SOURCE: "The Plan and Methods of the History," in Thucydides, The University of Michigan Press, 1963, pp. 74-110.

[Focusing on the opening chapters or "archeology" of the History in the following excerpt from his 1942 monograph, Finley asserts that the material reveals Thucydides' "belief that history is both useful and scientific. "]

[The] transition from Thucydides' age to his work is necessarily abrupt, because it is impossible to follow his development step by step as Plato's, for instance, can to some extent be followed. Thus one is confronted, on the one hand, with many facts of his life and many tendencies of his age which have an obvious bearing on his completed work and, on the other hand, with the complicated and impersonal work itself. But to see exactly how the one set of facts concerning his life and age grew into the other fact which is his History is impossible, because the agent effecting the change, the mind of Thucydides, stands aloof and distant. Hence, if one analyze too much the thought of his age, one neglects the History as an organic whole. But if one be concerned with the History alone, it will seem to exist, as the works of Aristotle long seemed, as something apart from all else, born fully grown. But since this inescapable gulf exists, it must be recognized.…

Like the opening lines of other Greek writings—the swift, majestic introductions to the Iliad and Odyssey or the wonderfully lucent scene at the start of the Republic—[the first sentences of the History] tell much of the work. It will be recalled that after giving his name Thucydides says that he undertook his History because he foresaw, even at the outbreak, that the war would exceed any earlier conflict in importance. It was, he says, the greatest upheaval ever to afflict the Greek world. But it is characteristic of him that, instead of turning at once to the background and causes of the war, he pauses at the beginning to substantiate this first statement by an elaborate study of the remote past.

He does so ostensibly because of the enormous fame of the Trojan War, and the next eighteen sections comprising the so-called Archaeology constitute, so far as form is concerned, not so much an introduction as a digression designed to support his view that the present war was vastly more serious. Such digressions occur frequently in the History, being the one means by which, in the absence of notes or appendices, a mind as sensitive as his to the demands of proof could substantiate its claims. Actually, however, the Archaeology expounds with such sweep and clarity what were to him the basic forces in the development of Greece that it forms an indispensable beginning to the History.

But before turning to the Archaeology it is necessary to say a word or two more of these first sentences. It will be remarked that Thucydides fails to say here that the war which he is about to describe lasted twenty-seven years and included not only the so-called Archidamian War, which came to an end in 421 with the delusive Peace of Nicias, but all the further hostilities down to the final surrender of Athens in 404. He first states this fact in so many words in the so-called second introduction prefaced to the narrative after the Peace of Nicias. The passage begins as follows: "The same Thucydides of Athens set down these events also in order as they occurred, by summers and winters, up to the time when the Lacedaemonians and their allies made an end to the empire of the Athenians and dismantled the long walls and the Piraeus." He then goes on to defend the view that all the hostilities of this twenty-seven year period constituted one war, to reckon exactly how long the war lasted, and to state, in the sentences quoted earlier, that he had lived through it all.

Now his failure to say as much at the start has given rise, in the century that has elapsed since the writings of the Hamburg scholar, F. W. Ullrich [Beiträge zur Erklärung des Thukydides, Hamburg, 1846], to an extended, though (in the opinion of the present writer) largely mistaken, controversy in regard to the composition of the History. The view of Ullrich, revised and restated in a thousand ways by his successors, was that Thucydides wrote the first four and a quarter books of the History in the belief that the war had ended in 421 with the Peace of Nicias, but that he later realized his mistake and, after the end of the war in 404, altered much of what he had written, appending the second introduction in the fifth book to justify his treatment of the whole conflict as one war. Nevertheless, the view continues, he died before completing his revision, and the work that we have contains many early passages harshly and inconsistently juxtaposed beside later passages. To attempt to refute this view in detail, as has been attempted elsewhere, would be a long and perhaps not over-profitable task. Suffice it to say that the main reason for believing that the History was composed not at widely scattered times but essentially at one time after 404 when the outcome of events had become clear, is to be found in its tight, organic development not only of certain leading ideas but of many minor themes as well. That fact, it is to be hoped, will be evident as we go on. That is not to say that Thucydides failed to make use of earlier notes; he inevitably did, and some of these notes may not tally in detail with his final opinions. Moreover, he evidently wrote with some difficulty, perhaps going back at times to insert new passages beside those already written, and he died without completing his work or even fully revising what we have of it. It is generally assumed that the main part of the fifth book and all the eighth book, both of which lack speeches, are particularly incomplete, and the view may be correct, especially for the eighth book, although it seems not impossible that Thucydides may have intended to treat certain years in this unemphatic way, reserving his fullest emphasis for what were to him the great symptomatic events of the war. But in spite of these marks of incompleteness, it nevertheless seems inconceivable that he could have given so searching and so consistent a picture of how and why all the parties to the war (and Athens particularly) acted from first to last as they did, unless he was viewing the war clearly and as a whole. One instinctively assumes so brilliant and closely knit a work to be the product of one period of intense creation, but that assumption appears inescapable when a man's very opinions postulate a full knowledge of events. Would an historian writing, for instance, of Napoleon and Napoleonic France in 1800 at the time of Marengo have seen in the subject exactly what he saw in 1815, after Waterloo? Similarly, could Thucydides, after the Peace of Nicias in 421, have written in such a way of the strength and weakness of Athens that what he wrote then would have tallied exactly with what he wrote seventeen years later? The answer gives the basic grounds for believing in the unity of the History.

