In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

16 Thucydides* In an age which assumes that the biography of an author is indispensable for an understanding of his work, it is refreshing to find Thucydides obliging the reader by supplying all the information on his own life that he considers relevant for this purpose. What he volunteers is, from our point of view, sparse. It is confined to his opening statement (1.1.1) that he was an Athenian and began writing on the Peloponnesian War as soon as it it broke out in 431 b.c.e.; that he lived to see its end, that he was mature enough at the time to understand what was going on (5.26); that he was in Athens and afflicted by the plague in 429 (2.48.3); that he was a general in 424/3, serving in the vicinity of Thasos and Amphipolis (4.104.4), where he had some interest in gold mines, and thus considerable influence among the local upper classes (4.105.1); and that he spent twenty years in exile after his service at Amphipolis (5.26.5). We learn his father’s name, Olorus, only incidentally , when he identifies himself by his full name in connection with his generalship (4.104.2). In short, Thucydides tells us just enough to establish his credentials as a historian—or more precisely: as an accurate reporter of the events of his own time—specifically because he personally experienced the Peloponnesian War in its entirety. We know the date of his birth only by inference from the date of his generalship: since it is likely that a general had to be at least thirty years of age at the time of his election, Thucydides cannot have been born later than 454. Similarly, he will have died after the end of the Peloponnesian War (404/3), since he tells us that he lived through the whole of it. For other data about his life—that he came from an aristocratic family related to that of Miltiades and Cimon, which had Thracian connections; and that he belonged to the deme Halimous (not far from the * This paper originally appeared as “Thucydide” in Le savoir grec: dictionnaire critique, ed. Jacques Braunschwig and Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), trans. Catherine Porter et al. in Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 763–68, copyright (c) 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College, reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. Thucydides 279 modern airport of Athens)—we depend on what later biographers, especially Marcellinus (fourth to fifth century of our era), have preserved for us. Thucydides himself apparently did not consider these details relevant to his enterprise. Although Thucydides is more forthcoming with autobiographical data than is Herodotus, many questions we should have liked to hear about remain unanswered in any credible fashion even by later authors: What kind of education did he have? Who were his friends? Was he married and, if so, to whom? Did he have children? What did he do before the Peloponnesian War broke out? What did he do between his recovery from the plague and his generalship? What mechanism sent him into exile? What were his movements during his twenty years of exile? Who were his major informants? A question that has occupied modern scholars for a long time is the chronology of the composition of his work. Even a superficial reader will notice that Thucydides’ opening statement, namely that he began his work as soon as the war broke out, cannot mean that he wrote what he did at the time that each event happened and in the sequence in which it has come down to us: statements such as those about the Sicilian Expedition and the end of the war, which are appended to his estimate of Pericles (2.65.11–12), or appear at the opening of the so-called “second preface” at 5.26, presuppose that he outlived some of the events he described. At what time did he write these sections? When did he compose the introductory section on past events, the archaiologia (1.1–19), through which he wishes to prove the greatness of the Peloponnesian War? When was the so-called pentekontaëteia (1.89–117) written, which describes the growth of Athenian power? All we can know is that he must have revised at least part of his work before he had...

Share