Thucydides
c. 460–c. 400 BCE · Ancient Greece
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Thucydides
Drew From(2)
who shaped Thucydides
via The Histories
- The history Thucydides is picking up — and arguing with
- His narrative deliberately begins where Herodotus left off (Sestos, 479 BCE), then drives to 431; the Histories are the explicit precursor he continues
- He kept the enterprise and threw out the method — read Herodotus first and Thucydides' colder, stricter approach reads as a direct rebuke
- Thucydides starts not with his own war but with Homer's, using the Iliad as the raw material against which he forges a new, evidentiary method
- He names Homer, doubts the 1,186-ship catalogue, and corrects the poet's exaggeration — and in doing so invents the historian's skepticism
- Read the Iliad first and the opening "Archaeology" reads as what it is: history arguing its way out of epic
Inspired(2)
who Thucydides shaped
via Plutarch's Lives
- When Plutarch reaches the Athenian generals, he doesn't compete with Thucydides — he defers to him
- On Nicias, Plutarch says outright he won't "vainly rival Thucydides," and across the Greek Lives he cites the History by name as the authority
- Thucydides supplies the hard chronicle of the war; Plutarch lifts his Pericles and Nicias straight off the page and turns them into character studies
via Leviathan
- Hobbes loved this book enough to translate it himself — his English Thucydides (1629) came decades before Leviathan
- The Melian Dialogue's cold verdict that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must is the seed of Hobbes's state of nature
- Thucydides taught Hobbes that men act from fear and self-interest, and that taught him why they need a sovereign
Portraits
Front-facing cast (Pushkin Museum casting collection) of the famous Holkham Hall marble — a Roman copy (c. 100 CE) of the early-4th-c. BCE original, considered the finest of the six surviving versions of the lost prototype.
Marble portrait head of a bearded, balding man with a broad forehead and three deep furrows, late Hellenistic Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original.
Famous Quotes
“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
“I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.”
“The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”
About Thucydides
Athenian historian and general whose History of the Peloponnesian War set the standard for analytical, evidence-based historical writing. Exiled after a military failure, he spent twenty years documenting the war between Athens and Sparta with unprecedented rigor. His Melian Dialogue remains a foundational text in political realism.