[[v]]

PREFACE

These articles concern what, thirty years ago, seemed two chief uncertainties surrounding Thucydides' History. The first, which appeared rather from comments of scholars than from formal discussion of the subject, has to do with the cast of Thucydides' style and thought, in the first books especially. If, as some held, it was the joint effect of his exile and of the shock of war to Greek outlooks that bred ill him his bold style and the political awareness of which it was the vehicle, then the History remains a unique record by a superbly gifted observer, but readers should beware of accepting the picture of the minds and policies, particularly those of Pericles, that he conveyed from the years near the outbreak. Rather, the portrayal would reflect his own slowly matured powers and would be anachronistic in the mouths of men a generation older. The second problem--when the various parts of the History may have been composed--had been vehemently pursued since the middle of the last century. It was in some conflict with the first problem: for if Thucydides for a while thought the war over with the Peace of Nicias and wrote much of the first books in that delusion, he would hardly have had time to form new habits of style, and his portrayal of Athenian f,gures at least would carry fresh memories of the Athens that he left in 424. To be sure, F. W. Ullrich's initial thesis--that the so-called second introduction in V 26 announced the historian's new sense that the several phases of the war

[[vi]]

comprised one great conflict and hence, to Ullrich's mind, implied that the previous books were written without that understanding--was no longer fully tenable; as was soon pointed out, the first books contain many passages that either expressly mentioil or evidently assume events at or near the end of the 27-years war. Yet the shadow of the controversy remained, and ill the light of it the History could be thought not merely truncated at the end but a more or less incomplete compilation throughout. In spite of their contradiction, these two views conspired to cloud understanding of the History, since one could not be sure that the author's outlook in the first four books was of a piece with that in the last four, nor, if it was, could one judge how fully to hear in the chief speakers of the first books, not the accent of the times, but the author's voice from some decades later.Of the two questions, that having to do with the style seemed the easier. If the prose of ?he late fifth century is largely lost, it was evidently the growth of prose that dictated the progressive change in poetic style from Aeschylus to Euripides. The latter's relative lucidity seems incomprehensible apart from a mounting taste, in his own mind and that of the public, for the effects of order and verisimilitude that prose subserves. Because many dates of Euripidean and other contemporary works are reasonably secure, it is possible to fix with some exactitude the periods when various stylistic usages grew widespread. This question in its relation to Thucydides is the subject of the first two of the following articles. (note 1) The abundant parallels between [1. The articles are reprinted with only minor editorial changs from HSCP 49 and 50 (1938 and 1939) and from Athenaian Studies Presented to William Scott (HSCP Suppl. Vol. 1940). Among desirable changes would be, at p. 90 below, reference to E. Dignone's convincing attempt to distinguish between the two Antiphons ("Antifonte oratore e Antifonte sofista" and "Studi stilistici su Antifonte oratore ed Antifonte sofista," Rend. Ist. Lomb. 52, 1919, reprinted in Studi sul Pensiero antico, 1 Napoli, Loffredo, 1938, 161-215; 2nd ed. Roma, Breitschneider, 1965). The argument at p. 4 below and throughout would have been strengthened by G. W. Dowersock's dating of the pseudo-Xenophontic ÉAyhna[[currency]]vn Polite[[currency]]a to approximately 443 (to appear in his forthcoming Loeb edition of the work and in HSCP 71). This welcome change from E. Kalinka's dating in the early 420's (Teubner 1913, 5-17) makes clear how a politically minded but not otherwise elaborately educated Athenian wrote during Thucydides' youth. G. Zuntz's The Political Plays of Euripides (Manchester 1955) happily corrects some dates of plays from the period of the Archidamian War, notably of the Suppliants, suggested at pp. 7-8 below.]

[[vii]]

Thucydidean speeches in the first books and works from the years in which these were purportedly delivered do not prove that his spokesmen actually used such expressions but sliow that they might have. It therefore seems certain that he conceived liis style as a young man in Athens, not as a mature man in exile, and also that what, for want of a better word, may be called his political realism was not uncharacteristic of the Athei,s of his youth--on the contrary, carries authentic tones of the years after the Peace of 445 and the Samian revolt when the grip of Athens on the Delian League was hardening.It is not surprising--rather, the opposite would be surprising--that his mind should thus have borne the stamp of his impressionable years. The statement in V 26.5 that he was of an age to have observed the entire war seems directed against a possible objection that he was either too young at the start or too old at the end to have followed events personally, but since at the end when he was in the full tide of his writing he could hardly have imagined the latter objection, the words suggest that he was in fact relatively young at the outbreak. The impulse to defend himself might otherwise not have occurred to him. One therefore imagines him in early maturity--probably in his twenties--in 431, but the statement of the first sentence of the History that he foresaw the magnitude of the impending war shows what he remembered as his then state of awareness. Further,

