Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (review)

Any text has dislocations in its narrative surface. Since the time of Schwartz and Schadewaldt (1929), the text of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War has been scrutinized for its omissions, ellipses, and apparent contradictions. Scholars have thought that these would contain important clues regarding aspects of the war not emphasized explicitly by Thucydides in his narrative and that in addition they would help solve historiographical questions about Thucydides as an author: the nature and quality of the sources he had available to him, for instance, or, even more important, the evolution of his own understanding, over the long years in which he was observing and writing up the war. Thucydides himself provides grounds for such scholarly expectations by emphasizing that he had begun his project right at the war's beginning (1.1); he tells us in the second preface (5.26) that he was exiled after his command in the Thraceward region, and that thereafter he had a much better chance to talk to combatants on all sides. Clear stylistic differences distinguish different parts of the History; most strikingly, it breaks off mid-sentence in the narrative of the summer of 411. One can certainly see why, with this author in particular, attentive readers are tempted to take an analytical approach.

Tim Rood, however, utterly rejects this temptation. Instead, he uses the tools of contemporary narratology to explore the text of Thucydides, just as it is, as the end product of authorial interpretation. He argues that Thucydides' narrative is not only written accurately to recount what happened but is also, in the most minute variations of its narrative details, an analysis of why and how the war happened as it did. Rood looks carefully at changes of perception (who "focalizes" the narrative at any given point), narrative disjunctions of time (analepsis, prolepsis, and variations in pacing), and Thucydides' handling of speech, thought, and the description of character. According to Rood, these are important clues that Thucydides provides to show us how the anticipations and perceptions of its various participants crucially shaped the Peloponnesian War.

This is a careful, subtle book, and a very important one for historians as well as literary students of Thucydides. Rood is a student of S. Hornblower and C. Pelling, and in this revision of his Oxford thesis he cites the enormous secondary literature, both historical and historiographical, to excellent effect, usually in the context of precise observations about the import of individual passages. This is the first major study seriously to take into account Hornblower's Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991 and 1996), and the result shows on almost every page. Even in the stretches where the minute attention to details of Thucydides' language make Rood's narrative itself read more like a commentary than an essay, the textual observations are aimed at a larger and more interesting interpretive point. In the thoughtfulness and integration of its readings of individual passages into a larger overall argument, it resembles Connor's Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), but where Connor uses a reader-response approach, arguing that Thucydides moves the reader in effect through the sequential experience of the war as it unfolds, Rood has Thucydides constructing his narrative to unpack for us as readers how the war's participants saw and thought about things and reacted to one another and how this in turn influenced how things unfolded.

The book has twelve chapters, divided among five parts. The first part generally discusses temporal and focalizing strategies, concentrating on the Pylos story and the role speeches play in the narrative; the second emphasizes how perception and gaps of knowledge between readers and characters as well as temporal displacement contribute to Thucydides' analysis of Peloponnesian and Athenian strengths and weaknesses in books 4 and 5. The third part explores how Athenian political life in general and the character of Nicias in particular become crucial in books 6 and 7 and shape the way the Sicilian Expedition unfolds, setting the stage for the grim years after...