Ancient Historians · Part 6 · Thucydides · B2–C1
Thucydides I: Method and the Funeral Oration
Part 6 of Ancient Historians: Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote the history of the war between Athens and Sparta while it was happening, and set out the rules of serious history: check every account, distrust your own sympathies, and look for the true cause behind the excuses. And the most famous speech he recorded: Pericles’ funeral oration for the Athenian dead, a portrait of a city at its proudest. Relative clauses for formal style (those who, whose, in which, which), formal rhetoric (not only… but also, we who…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Herodotus wrote about a war that ended before he was born. Thucydides wrote about a war he fought in. He was an Athenian general; he lost a battle and was exiled for twenty years; and he used his exile to write the history of the war, talking to both sides.
An exiled general writing the history of his own defeat. That takes honesty, or bitterness.
Both, perhaps, Philo. He wrote the most famous description of how a historian should work, and he recorded the most famous speech in Greek history, Pericles’ funeral oration. Tonight’s grammar is formal style: the long, balanced sentences of speeches and serious writing.
Thucydides (about 460–400 BCE) was an Athenian general. In 424 BCE he failed to save the city of Amphipolis from the Spartans and was exiled for twenty years, which, he says, allowed him to see events from both sides. His history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BCE) breaks off unfinished in 411.
In a famous passage on his method, he says that he did not trust the first story he heard, but checked every account as carefully as he could, because “different eyewitnesses give different accounts of the same events, depending on their sympathies or their memory.” He admits that he could not remember speeches word for word, so he wrote what the speakers would have said, “keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what was actually said”. He…
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