History of the Peloponnesian War Review

After the first World War, a generation struggled to understand the scale of the conflict of which they were a part.  Especially in Europe, the Great War was a cataclysmic event that permeated the zeitgeist, and its impact can be seen throughout the time’s artifacts: prose, poetry, music, visual arts, politics, philosophy, even industry were affected.  War and death were not so foreign as they are to us today, but World War I was still something different, something exceptional.

Writing down what happened was one technique for understanding what occurred, and in doing so, those historians followed the lead of, well, who else but the Greeks?  One ancient Greek in particular: Thucydides.  Oh, there was Herodotus, but Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is far closer to a history text such as we understand it today.  Like those seeking to process the first World War, he was writing to understand an earlier world war.

I know, I know: Greece is not the whole world.  True, but to the Greeks, the Peloponnesian War was a world war, drawing in all the Greek polities through a network of alliances, and, over twenty-seven years, involving diverse foreign powers, from Persia, to Egypt, to Italy, and even parts of Europe.  To the Greeks, that was the world, and for twenty-seven years the world warred.

The Greek World War, then, prompted the already expressive Greeks to seek explanations, understandings, and solace through such methods as the cathartic technology of the tragedy, poetry, and the will of the divine (aided in this latter interpretation by an unusual nexus of earthquakes and eclipses).  Thucydides took a different approach and, with almost the academic rigor and objectivity we might ascribe to a modern historian (and more than many of those bother to deploy), he wrote the definitive account of the conflict, not to mention one of our key sources on the ancient world.  Indeed, time and again moder historians have sought to identity issues with the History, only for new evidence to prove Thucydides correct all along.

Of all the Greek texts I’ve read, Thucydides’ is the most like a reading a more modern piece of writing.  The only “artifact,” as it were, is his predilection for including protracted, full-rendered speeches by various figures at key moments.  In some cases, these are speeches Thucydides heard in person or second hand, while others are what he thinks those people would have said under those circumstances.  If that seems odd, well, sometimes it is, but most of the time the speeches serve surprisingly well to advance the history and to provide valuable context, doing with a few words in a speech what might have taken far longer, and been less impactful, to explicate.  It helps that he does not pretend these speeches are intended to be word-for-word authentic recordings.  That isn’t the point, and the concept of such precise replication would have been alien to the Greeks.

Serving as perhaps the history of the ancient world, the greatest flaw in History of the Peloponnesian War is the ending, which doesn’t exist.  Most scholars think that Thucydides died before completing history, because the text we’ve inherited stops mid-sentences, and other authors, including his contemporaries, sought to finish it for him, though with rather less skill.  Xenophon’s Hellenica is the most famous, and probably the best, or these attempts (you might remember that review if you were following along in the site’s early days), and Xenophon, like Thucydides, fought in the war, but even Hellenica is generally considered inferior to Thucydides’ product.

From all my reading about and from ancient Greece, I often joke that the Greeks already figured everything out, and we’re still just trying to catch up with them.  Apparently, the list of things they did long before anyone else includes rigorous history writing.  Finally reading The History of the Peloponnesian War brought together numerous elements from other reading for me.  If you’re reading any of these ancient Greek texts, this one should definitely be on the list.