The excursus of Thucydides on the last years of Pausanias and Themistocles is remarkable for its simple, rapid-flowing style, its storytelling tone, its wealth of personal ancedote, its marked deviation from his normally strict criteria of relevance. These characteristics, which give the excursus a Herodotean flavour, have often been noted by modern scholars, but until recently acceptance of its general credibility has been widespread, and indeed, with one important exception, which seems to have created very little impression almost unchallenged.

In a recent paper I attempted to show that Plutarch founded his Timoleon upon a Hellenistic biography and made direct use of Timaeus only for the major episodes, where the material contained in this biography was insufficient. The Pelopidas is similar in colouring to the Timoleon, both belonging to what might be described as the ‘chivalrous hero’ class of Plutarch's Lives. Yet this similarity does not originate from the use of similar authorities; for in writing the Pelopidas he was compelled (...) by the nature of the sources available to him to adopt an entirely different process of composition. The bulk of the Life is, as I hope to show, directly derived from the work of a fourth-century historian, and a considerable amount of supplementary material is added from miscellaneous sources. (shrink)

Although the decision of Pericles to abandon Attica to devastation in 431 has often been severely criticized, the conviction of Thucydides that his defensive strategy was sound has been widely accepted during the last half-century. On the other hand, the offensive side of his strategic plan, consisting mainly of using his fleet to raid coastal districts of the Peloponnese, has tended to be dismissed as unimportant by modern writers, while a few have condemned it as pointless and wasteful. Because Thucydides (...) devotes so little space to these raids, it is tempting to regard them as minor operations, but his careful record of the naval and military resources engaged, together with his statement that the force which Pericles commanded in 430 was approximately equal to that sent to Sicily in 415 , shows that they were on a substantial scale. Their influence upon the course of the war was slight, but if Periclean strategy is to be fully appreciated, it is clearly important to inquire why they were undertaken. (shrink)

It was at one time almost universally believed, and is still believed by some scholars, that Thucydides cannot have written his account of the Pentekontaetia before his return from exile because he refers in it to the of Hellanicus, in which an event belonging to the year 407/6 was mentioned. This argument in favour of a late date for the composition of the excursus has been disputed and is now much less widely supported. It has been suggested that the reference (...) to Hellanicus in 97. 2, or the whole of that section, was added by Thucydides to a part of his work written much earlier, or that an edition of the including an account of the Pentekontaetia may have been published long before 406 and the work have been subsequently continued. (shrink)

Scholarly interest in epiteichismos has, for various reasons, been centred almost exclusively upon the Athenian occupation of Pylos and the Spartan occupation of Decelea. In occupying Pylos the Athenians were adopting epiteichismos for the first time, as were the Spartans in occupying Decelea. Both enterprises were on a considerable scale and deeply influenced the course of the Peloponnesian war, though neither so decisively as had initially seemed likely. Another source of interest in them is their link with the perennial problem (...) of speeches in Thucydides. The Thucydidean versions of speeches delivered shortly before the outbreak of the Archidamian war include references to the possibility that epiteichismos might be attempted by both sides , although in fact Athens did not do so until 425, and then partly by accident, and Sparta not until much later. These puzzling references have been thought by some scholars to be anachronistic, while others have disputed this inference, maintaining that even before the war military leaders had in mind the possibility of epiteichismos. A similar if less vexed problem arises from the fact that the occupation of Decelea, vigorously recommended by Alcibiades in the Thucydidean version of his speech at Sparta at the end of 415 and apparently accepted with enthusiasm , was not implemented until the spring of 413. (shrink)

The chapters in which Thucydides describes the revolt of Potidaea and the subsequent operations there have often been criticized for their lack of clarity and precision. Their unevenness suggests an inadequate mastery of technique, and it seems very probable that they were written in the earliest years of the Peloponnesian war and never revised. Although opportunities to interrogate Peloponnesian prisoners must occasionally have come his way , his accounts of military operations which took place long before his banishment are founded (...) very largely upon evidence derived from Athenian sources; but the chapters on Potidaea do not suffer from this disadvantage, and their faults are in no way attributable to a dearth of information from Peloponnesian sources, which seem, strangely enough, to have provided him with much of his material. His narrative is written as much from a Peloponnesian as from an Athenian point of view, and indeed it achieves warmth and colour only where its subject is the Corinthian Aristeus, whose plans and even motives are described in some detail, though they did not substantially influence the course of events. His treatment of Aristeus is sufficiently remarkable to merit examination with the object of seeking an explanation of its peculiarities. (shrink)

