[In the following excerpt from his monograph written in 1886, Jevons maintains that Thucydides sought "to give a strict and faithful account of the facts" of the Peloponnesian War and demonstrates the importance of the War to Western history.]

"Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war in which the Peloponnesians and the Athenians fought against one another. He began to write when they first took up arms, believing that it would be great and memorable above any previous war. For he argued that both states were then at the full height of their military power, and he saw the rest of the Hellenes either siding or intending to side with one or other of them. No movement ever stirred Hellas more deeply than this; it was shared by many of the barbarians, and might be said event to affect the world at large." These are the words with which Thucydides begins his history. He was born in the Athenian deme Halimus, belonging to the tribe Leontis, on the coast between Phalerum and Colias. His father, Olorus, was related, though in what degree we do not know, to the Thracian Olorus, whose daughter married the famous Miltiades, and was mother of Cimon. At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war in B.C. 432, when Thucydides, as he himself says, began to write, he was probably about forty years of age. The first twenty years of his life were spent under the administration of his great relative Cimon, and the next twenty under that of the man for whom Thucydides had such admiration, Pericles. About Thucydides' early life and education we have no direct information. We may, however, fairly assume that he met and learned from all the great men who at this time lived in or found their way to Athens. The philosopher Anaxagoras, who has left traces of his influence even on Herodotus, may be credited with having contributed to the formation of the mind of Thucydides, whose views on natural science and on religion are more closely connected with those of Anaxagoras than are even those of Herodotus. The orator Antiphon, whose style resembles that of Thucydides—both are classed by Dionysius as belonging to the "severe style"—may have been Thucydides' literary model, and was certainly in other relations known to and studied by Thucydides, as is shown by the manner in which he speaks of Antiphon. The sophist Protagoras, Gorgias the rhetorician, and Prodicus, have all left marks of their influence on the style of Thucydides. At Athens, though not at Olympia, he in all probability, when about twenty-five years of age, heard Herodotus read portions of his history. Æschylus he may well have seen; Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Phidias he must have met. Poetry, architecture, science, philosophy, and rhetoric all found in Athens, or sent there their best exponents; all helped to shape the citizens of Athens, and to make it right for one of her sons to say, "We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy." With these convictions Thucydides could not but "fix his eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until he became filled with the love of her, and impressed with the spectacle of her glory."

Educated in this city and by these means, and endowed with an originality and energy of mind which have elevated him to the level of the greatest minds the world has produced, Thucydides began in B.C. 432 to write the history of the Peloponnessian war, then commencing. Possessing extensive property and the right of working gold-mines in Thrace, and being consequently one of the leading men in Thrace, Thucydides must have spent a certain part of every year there. But the larger part of his time he passed in Athens. The speeches of Pericles he certainly heard; his admiration for Pericles' statesmanship is shown by what he says of it; and he may have been among the personal friends of Pericles. In B.C. 430 the plague, which wrought great harm to Athens, nearly deprived the world of Thucydides' history. He was, he says, himself attacked, and witnessed the sufferings of others. The celebrated debates on the fate of the Mitylenæans in B.C. 427, and the Spartan proposals for peace in B.C. 425, in consequence of the affair of Pylos, he was present at; and he may have taken part in some of the military operations of the earlier years of the war. At any rate, in B.C. 424 he acted as strategus, being one of the two Athenian generals intrusted with the protection of Thrace. He allowed, however, the Spartan Brasidas to occupy Amphipolis, the key to the whole of that country; the result of this serious disaster being that Thucydides was an exile from Athens for twenty years. That this was a heavy punishment to him it is impossible to doubt; but so far from its injuring the prosecution of his work, it had the opposite effect. It set him free from other claims on his time and attention; his work probably became the sole palliative to the exile's grief; and his enforced absence from Athens gave him the opportunity he could not have otherwise enjoyed of visiting the Peloponnese, and seeing the war from both sides. He says, "For twenty years I was banished from my country after I held the command at Amphipolis, and associating with both sides, with the Peloponnesians quite as much as the Athenians, because of my exile, I was thus enabled to watch quietly the course of events." He seems to have visited the places affected by the war not only in Greece, but, as his acquaintance with the topography and early history of Sicily shows, in Sicily and Italy; and everywhere he sought out eyewitnesses, "of whom," he says, "I made the most careful and particular inquiry." At length, in B.C. 404, he returned after his protracted exile to his country, six months after the destruction of the walls of Athens by Lysander. How long he lived after this is uncertain. He perhaps died before B.C. 396, for he says, when mentioning the eruption of Etna, which took place in B.C. 426, that only three eruptions were known to have taken place "since the Hellenes first settled in Sicily." and this statement was not true after the eruption of B.C. 396. But he may have lived after B.C. 396 and not revised the passage in question. Nor will a passage, in which he is supposed to imply that Archidamas at the time of writing was dead, bear much pressing. In fine, we do not know when he died, or where or how, though tradition says he was killed by a robber in Thrace. He lived long enough after the end of the war to put into shape most of the history which he began to write at the beginning of the war, as is shown by various passages, such as the reference in the first book to the destruction of the walls of Athens by Lysander, or the analysis in the second book of the causes which led to the final defeat of Athens, passages which can only have been written at the end of the war. On the other hand, he did not live long enough to complete his history, for the last book does not seem to have received the author's final revision, and instead of coming down to the end of the war, brings us only down to B.C. 411, the twenty-first year of this seven-and-twenty years' war.