But there is another and minor argument to the same effect, which brings us back to the opening sections of the History. It was observed above that the Archaeology is not, properly speaking, an introduction but a digression designed to support Thucydides' initial statements regarding the magnitude of the war. The second introduction is likewise a digression on the idea, tacitly assumed from the first, that all the wars of the period comprised, in fact, a single struggle, and on how long in years, months, and days the struggle lasted. It follows that one need not expect Thucydides to have treated the unity and length of the war at the outset, as he might have, had he been writing a formal introduction. Given his rigorous methods, he would have had to go into these matters in some detail, as is clear from the second introduction, and the place where they properly and conveniently came up was after peace had seemingly been made. Readers who had just lived through the war would meanwhile hardly be uncertain what war he was referring to, and the second introduction cannot have broached an unfamiliar idea. But at the start he was not chiefly concerned with the length of the war as such, which he alludes to merely in passing (for instance, in the aorist of the second sentence—"this was in fact the greatest upheaval," and again in section 23). Absorbed with his initial train of thought and forced by his self-imposed standards to demonstrate its truth exactly, he allows the first three sentences to suffice as an introduction, and plunges at once into the argument, demanded alike by these sentences and by the work as a whole, that the magnitude of any war depends on the contemporary state of material civilization. It may be that, as the rhetorician Dionysius observed, he should have begun by tracing the history of Greece from the remote past to the present, instead of, as he does, dividing the subject between the Archaeology and the Pentecontaëtia, the latter of which, like the former, is simply a confirmatory digression. Had he done so, he would certainly have made a more conventional beginning and might also have described the subject of his work, that is, the twenty-seven years of war, more explicitly. As it was, his pressing analytical mind set itself more searching goals, and these opening sentences stand witness to the fact not that he was ignorant of the length of the war when he wrote them but that the pressure of his thought dictated a procedure which had other merits than simple clarity. Since on any theory much of the first book was written after 404, one might after all assume that he would have revised this opening passage first of all, had he known that it did not phrase his view of the whole struggle.

These remarks do scant justice to the long-standing dispute on the composition of the History, which nevertheless will now be left on one side except as it comes up in passing. What has been said, however, may at least have cast some further light on the mind of Thucydides, as it reveals itself in these first sentences. The pressing succession of clauses, the breadth of the inferences made, the haste with which, having stated his concept of the war, he proceeds to verify it—all bespeak a mind, austere, swift, imperious, absorbed with the causal relation of events. These traits are the more evident if one compare the introduction of Herodotus, "Here are set forth the inquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, [undertaken] in order that the deeds of men should not grow dim with time and that the great and wondrous monuments both of the Hellenes and of the barbarians should not become unrenowned, and also [to narrate] why they fought one another." Herodotus, like Homer, looks to the past, seeking to preserve great deeds from oblivion. He even goes further and, like his predecessor, the geographer Hecataeus, would celebrate also the monuments of men's skill. There is little here of proof, though he later says that he feels obliged to report what he has heard, whether he believes it or not. Thucydides, on the other hand, turns to the past, not (as we have seen) for its own sake, but in order to confirm his views on the present. He does not think of himself as a commemorator; he is not even, like Herodotus, wholly concerned with great events in themselves, but almost equally with their social and political causes. One could go on to contrast the quite different feeling for proof in the two introductions and their dissimilar pace and intensity. But what is perhaps more worth observing is the size, so to speak, of the canvas sketched by the two men. Herodotus will set forth not only a longer past but, geographically, a far wider world. In these reaches, his work may be said to resemble that of Aeschylus, as it does also in its emphasis on the religious and moral import of the events described. Thucydides, on the other hand, gives all but a few pages to the far narrower scene and briefer period of the Peloponnesian War and, even when he digresses, does so to illustrate forces then at work. His breadth is not that of time or space but of representative action and lasting tendency. Thus his work resembles the bounded but intense plays of Sophocles, which take an action at its height and illuminate in swift succession the latent natures of all who are involved in it. Just so, Thucydides takes the states of Greece and, particularly, Athens at their height and reveals in the responses of each to the fierce demands of these twenty years the potentialities long inherent in their ways of life and government.

Something has been said already concerning both the occasion for the Archaeology and the reasoning on which it is based. Formally, this analysis of the weakness of Greece in earlier times justifies Thucydides' claims concerning the magnitude of the present war. His method is to postulate the kind of society that would have been appropriate to men's habits and standards in earlier times, as these were known either by tradition or from surviving literary works. These facts constituted confirmatory pieces of evidence, called by him τεκμήρια or σημεῐα, but his basic reasoning follows the pattern of what is likely or natural. Like the Old Oligarch, he assumes that certain social characteristics necessarily imply a certain form of government.