The Ionian war was more complex than any previous war in which Greeks had fought one another. Various factors contributed to its complexity. One of them was the uneasy partnership between Peloponnesians and Persians, which seldom functioned to the complete satisfaction of the former and was at times almost in abeyance. Other factors were the oligarchical revolution at Athens, which nearly plunged the Athenians into civil war, and the chameleon-like behaviour of Alcibiades, who within a brief period lent his services (...) first to Sparta, then to Persia, and finally to Athens, though at all times serving primarily his own interests. Yet another factor was the multiplicity of Greek states directly or indirectly involved in the war. In addition to those of the Greek homeland and of Italy and Sicily which supplied contingents to the Peloponnesian expeditionary forces in Asia, all the members of the Delian Confederacy included at any time in the Ionian, Hellespontine, and Carian districts, numbering more than 150, must have been affected to some extent by the war, though only a fraction of them played an active part in it. The aim of this paper is to consider the attitude of Asiatic Greek cities towards the war and the extent of their involvement in it. (shrink)

The informal character of political parties at Athens and the consequent absence of clearly defined party programmes often obscures the principles and aims of Athenian politicians. This obscurity is naturally greatest in the case of ‘moderates’, whose activities consisted largely of opposition to extremist elements of the Left or Right. Hence modern attempts to reconstruct their policies and assess their merits are liable to reach widely differing conclusions. A figure about whom there have been fluctuations of opinion, as well as (...) some misconceptions, is Nicias. A passage in Aristotle used to be accepted as evidence that he was an oligarch, and he was believed by many to have been a pacifist and a friend of Sparta. In an article which has had a deep influence upon subsequent accounts Allen B. West showed that he could be considered neither an oligarch nor a philo-Laconian pacifist. On one point, however, West echoes a commonly accepted view, though he expresses it in very moderate terms: he believes that Thucydides treats Nicias too sympathetically and is inclined to be blind to his faults. This view has been reaffirmed with much greater emphasis by other scholars who have strenuously challenged the impartiality of Thucydides in this respect. Such charges appear to me to have little foundation, and I shall attempt to substantiate my opinion by examining Thucydides’ account of Nicias. First, however, it is pertinent to ask whether the historian can have had any cogent reason for partisanship, and also to seek the source from which the commonly accepted view may have originated. (shrink)

To his narrative of the Sacred War Diodorus appends an excursus on the fate of the Phocian leaders, describing at some length the adventures of Phalaecus and his mercenaries after their departure from Thermopylae . The object of this excursus, whose substance probably derives from Demophilus, is to illustrate the terrible consequences of temple-robbery, but to modern scholars the story is interesting chiefly for its portrayal of the difficulties and hardships experienced by mercenary commanders. It does not appear to have (...) been noticed that at the same time Diodorus unconsciously throws some light upon the mission of Timoleon to Sicily. (shrink)

In this celebrated sentence Thucydides gives his opinion more specifically than anywhere in the narrative of Books 6 and 7 on the reasons for the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Unfortunately, however, he expresses his views with some lack of clarity, and this has led to disagreement among modern scholars who have sought to determine precisely what he means. It is also unfortunate that he does not state the evidence upon which he bases his conclusion that the expedition failed because (...) of struggles for political leadership at Athens. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the meaning and implications of this sentence, which can, I believe, be clarified by reference to other passages in which Thucydides uses when debating the causes of past actions. A closely allied problem, that of the relationship between this sentence and the narrative of Books 6 and 7, will also be discussed. A. W. Gomme has maintained that this relationship throws some light upon the date of composition of Books 6 and 7. There is no doubt whatever that the sentence was written at or after the end of the Peloponnesian war , and if there are differences of outlook, even inconsistencies, between it and the narrative which show that Thucydides cannot have written, or at any rate conceived, both at the same time, he almost certainly wrote the narrative before the end of the war.2 In my opinion there is inconsistency on one point only, but here the inconsistency is sufficiently marked to suggest not only that Books 6 and 7 were written considerably earlier than 2. 65. 11, but that they were written within the next few years after the conclusion of the Sicilian campaign. (shrink)