[[viii]]

if he was by birth a Philaid and kinsman of Cimon and Thucydides the son of Melesias--as his father's name, his Thracian connections, and the tradition of his place of burial join to assert--his admiration of Pericles implies some kind of political conversion, presumably in the years before the outbreak. This is of course an inference from the assumed solidarity of an important family, and one that had suffered much from Pericles, but even if for reasons that escape us he was reared in sympathy with the statesman and his policies, the political traditions of his upbringing were such as to have prompted early passion for politics.Without rehearsing here the evidence submitted below but on the tentative assumption that he in fact carried into exile the formative stamp of the Athens of his youth, it follows that readers of the History soon after the turn of the century would have found it an astonishing document. In the age of Lysias' new Atticism, of Xenophon's unpretentiousness, and of Plato's first efforts at naturalistic dialogue, its formal antitheses would have breathed a manner thirty years gone. Dionysius' comment on Aeschylus and Pindar (note 2)--that their noble austerity kept an érxaiow p[[currency]]now, as of the flower on old bronze--might almost have applied to it. Later generations thought him a pupil of Antiphon the rhetor, an older man than he, and the Tetralogies, which are ascribed to the 420's, come nearest the style of the speeches. As Eduard Meyer persuasively argued, (note 3) the temper of the work also carried older tones. The historian's defense of Pericles and his attribution of the defeat to the aggrandizing policies of later men ran counter to a mood that could conveniently blame the war on the man who began it.

This archaism of both style and argument must relate to his exile. Dante, Machiavelli, and (if blindness resembles

[2. Demosthenes 39.1074.

[3. Forschungen zur alten Geschichte (Halle 1899) II 293-326.]

[[ix]]

exile) Milton show how intensely minds once immersed in active affairs can ponder their teachings in later isolation. Tacitus' remarks at the start of the Agricola, if not wholly germane, convey the mental intensification that accompanies eiiforced silence. Inner dialogue must tend to sketch its own structures of thought, to condense, regulate, and discover latent meaning in events and words that formerly seemed random. What other form of command remains to an exile? Thucydides checked this tendency to schematism by the care in verifying events of which he speaks in I 22.2-3, also by his search for informants on both sides which he notes in V 26.5. The power of the work derives not least from this tension between his care for detail and his bent toward scheme and structure. In his celebrated article on the speeches, Jebb described the effects of the latter tendency; (note 4) for example, in the exhortations preceding the second naval engagement on the Gulf of Corinth in the summer of 429 (II 87-89), Phormio counters nearly point by point the grounds of confidence that the Peloponnesian commanders were even then propounding across a few !niles of water. Thucydides' paired speeches show in large the analytical parallelism that he brought to his sentences and clauses; his antithetical cast of style is also a cast of thought. But as Euripides', indeed Sophocles', paired speeches make clear, it is this very habit of thought that he acquired in youth in Athens; it is the mark, not of his uniqueness, but of his bond with a place and generation. Though therefore the silences of exile no doubt enhanced this cast of mind as inner dialogue wove the marvelous fabric of his interlocking designs, the process was one of intensifying, not of falsifying, what he had once known. Moreover, there are grades of schematism in the speeches, [4. Hellenica 2, ed. E. Abbott (London 1898) 244-95.]

[[x]]

and if the just mentioned exhortations mark one extreme, Pericles' unpaired speeches show an opposite effort to present a single mind. Even there, to be sure, the effort is not total, since parts of the Funeral Oration stand in formal contrast to Archidamus' portrayal in the first book of the Spartan égvgÆ and outlook (II 340, 183-84). So imperious a mind follows its own laws, which finally evade analysis. But two conclusions seem justified: first, that in the tension between bent toward schematism and care for unique fact, the two forces kept balance and, second, that the speeches of his Athenians, though condensed and though often related antithetically to other speeches, must have seemed to him the more truthful because, as he remembered, the actual speakers used a rhetoric not unlike his own. That cannot have been true of Spartans and other non-Athenians, and in reporting their speeches he, like Homer presenting his Trojans and Herodotus his Persians, yielded to canons of consistency. It is a paradox that speeches of the sixth and seventh books, of Alcibiades especially; must be imagined farthest from their originals, because the trend to the new Atticism--the trend that the historian escaped through his exile--must then have been already under way. By the same token the Athenian speeches of the first four books may be thought most authentic. Beyond his conscious fidelity, expressed in the famous sentence of I 22.1, to the jÊmpasa gn~mh of speeches actually made, lay the unconscious impulse of models en,ulated in youth, and in the age before Lysias brought to speech-writing his new goals of +/-yopoi[[currency]]a, (note 5) the standards of that rhetoric cannot have differed much from man to man. Though readers will variously appraise the refracting influence of his schematism and also doubtless of quite personal habits of style, both products ofa [5. Dion. Halic. Lysias 8.]

