Historians From Greece

"Surely no more lucid, unillusioned intelligence has ever applied itself to the writing of history."

"The emotional power of the work is not to be denied, repressed, branded as modern sentimentality or condemned as a form of "brain-washing." The ancient critics recognized Thucydides' ability to recreate the pathos of events, that is, to lead his readers to participate vicariously in the sufferings of the war. That experience is at the center of any reading of Thucydides and is the product of the shaping of the text to involve and implicate the reader, both mentally and emotionally. The result is the intensity of engagement that so many readers experience as they struggle with the Histories. If we want to fully appreciate Thucydides' work, we must give the emotional power of the work its place and shape our reactions by its development."

"Thucydides' The Athenian General—a narrative which would give you the chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine."

"Power, Thucydides wrote, or its equivalent wealth, created the desire for more power, more wealth. The Athenians and the Spartans fought for one reason — because they were powerful, and therefore were compelled (the words are Thucydides' own) to seek more power. They fought not because they were different — democratic Athens and oligarchical Sparta — but because they were alike. The war had nothing to do with differences in ideas or with considerations of right and wrong. Is democracy right and the rule of the few over the many wrong? To Thucydides the question would have seemed an evasion of the issue. There was no right power. Power, whoever wielded it, was evil, the corrupter of men."

"Thucydides saw that the foundation stone of all morality, the regard for the rights of others, had crumbled and fallen away. It had been the acknowledged foundation when Euripides wrote the Suppliants, not only of dealings between man and man, but also between state and state. The state embodied the idea of honorable men. But when Thucydides wrote, Athens had won an empire by dismissing that idea. In the big business of power politics it was not only necessary, it was right, for the state to seize every opportunity for self-advantage. Thucydides was the first probably to see, certainly to put into words, this new doctrine which was to become the avowed doctrine of the world. He makes Pericles explicitly deny that fair dealing and compassion are proper to the state as they are to the individual. A country pursuing her own way with no thought of imposing that way on others might, he points out, keep to such ideas, but not one bent upon dominion. "A city that rules an empire," he writes, "holds nothing which is to its own interest as contrary to right and reason.""

"One other Greek book of history all should know, perhaps the greatest of all histories, that of the Athenian Thucydides. Now Thucydides was in pre-eminent degree what Herodotus was not—a strictly scientific historian; one whose conception of the canons of historic precision has never been surpassed, against whom hardly a single error of fact, hardly a single mistaken judgment, has ever been brought home. Thucydides is much more than a great historian; or, rather, he was what every great historian ought to be—he was a profound philosopher. His history of the Peloponneslan War is like a portrait by Titian: the whole mind and character, the inner spirit and ideals, the very tricks and foibles, of the man or the age come before us in living reality. No more memorable, truthful, and profound portrait exists than that wherein Thucydides has painted the Athens of the age of Pericles."

"Recorded history is not an entirely unbroken saga of violence, but the historian knows that he must look much earlier than the twentieth century for the first examples of all the paraphernalia of violence with which the twentieth century has been familiar. International aggression, continuous, calculated, pathologically inspired? Thucydides is still the author of the best book on that subject."

"In the whole politics of Greece, the anxiety, with regard to the balance [of power], is most apparent, and is expressly pointed out to us, even by the antient historians. Thucydides represents the league, which was form'd against Athens, and which produc'd the Peloponnesian war, as entirely owing to this principle."

"The first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations are so intermixt with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon them, in a great measure, to the embellishment of poets and orators."

"A greater master of stern pathos than Thucydides never lived, and this is partly because he never says too much. He was not only a political philosopher, but also an artist who felt the tragic force of his story. Thus he fixes our attention on Athens at the summit of her cruelty and insolence—in the massacre at Mêlos—just before he passes to the terrible narrative of her ruin in Sicily. His style has many faults. It is often involved, abrupt, obscure. But no writer has grander bursts of rugged eloquence, or more of that greatness which is given by sustained intensity of noble thought and feeling."

"Reading the other day...in Thucydides the sad story of the destruction of the Athenian Expeditionary Force, the A.E.F., in Sicily, which after so many centuries still fills one's eyes with tears."

"For close, cogent, and appropriate reasoning upon practical political questions, the speeches of Thucydides have never been surpassed; and, indeed, they may be considered as having reached the highest excellence of which the human mind is capable in this department."

"This day I finished Thucydides, after reading him with inexpressible interest and admiration. He is the greatest historian that ever lived."

"I do assure you that there is no prose composition in the world, not even the De Coronâ, which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides. It is the ne plus ultra of human art. I was delighted to find in Gray's letters the other day this query to Wharton: "The retreat from Syracuse—Is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life?""