The narrative of Thucydides on the period from the Peace of Nicias to the Athenian expedition to Sicily has been less intensively studied than any other part of the History. It is true that the Melian Dialogue, which contrasts so sharply with the rest of the fifth book, has accumulated a large bibliography. The problems arising from the campaign culminating in the battle of Mantinea have also received a considerable amount of attention. On the other hand, the accounts of negotiations (...) and intrigues, mostly in the Peloponnese, which occupy much of the fifth book, have tended to be ignored, being thought to be obscure, confusing, and tedious. Scholars interested in the history of the period have experienced difficulty in tracing a coherent pattern in its catalogue of diplomatic manœuvres and in establishing the motives which prompted them. Scholars interested in the historical technique of Thucydides have been disappointed, even repelled, because his facility for mastering his material seems to have to a large extent deserted him. (shrink)

Of all the leading personalities who left their imprint on the history of the Peloponnesian war Tissaphernes was to Thucydides the most enigmatic. Although judgements on the ability and character of individuals occur more frequently in the eighth book of the History than in other parts, Thucydides apparently did not feel himself to be in a position to include an explicit judgement on Tissaphernes. Nor does Tissaphernes, unlike many major and minor characters, receive even a brief descriptive introduction, though such (...) introductions are also exceptionally plentiful in the eighth book. Thucydides has been successful in collecting an abundance of detailed information about the part played by Tissaphernes in the opening phase of the Ionian war and yet has failed to produce a satisfactory picture of him. In this paper attention will first be drawn to special problems arising in the case of Tissaphernes which do not arise in the presentation of other leading characters. My main purpose, however, is to attempt to establish that the account of him by Thucydides is basically inconsistent and that this inconsistency occurs because the material in the eighth book has not been fully integrated. One source of difficulty for Thucydides in writing about Tissaphernes was that he seems to have had little opportunity to acquire knowledge of Persia and the Persians. There is no indication that he spent any part of his exile in or near Asia, and the notorious sparsity of his references to Greek relations with the Persians before the outbreak of the Ionian war suggests that his contacts with them were scanty. In this respect he was not exceptional. Before the end of the fifth century even the best educated Athenians seem to have possessed only a dim or distorted impression of Persia, as is illustrated in different ways by the Persae and the Acharnians. (shrink)

In the course of the military operations at Pylos three major actions were fought. The first was the series of attacks by land and sea launched by the Peloponnesians against the forces under Demosthenes occupying the peninsulaof Pylos ; the second was the naval battle in the harbour ; the third was the Athenian assault on the Spartans cut off on Sphacteria. The second of these actions does not appear to have had less influenceon the development of the situation or (...) to have been militarily less interestingand instructive than the other two. The account of it by Thucydides is, however, less detailed than his accounts of the first and third major actions andmay be thought to be lacking in the clarity which is normally a conspicuousfeature of his battle narratives. (shrink)

Plutarch's Timoleon has received little attention from scholars who in recent years have studied the sources of his Lives and sought to determine the methods which he followed in their composition. The reasons for this neglect are obvious: the Timoleon is a simple Life, contains few citations, and is universally and justifiably believed to be founded, together with the Timoleon of Cornelius Nepos, upon the tradition established by Timaeus. Scholars of the nineteenth century agreed in further concluding that both authors (...) derived their material directly and almost exclusively from Timaeus. This conclusion does not appear to have been challenged in spite of the well-known contention of Eduard Meyer, which has won considerable approval, that neither biographer was accustomed to use primary historical authorities, each relying mainly upon biographies of the Hellenistic period which have not survived. The validity of Meyer's theory as a general principle of source-criticism will not be expressly discussed in this paper. My purpose is rather to examine the Timoleon only, especially in relation to the Timoleon of Nepos, and to suggest a method of composition here adopted by Plutarch, who, I believe, based his Life upon a secondary biography and supplemented this from a primary historical authority. (shrink)