Thucydides began to write the history of the Peloponnesian war, "believing that it would be great and memorable above any previous war." "No movement," he says, "stirred Hellas more deeply than this." The importance of the war, long as it was, and great as the sufferings it caused, is not to be measured by its length or destructiveness. It was, on the whole, a struggle between the two great Greek races, the Ionians and the Dorians, and between oligarchy and democracy. On the issue of the war it depended whether Athens, which was in possession of the intellectual supremacy of Greece, was also to hold the political; or whether the Spartans, who knew how to fight but not how to live, were to be at liberty to plant rapacious and irresponsible oligarchies in the cities that they conquered. These issues, and they were momentous enough, Thucydides saw; one other consequence, and that an inevitable one, Thucydides must have seen, though he could not know how soon it was to become in its turn a cause and produce other consequences—the necessary exhaustion of Greece, after so long a struggle, that led to the ruin of Greece. Two generations after the end of the Peloponnesian war, Greece lost her political liberty, and with it her literary genius, for want of the strength which had been wasted in the war of which Thucydides wrote.

If these, the political, results were all that is to be learnt from the story of the Peloponnesian war, it would have perhaps an interest for the students of history only. But for those who view the history of Greece from the standpoint of Athens—and erroneous as, for the purposes of history, this view may be, it is the view which gratitude for the art and literature we have inherited from Athens inclines most of us to take—the tale of this war must have, independent of its consequences, something of the fascination which the war itself had for such an onlooker as Thucydides. The hopes and fears with which such a spectator witnessed the successes and disasters of Athens as they followed on one another we who read of them do not feel, for we know from the beginning the result. But notwithstanding, as we read, our hearts are stirred by admiration for the courage with which the Athenians rose above each new disaster, and by regret that so much courage should be doomed only to aggravate their suffering. Still, as we read of each new chance of peace offering itself, now after the success at Pylos, now at the one year's truce, now when Cleon and Brasidas, the two obstacles to peace, are gone, we sigh that the opportunity should be lost, that Athens should persist in treading or be forced along the path of destruction. We watch her with a regret more intense than that with which we watch, impotent to help where we fain would save, the errors of some hero of fiction or the drama; for this is truth and that is fiction; the one is the story of a single imaginary sufferer, the other of the very sufferings of a nation.