But more important is the idea of progress to which the Archaeology gives expression. The idea is often said to be foreign to antiquity and was in fact less common than two other attitudes: on the one hand, the sense of decline from a happier past (an attitude natural to such troubled periods as those of Hesiod or of the youthful Horace and Virgil) and, on the other hand, the concept, best expressed by Plato, that societies rise and decline cyclically, as they approximate or depart from the norms of just government. But that Athenians generally should have believed in progress through the great creative period of the mid fifth century is both natural in itself and well attested by our sources. Indeed, as will be discussed later, an optimistic faith in man's developing powers inevitably accompanied the rise of democracy then, as it has in modern times. The tragedians are all concerned with the idea. Aeschylus' Prometheus and Eumenides, Sophocles' great ode on the triumphs of man in the Antigone, the speech of Theseus in Euripides' Suppliants, the lost Palamedes of each of the three dramatists, and the Sisyphus of Critias, all in one way or another betray the sense that modern times surpass all times before. Plato represents the sophist protagoras as discussing the rise of civilization, and the tract On Ancient Medicine traces the slow growth in the art of healing in a critical and even a patronizing spirit. Thucydide's accuracy will therefore hardly be doubted when in the History Pericles too speaks of Athens' achievements as beyond anything ever known, and when Diodotus, in a passage quoted in the last chapter, sketches the evolution of law in much the same spirit as that of the tract On Ancient Medicine. The attitude which Thucydides imputes to these men corresponds exactly to his own in the Archaeology, and there can be no doubt that it reflects the general sense of great contemporary progress that surrounded him in his youth. But when he states a little later that his work will be valuable to future generations because history repeats itself, it is clear that he finally adopted a cyclical view of history very much like Plato's. He had seen the brilliant material progress of Athens checked and squandered, in the course of the war, by a social instability bred of that very progress, and he traces the process of eclipse with an insight which originates, one could almost say, in surprise. The cyclical view of history was virtually forced upon him by events. On both historical and literary grounds, it is therefore extraordinarily apt that, at the very outset of his work when he is about to recreate the state of Greece at the start of the war, he should thus conjure up the idea of progress. The Archaeology explains why, as a young man, he foresaw the magnitude of the war and, by some unconscious process of reversion, may well express much of his earlier reasoning. At least it conveys quite purely that confident admiration for the present which breathes through the Funeral Oration and in contrast to which the later narrative is even darker than it otherwise would be.

The argument of the Archaeology is, in brief, as follows:

In very early times no settled life existed. Men fought over the better land, and since it was not adequately fortified, the weak were constantly forced out. Attica, where the soil was poor, provides the exception proving the rule. For the same people were able to maintain themselves there permanently. In this purely tribal stage, there existed as yet no sense of common Greek nationality. The period came to an end only when Minos, by creating a navy, enforced the conditions of settled life. (That piracy had been extremely common is shown by the fact that in Homer it involves no stigma. In western Greece, where men still carry arms, one sees a living remnant of a way of life once quite general. Indeed, it is not many generations since Athenians gave up carrying arms and assumed luxurious habits of dress and adornment. The Spartans, on the other hand, early adopted the soberer dress common at the present, as well as the fashion of exercising stript. The earlier Greek habits in this connection more resemble the barbarian habits of the present.)

With the naval domination of Minos, men were for the first time sufficiently peaceful to acquire wealth. Instead of living inland through fear of piracy, they now built walls and occupied advantageous positions by the sea. These new foundations, by fostering commerce, further raised the level of civilization, the weak meanwhile submitting to the strong, not only through force but for the sake of profit. Similar financial authority and naval power (not, as has been said, the oaths of the suitors) enabled Agamemnon later to muster the Trojan expedition. Nevertheless, from Homer's catalogue of ships it is evident that this expedition, representing as it did the full power of Greece, fell far below the standard of the present war. (It has, indeed, been assumed from the small remains of Mycenae that Agamemnon's power must have been small, but the inference is incorrect, since the small remains of Sparta would give no indication of her actual power.) The real difficulty of the Trojan expedition was the relative poverty of the times. The Greek force could not be adequately provisioned, and hence a part of it was always foraging away from Troy.

After the Trojan War fell the troubled period of invasions, followed in turn by that of colonization in Ionia and the west, and only gradually were the conditions of settled life restored. With the increase of trade, great advances were made once more, particularly at Corinth, which was very powerful commercially (the trireme was invented there). Somewhat later Samos likewise acquired naval power, and later still the Phocaeans of Massilia, the Syracusans, Corcyreans, and Athenians. These successive navies continued the main source of dominion in Greece, military undertakings being for the most part brief and local. Nevertheless, even these earlier naval developments did not totally fulfil their promise, having been checked, in the case of Corinth, by the rise of the somewhat unadventurous tyrants and, in the case of Samos, by the Persians. Only in Sicily occurred any considerable development of power. Eventually, however, largely through Sparta's efforts, the strength of the tyrants was broken. (Sparta alone maintained her normal form of government continuously and owed her position to that fact.) Finally, after the Persian wars, the naval state of Athens and the military state of Sparta emerged as the dominating forces in Greece. Athens created an empire and Sparta a league of oligarchic cities subordinate, if not tributary, to herself. Whether against each other or their rebellious allies, both states gained great experience in arms during the fifty years before the war.

Such is the argument of the Archaeology, and its insight must strike one as most remarkable. The scheme of historical development is in all essentials that followed today (the chief exception being that Thucy-dides seems to connect the period of invasions with the somewhat later period of colonization). More striking still is the understanding of, earlier society that it reveals. Only very recently has the way of life underlying the early epic poetry of Greece and of modern Europe been looked at with a similar realism. And that Thucydides reached these conclusions from very broken evidence and states them with trenchancy and breadth is doubly remarkable when one considers how glorious the tradition of the Homeric world remained even among his contemporaries. But these merits of the archaeology concern us less than the formative ideas of the History which are first expressed here.

