History of the Peloponnesian War

Overview

Eight books, unfinished, and the division into books was done by someone else later. The narrative stops in the middle of the twenty-first year of a twenty-seven-year war, mid-sentence, in the autumn of 411 BCE. Thucydides tells us in Book 5 that he lived to see the end and Athens defeated, so the incompleteness is a matter of writing, not of knowledge, and nobody knows why he stopped.

The book alternates between two modes. One is a dry campaign chronicle organised by summer and winter, full of place names, troop numbers and small sieges. The other consists of set pieces: long paired speeches, and a handful of analytical essays on the plague, on civil war, on the Athenian character. The set pieces are what everyone remembers. The chronicle is what gives them weight, because it shows you how ordinary the intervals between disasters were.

The speeches are not transcripts, and Thucydides says so in his one methodological paragraph: he gives what the situation demanded, keeping as close as he could to the sense of what was actually said. This is the most argued-over sentence in ancient historiography. Treat the speeches as the best available reconstruction of the reasoning on each side, not as quotation.

One more thing to know going in. Thucydides was a participant. He commanded in the north, lost Amphipolis to the Spartan general Brasidas in 424, and spent twenty years in exile, which he notes gave him access to both sides. He never defends himself.

What happens

Book 1 supplies the background: a compressed history of early Greece, the growth of the Athenian empire out of the Persian wars, the quarrels over Epidamnus and Potidaea that gave both sides their pretexts, and the debates at Sparta and Athens. Pericles argues that Athens should not yield to an ultimatum.

Books 2 and 3 cover the first years. The Thebans attack Plataea. Pericles delivers the funeral oration over the first year’s dead, describing a city worth dying for, and Thucydides follows it immediately with the plague, which kills perhaps a third of the population and Pericles himself. Then Mytilene revolts, and the Athenian assembly votes to kill every adult male, reverses itself the next day after a debate between Cleon and Diodotus, and sends a second ship to overtake the first. Corcyra tears itself apart in a class war, and Thucydides pauses to generalise.

Books 4 and 5 bring a stalemate, the Athenian success at Pylos, the loss of Amphipolis, the deaths of Brasidas and Cleon in the same battle, and the Peace of Nicias in 421, which nobody observes. In the middle of the uneasy peace, Athens demands the submission of Melos, a small neutral island, and the two sides hold the dialogue in which the Athenians argue that questions of right only arise between equals. Melos refuses, is besieged, and its men are killed and its women and children sold.

Books 6 and 7 are the Sicilian expedition. Athens is persuaded by Alcibiades to send a fleet against Syracuse, a city as large as itself, on the far side of the Greek world. Alcibiades is recalled to face a religious charge, defects to Sparta, and advises them. Nicias, who opposed the expedition, ends up commanding it, delays after an eclipse frightens his men, and loses the fleet in the harbour and the army on the retreat. Thucydides describes the last days with a plainness he uses nowhere else.

Book 8 covers the aftermath: revolts in the empire, Persian money entering the war, the oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred at Athens, and then the text stops.

How to read it

Get an edition with maps and use them. More readers give up on Thucydides for geographical reasons than for any other.

Read the speeches in their pairs. The Mytilenian debate, the Melian dialogue and the exchange between Nicias and Alcibiades over Sicily are the heart of the book, and each is designed so that the worse argument is the more persuasive one.

You may skim the minor campaigns on a first reading, but do not skip the plague in Book 2 or the Corcyra analysis in Book 3. They are the book’s theory of politics, stated in the form of case notes.

Resist the temptation to make Thucydides a cynic. He never says might is right; he puts that argument in the mouths of envoys and then shows Athens destroyed within a decade. He also never says the destruction was punishment. Working out what he does think is the whole exercise.

Questions it raises

• If the growth of Athenian power made war inevitable, what were all the debates for?
• Is the funeral oration Thucydides’ own view of Athens, or an exhibit placed next to the plague for contrast?
• The Melian dialogue is the only extended dialogue in the book. Why did he write that scene in that form?
• Was the Sicilian expedition a bad plan or a good plan badly executed? Thucydides seems to say both.
• What does it mean that a historian who removed the gods still writes as though Athens was destroyed by its own character?
• Can a war narrative that stops seven years early still be the book he said he was writing?