jeu d' esprit — the decision of the court; Isocrates fell
upon him with caustic politeness in the Busiris^ and
Xenophon with a certain clumsy convincingness in the
Memorabilia.
The chief point to realise is that the accusers were
not villains, nor the judges necessarily Mice' as M.
Aurelius tersely puts it. Socrates had always been
surrounded by young men of leisure, drawn mainly
from the richer and more dissolute classes. He had
in a sense * corrupted ' them : they had felt the de-
structive side of his moral teaching, and failed to grasp
his real aim. His political influence was markedly
sceptical. He was no oligarch ; his oldest apostle
Chairephon fought beside Thrasybulus at Ph^le ; but
he had analysed and destroyed the sacred principle of
Democracy as well as every other convention. The
city had barely recovered from the bloody reign of
his two close disciples Critias and Charmides ; could
never recover from the treason of his 'beloved' Alci-
biades. The religious terrors of the people were
176 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
keenly awake — confusedly occupied with oligarchic plots,
religious sins, and divine vengeance.
Of his accusers, the poet Meletus was probably a fanatic,
who objected to the Divine Sign. He was a weak man ;
he had been intimidated by the Thirty into executing an
illegal arrest at their orders — the same arrest, according to
the legend of the Socratics, which Socrates had refused
to perform. Lycon seems to have been an average re-
spectable politician ; the Socratics have nothing against
him except that he was once the master's professed friend.
These men could hardly have got a conviction against
Socrates in the ordinary condition of public feeling ;
but now they were supported by Anytus. A little later
in the same year, when Meletus attempted another pro-
secution for impiety against Andokides, in opposition
to Anytus, he failed to get a fifth of the votes, Anytus
was one of the heroes of the Restored Democracy, one
of the best of that generous band. As an outlaw at
Phyle he had saved the lives of bitter oligarchs who
had fallen into the hands of his men. When victorious
he was one of the authors of the amnesty. He left the
men who held his confiscated property undisturbed in
enjoyment of it.
He had had relations with Socrates before. He was
a tanner, a plain well-to-do tradesman, himself ; but he
had set his heart on the future of his only son, and was
prepared to make for that object any sacrifice except
that which was asked. The son wished to follow Soc-
rates. He herded with young aristocrats of doubtful
principles and suspected loyalty ; he refused to go into
his father's business. Socrates, not tactfully, had pleaded
his cause. Had Socrates had his way, or Anytus his,
all might have been well. As it was, the young man
SOCRATES AND ANYTUS 177
was left rebellious and hankering ; when his father be-
came an outlaw for freedom's sake, he stayed in the city
with Socrates and the tyrants ; he became ultimately a
hopeless drunkard. As the old tradesman fought his way
back through the bloody streets of the Pirajus, he thought
how the same satyr-faced sophist was still in Athens, as
happy under the tyrants as under the constitution, always
gibing and probing, and discussing ambiguous subjects
with his ruined son. It needed little to convince him
that here was a centre of pestilence to be uprooted.
The death of Socrates is a true tragedy. Both men
were noble, both ready to die for their beliefs ; it is
only the nobler and greater who has been in the end
triumphant.
VIII
THUCYDIDES
At the time when the old Herodotus was putting the
finish to his history in Athens, a new epoch of struggle
was opening for Greece and demanding a writer. The
world of Herodotus was complete, satisfying. Persia
was tamed ; the seas under one law ; freedom and
order won — " Equal laws, equal speech, democracy."
The culture which, next to freedom, was what Herodotus
cared for most, was realised on a very wide scale : he
lived in a great city where every citizen could read and
write, where everybody was Seii/o? and </>iA.oVa\o9. There
had never been, not even in the forced atmosphere of
tyrants' courts, such a gathering of poets and learned
men as there was in this simply-living and hard-working
city. There was a new kind of poetry, natural only to
this soil, so strangely true and deep and arresting, that
it made other poetry seem like words. And the city
which had done all this — the fighting, the organising, the
imaginative creating alike — was the metropolis of his
own Ionia, she whom he could show to be the saviour
of Hellas, whom even the Theban had hailed, " shining,
violet-crowned City of Song, great Athens^ buhvark of
Hellas, walls divined ^ That greeting of Pindar's struck
the keynote of the Athenians' own feeling. Again and
1 Find. frag. 76.
178
THE PERICLEAN IDEAL 179
again the echoes of it come back ; as late as 424 B.C.