First, there is the concept that settled life and material progress are possible only through political unification, which in practice meant forcible control by some central authority. As Minos and Agamemnon in earlier times delivered Greece from a state of extreme localism and thus created the settled conditions necessary for commerce and the arts of peace, so, it is implied, has Athens, and to an even higher degree. Before Minos only transitory and shifting settlements had existed, but, when he made navigation safe, strong communities grew up in places convenient for trade, and, though this meant that the weak must accept dominion by the strong, they were glad to do so for the higher standard of living which resulted. The expedition that Agamemnon led against Troy was of a size of which only a settled and therefore a centralized society would be capable. Now, in the present war, Sparta pictured herself as the liberator of Greece, that is, the restorer of local independence to the many cities controlled or menaced by Athens. The characteristically Greek desire for autonomy is often and sympathetically portrayed by Thucydides, but the Archaeology, like many following passages, shows that this simple question of independence versus subjection was not, to him, all that was at stake in the war. The great material progress of his time was inconceivable to him as apart from Athens' control of the subject cities. For the Athenian empire, rather than the backward land-states led by Sparta, was the progressive force in the period—how much so appears in his confident belief, to be discussed in the next chapter, that Athens should have won the war easily. In short, in the Archaeology he reads back into the time of Minos and Agamemnon that crucial problem which bewitched all Greek history: how the full sovereignty of smaller states was compatible with unification and progress.

It might be objected that, in assuming that unification could be had only when one strong state exerts its control over others, Thucydides neglects the possibilities of voluntary cooperation. But that issue, to his mind, was dead, at least so far as the Delian League was concerned, since he notes with some bitterness in the Pentacontaëtia that the Ionian states through their own sloth and weakness early surrendered complete leadership to Athens. This disparity in vigor between the Ionians and the Athenians is a crucial and tragic fact of the period. The living issue to Thucydides was, therefore, not the presence or absence of control by Athens, but rather the mildness or despotism of her control, and, as we shall see, one of the central themes of the History concerns exactly this transition from the doctrines of generous leadership enunciated in the Funeral Oration to those of naked absolutism expressed in the Melian Dialogue. Thucydides has often been compared with Machiavelli in his detached and, in some respects, amoral attitude towards power. But he is not Machiavellian in the ordinary sense of the word: that is, he is not solely concerned with the acquisition and the use of power but rather, as the Archaeology shows, with its significance in the history of civilization. For to him power meant unification and unification material progress, and if therefore Athens was in one sense a tyrant city, as her enemies alleged, she was equally the teacher and guide of Greece.

A second idea propounded in the Archaeology which has a vast bearing on the work as a whole concerns the part played by naval power in Greek history. Its early development by Minos and Agamemnon gave rise to the first marked advances in civilization, and it was of equal moment for the rebirth of Greek culture following the period of the invasions. In listing the great navies of Greece in section fourteen Thucydides concludes with the Athenian, mentioning the well-known fact that Themistocles was its originator. Later in the first book he says in so many words that Themistocles, by fortifying the Piraeus and making Athens primarily a naval state, laid the foundations of the empire. It need hardly be said that Pericles continued the work of his predecessor. His strategy in the war was a naval strategy, and his whole policy in transforming Athens into a commercial democracy was based on control of the sea. It follows, therefore, that, to the historian, Themistocles had rediscovered and Pericles reapplied the ancient secret of empire in Greece. But to speak of naval power to any Greek of Thucydides' time was to speak of the lower classes,… and therefore of democracy. "To begin with," says the Old Oligarch [or Pseudo-Xenophon, in his Constitution of Athens,,] "I say that the poorer classes and the demos rightly possess more authority than the well-born and the rich, because it is the demos that rows the ships and makes the city powerful. The pilots, the boatswains, the captains of penteconters, the prowmen, the shipbuilders, these strengthen the city far more than the hoplites, the nobles, and the well-bred." And in fact, of course, Themistocles and Pericles, the proponents of the navy, were likewise the leaders of the popular party. The Old Oligarch is right when he says that the lower classes were politically important in Athens because the empire was based on them. To Thucydides, therefore, the idea of naval supremacy was inevitably associated with that of democracy. He remarks, it will be recalled, that Corinth had earlier failed to fulfil her promise as a naval power because of the cramping policy of the tyrants. One concludes that one reason, to his mind, why Athens had achieved more fully than any earlier state the political and material advances which had always followed from the possession of naval power was to be found in her developed democracy. This line of thought attains its fullest expression in the Funeral Oration, where Pericles finds the key to Athens enormous achievements in the liberated energy of her citizens. More will be said of that later. The important point here is that, in the Archaeology, Thucydides sets the strength of Athens in the perspective of Greek history, and by giving its cause a naval supremacy which in turn implied democracy, raises the fundamental question of his work: namely, how strong the democracy of Athens, the source of her power, was to prove politically.

