Three Essays On Thucydides

Donated by Sydney Harris.

Presents the full text of "Three Essays on Thucydides," by John M. Finley. Includes a preface and discusses Euripides and Thucydides, the origins of Thucydides' style, and the unity of Thucydides' history.

In this book Professor Pritchett offers five original essays under the titles: Thucydides’ Pentekontaetia; Thucydides 1.61.3-5; Diodoros’ Pentekontaetia; The Solar Year of Thucydides; Aetiology sans Topography. The initial lengthy essay focuses on seven crux passages in which Thucydides in Book 1 describes the growth of Athenian power, maintaining against recent critics that they are presented in chronological order. The study combines a review of the manuscript tradition with regard to corruptions in toponyms and numerals and a personal autopsy of the ancient sites. In a separate essay, Pritchett adduces new arguments in defense of Thucydides’ seasonal chronological scheme. In the last essay, he takes sharp issue with a recent publication which attempts to attribute the origin of the ancient accounts of the Messenian wars and the battles of Hysiai, Thyreatis, and Phigaleia to legends evolved at festivals.

`War is a harsh teache' wrote Thucydides in the fifth-century BC. Rood analyses the techniques through which Thucydides' narrative explains the origin and course of the Peloponnesian War and exposes harsh truths about how individuals and states behave. Rood concentrates on how the use of techniques, such as selectivity, interaction of speech and narrative, and manipulation of time and perspective, points at one level to general human constraints, at another to the self-destructiveness of Athens' imperial power. The book explores some techniques that have received little attention and offers new ways of reading others; it gives new insight into Thucydides' sophistication and the way he relates to his predecessors. It is also important for its attempts to refute views that Thucydides' History is made up of different compositional strata or inspired by pro-Athenian bias. And it addresses directly the way modern historians use Thucydides, contributes to the contemporary debate over narrative history, and shows the value of applying some of the concepts of recent narrative theory to historical texts.

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly’s Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book’s original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides. Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides’ mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.