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Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 3.69 - 3.85

Continued from: Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book 3: Part 1

Thucydides is disillusioned. He does not believe that people's nature will ever permit them to solve their problems without waging a war and shows it by saying that "the suffering"of revolution "have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same (3.82). However, he does his best not to show his emotions in his writings.

Thucydides is a good writer and his talent shows through the descriptions he makes or the biographical stories he tells. For example, we cannot help but feel eager to find out the fate of Pausanias, to think over the list of the evils of revolution, or to shudder at the description of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse. He tries his best not to please the public. He does not seem to care whether the listener is entertained. Otherwise why would he include the detailed description of the defeat at Syracuse? This episode could only depress the reader, not entertain him. Thucydides wanted his history to look as a collection of facts and not as an engaging gossip (for facts are usually plain while gossip is entertaining). As far as he is concerned, if the reader is looking to be entertained, The PW is not the book for him. It is rather written for people who would want to know what this war specifically and warfare in general is like and how does it affect the people who are involved in it.He does not want us to be entertained, he wants us to know the truThucydides

His talent of a writer also shows through the language he uses. For example, in 3.81 he says: "Death thus raged in every shape; and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by their fathers, and suppliants dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there."

This is not a quotation of a simple soldier. Even if the exact Thucydidean words may have been totally lost in translation, this passage shows his incredible command of the language. In these short three lines Thucydides creates such a vivid image of death and destruction that one cannot help but shudder from it. The historian has not been very successful in hiding his talent of a writer here.

It is comforting to know that Thucydides does his best to verify the facts he uses. However, even he is not perfect, as the speeches in The PW, for example, have definitely been altered as the historian was not able to preserve their exact text. I do trust Thucydides more than Herodotus, even though it can be scary to read his work sometimes. Some incidents, as the Athenian defeat in Sicily for example, sound more like scenes from a horror movie than from a history book.