This point leads to the last of the leading ideas adumbrated in the Archaeology. Thucydides remarks that Sparta, though not a naval state, had nevertheless been extremely strong because of her stable institutions. He notes, however, the old-fashioned simplicity both of Spartan life and of the actual town of Sparta, and over and over again this picture of the city as a stalwart but antiquated force in the Greek world returns. "Your ways are old-fashioned as compared with theirs," say the Corinthians at the assembly of the Peloponnesian League. "But in politics, as in mechanics, the new inevitably displaces the old." It follows from the great importance which Thucydides attached to material progress that he thought Sparta outmoded as a power and no longer fitted for her ancient position of leadership. Indeed, never having been a naval state, she had been strong, to his mind, for no positive reason but for the negative reason that she was well governed when the rest of Greece was under the fettering control of the tyrants. For he expressly says that, in Greek experience, no great empire had ever been founded on land-power. One returns, therefore, to the conclusion reached in the last paragraph, that Athens, whose dominion rested on a basis justified by the whole course of Greek history, should not only have defeated Sparta but have displaced her as the mistress of the Greek world. Nevertheless, he identifies in the Archaeology the one element which was Sparta's strength and was to prove the weakness of Athens: namely, stability of government. As we have seen, the greatness of Athens was, to him, dependent on her being a democracy, not only or chiefly because the poorer classes were the backbone of the fleet but because freedom alone could supply men individually with the self-confidence and vigor which were necessary for the maintenance of Athens' far-flung interests. He was not blind, however, to the weaknesses which could develop in a democracy through popular pressure and under the strain of war. When, therefore, he later finds the cause of Athens' defeat, neither in the strength of her enemies nor in her own lack of resources, but in the mistakes of Pericles' more violent successors, he returns to the same factor to which he had pointed in the Archaeology as the source of Sparta's strength.

The connection between political unity and material progress, the significance in Greek history of naval power (a power best achieved by a democracy), and the importance of stable government, these are the nerves of the History as a whole first revealed in the Archaeology. As a study of the remote past, it is undoubtedly colored by the author's attitude to the present, as all historiography probably is to some extent. Nevertheless, Thucydides transcends the more obvious vices of such an attitude both by the rigor of his methods and by the largeness of the principles which he invokes. There can be little doubt that these principles form part of what he refers to just beyond as the recurrent teachings of history.

We pass now to the famous section which follows on the method and purpose of the work. Just before it, Thucydides restates his belief in the supreme magnitude of the present war and his confidence in the essential picture which he has given of early Greece. This affirmation prompts him to glance, with amusing and quite characteristic irony, at those who easily accept all tradition, even such local and verifiable tradition as that Harmodius and Aristogeiton killed Hippias rather than Hipparchus, or who believe "the poets' gilding songs or what the logographers have written less for the sake of truth than to lend charm to their recitations." This last remark evidently applies to Herodotus, two of whose statements had just been singled out for criticism. "While a war is going on," Thucydides adds, "people always think it the greatest ever to have been fought, but, when it is over, they go back to admiring the past." The scholiast on the digression on the conspiracy of Cylon later in the first book somewhat mysteriously observes, "here the lion laughed," and the remark comes to mind at this and a few other passages where Thucydides finds a dry amusement, not unmixed with annoyance, in the follies of mankind. But whether his strictures of his contemporaries are wholly just may be doubted. At least, Pericles too is made to speak, no doubt authentically, of the supreme brilliance of the present as compared with the past, and even Thucydides' careful methods were by no means alien to the spirit of the time.

The actual statement of his method falls into two parts: first, on what basis he has composed his speeches, and then what evidence underlies his narrative. He concludes by stating the purpose of the History. Something has been said of the passage already, but because of its extreme importance we may here look into it in some detail.

It begins as follows: "As for the speeches delivered by the several statesmen before and during the war, it proved difficult for me to report the exact substance of what was said, whether I heard the speeches myself or learned of them from others. I have therefore made the speakers express primarily what in my own opinion was called for under the successive circumstances, at the same time keeping as close as possible to the general import of what was actually said."

The first thing perhaps that strikes one in these sentences is Thucydides' fundamental desire for accuracy, the same desire which he had expressed in the section preceding and, indeed, from the outset. Nevertheless, because it proved impossible to report the exact substance of what was said … he makes no claim to do so. What he has failed to report seems not entirely clear; presumably, the wording and structure of the originals. It has been suggested [by A. Grosskinsky in his Das Programm des Thukydides (1936)] that he sometimes gives as one speech what was orig-inally two or three speeches, though that may be stretching his words too far. But at least he has given himself a good deal of latitude. For he goes on to say that, though he has kept as close as possible to the general import of what was said (the clause, it should be noted, has a purely secondary, limiting force), he has caused his speakers to say primarily what he himself thought called for at each stage of events. In the phrase "what was called for" (literally "the things necessary,"… ), one obviously reaches the crux of the passage, since this is what the speeches chiefly contain. Unfortunately the connotation of the words is somewhat difficult to fix. Most commentators have given them an entirely political meaning. Speaking later of Themistocles, the historian calls him supremely able to conceive "what was called for"… and, from the context, he is evidently thinking of Themistocles' ability to see the decisive elements in any practical situation. Hence the words presumably have the same meaning here. Thucydides therefore means that he has set forth in any given speech those broad considerations, political, social, historical or even psychological in character, on which, to his mind, the choice of policy at a given moment depended. In other words, the speeches contain an analysis of the principal factors in the war, as these appeared at different times to the leaders of the several states or to opposing leaders in any one state. The speeches, therefore, are in no sense detailed copies of actual speeches; for, if they had been, they would not have contained Thucydides' own estimate of a situation. On the other hand, neither do they set forth his personal views; otherwise they would not have been limited to the standpoint of the actual speakers. They may be described as expounding what Thucydides thought would have seemed to him the factors in a given situation, had he stood in the place of his speakers.