Were this the only hold which the history of the Peloponnesian war has upon our interest, it would be enough to earn eager readers for Thucydides in all ages. But this is not all. The losses in wealth and blood, the material disasters and the political humiliation of Athens, which at first sight seem to make up the cost of the war, though they constitute claims on our sympathy for Athens, are not the whole price which Greece or Athens paid for this great and memorable war, as they are not that in the war which touches us most deeply. What touches us most closely is not the sufferings—great as they were—bravely borne by the Athenian people, but Athens' moral fall. That the Athenians, who abandoned hearth and home to the Persian invader for the common good, whose self-sacrificing devotion to the national cause of Hellas put them far above, not merely the craven Greeks who joined the Persians, but far above the selfish indifference of the Peloponnesians to anything but the safety of the Peloponnese; that the Athenians who saved Hellas should have grasped at empire, should have become a menace to Greece, and brought about the war which two generations after gave the independence of Hellas over into the hands of the Macedonian conqueror— this we feel is "the pity of it." As we trace in the pages of Thucydides the course and causes of this falling off, we begin to understand that the fear and pity which it is the function of tragedy to inspire may be excited by the historian as well as the poet, by the actual events of history when told by a great historian, as well as by the creations of a poet's mind. The story of Œdipus, as Sophocles, the contemporary of Thucydides, tells it, fills us with pity for the man "more sinned against than sinning," and with fear for ourselves when, seeing how every step which Œdipus takes to avoid the crimes he is fated to commit only leads him inevitably to commit them, we become possessed with a sense of the ruthless power of Heaven, and the fearful catastrophes to which the slightest deviations from the paths of righteousness may lead. The same sentiments are aroused by the history of the Peloponnesian war as Thucydides tells it. It was her very patriotism and self-sacrifice which led to the moral fall of Athens. Not only of our vices, but of our virtues do the gods make whips to scourge us. The services of Athens to the national cause made the Greeks look up to her as their leader; she was placed by them at the head of the confederacy of Delos; her energy in prosecuting the war, and the indolence of the allies who allowed her to do the fighting against the Persians, converted her leadership practically into empire. "That empire," as the Athenians said to the Lacedæmonians in B.C. 432, shortly before the outbreak of the war, "was not acquired by force; but you (the Lacedæmonians) would not stay and make an end of the barbarians and the allies came of their own accord and asked us to be their leaders. The subsequent development of our power was originally forced upon us by circumstances." And the Athenians go on to say, "An empire was offered to us; can you wonder that, acting as human nature always will, we accepted it, and refused to give it up again?" The excuse may be accepted, but excuses, even when accepted, cannot prevent our actions from producing their consequences; and the consequence of the Athenian acceptance of empire was the Peloponnesian war. Thucydides says, "The real though unavowed cause [of the war] I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacedæmonians and forced them into war." The war once begun, the next result of empire was the impossibility of withdrawing from the war. When the Athenians, overwhelmed by the unexpected disaster of the plague, were inclined to peace, Pericles put before them, in B.C. 430, the simple truth, which admitted of no reply: "Once more, you are bound to maintain the imperial dignity of your city, in which you all take pride, for you should not covet the glory unless you will endure the toil. And do not imagine that you are fighting about a simple issue, freedom or slavery; you have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you. Neither can you resign your power, if, at this crisis, any timorous or inactive spirit is for thus playing the honest man. For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which, in the opinion of mankind, may have been unjustly gained, but which cannot be safely surrendered. The men of whom I was speaking, if they could find followers, would soon ruin a city, and if they were to go and found a state of their own, would equally ruin that." The principle which Pericles thus laid down, Cleon, in B.C. 427, proceeded to put into application. The Mitylenæans, who had originally joined the confederacy of Delos, and now found themselves belonging to the Athenian empire, withdrew. They were, however, attacked as rebels, and conquered by the Athenians; and the Athenians decreed that every man in Mitylene should be killed and the women and children enslaved. As Cleon said to the Athenians, "If they were right in revolting, you must be wrong in maintaining your empire. But if, right or wrong, you are resolved to rule, then rightly or wrongly they must be chastised for your good. Otherwise, you must give up your empire, and, when virtue is no longer dangerous, you may be as virtuous as you please." The same year as that in which the Mitylenæans suffered was to show that the consequences of our actions cannot be limited to ourselves, and that the innocent pay the penalty as well as the authors of a misdeed; for in this year the Platæans, who had stood a rigorous siege with remarkable bravery, succumbed, and thus the war brought it about that the Spartans, who had defeated the Persians at Platæa with the aid of the Platæans, were about to slaughter the Platæans, and raze to the ground their city, memorable for the defeat of the common foe of Hellas. The pity of it is summed up in one sentence of the Platæans' appeal to the Spartans. "The Platæans, who were zealous in the cause of Hellas even beyond their strength, are now friendless, spurned, and rejected by all. None of our old allies will help us, and we fear that you, O Lacedæmonians, our only hope, are not to be depended upon." The imperial position of Athens, which in this year necessitated the slaughter of a thousand Mitylenæans, whose offence was struggling for their freedom, produced more fruit eleven years later; for as the necessities of empire made it impossible for Athens to retire, so they offered her every inducement to advance. "The Melians," says Thucydides, "were colonists of the Lacedæmonians, who would not submit to Athens like the other islanders. At first they were neutral, and would take no part; but when the Athenians tried to coerce them by ravaging their lands, they were driven into open hostilities." The Melians, therefore, being weak, were to be crushed, and the conscience of Athens, having adapted itself to its imperial position, felt no need of excuses. "We Athenians," said they to the Melians, "will use no fine words; we will not go out of our way to prove at length that we have a right to rule because we overthrew the Persian, or that we attack you now because we are suffering any injury at your hands. We should not convince you if we did. … You and we should say what we really think, and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must." Melos was annexed, and Athens continued to advance, whereby she not merely left the question of justice behind, but also neglected the advice which Pericles had given her twenty years before, "Not to seek to enlarge her dominion while the war was going on." Sicily was next attacked. "They virtuously professed that they were going to assist their own kinsmen and their newly-acquired allies, but the simple truth was that they aspired to the empire of Sicily," says Thucydides, an Athenian. The Sicilian expedition failed disastrously, and contributed more than any other error on the part of Athens to her fall. And it, too, was recommended by arguments drawn from the imperial position of Athens. "We cannot," said Alcibiades, "cut down an empire as we might a household; but having once gained our present position, we must keep a firm hold upon some, and contrive occasion against others; for if we are not rulers, we shall be subjects."

