Quotes About Thucydides

In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.

Underneath the shifting sands of the struggle between two little Greek states [Thucydides] had caught sight of a universal truth. Throughout his book, through the endless petty engagements on sea and land which he relates with such scrupulous care, he is pointing out what war is, why it comes to pass, what it does, and, unless men learn better ways, must continue to do. His History of the Peloponnesian War is really a treatise on war, its causes and its effects.

Morgenthau begins his argument by noting that the world "is the result of forces inherent in human nature." And, human nature, as Thucydides pointed out, is motivated by fear ( phobos ), self-interest ( kerdos ), and honor ( doxa ).

Human nature - the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor - makes for a world of incessant conflict and coercion.

You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.

I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing.

Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals. He

The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.

T]he more one reads Thucydides, the less one feels that Athens's suffering was fitting or deserved. And, more generally, our first response to the book as a whole is not satisfaction at justice having been done, but is far more likely to be a feeling of sadness. This sadness arises, in large measure at least, from a growing sense that the defeat of Athens is not the victory of justice, but that justice itself is among the chief victims of the war.

Thucydides: "Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

Thucydides is the greatest writer of history in history. In fact, he is so good that we are trapped inside his version of events.

Pericles was among its victims. It was the first pandemic in recorded history. Thucydides, who himself became infected

The fate of Melos was by no means the only atrocity recorded by Thucydides

Thucydides and, maybe, Machiavelli's prince are most closely related to me by their unconditional will to fabricate nothing and to see reason in reality—not in "reason," and still less in "morality" . . .

But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over.

The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils.

Or the octogenarian twins—Creason and his colleagues referred to them as Heckle and Jeckle—who came to the library daily, spending their time reading Herodotus and Thucydides and telling Creason the very same joke every day for seven years.

Meanwhile the party opposed to the traitors proved numerous enough to prevent the gates being immediately thrown open, and in concert with Eucles, the general, who had come from Athens to defend the place, sent to the other commander in Thrace, Thucydides, son of Olorus, the author of this history, who was at the isle of Thasos, a Parian colony, half a day's sail from Amphipolis, to tell him to come to their relief.

The Athenians were the first to lay aside their weapons, and to adopt an easier and more luxurious mode of life;

For these reasons or reasons very like them he was killed who, of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved to come to so miserable an end, since the whole of his life had been devoted to the study and the practice of virtue.

In the final analysis, what stands out about Thucydides is not his weaknesses but his strengths as a historian. We note his omissions, but no account of the Peloponnesian War or of fifth-century Greece in general is more complete. Some scholars worry over his cut-and-dried heroes and villains. But is there much evidence to suggest that these assessments were fundamentally wrong? Others argue that his speeches are biased distortions, but no one can prove that any are outright fabrications.

At times Thucydides may be clearly mistaken in both detail and interpretation, but the extent of his accuracy and analysis astounds in a world where travel was difficult, written sources rarely available, and the physical obstacles to the writing of history substantial.