But a further point of interpretation remains which does not alter so much as clarify the meaning of the passage: namely, the rhetorical connotation which the words "what was called for,"… had for him. In speaking of Themistocles in the passage just cited, he expresses his amazement at the sheer genius whereby, without any formal training and on the spur of the moment, he could see and expound "what was called for,"… that is, as we have seen, the decisive elements in a situation (which are further defined just before as having to do with the probable future course of events). Thucydides' astonishment is the more striking because both Pericles and Antiphon are later said to have had the same ability. Thucydides uses virtually the same words of the three men, except that in the case of the latter two he expresses no surprise. Anti-phon the professional rhetorician and Pericles the friend of sophists and philosophers were clearly not untrained as speakers, and their powers of estimating and expounding the elements of a situation were therefore admirable but not astonishing, whereas Themistocles' similar powers seemed almost incredible. A few other passages bear on the question. Gorgias in the Helen appears to use τό δεον to describe a speaker's reasoning, and in Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates is about to analyze the speech just read to him, he clearly refers to its argumentation as opposed to its language in Thucydides' manner by the words τὰ δεοντα. But a final passage from the History is more informative, that at the end of the present paragraph where he says that his work will set forth the nature of coming events. Now the untutored Themistocles is said to have seen just that. "He was," says the historian, "a supreme judge of present policies and supremely able to conjecture what would ensue even in the distant future." And Pericles, it has already been said, is expressly praised for his foresight; indeed, the History largely concerns how correct that foresight was. When therefore, on the one hand, both these men are said to have had foresight and to have expounded ["what was called for"] and, on the other hand, the History as a whole is to set forth the nature of future events and the speeches to contain [the term "what was called for"], it follows that [the words "what was called for"] are the instruments of conveying the tendencies of society and human nature on which alone foresight can be based. But, as we saw, it seemed in the highest degree surprising that Themistocles should have been aware of these deep recurrent elements in experience which permit foreknowledge. Therefore knowledge of them must have been gained after his time, and, since that knowledge is used in speaking, it can hardly be dissociated from the sophistic movement. Accordingly, it seems clear, [the words "what was called for"] have a partly rhetorical connotation.

Here it is necessary to recall what was said in the last chapter: namely, that the sophistic arguments from likelihood, from expedience, and from the law of nature were more than mere tools of persuasion. They seemed to provide a searching (one had almost said, a scientific) insight into human nature. The grip of the sophists on the thought of the later fifth century is hardly to be explained on any other assumption. These arguments, moreover, appeared the more valuable because they were wholly directed to the practical tasks of speaking and hence of government. Sophistic rhetoric had arisen because, in the changed conditions of the time, it seemed to furnish speakers with the means of estimating human conduct and calculating the probable course of events. It was not, therefore, as we tend to think that rhetoric is, an art of adornment unconnected with thought; it was as much concerned with thought as with expression, uniting both into an effective, practical instrument. When, therefore, Thucydides says that he has caused his speakers to say "what was called for," using the term in a half-rhetorical sense to signify the main lines of reasoning possible under various circumstances, that does not mean that he is not also using the words in the political sense described above. So completely was rhetoric the vehicle of political thought. The fact that the term ["what was called for"] had to him only one meaning, whereas we can detect two, shows rather how exclusive an instrument of political analysis the argumentation of his time seemed to him to be.

This profound validity which he felt that argumentation to possess in many ways gives the key to his speeches. One can say that they are in purpose something like the Tetralogies of Antiphon: that is, compressed examples of the reasoning to be followed under different circumstances, though they are at the same time more than that, because they both convey the point of view of actual speakers and are the main means of presenting the compelling forces in the history of the time. It is as if Thucydides had made a virtue of a necessity by saying that, if his speeches could not have the merit of exact truth, they would at least have the merit of clarifying the main reasons for events. And since his work as a whole is to acquaint men with the recurrent forces in history, then the speeches became to him the main means to that end. It is in this way that he effects the union between the specific and the generic which was referred to in the last chapter as vital to his thought. Doubtless such other passages as the Archaeology or the description of the revolutionary mind likewise do so; doubtless also the prognostic value of the book lies to some extent in the mere pattern of the events which it describes. Nevertheless, the arguments of the speeches, precisely because they embody that searching and realistic estimate of human behavior introduced by the sophists, must have been to Thucydides the primary link between his narrative and what he considered its deeper teachings.

