Thucydides

Biography

Thucydides was an Athenian general who lost his command and spent the war in exile — and used those years of enforced leisure to write the most important work of political and military analysis in Western history. His History of the Peloponnesian War was the first work of history that explicitly set out to record only what the author had personally witnessed or verified through the most careful available evidence, distinguishing itself from myth, hearsay, and the unreliable accounts of others. As a general, he failed: recalled to relieve Amphipolis from Brasidas, he arrived too late and lost the city. He was exiled for twenty years. As an historian, he succeeded beyond any possible measure: his analysis of the causes of war (fear, honour, and interest as the permanent drivers of state behaviour), his dramatisation of the Melian Dialogue as a study of power politics, his account of the Plague of Athens as both medical observation and social collapse, and his portrait of the Sicilian Expedition as democratic hubris destroying itself — these are works of permanent political insight that political scientists, strategists, and statesmen quote to this day. His history breaks off unfinished in 411 BC, mid-sentence. He saw how it ended — Sparta won in 404 BC — but died before he could write the conclusion. He may have been the greatest writer who ever went to war.

Key Battles