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THUCYDIDES, son of Olorus, was a native of the township of Alimus in Attica. Through his mother, Hegesipyle, he was connected with Miltiades. When a boy, he is said to have heard the history of Herodotus recited at the Olympic Games, and to have been moved to tears. He studied philosophy under Anaxagoras.
He was forty years old when the great war broke out between Athens and Sparta. In the eighth year of this war he was in command of an Athenian fleet, which failed to save one of the most important possessions of Athens, Amphipolis, a city on the Strymon, from the Spartan general Brasidas. For this failure he was brought to trial and banished. He did not return from exile till twenty years afterwards, in 403. The exact time and place of his death are uncertain. To his exile we owe the immortal history of the Peloponnesian war.
While purporting to be an accurate record of events as they passed before him year by year, this history gives proof of the highest philosophic power, that of analyzing and estimating the social phenomena of his time. He was convinced, he tells us, of the critical nature of the struggle between the two great powers of Hellas. Human nature was the same always; and a careful statement of facts, from which all legend should be rigorously excluded, would make his work less attractive for present readers, but more precious to posterity.
Masterly portraiture of great social facts, with minute accuracy of detail--such is the character of his work. The contrast between Sparta and Athens--the first, a premature and abortive Rome, absorbed in one-sided military training; the second, a free State, in which every function of civic life, war, commerce, philosophy, art, had free play--is strongly drawn. Their mental culture did not make the Athenians less brave in danger, or more spiritless in defeat. "Their lives they spent for their country as though not their own; their counsels they cherished as the dearest possession, to use them for her service" (Thuc. i. 70). There were no privileged castes among them: "All take their share of public burdens, all are free from intolerance," Thucydides records Pericles as saying; "We persecute no one for following his own pursuits. Our life is humanized by public festivals and private refinement. We cultivate beauty without luxury, and wisdom without weakness." Not less striking is his picture of the plague at Athens, and of the lawlessness and demoralization that followed it (ii. 47-53). Most imperssive of all is his description of the factious strife between the oligarchical and democratical parties at Corcyra, which he gives as a type of what went on everywhere through the cities of Greece, and which was fated to continue till their independence was suppressed first by Macedon, afterwards by Rome. The same passions, the same intertwining of private with public hatreds, at those which raged between Guelph and Ghibelline in the Italian republics, or in Paris during the Reign of Terror and the reaction which followed, are depicted by Thucydides with inimitable truth and power.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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