the word 'violet-crowned' could make an audience sit
erect and eager, and even a judicious use of the ad-
jective 'shining' by a foreign ambassador could do diplo-
matic wonders.^
It was a passionate romantic patriotism. In the best
men the love for their personified city was inextricably
united with a devotion to all the aims that they felt to be
highest — Freedom, Law, Reason, and what the Greeks
called 'the beautiful.' Theirs was a peerless city, and
they made for her those overweening claims that a man
only makes for his ideal or for one he loves. Pericles
used that word : called himself her ' lover ' (epao-TT;?) — the
word is keener and fresher in Greek than in English —
and gathered about him a band of similar spirits, united
lovers of an immortal mistress. This was why they
adorned her so fondly. Other Greek states had made
great buildings for the gods. The Athenians of this age
were the first to lavish such immense effort on buildings
like the Propyl?ea, the Docks, the Odeon, sacred only
to Athens. Can Herodotus have quite sympathised with
this ? He cannot at least — who can understand another
man's passion ? — have liked the ultimate claim, definitely
repeated to an indignant world, that the matchless city
should be absolute queen of her ' allies,' a wise and bene-
ficent tyrant, owing no duties except to protect and lead
Hellas, and to beat off the barbarian.^
There was a great gulf between Herodotus and the
younger generation in the circle of Pericles, the gulf of
the sophistic culture. The men who had heard Anaxa-
1 Ar. Eq. 1 329, Ach. 637.
^ Thuc. ii. 63, Pericles ; much more strongly afterwards, iii. 37, Cleon ;
V. 89, at Melos ; vi. 85, Euphemus ; cf. i. 124, Corinthians.
i8o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
goras, Protagoras, and Hippocrates, differed largely in
beliefs, in aims, in interests ; but they had the all-
important common principle, that thought must be clear,
and that Reason holds the real keys of the world.
Among the generation influenced by these teachers
was a young man of anti-Periclean family, who never-
theless profoundly admired Pericles and had assimilated
much of his spirit ; who was perhaps conscious of a
commanding intellect, who had few illusions, who hated
haziness, who was also one of the band of Lovers. He
compared his Athens with Homer's Mycenae or Troy ;
he compared her with the old rude Athens which had
beaten the Persians. He threw the whole spirit of the
* Enlightenment ' into his study of ancient history. He
stripped the shimmer from the old greatnesses, and found
that in hard daylight his own mistress was the grandest
and fairest. He saw — doubtless all the Periclean circle
saw — that war was coming, a bigger war perhaps
than any upon record, a war all but certain to estab-
lish on the rock the permanent supremacy of Athens.
Thucydides determined to watch that war from the
start, mark every step, trace every cause, hide nothing and
exaggerate nothing — do all that Herodotus had not done
or tried to do. But he meant to do more than study it :
he would help to win it. He was a man of position and
a distinguished soldier. He had Thracian blood, a nor-
thern fighting strain, in his veins, as well as some kinship
with the great Kimon and Miltiades. The plague of 430
came near to crushing his ambitions once for all, but he
was one of the few who were sick and recovered. The
war had lasted eight years before he got his real oppor-
tunity. He was elected general in 423 B.C., second in
command, and sent to Chalcidice. It was close to his
THUCYDIDES AT AMPHIPOLIS i8i
own country, where he had some hereditary chieftain-
ship among the Thracians, and it was at that moment the
very centre of the war. The Spartan Brasidas, in tlie
flush of his enormous prestige, was in the heart of the
Athenian dependencies. A defeat would annihilate
him, as he had no base to retire upon ; and the
conqueror of Brasidas would be the first military name
in Greece.
No one can tell exactly what happened. The two
towns in especial danger were Amphipolis and Eion
on the Strymon. The mere presence of the Athenian
ships might suffice to save these two towns, but could
do little to hurt Brasidas. Whereas, if only Thucydides
could raise the Thracian tribes, Brasidas might be all
but annihilated. That is what the Amphipolitans seem
to have expected ; and that is perhaps why, when
Brasidas, starting unexpectedly and marching all day
and all night through driving snow, stormed the
bridge of the Strymon in the winter dawn and
appeared under the walls of Amphipolis, Thucydides
was half a day's sail away near Thasos, opposite his
centre of influence in Thrace. His colleague Eucles
was in Amphipolis, and the town could easily have held
out. But Brasidas had his agents inside ; his terms
were more than moderate, and there had always been
an anti- Athenian party. When the first seven ships
from Thasos raced into the river at dusk, Amphipolis
was lost, and so was Thucydides's great opportunity.
