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Thucydides and Xenophon: Political Historians of Ancient Greece

Thucydides and Xenophon: Political Historians of Ancient Greece

By R. James Ferguson

Journey to the West: Essays in History, Politics and Culture (1998)

Introduction: We now little about Thucydides (also transliterated as Thoukydides) except what we can glean from his own book, The History of the Peloponnesian Wars. He was an Athenian citizen, probably born around the early 450s B.C.E., and was old enough to hold the position of strategos (a general, one of the elected positions in the Athenian democracy) in 424 B.C.E. He was quite young during the earlier events he describes, and therefore had to rely on interviewing others for large sections of his account, but was of manhood age when the war proper began. It is possible to infer something of Thucydides background and connections:

One important bit of information is that his father’s name is Oloros; this is a very unusual name, which we know belonged to a late sixth-century Thracian king who gave his daughter in marriage to Miltiades, son of Kimon (who would later be the Athenian commander at the Battle of Marathon). This name strongly suggests that the historian himself was a member of the family of Miltiades and Kimon, one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families in Athens. Thoukydides’ wealth and noble birth, as well as his Thracian connections, tend to be confirmed by what he tells us himself: he was elected Commander (strategos) in 424/3 (a position that still almost invariably went to prominent aristocrats at this time), and he was in 424 ‘in possession of the working of the goldmines on the Thracian mainland’ opposite the island of Thasos (which implies the acquisition of prodigious wealth from slave-worked mines). Probably because of this Thracian connections, Thoukydides was dispatched as leader of a campaign force to this area, charged with preventing the defection of Athenian allied cities to the Spartan commander Brasidas. Thoukydides (possibly on his first mission as Commander) miscalculated and arrived just hours too late to prevent the defection of the strategically important city of Amphipolis to Brasidas. Rather than face the wrath of the Athenian people for his crucial military failure, Thoukydides chose voluntary exile for the next twenty years.



It is also likely that Thucydides had not quite finished revising the account before he died; the last book of The Peloponnesian War has some differing features, e.g. a lack of speeches, the look of a collection of notes, and it breaks off suddenly in 411 B.C.E., some years before the ending of the war itself in 404. The structure of the work, however, suggests that he certainly lived past 404 and he may have died in the early 390s. As we shall see, the theme was to be taken up by a later historian following in Thucydides’ footsteps; Xenophon.

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