It is this tale told in detail, with no striving after effect, but with a calm and cold veracity which imprints the story with painful distinctness on the imagination and the mind, that makes Thucydides as interesting as Sophocles, and the fate of Athens a moral study as absorbing as that of Œdipus. One difference, however, will strike those who read both authors. Destiny, which is the eventual source of all Œdipus' actions, plays no part in Thucydides. How universally useful destiny might be to the historian, Herodotus had already shown. It was a key to which no lock could fail to open. If a storm wrecked Persian ships, this was "in order that" the Persian fleet might not be larger than the Greek fleet. If Xerxes made a mistake in his campaign, this was because destiny had decreed his defeat. But this crude use of destiny could have as little attraction for Thucydides when applied to the solution of historical problems, as for Sophocles when applied to moral problems. Sophocles uses it more sparingly and more effectively. As far as Œdipus is concerned, fate only interposes directly once; in the oracle warning him of the crimes he will commit—and granted but this one interposition, all the actions of Œdipus flow naturally and inevitably. But Thucydides knows not even this refined form of destiny. To Thucydides, a man's own actions are his fate; they are a man's destiny, which decrees what he shall do and what he shall be. The absence of any other kind of destiny from the history of Thucydides does not prove that Thucydides had no belief in destiny. Its absence is satisfactorily accounted for by its being no part of Thucydides' design to entertain theological considerations. His object was to set down only facts, which admit of closer proof than destiny is susceptible of. It will help to the understanding of this and other points to read his own words:—

"Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself or learnt from others, of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other. And very likely the strictly historical character of my narrative may be disappointing to the car. But if he who desires to have before his eyes a true picture of the events which have happened, and of the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things, shall pronounce what I have written to be useful, then I shall be satisfied. My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten."

The object of Thucydides, then, was to give a strict and faithful account of facts. He had no preconceived theory to prove, no "notion of his own" which his history was to establish. The actual facts, free from the distortions of inaccurate memories or of prejudiced eyes, once established, his history would be an everlasting possession for the guidance of future generations. To the actual facts, then, he confines himself, without moralising and without theorising. For instance, in his great description of the plague he says: "No human art was of any avail, and as to supplications in temples, inquiries of oracles, and the like, they were utterly useless, and at last men were overpowered by the calamity and gave them all up." What he himself thinks on the objective utility of prayer he does not say; he simply notes the fact that in this case supplications were useless, with the same abstention from theorising as he notes, in the next chapter, that the disease after attacking the throat moved down to the chest. Moral disorders he treats in the same positive way as he describes the plague; he notes that a symptom of extreme demoralisation is disregard of law, human and divine. In the same way he records both that Brasidas thought that he captured Lecythus by supernatural aid, and that when Lecythus was attacked the walls happened to be accidentally deserted. So, too, he notes that the Spartans celebrated their religious festivals regardless of the military situation, and that their enemies profited by the fact. The Lacedæmonians, in accordance with their tradition, consulted oracles, but did not guide their policy by them—e.g. they consulted Delphi at the beginning of the war as to whether they should declare war or not, but they left the decision to the general meeting of their allies; and the Corinthians used the oracle to silence scruples as to the justice of the war, but trusted to grounds of policy as the means of convincing their hearers. The Spartans also employed the imputed "pollution" of Pericles, not from religious motives, but for purposes of policy; as they and other Greeks regularly appealed to the gods rather from wont than conviction. Amongst the Athenians the religion of their forefathers was held in no better esteem. They purified Delos conventionally. The celebrated affair of the Hermæ was a religious offence, but was converted into political capital. Even for their unjustifiable attack on the Melians, the Athenians count on the approval of the gods. And Thucydides recounts all these things with no comment and no expression of his own opinion: he gives the facts. With regard to oracles and portents he is equally reserved. He observes that in times of excitement everything of the nature of a portent is curiously noted; and he records that after the failure of the Sicilian expedition the Athenians were furious "with the soothsayers and prophets, and all who by the influence of religion had at the time inspired them with the belief that they would conquer Sicily." He is aware that ambiguity is of much virtue in an oracle: he says of the Athenians during the plague, "In their troubles they naturally called to mind a verse which the elder men among them declared to have been current long ago:—'A Dorian war will come and a plague with it.' There was a dispute about the precise expression; some saying that limos, a famine, and not loimos, a plague, was the original word. Nevertheless, as might have been expected—for men's memories reflected their sufferings— the argument in favour of loimos prevailed at the time. But if ever in future years another Dorian war arises which happens to be accompanied by a famine, they will probably repeat the verse in the other form." The vagueness of another oracle—"Better the Pelasgian ground left waste"—allows him to say for it, "The oracle, without mentioning the war, foresaw that the place would be inhabited some day for no good." Though whether the foresight of the oracle is to be regarded as human or divine, he does not say. When an oracle is fulfilled he notes the fact; in estimating the length of the war he says, "He who reckons up the actual periods of time will find that I have rightly given the exact number of years. He will also find that this was the solitary instance in which those who put their faith in oracles were justified by the event. For I well remember how, from the beginning to the end of the war, there was a common and often-repeated saying that it was to last thrice nine years. I lived through the whole of it, and was of mature years and judgment, and I took great pains to make out the exact truth." This being so, the Athenians had grounds, therefore, it would seem—whether the fulfilment of this solitary oracle was supernatural or casual—for advising the Melians not to have recourse "to prophecies and oracles and the like, which ruin men by the hopes which they inspire in them."

