THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY FOtTNDED BY JAMES LOEB, LL.D. EDITED BY |T. E. PAGE, C.H., LITT.D. CAPPS, ph.d., ll.d. tW. H. D. ROUSE, litt.d. POST, m.a. E. H. WARMINGTON, m.a., f.r.hist.soc. THUCYDIDES I PORTRAIT OF PERIKLES. BRITISH MUSEUM. THUCYDIDES WITH AN ENGLISH TRANSLATION BY CHARLES FORSTER SMITH OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN IN FOUR VOLUMES I HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR BOOKS I and II LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCMLVI First printed 1919 Revised and Reprinted 1928 Reprinted 1935, 1951, 1956 6523feb Prinied in Great Britain CONTENTS PAOJt PORTRAIT OF PERICLES Frontispiece INTRODUCTION vii BIBLIOGRAPHY Xxi BOOK I 1 BOOK II 257 MAPS CORCYRA AND NORTH-WESTERN HELLAS . to face 43 CHALCIDICE , 95 PIRAEUS 157 INTRODUCTION Three ancient biographies 1 of Thucydides have come down to us, but they are of little value. They are derived from ancient commentaries, and the bio- graphical details which they contain, wherever they do not rest upon inference from the text of the history itself, are often confused and contradictory. These are supplemented by scattered statements of several ancient writers— Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote two treatises on Thucydides (Z)<» Thucy- didis historia indicium and the Second Letter to Am- maeus), Plutarch (Cimon iv), and Pausanias (i. xxxii.). The-only authentic facts about the life of Thucy- dides are gathered from casual mention in the History. He was the son of Olorus (iv. civ. 4) ; commenced the compilation of materials for writing the History at the outset of the Peloponnesian War (i. i. 1); and lived through the whole war, ripe in years and 1 One of these, compiled in three distinct portions u from the commentaries," passed under the name of Marcellinm, who is probably to be identified with the author of Scholia on Hermogenes wep\ araotwr, who seems to have lived in the fifth century A.D. ; another was by an anonymous gram- marian ; and the third is a short notice in* Suidas, a.v. A 2 vii INTRODUCTION judgment, following it with close attention, that he might acquire accurate information (v. xxvi. 5). He suffered from the plague of 429 b.c. (ii. xlviii. 3), of which he wrote his famous account (ii. xlvii-liv). Elected one of the ten generals in 424 b.c, he was sent to the coast of Thrace (where he enjoyed the right of working certain gold mines) to operate against Brasidas. Failing to relieve Amphipolis, he was exiled in 424 b.c, and remained in banishment for twenty years, and thus was able to become ac- quainted with affairs on both sides (v. xxvi. 5). For other facts we are dependent largely upon inference ; some are reasonably certain, others less so. The name of his father was identical with that of the Thracian prince Olorus, whose daughter He- gesipyle was married to Miltiades, and his tomb, having the inscription ©ovkvSiS^s 'OAopov 'AkifxovaLos, was in the suburb of Athens known as K01A.17 MeAe- TtScs, adjoining those of Cimon and Miltiades (Plut. Cim. iv). We may therefore assume that Olorus, the father of Thucydides, was a near kinsman of the Thracian prince Olorus. If, as Marcellinus says (§ 2), Thucydides' mother was named Hegesipyle, like Cimon's mother, that would be confirmation of the this. relationship ; but Plutarch makes no mention of It seems likely, then, that Thucydides was of near kin to Cimon, younger perhaps by one generation. His father Olorus was probably a full citizen of Athens, as is indicated by the fact that, mentioning viil INTRODUCTION himself as o-rpaTrjyos (iv. civ. 4), he writes ®ovKv&fir)v citizen rbv 'OAdpov ; for only as an Athenian could his father be mentioned in this official style. As to the date of Thucydides' birth, the only ancient statement that seems worthy of credence was made by Pamphila, a woman writer who in the time of Nero made a great compilation of the results of learning. Aulus Gellius (N.A. xv. 23) quotes from Pamphila that, at the beginning of the Pelo- ponnesian War, Hellanicus was sixty-five years of age, Herodotus fifty-three, Thucydides forty. Pam- phila's dates were probably taken from the chrono- logical handbook of Apollodorus (second century B.C.), which was generally accepted among the Greeks and Romans. The term forty years used by Pamphila doubtless meant the d/c/x^ or prime of Thucydides, and may have been fixed on the basis of his own assertion that he began to collect material at the opening of the war (i. i. 1) and was then in full maturity of mind (v. xxvi. 5). At any rate his own statement, taken with Pamphila's date, has led to the general assumption that the historian was born somewhere about 472 b.c It is indicated by Marcellinus (§ 46), and is prob- able in itself, that the decree for Thucydides' ban- ishment was adopted on the motion of Cleon, who was then at the height of his power ; and it is probable that the charge brought against him was treachery (Ttpo&ocria), as stated by Marcellinus (§ 55) ix r INTRODUCTION and the anonymous biographer (§ 2), and apparently implied by Aristophanes (Vesp. 288). His own words, £wefir) fjLOL favyeiv, admit of this interpretation ; and the statement of Pausanias (i. xxiii. 