Quotes About Thucydides

There is a story of a reply made by a captive taken in the island to one of the Athenian allies who had sneeringly asked 'Where were their brave men all killed?' He answered that 'The spindle' (meaning the arrow) `would be indeed a valuable weapon if it picked out the brave.' He meant to say that the destruction caused by the arrows and stones was indiscriminate.

Thus both in the movement along the coast and in the naval engagement which ensued, the Syracusans proved themselves quite a match for the Athenians, and at length made their way into the harbour at Messenè.

Once you come forward in the role of liberators, you will find that your strength in the war is enormously increased. -p201

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.

I lived through the whole of it, being of mature years and judgment, and I took great pains to make out the exact truth. For twenty years I was banished from my country after I held the command at Amphipolis, and associating with both sides, with the Peloponnesians quite as much as with the Athenians, because of my exile, I was thus enabled to watch quietly the course of events.

they will neither become over-confident because of their successes in war, nor, because of the charms and blessings of peace, will they put up the acts of aggression. -p104

would be a great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.

he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel;

Athenians having made up their minds to abandon their city, broke up their homes, threw themselves into their ships, and became a naval people.

THE HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians; he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.

Oracles in Thucydides reveal not the gods' plan for the world but humanity's capacity to fool itself that the arbitrary processes of fortune are somehow predestined.

This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It's the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many.

To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It's the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means "the many." Oligoi means "the few.

History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars , Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders' accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions.

The selflessness and dedication shown by many Greek doctors can be seen not only in such works as the Epidemics, but also in, for example, Thucydides' account of the plague at Athens (II, 47ff.) – where he notes the high incidence of mortality from the disease among the doctors who attempted to treat it.

Many scholars are not used to perceiving natural knowledge expressed in mythological language. If the study of fossils was not mentioned by Aristotle or Thucydides, and it wasn't, then it just didn't exist for many classicists and ancient historians.

The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.

We would be wise to remember that the Athenian historian Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue of his History of the Peloponnesian War characterizes hope as danger's comforter.

And, hence, to manage it. For if, as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the "ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,"82

It's no stretch to say, then, that Thucydides coaches all who read him. For as his greatest modern interpreter (himself a sometime coach) has gently reminded us, the Greeks, despite their antiquity, "may have believed things we have either forgotten or never known; and we must keep open the possibility that in some respects, at least, they were wiser than we.

There were, of course, precedents for questioning the wisdom of war: Artabanus, Archidamus, and Nicias had all done that, if unsuccessfully, and Thucydides' doomed Melians had raised timeless misgivings about the conduct of wars once started. No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war.

The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.