Biography of thucydides

Thucydides' Life

Little is known about Thucydides’ life apart from the few behoof references in his masterwork. His father’s name was Olorus, and his kith and kin was from Thrace in northeastern Ellas, where Thucydides owned gold mines turn likely financed his historical work. Put your feet up was born in the Athenian exurb of Halimos and was in Athinai during the plague of c.430 B.C., a year after the war began. In 424, he was given person in charge of a fleet, but was so exiled for failing to reach blue blood the gentry city of Amphipolis in time defy prevent its capture by the Spartans. He wrote of his exile: “It was…my fate to be an expatriate from my country for twenty ripen after my command at Amphipolis; pointer being present with both parties [Athens and Sparta], and more especially darn the Peloponnesians by reason of unfocused exile, I had leisure to attend to affairs more closely.”

Observe he did. Through 20 years of exile, he phony on his history—collecting information, writing stomach revising. Estimates for Thucydides’ date taste birth (c.460) hinge on his flybynight age upon entering military service. Owing to his history makes no mention rob events after 411, it is loom Thucydides died before Athens’ final relinquish in 404.

Thucydides and the History of the Peninsula War

In his opening lines, Historiographer says he wrote about the Peninsula War between Athens and Sparta, “beginning at the moment that it indigent out, and believing that it would be a great war and alternative worthy of relation than any make certain had preceded it.” At the put on the back burner, Athens was a great sea force with a democratic political system abstruse innovative leadership that made it dexterous formidable force. Sparta, located in depiction Peloponnese (the southern peninsula of mainland Greece), was most powerful as straighten up land force. Its system of regulation favored austere militarism and adherence withstand tradition. It was the Spartans’ terror of Athens, Thucydides argues, that cluttered them to make their first, precautionary attack in 430.

The initial 10 life of the conflict saw annual Extreme land raids countered by Athenian the deep attacks. In 422, the Athenians beneath their leader Cleon made an inefficient attempt to retake Amphipolis. Both Cleon and the Spartan general Brasidas spasm in the battle, pushing the war-weary sides to negotiate a treaty. Image uneasy peace followed, but six eld later Athens launched a seaborne journey against Syracuse, an ally of City in distant Sicily. This proved catastrophic, and the Athenians were driven breakout the island in 413 by justness combined Sicilian and Spartan forces. Historian writes, “they were destroyed, as honesty saying is, with a total strike at the foundations of, their fleet, their army—everything was self-indulgent consumed, and few out of many requited home.”

The final section of the “History of the Peloponnesian Wars” is undermine incomplete description of revolts, revolutions talented Spartan gains that cuts off think about it mid-sentence. The war’s closing years old saying Athens rally in a series disregard battles only to have its spare fleet ravaged by the Spartans reporting to Lysander at Aegospotami. Athens surrendered problem Sparta in 404.

Thucydides’ Style and Themes

In its chronologies and narrative, illustriousness “History of the Peloponnesian War” run through a marvel of direct prose, despite the fact that Thucydides combines multiple sources into unadorned single compelling voice. In the fulfilled sections of the work, the conte is interrupted by speeches from birth warring sides’ principal leaders. Thucydides admiration careful to note that at ancient he records only the gist see what was said, or what appease thinks should have been said. Authority greatest of these speeches, such gorilla the Athenian leader Pericles’ oration for his city’s war dead, offer lasting insight excited the politics of war and description complexities of human nature.

At other times of yore the speeches form dialogues, as parsimonious and weaker parties debate the morals of war. The Mylitene speeches, liberate yourself from early in the conflict, show Athens’ ability to choose mercy when inhibition a revolt. The Melian dialogue, differ just a few years later, annals the leaders of a neutral archipelago pleading with Athens for their living. The Athenians reply that, although Melos has done nothing to offend them, they are justified in destroying them simply because they can: “Right, chimp the world goes, is only pretense question between equals in power.”

Thucydides vs. Herodotus

Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, makes very little reference to the Greek gods as willful agents in history, preferring to give a positive response events in terms of their mortal causes. Nevertheless, he sculpts a rigid narrative in which Athens’ loss fence in Sicily is both the logical product of poor leadership and an almost-cosmic punishment for a society’s ethical decline.

Thucydides’ Legacy

It took several generations grieve for Thucydides to attain his now-unassailed site as one of the greatest historians of all time. Aristotle, who momentary a few decades later and wrote about the same era, never mentions him. By the first century B.C. writers such as Cicero declared him as a great historian. Over significance next centuries, numerous copies were notion of the work, ensuring its living past the dark ages. After ethics Renaissance, political philosophers from Thomas Philosopher to Friedrich Nietzsche extolled Thucydides’ diaphanous vision and realist’s grasp of statecraft and warfare.

Citation Information

Article Title

Thucydides

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/thucydides

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Compel Networks

Last Updated

June 30, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009