[[xi]]

long exile, his purpose and the unusual nature of his life jointly confirm his portrayal of the Athens that he had known.The third article, on the unity of the History, tries to show a series of related statements that bind the work together and mark a single, consistent outlook. But even to grant this larger consistency may not solve all questions of date, since uncertainty might remain at what time he became convinced of Athens' ultimate defeat. Yet some practical considerations enter. Though he owed his exile to Cleon's abandonment of the Periclean restraint--since Brasidas would hardly have been allowed to reach Thrace in the summer of 424 and, if he had, Thucydides and his colleague Eucles would have been reinforced, had the Athens of Cleon been less distracted by the abortive Boeotian campaign--and though he thus had early and personal reason to approve Pericles' policy of nonexpansion, it is hard to imagine him then sitting down to write. The shock of exile would have been heavy at first, but even after 421 a resident of Thrace--as tradition held him to have been--would have had small reason for confidence in the Peace of Nicias, since the Spartans kept Amphipolis in violation of the treaty. Alcibiades' Peloponnesian alliance soon followed, and the historian's then interest in these developments seems to speak in the weight that he gives to the battle of Mantinea in 418 (esp. V 72.2, 75.3). Throughout these years he could hardly have believed the war over and the time for writing at hand. Moreover, one of his chief eventual themes, Athens' resilience in defeat, had yet to be evoked. Alcibiades continued active in the next years and the decision to attack Syracuse crowned his policies, but the topographical and other detail of the sixth and seventh books makes as certain as such things can be that Thucydides visited Syracuse, (note 6)

[6. M. V. Chambers, "Studies in the Veracity of Thucydides," summarized in HSCP 62 (1957) 141-43.]

[[xii]]

necessarily after 413. The account in the eighth book of Athens' resilience would have led on to the naval victory at Cyzicus in 410, the rise of Cleophon, and the rejection of Spartan overtures of peace--a subject of great interest to the historian, formally broached in the fourth book before Sphacteria in 425. This rejection, repeated even after Arginusae in 406, would surely have seemed to him, as incipiently in IV, a sign of self-interested leadership and deep political division, hence further proofof the correctness of Pericles' initial policies. The roster of his themes would now have been complete, and Athens' defeat must have seemed to him imminent. He therefore may have turned steadily to writing in the last years of the war but, if so, had not finished the extant History before the end of his exile and his return to Athens, since many passages make clear his knowledge of the full and final defeat.He certainly kept notes, presumably from the first years forward, and may early have attempted speeches and analytical passages; such mastery as his hardly emerges fully grown. Yet a chief impression of the History is of its tightness of texture; a given passage commonly brings to mind others, and near-repetition creates the sense of a great but not limitless store of idea and phrase continually forming fresh but related designs. It is this internal allusiveness that chiefly suggests a single sustained period of final composition. One other characteristic, which seems related to his exile, may be worth noting: his concentration on the past moment in hand. His annalistic method fostered this bent of mind, but it seems prompted by more than procedure only, rather by a temperament that lived intensely what engaged it. If, as is argued below, even the Archaeology and, with it, the opening sentences of the History are late passages written near or after 404, the reason why he did not then mention

[[xiii]]

the length of the war was that his mind was on the outbreak. The Archaeology is, in function, an extended note or appendix (resembling in this respect the Pentecontaetia) to justify his original prescience by explaining why he judged that the impending war would exceed those of earlier times. His argument carries him backward, not forward, and he seems lost in reliving his memory. It has lately been urged (note 7) that, writing at the end of the war, he would not have given his present emphasis in the first book to Corinth and Corcyra, which later proved of minor importance; hence that some parts of the account of the outbreak betray an early date. But the great Corinthian speech contrasting Athens to Sparta is of a piece with his whole judgment of the adversaries, and the treatment of Corcyra leads forward to one of the chief themes of the History, the political instability that undid many states, including Athens. His rehearsal of these once vivid happenings seems, like the Archaeology, much more easily explicable through the ardor of his backward gaze.These reasons, among others, may reinforce the argument made below that the History is a consistent document apparently reflecting a more or less continuous period of composition, hence necessarily from late in the author's life near the end of the war and after it. But if so and if the related argument on his style is at all acceptable, the resulting conclusion is at first sight surprising: namely, that though Thucydides' style and thought reflect the Athens that he knew before 424, the History as we have it dates from some two decades later. His exile explains the seeming contradiction.

I am deeply grateful to our recent and present chairmen, Professors C. H. Whitman and W. V. Clausen, and to our [7. A. Andrewes, "Thucydides on the Causes of the War," CQ n. s. 9 (1959) 223-39.]

[[xiv]]

younger colleague, a Thucydidean among his other attainments, Professor G. W. Bowersock,who in their generosity jointly conceived the plan of republishing these old articles. The publication will inaugurate a new series made possible by the bequest of the late James C. Loeb, whose famous gift to establish the Loeb Classical Library has now after many years reverted to Harvard University. For this privilege too I offer feeling thanks.

J.H.F., Jr.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

October 20, 1966