He threw himself into Eion, had the barren satisfac-
tion of beating Brasidas twice back from the walls ;
then — all we know is given in his own words (v. 26) —
"// befell to me to be an exile from my country for twenty
years after my command at Amphipolis y
1 82 LITERATaRE OE ANCIENT GREECE
Who can possibly tell the rights of the case ? ^ We
know only that Athens was a rude taskmaster to her
generals. We cannot even say what the sentence was.
He may have been banished ; he may have been con-
demned to death, and fled ; he may have fled for fear
of the trial. We do not know where he lived. The
ancient Life says, at his estate at Scapte Hyle in Thrace ;
but that was in Athenian territory, and no place for
an exile. It is certain that he returned to Athens after
the end of the war. He says himself that he was
often with the Lacedaemonian authorities. He seems
to have been at the battle of Mantinea, and possibly
in Syracuse. We know nothing even of his death,
which probably occurred before the eruption of Etna
in 396. His grave was in Athens among those of
Kimon's family; but 'Zopyrus,' confirmed by 'Cra-
tippus' — whoever they are— say that it had an 'ikrion'
— whatever that is — upon it, which was a sign that the
grave did not contain the body.
If we knew more of Cratippus we should be able to
add much to our life of Thucydides. The traditional
lives, one by Marcellinus (5th cent. A.D.), one anonymous,
are a mass of conflicting legends, conjectures, and de-
ductions. He wept at hearing Herodotus read, and
received the old man's blessing ; he married a Thracian
heiress ; he was exiled by Cleon ; he sat under a plane-
tree writing his histories ; he drove all the ^ginetans out
of their island by his usury ; he was murdered in three
places, and died by disease in another. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus says in so many words (pp. 143, 144) that
Cratippus was Thucydides's contemporary. If that were
^ The case against Thucydides is well given by Grote (vi. 191 ff. )» who
accepts Marcellinus's story that Cleon was his accuser.
THE 'LIVES' OF THUCYDIDES 183
true it would rehabilitate the credit of the tradition, but
the evidence is crushing against it. Recent criticism of
the Life is all based on an article in Hermes xii., where
Wilamowitz reduces the conventional structure to its
base in the facts given incidentally by Thucydides him-
self plus the existence of a tomb of " Thucydides, son
of Olorus, of the deme Halimus," among the Kimonian
graves in Athens ; and then rebuilds from the frag-
ments one small wigwam which he considers safe — the
conclusion, namely, that Praxiphanes, a disciple of
Theophrastus and a first-rate authority, had said that
Thucydides, together with certain poets, lived at the court
of Archelaus of Macedon. The argument is supported
by Thucydides's own remarks (ii. 100) about that king
improving the country in the way of organisation and
road-making " more than all the eight kings before him
together!' But it has led irresistibly to a further con-
clusion.^ Not only did Praxiphanes say this, but we
can find where he said it : it was in his dialogue About
History* That spoils all. The scenes in dialogues
are, even in Plato's hands, admittedly unhistoric ; after
Plato's death they are the merest imaginary conversa-
tions ; so that our one wigwam collapses almost as soon
as it is built. One corner of it only remains.
The dialogue, in discussing the merits of history and
poetry — Aristotle had pronounced poetry to be the
'more philosophic' — pits Thucydides, the truthful his-
torian, alone against five poets of different kinds ; and
we can probably guess what the decision was, from the
fragmentary sentence which states that " in his lifetime
Thucydides was mostly unknown, but valued beyond price
by posterity!'
^ Hirzel in Hermes xiii.
1 84 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
That, then, is one new fact about Thucydides, and it
is Hke the others. His personal hopes were bhghted
in 423 ; his pohtical and public ideals slowly broken
from 414 to 404. And the man's greatness comes out
in the way in which he remains faithful to his ideal of
history. He records with the same slow unsparing detail,
the same convincing truthfulness, all the triumphs and
disasters — his own failure and exile, the awful story of
Syracuse, the horrors of the ' Staseis,' the moral poison
of the war-spirit throughout Greece, even the inward
humiliations and exacerbated tyranny of her who was
to have been the Philosopher-Princess among nations.
