Thucydides the son of Milesias ( not the historian ), an aristocrat, stood in opposition to these policies, for which he was ostracised in 443 BC.

According to Thucydides, the official aim of the League was to " avenge the wrongs they suffered by ravaging the territory of the king.

He compares this to the work of the historian Thucydides, who found it difficult recording speeches verbatim but instead had the speakers say what he felt was appropriate for them to say on the occasion while adhering as much as possible to the general sense.

In the second year of the Peloponnesian War ( 430 BC ), Thucydides described an epidemic disease which was said to have begun in Ethiopia, passed through Egypt and Libya, then come to the Greek world.

Nevertheless, Thucydides chose to begin his history where Herodotus left off ( at the Siege of Sestos ), and may therefore have felt that Herodotus's history was accurate enough not to need re-writing or correcting.

Galen states that the skin rash was close to the one Thucydides described.

Moreover, Thucydides developed a historical topic more in keeping with the Greek lifestyle-the polis or city-state-whereas the interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Asiatic Greeks ( such as Herodotus himself ), for whom life under foreign rule was a recent memory.

Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda, Photius and Tzetzes, in which a young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father and burst into tears during the recital, whereupon Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: " Thy son's soul yearns for knowledge.

Such at least was the opinion of Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides.

But, as it was mainly within living memory and Thucydides himself was alive throughout the conflict and a participant in many of the events, there was less room for myths and tall tales.

Due to his literary style and the thoroughness of his research — which seemingly included studying Roman imperial archives and heavily relying on Thucydides — and his apparent rigor — for he tended not to support any character or subject, taking an impartial point of view — he was by far the most read and admired historian during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Modern Era.

One, as early as Thucydides, reported in Plutarch, the Suda and John Tzetzes, states that the Delphic oracle warned Hesiod that he would die in Nemea, and so he fled to Locris, where he was killed at the local temple to Nemean Zeus, and buried there.

Thucydides tells us Minos was the most ancient man known to build a navy.

What then ensued was a period, referred to as the Pentecontaetia ( the name given by Thucydides ), in which Athens increasingly came to be recognized as an Athenian Empire, carrying out an aggressive war against Persia.

Thucydides was dispatched with a force which arrived too late to stop Brasidas capturing Amphipolis ; Thucydides was exiled for this, and, as a result, had the conversations with both sides of the war which inspired him to record its history.

Thucydides deduces that this was due to lack of money.

That most Achean heroes did not return to their homes and founded colonies elsewhere was interpreted by Thucydides as being due to their long absence.

Thucydides (; Greek: Θουκυδίδης, Thoukydídēs ; c. 460 – c. 395 BC ) was a Greek historian and author from Alimos.

Thucydides informs us that he fought in the war, contracted the plague and was exiled by the democracy.

Thucydides meanwhile clearly states that in the time of the Persian invasions, the majority of the Greek navies consisted of ( probably two-tiered ) penteconters and ploia makrá (" long ships ").

One of the paramount reasons that contributes to the Peloponnesian War, according to Thucydides, is “ the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta .” President Hu clearly learned from the Peloponnesian War and tried to reduce the deadly psychological feeling in the nature of humans as well as nations.

Thucydides ' account clearly details the complete disappearance of social morals during the time of the plague.

Thucydides documents the example of Melos, a small island, neutral in the war, though originally founded by Spartans.

* Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner ; with an introduction and notes my M. I.

Similarly, in a Corinthian Oration, Dio Chrysostom ( or yet another pseudonymous author ) accused the historian of prejudice against Corinth, sourcing it in personal bitterness over financial disappointments-an account also given by Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides.

Moreover, he included transcriptions of speeches that were delivered by historic figures, although sometimes they were made up by Thucydides himself according to what those people should have said at the moment they delivered them.

The characterization of Homer as a blind bard goes back to some verses in the Delian Hymn to Apollo, the third of the Homeric Hymns, verses later cited to support this notion by Thucydides.

Thucydides describes the panic caused by the plague, possibly an epidemic of typhoid which struck the besieged city in 430 BC.

... contemporary readers are reminded by Machiavelli's teaching of Thucydides ; they find in both authors the same “ realism ,” i. e., the same denial of the power of the gods or of justice and the same sensitivity to harsh necessity and elusive chance.

Yet Thucydides never calls in question the intrinsic superiority of nobility to baseness, a superiority that shines forth particularly when the noble is destroyed by the base.

