The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Hence the beginning reader should not seek in him a clear and, by present-day standards, correct account of the Greek-Persian Wars. He should be read, at least at first, in great long gulps, almost carelessly. He should be read for the stories, the digressions, the character descriptions, the fantastic oddments of information about the manners and customs of dozens of ancient peoples. And he should be read for the plea- sure of meeting Herodotus himself—sometimes gullible, sometimes skeptical, always humane, humorous, curious, and civilized. Don't worry overmuch about who is who and what is where. The absorption of specific facts is less important than immersing yourself in the broad, full, buoyant Herodotean river of narrative. The Greek critic Longinus, who said of him "He takes you along and turns hearing into sight," gives us our cue—just to go along and see things.

C.F.

9

THUCYDIDES

ca. 470/460-ca. 400 B.C.E.

The History of the Peloponnesian War

Called by Macaulay "the greatest historian that ever lived," Thucydides belonged to a highly placed Athenian family and saw Athens at its height under Pericles. He was himself involved as a general in the war he chronicled. In 424 b.c.e., as a consequence of his failure to relieve the Thracian town of Amphipolis, he was removed from his command and banished, enduring twenty years of exile before being pardoned. In his history he refers to this crucial episode with brief, cold, third- person detachment. During these twenty years he traveled about in Sparta and elsewhere seeking and verifying the facts that form the material of his book. A tradition states that he was assassinated, perhaps in 400 b.c.e.

Never finished (it breaks off in 411 b.c.e.) but somehow a satisfying whole, his history records the great Greek Civil War between the imperial forces of Athens and the coalition headed by Sparta. The emphasis is almost entirely on the second half of the war, of which in his mature years Thucydides was a con- temporary. This phase began in 431 b.c.e. and ended in 404 b.c.e. with the defeat of Athens, perhaps the most hopeful civi- lization the world has ever known and to whose purely intellec- tual eminence we have never since attained. Thucydides knew he had a great tragic subject. He devoted to it limited but mag- nificent talents of whose worth he was quite aware. With calm confнdence he states that his work will remain "a possession for ali times." So far he has not been proved wrong.

Though Thucydides and Herodotus [8] are partially con- temporary, they have little else in common. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides does his best to be what we now call a scientific historian. He believes the proper ordering of sufficient facts plus the exercise of a powerful mind can explain historical processes. He rejects entirely ali fuzzy explanations, such as Herodotus^ childlike notion of an avenging Nemesis, ever alert to punish arrogance like that of the Persians. He scorns omens, oracles, and prophecies; he does not need the gods. He analyzes the motives, rarely idealistic, that impei leaders and so precipitate great events. He supplements his extraordinary psy- chological insight with notable understanding, considering his time, of the demographic and economic forces that underlay the Peloponnesian War.

Where Herodotus is gossipy and digressive, Thucydides is austere and unified. He is not a cultural historian, but a politico-military one. He is skeptical, charmless—and, let us admit, difficult. He cannot be read except with one's full atten- tion and is one of those writers who yield more with each rereading. Finally, he is the first historian to grasp the inner life of power politics. Hobbes [43], Machiavelli [34], and Marx [82] are, each in a different way, his sons.

Despite his severity and aristocratic denial of emotion, he grips the serious reader. Of the forty speeches he puts into the mouths of his historical personages, at least one, Pericles's Funeral Oration (Book II), is a supremely great dramatic monologue. Masterpieces also, though of differing kinds, are his accounts of the plague at Athens (Book II), the Melian dia­logue (Book V), and the terrible Sicilian expedition (Books VI and VII) that signaled the end of Athenian dominance.

C.F.

SUN-TZU 10

SUN-TZU

ca. 450-ca. 380 B.C.E. The AH ofWar