01 Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides (465–400 B.C.), Athenian general and adherent of Pericles, penned his eyewitness account of the Peloponnesian War after being exiled in 424 B.C. Although he survived the war, Thucydides failed to complete his history, which ends abruptly in 411 B.C.; we must depend, accordingly, on the less- accomplished narratives of Xenophon and Diodorus Siculus for information on the last six years of the war. Thucydides set the standard of historical writing and analysis in the West, and he is often hailed for his accuracy and objectivity, yet he wrote from a distinctly Athenian perspective. He idealized Pericles, and occasionally revealed anti-Spartan prejudices. Thucydides wrote a narrative of the war so convincing that it has influenced all subsequent interpretations. The British Victorian scholar George Grote, for example, saw the struggle of Athens and Sparta as comparable to that between Great Britain and Napoleonic France. This comparison, implicitly accepted by most historians even today, has left open the question of why Sparta won the war. In the era of the Cold War, scholars hoping to find ways to avoid a crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union which could escalate into nuclear war debated Thucydides’s judgment that the Peloponnesian War was inevitable. This model, too, is problematic; equating Sparta with the Soviet Union is misleading (and unfair to Sparta). Clearly reading the account of Thucydides, in tandem with other ancient sources, generates a host of questions as to the causes, course, and outcome of the Peloponnesian War, as well as of the characteristics of both Athenian and Spartan society.