In the same way as he thus prefers to record historical facts without having recourse to any theory, whether of destiny or divine intervention, he records such natural phenomena as were considered portentous, and what was known about them. Thus he duly narrates how when the Athenians were about to leave Sicily, the occurrence of an eclipse of the moon terrified them into delaying their departure, and thus brought about the destruction of them all. But he also notes elsewhere, with regard to solar eclipses, that it is apparently only at the beginning of the lunar month that they are possible. In one place he observes that during a battle in Sicily, "as is often the case in the fall of the year, there came on a storm of rain and thunder, whereby the Athenians were yet more disheartened, for they thought that everything was conspiring to their destruction." Of another engagement he says, "During the battle there came on thunder and lightning and a deluge of rain; these added to the terror of the inexperienced who were fighting for the first time, but experienced soldiers ascribed the storm to the time of the year, and were much more alarmed at the stubborn resistance of the enemy." The plague was considered by many people to be a fulfilment of the promise of Apollo to assist the Spartans. Thucydides says, "The disease certainly did set in immediately after the invasion of the Peloponnesians, and did not spread into the Peloponnesus in any degree worth speaking of, while Athens felt its ravages most severely, and next to Athens the places which were most populous." But he had a few chapters before said, "The disease is said to have begun south of Egypt in Æthiopia; thence it descended into Egypt and Libya, and after spreading over the greater part of the Persian empire, suddenly fell upon Athens." He records all the facts, but does not express "any notion of his own."

The determined resolution of Thucydides to adhere to the facts of the war has materially influenced the form of his work. Having no preconceived theory of his own, no philosophy of history from which to deduce the facts of the war a priori, Thucydides follows, not a logical, but a strictly chronological order. The events of each year are ranged under that year. The story of a siege, for instance, such as that of Platæa, which lasted three years, is not told in one continuous section, but what happened in each year is told under the head of that year, and thus the story of the siege is twice dropped and twice picked up again. The adoption of this annalistic method by Thucydides is the more noteworthy because there were no annalists in Greece. The materials out of which annals sprang in the Middle Ages, lists of magistrates, festivals, &c., and family records, existed in Greece; but before annals could be developed out of them, Thucydides produced history. To us this chronological method of Thucydides seems, as it is, somewhat clumsy. It fetters the historian without apparently affording any compensation. But it must be remembered that in the time of Thucydides there was no uniform system of chronology current throughout Greece. Later, the method of reckoning years by Olympiads, i.e. by the recurrence of the Olympic games every four years, was universally adopted by the Greeks. But in the time of Thucydides each state had its own mode of reckoning, and commenced its civil year, not on the same day as any other state, but when its own chief magistrate entered on office, or on some other such principle. This latter difficulty Thucydides evaded by disregarding the civil year and following the natural year, which he divides into summer and winter. This procedure had this advantage, that it suited admirably a record of military operations, which, in the case of the Greeks, ceased in the winter and were carried on only in the summer. The other difficulty which arose in the absence of a uniform chronology, that of specifying the year, Thucydides got over as best he could by counting from the date of some well-known event, and by reference to the chronological system of various states. This, for instance, is his way of specifying the year in which the Peloponnesian war began: "For fourteen years the thirty years' peace which was concluded after the recovery of Eubæa remained unbroken; but in the fifteenth year, when Chrysis the high-priestess of Argos was in the forty-eighth year of her priesthood, Ænesias being the Ephor at Sparta, and at Athens Pythodorus having two months of his archonship to run, in the sixth month after the engagement at Potidæa, and at the beginning of spring," &c. We, with our fixed system of chronology, say "in B.C. 431." Modern historians, who can specify the date of an event with three strokes of the pen, may arrange events in any order they think most lucid; but Thucydides, having once specified his year, had good reason for adhering to the chronological order of events. The annalistic method might fetter the historian, but it secured his chronology, which other wise might have fluctuated.

Beyond this division into summers, winters, and years, no other seems to have been designed by Thucydides. The division into eight books, as we have his work, though made early, was not made by Thucydides. There are traces in the scholiasts of a division into thirteen books, and Diodorus mentions a division into nine books. But these divisions are probably later even than the one we have. Thucydides, however, does sometimes speak of "the first war" or "the ten years' war," and of "the Sicilian war," and the "Ionic war"; and so it has been conjectured that he intended a division into five parts—the introduction, the ten years' war, the period before the Sicilian expedition, the Sicilian war, and the Ionic war. But the narrative flows on without regard to the subdivisions; the references which Thucydides makes to them are few, and they exercise no influence on the form or matter of his work. Indeed, he seems to have neglected any attempt to break up his work into sections possessing balance, symmetry, proportion, or form, with as much contempt as he disclaims any design of making his history pleasing to the car. The division into years is "strictly historical." Nothing more is aimed at. At any rate, the notion that Thucydides' history is composed on the analogy of a drama, and is arranged in a prologue and five acts, is purely fanciful, and as grotesquely incongruous with Thucydides' conception of the functions of the historian as any piece of "subjectivity" could be. Of all manifestations of power, self-restraint impresses men most, partly because it is the form which power least often takes; and there is scarcely a page of Thucydides that does not exemplify his strength in this respect. Where strong expression seems justifiable, where even it seems demanded, Thucydides contents himself with a sober statement. Events which call aloud for some expression of pity or of horror he leaves to speak for themselves, without a word from him. Where the temptation to any other writer to comment or to moralise would be irresistible, Thucydides resists it. He places before the reader the agonies of a nation, as in his account of the Sicilian expedition, or the presence of death, as in his description of the plague, with grave silence.

