Thucydides and the Birth of War History

Around 2,400 years ago, an Athenian general who had been sent into exile set himself a hard task. He would record the great war of his time, between Athens and Sparta and their allies, as accurately as he could. He would not repeat the first story he heard. He would compare witnesses, admit what he could not know, and explain his method to the reader. His name was Thucydides, and the questions he asked are the same ones historians, archivists, and family interviewers still ask today.

Who Thucydides was

Most of what we know about Thucydides comes from what he tells us in his own book. Britannica gives his birth as around 460 BCE or earlier and his death as sometime after 404 BCE. He was an Athenian, and he lived through the whole of the Peloponnesian War, the long conflict that lasted from 431 to 404 BCE.

He was not an outside observer. Early in the war, a terrible plague struck Athens. Thucydides described its symptoms in careful detail, he explains, so that it could be recognized if it ever returned. He also tells us why he felt qualified to do so:

This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.48, translated by Richard Crawley

That sentence is a small example of his whole approach. He states plainly what he saw for himself, and he gives a reason for the reader to trust it.

A failed command and twenty years of exile

Thucydides also served as a commander. In the winter of 424/423 BCE, the Spartan general Brasidas moved against the important city of Amphipolis in Thrace, on the northern coast of the Aegean. Thucydides was at the island of Thasos, about half a day's sail away, when he was called for help. In his own account, translated by Richard Crawley, he set sail at once with seven ships. He arrived too late to save Amphipolis, which had already come to terms, but in time to hold the nearby port of Eion.

Athens punished the failure. Thucydides mentions his exile almost in passing:

It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.26, translated by Richard Crawley

He goes on to say that exile gave him time and access he would not otherwise have had. Being present with both sides, "and more especially with the Peloponnesians," he had leisure to observe events closely. A personal setback became the condition that let him gather testimony from the other side of the war.

His method: test every report

Near the start of his book, Thucydides explains how he worked. This short passage is one of the most quoted statements of historical method ever written. On the events of the war, he says:

far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22, translated by Richard Crawley

He then admits the work was hard. Different eyewitnesses described the same events differently, he writes, sometimes because of imperfect memory and sometimes because of partiality for one side or the other. Anyone who has interviewed several veterans of the same unit about the same day will recognize that problem at once.

Three standards that still hold

Thucydides did not use modern terms, but his approach rests on three ideas that remain at the heart of good history:

• Closeness to the event. He favored what he saw himself and what direct witnesses told him over hearsay and old legends.
• Comparison of accounts. He checked one witness against another rather than accepting a single version.
• Awareness of bias and memory. He knew that loyalty to one side, and the simple passage of time, could bend an honest person's account.

Those same standards are explained in more detail in our guide to how historians weigh eyewitness accounts.

The speeches problem

Thucydides' history is full of speeches. Generals address their troops before battle, envoys argue in assemblies, and statesmen debate whether to go to war. Britannica notes that speeches are one of his two main ways of telling the story, alongside straightforward narrative. They are among the most admired parts of the book. The most famous is the funeral oration Thucydides gives to the Athenian leader Pericles, honoring those killed in the first year of the war. Another well-known passage, the Melian Dialogue, presents a tense exchange between Athenian envoys and the leaders of the island of Melos.

But these are not transcripts. Thucydides tells us so directly, in the same passage where he describes his method:

it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22, translated by Richard Crawley

Why the honesty matters

Modern readers sometimes find this troubling. How can a careful historian put words in people's mouths? The answer is that Thucydides was open about it. He separated what he had checked, the narrative of events, from what he had reconstructed, the speeches. He told the reader which was which.

That distinction is still useful. When a veteran recalls what a sergeant said sixty years ago, the words are almost never exact. The memory may still capture the sense of the moment faithfully. A good interviewer, like Thucydides, notes the difference without dismissing the account. Our article on memory and the war memoir explores this in more depth.

Thucydides and Herodotus

Thucydides is often paired with an older Greek writer, Herodotus, who wrote about the wars between the Greeks and Persia. According to Britannica, the 4th-century BCE thinker Theophrastus already grouped the two together as founders of the writing of history. Herodotus is often called the "father of history."

The two men worked very differently. Herodotus collected many traditions, including some he doubted, and gave his readers a wide-ranging and entertaining story. Thucydides wrote about a war he lived through, and he kept his focus narrow and his evidence close. Britannica's account of Greek historiography describes his ambition as a kind of diagnostic science of history, an attempt to explain why events happened, not just to tell them well. He knew this would make his book less entertaining, and he accepted the trade:

In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.22, translated by Richard Crawley

Just before that line he says he feared the "absence of romance" in his history would make it less interesting, but he would be content if it proved useful to readers who wanted an exact knowledge of the past.

An unfinished book

The Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BCE, but Thucydides' history does not reach that far. Britannica notes that it stops abruptly in 411 BCE, and it is generally thought that he did not live to complete it. Even his last book appears unfinished. For a work so concerned with accuracy, there is something fitting about that. It ends where his evidence and his life ran out, rather than with a neat conclusion supplied after the fact.

What Thucydides offers today's readers

Britannica calls Thucydides' history the first recorded political and moral analysis of a nation's war policies. For anyone interested in how war is remembered, his book offers lessons that go beyond ancient Greece:

• Say how you know. Thucydides told readers when he was an eyewitness and when he relied on others. Family historians and oral history interviewers can do the same by noting who said what, and when.
• Expect witnesses to disagree. Different accounts of the same event are normal. They are evidence to be weighed, not proof that someone is lying.
• Mark what is reconstructed. Remembered conversations, estimated dates, and approximate numbers are valuable, but they should be labeled honestly.
• Write for the long run. A record made carefully today may be read by great-grandchildren or historians a century from now.

Before Thucydides, the war stories that survive were mostly royal boasts, sacred poems, or songs, as described in our article on the oldest war stories. After him, there was a model for something different: an account written by someone who had served, who had suffered losses, and who still tried to be fair to all sides. That model shaped how later readers judged the letters, diaries, and memoirs of soldiers in every war that followed. If you are preparing to record a veteran's memories, his standards make a sound starting point, and our guide to recording a veteran's story shows how to put them into practice.