A few final deductions concerning the speeches thus become possible. In the first place, because they embody arguments of a fundamental character, they may be expected to play an organic, even an interrelated, part in the work as a whole. It will appear in the following chapters that many speeches look to one another and that in some Thucydides even violates reality by ascribing to one speaker a knowledge of what another was even then saying some distance away. The fact should not be surprising, since, granted the searching nature of the arguments, the speeches naturally possess a significance in some sense transcending their immediate circumstances. At the same time, many speeches appear in pairs, partly because they reflect actual debates, but partly also because the coupling of arguments more clearly reveals their contrasting implications. As we saw, this form of antithetical debate had a strong influence on fifth-century thought from the time of Protagoras on. But if these tendencies inherent in the nature of Thucydides' arguments seem to rob the speeches of veracity, there are other and strong considerations to the contrary. For if the sophistic arguments were in any sense as widely known as has been represented, then they constitute in themselves strong proof of his veracity. The many correspondences between the speeches and the actual writings of the years in question prove, if they prove anything, that his concept of oratory was formed in the very period of which he wrote and thus, in the main, well represents the manner of speaking then common. That may not be the case, to be sure, of speeches delivered by Spartans, Corinthians, Syracusans, and others. These men actually spoke in their own dialects and, though we know little on the subject, were presumably less versed than Athenians in the contemporary forms of argument. But, as will appear in a later chapter, Athenians at least probably did not vary enormously in their manner of oratory. Lysias had not as yet evolved his concept that the style should be suited to the speaker, nor had Plato and Isocrates advanced their more complex theories of style and argumentation. Rather, these men thought of the oratory that preceded them as rigid and uniform. If, then, the speeches do occasionally violate reality and fulfil a larger function of contrast and interpretation in the work as a whole, they can be fundamentally veracious, at least in the case of Athenians. That is merely to say that we are dealing here with two kinds of veracity: the one of circumstance, the other of outlook and attitude. The former Thucydides sometimes violated, though even here one must remember that he kept to the import of what was actually said. The latter he maintained, because he could not by his nature be unveracious but, even more, because he was raised in the same tradition of oratory as his Athenian speakers.

Finally, the speeches have a value quite relative to the speakers and the circumstances, and their deeper meaning (so Thucydides seems to suggest) will be apparent only to readers gifted with political insight. The first point is obvious, though sometimes neglected. For when he expressly limits himself to the points of view actually advanced by the several speakers, he is evidently committed to giving their judgment, not his own. Thus it is incorrect to read his approval into all the opinions advanced in the History; in fact, it is impossible, since the frequent pairing of speeches means that they convey opposite opinions. How, then, may one penetrate this enigmatic surface and find what Thucydides considered the core of truth beneath? The answer is not easy; for one must remember that, whatever their deeper meaning, the speeches always and primarily recreate an actual dilemma which confronted statesmen at a given time and of which none of them could know the solution. Quite as much as the characters of tragedy, Thucydides' speakers face an uncertain future and reveal their wisdom or their folly by the course which they advocate. This plan, strange to our conception of history, undoubtedly seemed natural to him (he probably imagined no other), precisely because he wished to reconstruct the actual course of events, believing that only from reality could any permanent lesson be drawn. The reader, then, is much in the position of the speakers, since he too must decide at any given moment which course is desirable. Yet, needless to say, he is more fortunate; for the later narrative quickly shows the result of earlier decisions, and Thucydides also does not entirely withhold his own judgment. Such passages as the Archaeology, the statement of the causes of the war, the appraisal of Pericles, and the description of the war's brutalizing effect, definitely express the historian's own views and, by so doing, offer a standard by which to interpret the speeches. For instance, we have already seen that, in the Archaeology, Thucydides states the prime importance both of empire and of naval power in Greek history and also that the latter idea is inseparable from his concept of democracy as the energizing force which made Attic naval power possible. When therefore Pericles, held up as an example of foresight, explains the function both of the Athenian navy and of democracy, one is justified in believing that his views coincide with the historian's. Or conversely, after Thucydides has sketched the brutalizing effect of war, it is incorrect to conclude that the doctrine of naked power advanced in the Melian Dialogue represents his views. It merely pictures views then actually held by the speakers. But such interpretations of the meaning of the History must be reserved for the next chapters. Here it is merely necessary to see that the speeches have a value relative to the speakers and to the stage of the conflict which they represent, and that only the course of the war, coupled with Thucydides' direct statements, can show which speeches convey his own judgment. But in this fact probably inheres what he considered the usefulness of his book. He himself analyzes some of the forces at work in the war, concurs in the judgment of certain of his speakers, but in all cases, whether he considered his speakers wise or foolish, shows the larger reasons on which their policies were based. He expects that his readers will be men of political interests faced with analogous problems in the future, and he leaves a manual of statecraft for their use.

It remains, then, to speak of the final sentences in the paragraph on his method. Having described the speeches and stated that detailed accuracy cannot be expected in them, he goes on to say that in his narrative, on the other hand, he has spared no effort to achieve complete fidelity. "As for the events of the war, I did not consider it proper to report them on the information of any chance witness, but [I have reported] only what I myself saw or learned from others, after testing their information in detail with the greatest possible care. The truth was hard to discover because reports of the same event by different witnesses were not identical but varied with the observer's memory or bias."

In the narrative then, if not in the speeches, Thucydides has maintained an ideal of absolute and rigidly tested truth. It is interesting to observe his method as he expresses it here. Negatively, he has avoided Herodotus' practice of reporting any chance story. Positively, he relies either on his own personal observation or on the tested reports of witnesses, presumably several in each case, since the variation in their reports much impressed him. These informants were men from both sides. So much appears from his previously mentioned statement in the fifth book to the effect that his exile had the advantage of enabling him to talk with the enemy. His difficulties as well as the resource with which he met them are illustrated in another passage of the fifth book, where, after telling how the Spartans with characteristic secretiveness concealed their numbers at the battle of Mantinea, he goes on to analyze the organization of the Spartan army and thus to achieve a fairly exact reckoning.