Therefore Thucydides ' History arouses in the reader a sadness which is never aroused by Machiavelli's books.

These sanctions, known as the Megarian decree, were largely ignored by Thucydides, but some modern economic historians have noted that forbidding Megara to trade with the prosperous Athenian empire would have been disastrous for the Megarans, and have accordingly considered the decree to be a contributing factor in bringing about the war.

* The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strassler.

These authors, in such works as The Republic and Laws by Plato, and The Politics and Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle, analyzed political systems philosophically, going beyond earlier Greek poetic and historical reflections which can be found in the works of epic poets like Homer and Hesiod, historians like Herodotus and Thucydides, and dramatists such as Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides.

Polybius is considered by some to be the successor of Thucydides in terms of objectivity and critical reasoning, and the forefather of scholarly, painstaking historical research in the modern scientific sense.

Thucydides has been dubbed the father of " scientific history ", because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.

Brasidas, aware of Thucydides ' presence on Thasos and his influence with the people of Amphipolis, and afraid of help arriving by sea, acted quickly to offer moderate terms to the Amphipolitans for their surrender, which they accepted.

Thucydides was probably connected through family to the Athenian statesman and general Miltiades, and his son Cimon, leaders of the old aristocracy supplanted by the Radical Democrats.

Leo Strauss ( in The City and Man ) locates the problem in the nature of Athenian democracy itself, about which, he argued, Thucydides had a deeply ambivalent view: on one hand, Thucydides ' own " wisdom was made possible " by the Periclean democracy, which had the effect of liberating individual daring, enterprise and questioning spirit, but this same liberation, by permitting the growth of limitless political ambition, led to imperialism and, eventually, civic strife.

Thucydides largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element which set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings.

As the preeminent Athenian historian, Thucydides, wrote in his influential History of the Peloponnesian War, " The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.

More generally, Thucydides showed an interest in developing an understanding of human nature to explain behaviour in such crises as plague, massacres, as in that of the Melians, and civil war.

According to Pausanias, someone named Oenobius was able to get a law passed allowing Thucydides to return to Athens, presumably sometime shortly after the city's surrender and the end of the war in 404 BC.

To be an admirer of Thucydides ' History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists — a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire — was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.

However, his great rival Thucydides promptly discarded Herodotus's all-embracing approach to history, offering instead a more precise, sharply focused monograph, dealing not with vast empires over the centuries but with 27 years of war between Athens and Sparta.

Thucydides reports that when a Spartan man went to war, his wife ( or another woman of some significance ) would customarily present him with his shield and say: " With this, or upon this " ( Ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς, Èi tàn èi èpì tàs ), meaning that true Spartans could only return to Sparta either victorious ( with their shield in hand ) or dead ( carried upon it ).

Thucydides speaks of Selinunte just before the Athenian expedition as a powerful and wealthy city, possessing great resources for war both by land and sea, and having large stores of wealth accumulated in its temples.

In classical times, Thucydides condemned the Thebans, allies of Sparta, for launching a surprise attack without a declaration of war against Plataea, Athens ' ally – an event that touched off the Peloponnesian War.

Sparta took the island from Argos early in the sixth century, and ruled it under a kytherodíkes ( kυθηροδίκης, " judge on Cythera "), in Thucydides ' time ; Athens occupied it three times when at war with Sparta ( in 456 during her first war with Sparta and the Peloponnesians ; from 426 to 410, through most of the great Peloponnesian War ; and from 393 to 387 / 386, during the Corinthian War against Spartan dominance ) and used it both to support her trade and to raid Laconia.

At the end of the 8th century BC, however, Eretria and Chalcis fought a prolonged war ( known mainly from the account in Thucydides as the Lelantine War ) for control of the fertile Lelantine plain.

It was written by Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the war.

Another distinctive feature of the work is Thucydides ' inclusion of dozens of speeches assigned to the principal figures engaged in the war.

It is commonly thought that Thucydides died while still working on the History, since it ends in mid-sentence and only goes up to 410 BC, leaving six years of war uncovered.

Thucydides was exiled for his failure to protect Amphipolis, thus ending the period of the war in which he directly participated.

The war began over a dispute between Corcyra and Epidamnus ; the latter was a minor enough city that Thucydides has to tell his reader where it is.

Thucydides famously wrote " The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.