"It was, of course, Thucydides who, coming immediately after Herodotus and accepting this theme, contributed more than anybody else to making it [war] an essential ingredient of European thought."

"Thucydides' history is a study in political and military leadership which after 2400 years still defies comparison."

"Thucydides concentrated on political life; it was here that he found the meaning of human effort. By understanding the political life of the present, and its military consequences, he believed that he had understood the nature of man in its perennial elements. He refrained almost completely from descriptions of foreign lands, unusual occurrences (with the exception of the plague), anecdotes about famous individuals, myths and cults, or information about monuments conspicuous for beauty or greatness. He was at pains to understand the Peloponnesian War as the sum of human nature – so much that he entertained no doubt whatsoever about the premises of his method."

"A soldier told Pelopidas, "We are fallen among the enemies." Said he, "How are we fallen among them more than they among us?""

"To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot.""

"There are two sentences inscribed upon the Delphic oracle, hugely accommodated to the usages of man's life: "Know thyself," and "Nothing too much;" and upon these all other precepts depend."

"For many, as Cranton tells us, and those very wise men, not now but long ago, have deplored the condition of human nature, esteeming life a punishment, and to be born a man the highest pitch of calamity; this, Aristotle tells us, Silenus declared when he was brought captive to Midas."

"The measure of a man's life is the well spending of it, and not the length."

"About Pontus there are some creatures of such an extempore being that the whole term of their life is confined within the space of a day; for they are brought forth in the morning, are in the prime of their existence at noon, grow old at night, and then die."

"Diogenes the Cynic, when a little before his death he fell into a slumber, and his physician rousing him out of it asked him whether anything ailed him, wisely answered, "Nothing, sir; only one brother anticipates another,—Sleep before Death.""

"Socrates thought that if all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most persons would be contented to take their own and depart."

"Young men," said Cæsar, "hear an old man to whom old men hearkened when he was young."

"As Athenodorus was taking his leave of Cæsar, "Remember," said he, "Cæsar, whenever you are angry, to say or do nothing before you have repeated the four-and-twenty letters to yourself.""

"As Cæsar was at supper the discourse was of death,—which sort was the best. "That," said he, "which is unexpected.""

"After he routed Pharnaces Ponticus at the first assault, he wrote thus to his friends: "I came, I saw, I conquered.""

"After the battle in Pharsalia, when Pompey was fled, one Nonius said they had seven eagles left still, and advised to try what they would do. "Your advice," said Cicero, "were good if we were to fight jackdaws.""

"Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse."

"He said they that were serious in ridiculous matters would be ridiculous in serious affairs."

"Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils."

"Cato instigated the magistrates to punish all offenders, saying that they that did not prevent crimes when they might, encouraged them. Of young men, he liked them that blushed better than those who looked pale."

"Cato the elder wondered how that city was preserved wherein a fish was sold for more than an ox."

"When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets.""

"To one that promised to give him hardy cocks that would die fighting, "Prithee," said Cleomenes, "give me cocks that will kill fighting.""

"Lysander said, "Where the lion's skin will not reach, it must be pieced with the fox's.""

"King Agis said, "The Lacedæmonians are not wont to ask how many, but where the enemy are.""

"Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, "Pray," said Lycurgus, "do you first set up a democracy in your own house.""

"Phocion compared the speeches of Leosthenes to cypress-trees. "They are tall," said he, "and comely, but bear no fruit.""

"Once when Phocion had delivered an opinion which pleased the people,… he turned to his friend and said, "Have I not unawares spoken some mischievous thing or other?""

"To Harmodius, descended from the ancient Harmodius, when he reviled Iphicrates [a shoemaker's son] for his mean birth, "My nobility," said he, "begins in me, but yours ends in you.""

"Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as ‘I should not have thought of it.'""

"Being summoned by the Athenians out of Sicily to plead for his life, Alcibiades absconded, saying that that criminal was a fool who studied a defence when he might fly for it."

"Alcibiades had a very handsome dog, that cost him seven thousand drachmas; and he cut off his tail, "that," said he, "the Athenians may have this story to tell of me, and may concern themselves no further with me.""

"He preferred an honest man that wooed his daughter, before a rich man. "I would rather," said Themistocles, "have a man that wants money than money that wants a man.""

"Themistocles being asked whether he would rather be Achilles or Homer, said, "Which would you rather be,—a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?""

"Pyrrhus said, "If I should overcome the Romans in another fight, I were undone.""

"I will show," said Agesilaus, "that it is not the places that grace men, but men the places."