On Justice Power and Human Nature

“Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote up the war of the Peloponnesian and the Athenians as they fought against each other. He began to write as soon as the war was afoot, with the expectation that it would turn out to be a great one and that, more than all earlier wars, this one would deserve to be recorded. He made this prediction because both sides were at their peak in every sort of preparation for war, and because he saw the rest of the Greek world taking one side or there other, some right away, others planning to do so.”

The first sentence from Thucydides’s History, the above passage shows him positioning himself in relation to his predecessors who told the stories of wars in which Greek speakers participated: Homer in his Iliad and Herodotus in his Histories. The “earlier wars” he refers to are, presumably the Trojan War and the Persian Wars, recounted by Homer and Herodotus, respectively. Thucydides explains that his effort differs from his predecessors’ because he is writing about events that take place in his own time, unlike Homer, who wrote about the distant heroic past—and because the two combatants were of equal strength, unlike the Athenians and the Persians, who differed significantly in size and power.

“What particular people said in their speeches, either just before or during the war, was hard to recall exactly, whether they were speeches I heard myself or those that were reported to me at second hand. I have made each speaker say what I thought the situation demanded, keeping as near as possible to the general sense of what was actually meant.”

Thucydides’s meaning in what Woodward translates as “keeping as near as possible to the general sense” (51) is a source of spirited debate. Some scholars have proposed that Thucydides imaginatively reconstructed the speeches based on what he thought the speakers would have been compelled to say under the circumstances. Woodruff takes a different position: He proposes that Thucydides isn’t attempting to reproduce actual speeches that could have been recited at that moment but is using the occasion of speechmaking to reveal each speaker’s motives and beliefs.