Our conception, 'the Peloponnesian War,' we owe
to Thucydides. There are in it three distinct wars and
eight years of unreal peace. The peace after the first
war was followed by an alliance, and it looked as if
the next disturbance in the air of Hellas would find
Athens and Sparta arrayed as allies against some Theban
or Argive coalition. Thucydides was still working at
his record of the Ten Years' War when fresh hostilities
broke out in Sicily, and he turned his eyes to them.
The first war is practically complete in our book. The
Sicilian Expedition (vi., vii.) is practically finished, too,
in itself, though not fully brought into its place in the
rest of the history. It has a separate introduction ; it
explains who Alcibiades is, as though he had not been
mentioned before ; it repeats episodes from the account
of the Ten Years' War, or refers to it as to a separate
book. As the Sicilian War drew on, Thucydides realised
what perhaps few men could see at the time, the real
oneness of the whole series of events. He collected
the materials for the time of peace and partly shaped
them into history (v. 26 to end) ; he collected most of the
COMPOSITION OF HIS HISTORY 185
material for the final Dekelean or Ionian War (viii.). He
has a second prologue (v. 26) : " The same TJmcydides of
Athens has written these, too, in order, as each thing fell,
by summers and tvinters, until the LacedcEinonians and allies
broke the empire of the Athenians and took the Long Walls
and the Pircsus." Those words must have been hard to
write.
He never reached the end. It is characteristic both
of the man and of a certain side of Athenian culture,
that he turned away from his main task of narrative to
develop the style of his work as pure literature. Instead
of finishing the chronicle of the war, he worked over
his reports of the arguments people had used, or the
policies various parties had followed, into elaborate and
direct speeches. Prose style at the time had its highest
development in the form of rhetoric ; and that turn of
mind, always characteristic of Greece, which delighted
in understanding both sides of a question, and would
not rest till it knew every seeming wrongdoer's apology,
was especially strong. The speeches are Thucydides's
highest literary efforts. In some cases they seem to
be historical in substance, and even to a certain extent
in phrasing ; the letter of Nikias has the look of reality
(vii. II ff.), and perhaps also the speech of Diodotus
(iii. 42). Sometimes the speech is historical, but the
occasion is changed. The great Funeral Oration of
Pericles was made after his campaign at Samos ; ^ he
may have made one also in the first year of the war,
when there were perhaps hardly fifty Athenians to bury.
More probably Thucydides has transferred the great
speech to a time when he could use it in his history.^
^ Ar. Rhet. 1365 a 31, 1411 a i ; Plut. Per. 28.
* W. M. in Hermes xii. 365 note.
1 86 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
Sometimes the speakers are vaguely given in the plural
— ^ the Cot'inthians said' — that is, the political situation
is put in the form of a speech or speeches showing
vividly the way in which different parties conceived it.
A notable instance is the imaginary dialogue between
the Athenians and the Melians, showing dramatically
and with a deep, though perhaps over-coloured, char-
acterisation the attitude of mind in which the war-party
at Athens then faced their problems.
This is at first sight an odd innovation to be intro-
duced by the great realist in history. He warns us
frankly, however. It was hard for him or his informants
to remember exactly what the various speakers had said.
He has therefore given the speeches which he thought
the situation demanded, keeping as close as might be to
the actual words used (i. 22). It is a hazy description.
He himself would not have liked it in Herodotus ; and
the practice was a fatal legacy to two thousand years
of history- writing after him. But in his own case we
have seen why he did it, and there is little doubt that
he has done it with extraordinary effect. There is
perhaps nothing in literature like his power of half
personifying a nation and lighting up the big lines of
its character. The most obvious cases are actual de-
scriptions, such as the contrast between Athens and
Sparta drawn by the Corinthians in I., or the picture
of Athens by Pericles in II.; but there is dramatic
personation as well, and one feels the nationality of
various anonymous speakers as one feels the personal
character of Nikias or Sthenelaidas or Alcibiades. It
would be hard to find a clearer or more convincing
account of conflicting policies than that given in the
speeches at the beginning of the war.
