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Thucydides
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Thucydides was in Athens when the Peloponnesian war broke out in 431 B.C. Soon after the war began, Thucydides perceived that it would be a conflict on a scale without precedent and he would become its historian. He ... began writing the History of the Peloponnesian War to which he devoted most of his life. Thucydides believed that there were patterns of behavior which emerged during the war, and that they could be repeated in the future. He was a mechanist in that he believed that when faced with similar problems, similar people would react in similar fashions. Believing that one may change immediate situations, the end products of large-scale enterprises are the result of mechanical forces present in nature and in man.
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Thucydides was the famous Greek author of "The Peloponnesian War." He was born somewhere between 460 and 455 BC. Thucydides was a wealthy Athenian noble and the son of Olorus the King of Thrace. His wealth came from his families goldmines at Scapte Hyle on the Tracian coast. Thucydides was connected through family to Miltiades and Cimon. Thucydides lived between his two homes, one in Athens and one in Thrace.
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By writing down these speeches Thucydides ... had a record that people could follow in the future when they came into conflict. The citizens could read these speeches and be inspired by the powerful words of Thucydides a man whose human nature was that to be aspired to by every other man. At the same time however Thucydides is bringing to light the power that one man can possess over people whose human nature has gone wild and weak. This is why Pericles was able to convince the entire Athenian body of citizens to continue fighting the Spartans and their allies and not accept peace. Thucydides views human nature as the ultimate tool used by the famous speakers of ancient Greece in order to persuade the weaker minds of the average citizen of Athens into believing that what they are saying is best for everybody. He views this as both a necessity for the government to successfully function, but at the same time he sees it as a way for the speaker to gain power in the interest of himself and not the state. In this regard Thucydides regards human nature as always have some slight deception and ill-cause.
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Thucydides (born c. 460-455 B.C.) had first hand information about the Peloponnesian War from his pre-exile days as an Athenian commander. During his exile he interviewed people on both sides and recorded their speeches in his History of the Peloponnesian War. Unlike his predecessor, Herodotus, he didn't delve into the background but laid out the facts as he saw them, chronologically or annalistically.
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The tragedy of Thucydides' history emerges from the ultimate failure of the Athenian project. The new morality of the imperialists proved as conflicted as the old; history shows that their values were unstable and self-destructive. Thucydides' history ends with the recounting of an intellectual stalemate that, a century later, motivated Plato's greatest work.
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Thucydides had intended to take his history down to the fall of Athens in 404, but the narrative breaks off in mid-sentence with the events of the winter 411/10. Its continuation by Theopompus and Cratippus is lost, together with the rest of their works. Thucydides says that at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War he realized that it would have a greater importance in the history of Greece than any previous wars (including the Persian Wars) and would be for that reason more worth writing about. Since he spent most of the war in exile and removed from the immediate action, he was in a good position to gain first-hand information from both sides and to have a clearer perspective. His object was to provide an accurate record of what happened and to be instructive, because knowledge of the past is a useful guide to the future. His work was to be a ‘possession for all time’ (ktēma es aiei) not something ‘written for display, to make an immediate impression’.
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