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ahorbinskiIt's interesting to read Thucydides while bearing in mind that, as Breisach notes in Historiography, later historians have on the whole vastly tended to prefer him to his near-contemporary Herodotus. Given Thucydides' obsession with extracting general patterns and principles of political behaviour out of the events that he relates, and his reliance, no less than Herodotus, on speeches of highly dubious accuracy (veracity being a somewhat different question), as well as his determination to suppress all details about his specific sources, this marked preference does, in fact, seem somewhat odd. All of these traits, however, make it easy to see why he was so popular in the Renaissance, and why he has retained that popularity particularly in the 19thC and at least until fairly frequently. I think most undergrads in history and political science, for instance, are run through the mines of the Melian Dialogue, the Funeral Oration, and the disaster of the Sicilian expedition; this is at least my fourth time with the former, although I hadn't until now read much of the latter.
Herodotus gets a bad rep for being credulous, non-secular, and never having met a digression he didn't love, as well as for being too focused on individuals and overlooking larger patterns. (Indeed, I myself berated him for some of the latter in my last post, vis-a-vis his treatment of Themistokles.) To the extent that his narrative is overtly skeptical, secular in that he never acknowledges the possibility of divine agency in history, and much more tightly focused on the main plot of his story (though I should note that the doomed Sicilian expedition, in which the author himself played a notable part, constitutes a good 1/4 of the narrative), Thucydides is certainly Herodotus' opposite. But, as others have pointed out, both authors were highly concerned with warfare, and not just the constant low-level warfare that was a given in the Greek oikumene (in ancient Greek one declares peace treaties, not war) but the two central conflicts that made Athens into a hegemon and then destroyed her preeminence almost as quickly. Inasmuch as one can detect in both authors a longing for the vanished ideal Athens of old, they have more in common than is apparent at first glance.
I do want to return to the speeches, since now more than ever I find it useful to poke at Thucydides a bit in terms of his method here. Like Herodotus, Thucydides does not claim to report exactly what people said; rather, he claims, "my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation" (I.22). So we can no more excoriate Thucydides for inaccuracy than we can Herodotus, although Herodotus is the one who has frequently been accused of making things up out of whole cloth. It seems fairer to give both writers the benefit of the doubt, and proceed on the assumption that while both did their honest best to reconstruct what was said, the speeches are an excellent place to detect the author's own point of view. Essentially, then, given the differences in the scope of their subject matter and interests, it seems that Herodotus and Thucydides are much closer in terms of method than we might like to think. Furthermore, in terms of what they see as the purpose of writing history, given that Thucydides holds his cards closer to the chest, saying only that the Peloponnesian War "was more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past" (I.1), it seems that their motivations may have actually been the same. Especially in light of the fact that no other ancient historians took up Thucydides' banner, it seems best to conclude that Thucydides and Herodotus are much more alike than different.
Herodotus gets a bad rep for being credulous, non-secular, and never having met a digression he didn't love, as well as for being too focused on individuals and overlooking larger patterns. (Indeed, I myself berated him for some of the latter in my last post, vis-a-vis his treatment of Themistokles.) To the extent that his narrative is overtly skeptical, secular in that he never acknowledges the possibility of divine agency in history, and much more tightly focused on the main plot of his story (though I should note that the doomed Sicilian expedition, in which the author himself played a notable part, constitutes a good 1/4 of the narrative), Thucydides is certainly Herodotus' opposite. But, as others have pointed out, both authors were highly concerned with warfare, and not just the constant low-level warfare that was a given in the Greek oikumene (in ancient Greek one declares peace treaties, not war) but the two central conflicts that made Athens into a hegemon and then destroyed her preeminence almost as quickly. Inasmuch as one can detect in both authors a longing for the vanished ideal Athens of old, they have more in common than is apparent at first glance.
I do want to return to the speeches, since now more than ever I find it useful to poke at Thucydides a bit in terms of his method here. Like Herodotus, Thucydides does not claim to report exactly what people said; rather, he claims, "my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation" (I.22). So we can no more excoriate Thucydides for inaccuracy than we can Herodotus, although Herodotus is the one who has frequently been accused of making things up out of whole cloth. It seems fairer to give both writers the benefit of the doubt, and proceed on the assumption that while both did their honest best to reconstruct what was said, the speeches are an excellent place to detect the author's own point of view. Essentially, then, given the differences in the scope of their subject matter and interests, it seems that Herodotus and Thucydides are much closer in terms of method than we might like to think. Furthermore, in terms of what they see as the purpose of writing history, given that Thucydides holds his cards closer to the chest, saying only that the Peloponnesian War "was more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past" (I.1), it seems that their motivations may have actually been the same. Especially in light of the fact that no other ancient historians took up Thucydides' banner, it seems best to conclude that Thucydides and Herodotus are much more alike than different.