Problems of political morality, which he had studied for years and in which his keen intellect took the profoundest interest, he states so far as they were debated or exemplified in the war; but he is not betrayed into speculation; he confines himself to facts. On the great problems of life it is sometimes said that it is impossible for a man to hold his judgment in perpetual suspense; but Thucydides seems to have had them perpetually present to his mind, and to have perpetually regarded the material before him as inadequate for the formation of a decision. It is this habit of never going beyond his facts, of never losing sight of his purpose to ascertain and record facts, this self-restraint which never relaxes, that makes the reader respect and marvel at the power of Thucydides. It creates absolute confidence in him, in his will and his power to record the plain truth. It makes his very silence eloquent, and his least word weighty beyond the superlatives, the exclamations, or asseverations of other writers. This, however, is only the negative side of his power. His silent self-restraint prepares us to be impressed by his words, but his words also impress us. His facts are more valuable than others' comments, and for this there is a reason. In Thucydides' history we have the facts of the war as Thucydides saw them; and the difference between his work and that, say, of Xenophon, who continued Thucydides' incomplete work, is much the same as that between what a geologist and a navvy see in a railway cutting, or a botanist and a ploughboy see in a hedge-bottom, or between what Shelley and a farmlabourer hear in a skylark's song. That is to say, Thucydides had a knowledge of what happened in the war comparable to the geologist's or botanist's knowledge of his science, and he further had, like Shelley, the genius to transmute what he heard into words more precious than gold. Beyond this, in the way of analysis, it is not possible to go far. The intimate acquaintance which he gives us with the Peloponnesian war is proof of the clearness and grasp with which he realised all the details and the whole significance of the war; but to ask how this clear sight was acquired or conveyed is folly. It is better to try and profit by than spy into genius.

The genius of Thucydides is seen in the way in which he not only conveys to the reader his own clear perception of the facts and the course of the war, but also arouses in the reader the emotions with which he himself followed the various incidents of the struggle. In other words, Thucydides' literary genius is as great as his historical genius. Over the literary as well as the historical difficulties involved by his chronological method of relating facts he rides triumphant. It is said that his work is without a plan, and this is true; there is no more plot or plan in his annals than there would be in a diary of the war. But this defect is rather apparent than real. Every incident is viewed by Thucydides in the light thrown on it by the whole war, and thus its importance and position is assigned to it as unerringly and as clearly as though all the other events narrated by Thucydides had been grouped with the purpose of giving this one incident its proper literary value. But although Thucydides disdains to strive after the external balance and harmony which he might have obtained by articulating his history, and by grouping his facts so as to reach the consummation of a culmination, still this is, from a literary point of view, even more than compensated for by the internal proportions of his work, in virtue of which each incident receives its proper amount of attention and receives light from and throws light on every other incident and the whole course of the war. But although everything which belongs to the narrative of the war fits in with the narrative harmoniously, there are various digressions having nothing to do with the war, e.g. that about Harmodius and Aristogiton, which, however valuable in themselves, absolutely spoil the form of the work, as they also constitute an undeniable exception to the strictness with which Thucydides otherwise excludes all matter which does not bear directly on his subject. Whether this is due to simple neglect, or to absolute contempt for literary form, may be doubted. Errors of taste are to be found in Thucydides—they occur precisely when, abandoning his general principle, he strives after effect—and these digressions may have been inserted by him under the impression that a history to possess literary form must have episodes, since they were to be found in Herodotus and the logographers. At the same time, though his annalistic method involves literary disadvantages, it also brings with it some compensating advantages. The system of dropping one thread of the narrative when the end of a year is reached, and then taking up the narrative of the other events of the year, though it sometimes, as in the case of the Sicilian expedition, interrupts with foreign matter the main narrative, yet elsewhere and more generally affords a welcome relief, and a variety such as is attained in a drama by means of a secondary plot.