9) that he was later recalled from exile on the motion of Oenobius is best understood on this basis. If he had been banished by a simple decree of the people, the general amnesty that followed the capture of Athens by Lysander would have been sufficient for him as for other exiles ; if the sentence was more severe, a special decree would be necessary. But it is possible, of course, that the motion of Oenobius antedated the amnesty of Lysander's peace by a few months. ^ As to Thucydides' death, there was a persistent tradition thatjie was assassinated, and the fact that the History breaks off suddenly in the midst of ex- citing events of the Decelean War seems to support the tradition. Plutarch (Cim. iv. 3) says that it was commonly reported that he died a violent death at Scapte Hyle ; Pausanias (i. xxiii. 9), that he was murdered on his journey home from exile ; Marcel- linus (§ 10), that after his return from exile he died and was buried in Athens. But whether he died in 1 The name, which is a rare one in the fifth century, is found as that of a general commanding in the neighbourhood of Thasos in 410-9 b.o. and we hear somewhat later of one Eucles, son of Oenobius ; hence it has been conjectured that the father of Oenobius was Eucles, who was Thucydidea' colleague in Thrace in 424 b.o. (lv. civ). : INTRODUCTION Thrace or in Athens, it seems clear from his own words that he outlived the term of his banishment (v. xxvi. 5, £vvitirj fxot <f>evyeiv rrjv ifxavrov errj €iko<ti) and that he returned to Athens, since his description of the wall of Themistocles, whose remains "may " still be seen at the Peiraeus (i. xciii. 5), shows that he was there after the destruction of the walls by Lysander. If he had lived to see the restoration of the walls by Conon in 395 B.C., it seems he would certainly have mentioned it. There is another reason, too, for supposing that he did not live to this year in in. cxvi. 2 he says that the eruption of Aetna, which occurred in the spring of 425 b.c, was the third on record ; hence the one mentioned by Dio- dorus (xiv. lix. 3) for 396 b.c. could not have been known to him. It seems reasonable, then, to assume that he was not alive in 396 I3.c. There is a pretty and oft-repeated story J that Thucydides, as a boy, heard Herodotus recite a portion of his History at Olympia and was moved thereby to tears, whereupon Herodotus said, " Olo- rus, your son's spirit is aflame with a passion for learning." But Lucian, when telling of the powerful effect of Herodotus' recitation at Olympia, 2 would surely have mentioned this circumstance had he known of it ; besides, chronology is in the way, if 1 s.v. Suidas opyav and ©ou«i/5/5rjj ; Photius, Bibl. 60; Marcellinua, § 54. " Htrod. i. INTRODUCTION we hold to Pamphila's testimony. But if he did not as a boy hear Herodotus recite at Olympia, he must have known him later as a man at Athens. The period of his youth and early manhood fell in the time when Athens was most prolific in great men. It is clear that he had heard and admired Pe- ricles, and he must have seen Aeschylus and known Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Anaxagoras, So- crates, Gorgias, Antiphon, Pheidias, Polygnotus, Mnesicles, Ictinus, Callicrates, and Hippocrates. Association with such men and the atmosphere of Athens at such a time best explain the development of his genius ; but the limits of his subject, as he conceived it, precluded any mention of any of these except Pericles, so that for any personal influence ot theirs upon him we are left to inference. The first seven years of the war, before his banishment, were doubtless spent in large part at Athens, where he must have heard the speeches of Pericles, the dis- cussions about Mytilene and about Pylos, as well as about other matters of which we have accounts in this History. But the twenty years of his exile he probably passed largely on his properties in Thrace, 1 engaged in the task of compiling materials for his work about the war, as indeed we are told that he 1 It was his family connection with Thrace which led to his acquiring the right of working gold mines in that region (iv.