THUCYDIDES

Athens, approx. 460 - 396 B.C.

WAR IS A MATTER NOT SO MUCH OF ARMS AS OF MONEY

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The chronographically first critic, historiographer and noteworthy Attic prose writer. He was born in the municipality of Alimundos (NE of P. Faliros, today's Alimos) in 470 BC. A naturalized Athenian, he was the son of Olarus, a descendant of Olorus, king of Thrace, whose daughter, Hegsipolis, was married to Miltiades, the Marathon warrior. But he was also related to the Peisistratides. His father's wealth allowed him to receive an excellent education and training. His teachers were the philosopher Anaxagoras and the orator Antiphon, whose virtue he extols in his writings. Apart from them, other sages who flocked to Athens at that time influenced his mental attitude.

In 430 he was attacked by the terrible epidemic which had started and which he himself describes. In 424 he was named general in a campaign about Thassos and Thrace, where he was known and exercised power, because in the so-called Skaptin Hylin, he was the owner of gold mines. Because he failed in this campaign and was defeated by Brasidas at Amphipolis, he was accused of treason and sentenced to death. But he escaped execution, leaving his homeland, and exiled himself for twenty years. This flight benefited the history of letters, because the exiled Thucydides found time to visit places that had become the theater of war and, completely undistracted, to study. He seems to have visited Italy and Sicily, as evidenced by the lively account of the warlike events in Sicily, during that ill-fated campaign of the Athenians. He stayed close to the philomuse King Archelaus of Macedonia for some time. He then went down to Skaptin Ylin, and there, while writing his story, he seems to have died suddenly, as his work which ends abruptly testifies. His bones were brought to Athens and buried in the "Cimonian Tombs".

The modesty of his morals, his blameless life, the strictness of his style, clearly visible in the features of his form. The story of Thucydides resembles a drama, the middle part of which is the campaign of Syracuse. This destruction also brings about the resolution of the drama. In this story, with terrible dramatic beauty, he describes the desertion of the camp, when the Athenians had already been defeated by sea, and there was not a single hero to die fighting, not a corpse to find burial, but innumerable dead moved the sorrow, the wounded and the sick were more pitiable than the dead. Thucydides, as a historian, read the previous logographers, whose works he criticizes. He criticizes them severely, even Herodotus, though he does not name names, and says that they wrote history merely for pleasure,

As a critical historian, he attributes the causes of what happens in the world, as well as the painful results of war, not to the gods, like Herodotus, but to natural causes and human nature that regulate everything, with passions, greed, ambition etc. That is why, in describing the fury of civil wars, he condemns their motives. Freed from religious prejudices, he does not make history a theater of miracles and does not believe that the current natural phenomena (solar eclipses, earthquakes, etc.) were divine messages and warnings. During the civil wars, when hatred, slaughter, destruction, fear, rage, took monstrous proportions (Peloponnesian war), Thucydides stands above the wild passions and soberly, with a calm and measured tone, sees things, setting on the homeland, freedom and goals, the truth and only that.

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Histories

THUCYDIDES

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