THE SPEECHES IN THUCYDIDES 187
Of course we should have preferred a verbatim re-
port ; and of course Thucydides's practice wants a
Thucydides to justify it. But if we compare these
speeches with the passages in VHI. where he has given
us the same kind of matter in indirect form, one in-
cHnes to think that the artificial and fictitious speech
is the clearer and more ultimately adequate. The fact
is that in his ideal of history Thucydides was almost
as far from Polybius as from Herodotus. Careful-
ness and truth, of course, come absolutely first, as
with Polybius. ^^ Of the things done in the war" (as
distinguished from the speeches) "/ have not thought
fit to write from casual information nor according to any
notion of my own. Parts I saw myself; for the rest,
which I learned from others, I inquired to the fulness
of my power about every detail. The truth was hard
to find, because eye-witnesses of the same events spoke
differently as their memories or their sympathies varied.
The book will perhaps seem dull to listen to, because there
is no myth in it. But if those who wish to look at the
truth about what happened in the war, and the passages
like it which are sure according to man's nature to recur
in the future, judge my work to be useful, I shall be content.
What I have written is a thing to possess and keep always,
not a performance for passing entertainment."
He seeks truth as diligently and relentlessly as a
modern antiquary who has no object for conceal-
ment or exaggeration. But his aim is a different one.
He is not going to provide material for his readers
to work upon. He is going to do the whole work him-
self — to be the one judge of truth, and as such to give
his results in artistic and final form, no evidence
produced and no source quoted. A significant point,
1 88 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
perhaps, is his use of documents on the one hand and
speeches on the other. Speaking roughly, one may
say that in the finished parts of his work there are no
documents ; in the unfinished there are no speeches.
With regard to the speeches the case is clear. Nearly
all bear the marks of being written after the end of
the war. The unfinished Eighth Book has not a single
speech ; the unfinished part of Book V. only the Melian
Dialogue.
With the documents there is more room for doubt ;
but the point is of great inner significance. Of the nine
documents embodied verbatim in the text, three are in
the notoriously unfinished Eighth Book ; three are in
that part of Book V. which deals with the interval of
peace; three — a Truce, a Peace, and an Alliance, between
Athens and Sparta — belong to the finish of the Ten
Years' War. Now, it can be made out that these last
three come from Attic, not Spartan, originals ; that they
were not accessible to the exile till his return in 403,
and that such information as he had of them through
third persons was not correct. Where they stand in
the text they are inorganic. The narrative has been
written without knowledge of them; in one case it
contradicts them. The Truce shows that a separate
truce had been made between Athens and Troezen,
not mentioned in the text. The Peace differs from
the narrative about Pteleon and Sermylia, and im-
plies that Athens had recovered the towns in Chalci-
dice. The Alliance does not contain any clause binding
Athens and Sparta to make no separate alliance except
by mutual consent, though the surrounding narrative
both implies and states that it did (v. 39, 46). Thucy-
dides's documents have all been added to the text after
THUCYDIDES'S USE OF DOCUMENTS 189
403, and imply a new and more ambitious aim for his
history. When he wrote the Ten Years' War he gave
no documents — not the peace of 445, nor the treaties
with Rhegion and Leontini in 433, nor even that with
Corcyra. The same with his Sicihan War ; there is not
even the treaty with Egesta.
He began his history as a true ' chronicle of the war by
summers and winters.' He enlarged it to an attempt at
a full and philosophic history of Athens in her diplomatic
and imperial relations. When he was cut off from
documents he saw their value, and when the opportunity
came back, embodied them in his history as they stood
recorded on the stones. The great political speeches
were not recorded ; he knew that they expressed the
inner meaning of the time, and he did his best to re-
member or recreate them.
Here again his work is unfinished. He has only nine
documents in all, and the collection seems to a certain
extent fortuitous. Three of them, more interesting than
important, are mere abortive and apparently secret
treaties between Sparta and Persia. He must have
got these through some private channel, perhaps from
the same source — Kirchoff thinks, Alcibiades — as the
Argive and Spartan documents in Book V. Many more
documents would have been needed to make up his
ideal history ; and many more of the dissertations and
digressions, the explanations of internal policy and social
change, which are now almost confined to the first two
books and the introduction to Book VI. Even the
documents which he has got, have not, as we have
seen, been fully utilised. There were still some small
errors in the narrative, which documentary evidence
could help him to correct. There were some considcr-