But it is in the matter, not in the manner, of his work that Thucydides' literary greatness makes itself most felt. And here it is difficult to determine what department and what quality in his work claims our greatest admiration. For the political philosopher of all ages, and for the student of Greek thought, the speeches will ever rank as the greatest work of "the greatest historian that ever lived" [Life of Lord Macauley.] And it is a pardonable error if, in the luminous profundity of the thought contained in them, we lose sight of "the antitheses, the climaxes, the plays of words, the point which is no point," that mar the speeches as literature. It is rather to the narrative that we must look for the literary perfection of Thucydides; and there we must turn, not to the philosophical disquisition—great and justly famous as it is—on the effects of civil war, but to the description of the plague, which has had many and able imitators, from Lucretius onwards, but none to approach Thucydides; or to the seventh book, the retreat from Syracuse, of which Macaulay said, "There is no prose composition in the world, not even the De Corona, which I place so high," and Gray, "Is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life?" Macaulay speaks of the "intense interest," the "magnificent light and the terrible shade of Thucydides;" and these words apply not only to the Sicilian expedition, but to the whole narrative. In some instances they apply also to the speeches. The speeches are not in all instances devoted wholly to political wisdom. Characters are drawn, as, e.g. in the speeches of Alcibiades, Nicias, Archidamus, and Pericles. While in other Speeches, e.g. the funeral oration, the appeal of the Platæans, the final speech of Nicias to his men, the light is as magnificent and the shade as terrible as in any part of the narrative.

The language of Thucydides is often considered obscure and difficult. Obscure, in the sense that he does not quite know what he wishes to express, he certainly is not. With regard to the difficulty of his style, it is necessary to draw a distinction. When he is narrating events, his style is simple, powerful, and beautiful. When he begins to philosophise and to generalise, he begins to be difficult to understand. But here again we must distinguish. The philosophical reflections of Thucydides are contained mostly in the speeches, and it is in the speeches that he most conspicuously departs from his resolve to describe the simple facts of the war without any attempt to please the ear. It is in the speeches that Thucydides deliberately makes an attempt at form, and whereas when he makes no effort he does attain form, he as signally fails when he is faithless to his principle of not seeking after effect. Doubtless, in throwing his own recollections or the reports of others into the form of direct speeches, Thucydides was practically obeying necessity. To the Greek, in whose life, from the time of Homer, public speaking occupied a large place, to the Athenian above all, whose main occupation in time of peace was the making and hearing of political speeches, a history which contained no speeches would have been no faithful reflection of political life. Thus Thucydides felt himself to a certain extent constrained by his desire to write a faithful history to introduce direct oration; and thus he was constrained to strive after form; for to merely reproduce by an act of memory the original form in which the speeches were delivered was, as he tells us, impossible. In this attempt at form Thucydides allowed himself to be guided by the precept and the example of the early rhetoricians, who, though they helped to lay the foundations of Greek oratory, were immeasurably removed from even the natural ease and grace of Lysias, much more from the perfection of Demosthenes. Thus the mistakes of Thucydides are the mistakes of his masters, not his own, and their mistakes were incidental to and inevitable in the earliest attempts to form artistic prose. The florid rhetoric of Gorgias appears in bad taste to us, but to the Athenians of his time it was a revelation. It showed that beauty was possible in prose as well as in verse. Its principal defect—that it ignored the difference between poetry and prose—we, who have great prose-writings to compare with it, can readily see. But Thucydides, who had to create prose, may be excused for joining the rest of Athens in admiration of the rhetoricians. Thus the conceits of Thucydides, to which his difficulty is partly due, are owing to the early stage of development to which prose and oratory in his time had reached.

A second cause is to be found in the undeveloped stage of the language. Although there seems no reason to doubt that thought is to a limited extent possible without language, no considerable or continuous advance of thought is so possible. An idea, once cap-tured and imprisoned, so to speak, in a word, is thence-forward available to succeeding generations. Thus the child in learning the meanings of words is storing its mind with ideas. By means of language the child, as with seven-leagued boots, traverses large spaces in the realm of thought, which its ancestors took years to subjugate by means of language, and which are still firmly held by the words they planted there. We at the present day inherit a language the total number of whose words is several times greater than the number any single one of us uses; while though there are many words—technical ones—which the majority of us do not even know the meaning of, we can, when necessary, acquire that knowledge by a reference to a dictionary. It is, therefore, hard for us to realise a stage of language in which there were more ideas than there were words to express them, and in which there was not only no dictionary to explain the meaning of words, but the very idea that it was possible to define the meaning of a word was a new and startling conception, which was used by Socrates, the originator thereof, as long as he had a monopoly of it, to the utter discomfiture of all who came in argument against him. Yet this was the state of the language by means of which Thucydides had to convey ideas that the world had yet never conceived of. Further, at the present day our linguistic conscience permits us to take a word wherever we find it if we want it, or, indeed, if we do not much want it. From naked savages on opposite sides of the world we take the words "palaver" and "taboo," as readily as we appropriate a technicality from languages that are dead. But Thucydides borrowed neither ideas nor the words to clothe them in. He writes pure Attic.

