The History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides, an Athenian who himself served as a general in the war, writes the history of the long conflict between the Peloponnesian alliance led by Sparta and the maritime empire of Athens, beginning the moment it broke out because he judged it the greatest movement yet known among the Hellenes. He opens by surveying early Greece to prove, from hard evidence rather than legend, that no earlier age had matched the scale of this war.

He is explicit about method. The speeches he reports are reconstructed to convey what the occasion demanded while keeping as close as he could to what was really said; the narrative rests on what he saw himself or had carefully checked with others, every report tried by the most severe tests. He warns that the absence of romance may make his work less entertaining, but offers it as a possession for all time for those who want an exact knowledge of the past as a guide to a future that human nature will make resemble it.

The early books drive past the surface quarrels over Corcyra and Potidaea to what Thucydides calls the truest cause: the growth of Athenian power and the alarm it stirred in Sparta. The war's first phase brings the invasion of Attica, Pericles' great Funeral Oration over the Athenian dead, and then the plague, which kills Pericles and loosens the bonds of law and religion as men, expecting to die, abandon restraint.

As the war grinds on, Thucydides shows civic life corroding under its pressure. In the revolution at Corcyra and the debate over Mytilene, words change their meaning and reckless violence passes for loyalty. The cold logic of empire reaches its sharpest point in the Melian Dialogue, where Athenian envoys tell the neutral islanders that justice holds only between equals, that the strong take what they can and the weak endure what they must; when Melos refuses to submit, its men are killed and its women and children enslaved.

The history's emotional center is the expedition Athens launches against Sicily, an ambitious bid to extend the empire across the sea. Persuaded by Alcibiades against the caution of Nicias, the Athenians overreach, lose their fleet and army at Syracuse, and see thousands of prisoners die in the quarries. Thucydides calls it the greatest Hellenic achievement of the war, most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered, destroyed with a total destruction. The text breaks off before the war's end, but its study of how power and fear ruin even a brilliant city is complete.