowledge which is often apparent in his Sicilian books may have been acquired at this period. The banishment of Thucydides was the most fortunate event that could have occurred for him and for us, when it enabled him, in this way, to look at his subject all round. If it is always hard for an historian to be impartial, it is especially so for the historian of a great war in which his own country has been one of the combatants. The mind of Thucydides was naturally judicial, and his impartiality—which seems almost superhuman by contrast with Xenophon’s Hellenica— was in some degree a result of temperament. But it cannot be doubted that the evenness with which he holds the scales was greatly assisted by the experience which, during these years of exile, must have been familiar to him—that of hearing the views and aims of the Peloponnesians set forth by themselves, and of estimating their merits otherwise than would have been easy for an observer in a hostile camp.

His own words make it clear that he returned to Athens, i . at least for a time, in 404. Classen supposes that his ] return took place in the autumn of that year, about six i months after Athens had surrendered to Lysander, and while the Thirty were still in power. Finding that the rule of the oligarchy was becoming more and more violent, Thucydides again left Athens, and retired to his property in Thrace, where he lived till his death, working at his History. The preponderance of testimony certainly goes to show that he died in Thrace, and by violence. It would seem that, when he wrote chapter 116 of his third book, he was ignorant of an eruption of Etna which took place in 396. There is some reason then, for believing that he did not survive his seventy-fifth year. According to ancient tradition, he was killed by robbers. His relics were brought to Athens, and laid in the vault of Cimon’s family, where Plutarch saw their resting-place. The abruptness with which the History breaks off agrees with the story of a sudden death. The historian’s daughter is said to have saved the unfinished work, and to have placed it in the hands of an editor. This editor, according to one account, was Xenophon, to whom Diogenes Laertius assigns the credit of having “brought the work into reputation, when he might have suppressed it.” The tradition is however, very doubtful. In its origin, it may have been merely a guess, suggested by a feeling that no one then living could more appropriately have discharged the office of literary executor than the writer who, in his Hellenica, continued the narrative.

At the outset of the History Thucydides has indicated his general conception of his work, and has stated the principles which governed its composition. His purpose had been formed at the very beginning of the war, in the conviction that it would prove more important than any event of which Greeks had record. The leading belligerents, Athens and Sparta, were both in the highest condition of effective equipment. The whole Hellenic world—including Greek settlements outside of Greece proper—was divided into two parties, either actively helping one of the two combatants or meditating such action. Nor was the movement confined within even the widest limits of Hellas; the “barbarian” world also was affected by it,—the non-Hellenic populations of Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, Sicily, and, finally, the Persian kingdom itself. The aim of Thucydides was to preserve an accurate record of this war, not only in view of the intrinsic interest and importance of the facts, but also in order that these facts might be permanent sources of political teaching to posterity. His...