Hitherto we have spoken as though the lack of a vocabulary were the only difficulty with which Thucydides had to contend; but a still more serious difficulty was that the language had as yet no settled or recognised grammar. By this is meant not merely that some centuries had yet to elapse before Dionysius Thrax was to make the first attempt to throw together a body of rules which may be regarded as the beginning of Greek grammar. People may and must speak grammatically before the principles on which they—or those best worth attention—speak can be observed and noted in a grammar. But Thucydides belongs to a time when people did not, even unconsciously, systematically follow the same analogies or the same principles under similar circumstances. It is not, therefore, to be wondered at if, in the absence of grammatical moulds to receive it, the thought of Thucydides should overflow in some sentences, or solidify into some shape for which later literature has no parallel or only a distant analogy. Nor is it strange if, under the weight of Thucydides' thought, which would have strained the strength of a more developed language, Attic in its then cartilaginous and plastic condition should have sometimes yielded, and have sometimes betrayed the weight thrown on it.

It has been the custom to institute comparisons between Thucydides and other historians, mainly, one would suppose, because Thucydides is by far the greatest of historians. Between him and Herodotus or Xenophon the comparison must be one of contrast, and is one which the reader may be left to draw out for himself; but on the comparison between him and Roman historians a word must be said. In the first place, in any such comparison it should be noticed that Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, whatever the differences between them, all belong to a literature which is essentially original and creative; whereas the Roman historians belong to a literature which is not original or creative. In the next place, the three Greek historians belong to the best period of Greek literature, but the Roman historians do not belong to the golden age of Latin literature. As to the comparison between Thucydides and Sallust, what resemblance imitation could produce there is; but genius cannot—certainly that of Thucydides cannot—be imitated. Between Thucydides and Tacitus there are some points of resemblance. Both are great historians; both have a profound knowledge of human nature; and both take somewhat pessimistic views of human nature and of life. As to style, both possess great power; both are difficult at times to understand, and brevity is one of the characteristics of each. But to imagine that to Thucydides in his own line it is possible to compare Tacitus, great as he is, is a mistake. The first quality demanded of a historian is credibility; and whatever conclusion we may come to about the credibility of Tacitus, it is impossible to maintain that his reputation stands as high as that of Thucydides in this respect. Thucydides laid the foundations of scientific history, but Tacitus has built elsewhere. Both historians draw largely on oral testimony; but whereas Thucydides understood that the historian should go only to witnesses of the events he wished to record, and that their evidence, and even his own recollection of what he has himself seen, require testing and corroborating, Tacitus was content with hearsay evidence at third or fourth hand. When Thucydides had recourse to documentary evidence, it was, as far as we can discover, to official documents that he went; or, if he has occasion to refer to other histories, it is in a way which shows that he criticised them closely. Tacitus, on the other hand, has as little notion of criticising documentary as oral testimony, and relies on partisan memoirs as though they were wholly true.

We expect in a historian not only capacity to ascertain facts, but impartiality in stating them; and this quality no historian possesses so eminently as Thucydides. He writes an impartial history of a struggle in which he himself was one of the combatants. Tacitus writes a partial history of events from which he was so far removed in time that we might have reasonably expected from him an unbiased history. Thucydides' love for his native country—and it was great—never leads him to exaggerate the successes or minimise the defeats or the defects of Athens. Tacitus shares the weak amiability of Livy in never admitting a Roman defeat if it is possible to close his eyes to it. In politics there is the same distance between the two historians. Thucydides had political views, but he was a moderate politician, and his views were such that they rather assisted him than prevented him from comprehending the standpoint of others. Tacitus, on the other hand, shared the yearning of his order after a state of things which it was impossible to restore—yearnings which the nobility of Rome expressed the more virulently because they were conscious that they had not the energy or the courage to do anything to get what they sighed for. Tacitus was, on the whole, hostile to the political régime which he undertook to portray.

Let us now consider Tacitus and Thucydides, not as historians, but from the literary point of view. Both suffer from the inconveniences entailed by their following the annalistic method; but these inconveniences are felt much more strongly in Tacitus than in Thucydides. It is no depreciation of Tacitus to say that, great as is the interest with which we read him, it is not the intense interest which Thucydides inspires. The power of Tacitus as a writer is great and undeniable, and he is a master of light and shade, but it is not the magnificent light and the terrible shade of Thucydides. Both writers have the power of brevity, and this is frequently considered to constitute a great resemblance between them; but there is no difference between them so great and so characteristic as this supposed point of resemblance. Where the sentences of Thucydides are brief, it is because they are surcharged with thought; they are weighty with wisdom, and they sink into the mind. The sentences of Tacitus are brief because ejaculatory, exclamatory, abjurgatory. The one is the brevity of condensation, the other of amputation. Thucydides' is the brevity of dignity, Tacitus' the brevity of breathlessness. In fine, Tacitus is a "stylist," Thucydides is none. Thucydides is a perpetual demonstration that there is a higher art than that of concealing art—the art of dispensing with it.