His extraordinary care in gathering less important details could be illustrated from many passages such as the following from the account of the Ambracian army in the second book: "Their barbarian contingents consisted of a thousand Chaonians who, being a people without kings, were lead by Photius and Nicanor, the members of the ruling house who enjoyed the magistracy for that year. With them came the Thesprotians, also a kingless people. The Molossians and Atitanians were commanded by Sabylinthus, the guardian of the King Tharyps who was still a child, and the Parauaeans by their King Oroedus." Another type of passage shows his interest in geographical facts learned presumably either by his own efforts or from works on the subject: for instance, the following on the army of the Thracian King Sitalces: "His rule extended, in the direction of the independent Paeonians, as far as the Paeonic Laeaeans and the Strymon river, which flows from Mount Scombrus through the territory of the Laeaeans and the Agriani. In the direction of the Triballi, likewise independent, the boundary is formed by the Treres and Tiltari who live to the north of Mount Scombrus extending westward as far as the river Oscius. The latter rises in the same mountains as the Nestus and the Hebrus, a huge deserted range adjoining Rhodope." When one reflects how constantly such details are given and what care was demanded in acquiring them, their unobtrusive presence in the History inspires unfailing amazement. Like the more important facts, such as the names of generals and the number of troops at crucial engagements or the exact wording of treaties, they reveal how seriously the preceding statement on the accuracy of the narrative was meant.

But one other point of some importance for his narrative must be mentioned in this connection, namely, his system of chronology. Confronted as he was with a variety of calendars in use in the various Greek states (the official Attic year beginning in midsummer, the Spartan in the autumn, and so on) and with the additional difficulty that these calendars, being based on lunar months, varied markedly from year to year, he abandoned them entirely. Or rather, he used them just once to fix the outbreak of the war with reference to the official Attic and Spartan years and to the list of priestesses in the temple of Hera at Argos. Thereafter he calculated by years of the war, which he subdivided in turn into a winter and a summer season. Within these subdivisions he is often more precise, dating events as near the beginning or end, at the early harvest or late vintage. On the other hand, his system precludes his giving exact dates, forcing him to fix events primarily by their sequence. It need hardly be said that such a system hampers his narrative. The description of the long siege of Plataea, for instance, thus falls under three separate years. But he adopted it consciously and doubtless with a full understanding of its limitations. Thus when he finds fault with the chronology of Hellanicus, it is quite evident that he thinks his own standards far superior. At the same time, when he confesses in the final sentence of the present section that his work will be less attractive, because less fabulous, than those of his predecessors, one concludes that he realized well how cramping these same standards were, even as they revealed themselves in his chronology. Nevertheless, his satisfaction in his system is very great. He several times points out that it enabled him to achieve more reliable reckonings than any which might have been based on official calendars. In short, his chronology reflects the same ideal of accuracy that is expressed in this whole section and revealed in great and small ways throughout the book. And if such details, whether of fact or of chronology, sometimes break the thread of important happenings, they supplied, he undoubtedly felt, the sole basis for any larger estimate of the war. They also reveal a side of his mind which was concerned not with judgment but with fact alone.

The section concludes with words as famous as any in the History: "The absence of the fabulous will, I fear, detract from the charm of my work. But if it be found useful by those who wish to know the exact nature of events that once took place and, by reason of human nature, will take place again in similar or analogous form, that is enough. My work has been composed, not for the applause of today's hearing, but as a possession forever." The first sentence repeats his passionate contempt for those who found fable easier than truth and the past greater, because more golden, than the present. The second states his belief that history is both useful and scientific: useful, because posterity will find in the experience of the past some indication of the forces at work in their own day; scientific, because those forces are implicit in human nature and, as such, can be studied and recorded as something quite permanent.

This view, as we have seen, reflects a characteristic attitude of the Greek mind, an attitude which found truth neither in divine revelation nor in the purely material aspects of nature but rather in the observed traits of human character and the lasting tendencies of society. More particularly, the statement embodies a new sense which came into being in the latter half of the fifth century that conduct is predictable, that men of a certain sort tend to act in a certain way, that certain conditions will always produce certain results; in sum, that human nature too is subject to almost mechanistic laws. What those laws are can perhaps hardly be defined exactly. In reading the History, one feels that Thucydides was constantly trying to reduce the movements of society to some clear, orderly pattern, but that this pattern, suggested over and over again by recurrent themes and repeated situations, in the end always eluded him. That is not to say that he does not state what were to him the compulsive forces in the war. We have already observed in connection with the Archaeology what he considered some of these forces to be, and others will emerge in coming chapters. But over and above these specific tendencies, there is the sense that the social, as much as the individual, organism acts as a unit following the laws of its being, and perhaps the subtlest charm of Thucydides is constantly to suggest, if not to define, these laws. Especially do the speeches, as has been said, serve this end. The searching commentaries which they give on social and individual conduct seem to lay bare the guiding nerves beneath events. That the thought and oratory of the time had, generally speaking, a similar object has already been argued. There can at least be no doubt that Thucydides, imbued as he was with the new teachings of the sophists, rested his work squarely on his estimate of human nature …, and predicted eternal usefulness for it because human nature in its cyclical course would forever bring back similar situations. At the same time, to his view, his work could not fulfil this function were it not absolutely truthful. Accuracy, congenial to him in itself, ultimately subserved this long-term object. Conscious then of these two merits, fidelity and depth, he makes the single boast of the History, a boast as Olympian as his usual reticence, that he has composed his work not for a day, but forever.