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.

But it was part of the method of both alike to eliminate conventional sentiment and morality. In the seventeenth century, the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan advocated absolute monarchy, admired Thucydides and in 1628 was the first to translate his writings into English directly from Greek.

Demosthenes is also said to have admired the historian Thucydides.

The military exploits of the Athenians led to some universally read and admired history, the works of Thucydides and Xenophon.

According to Thucydides, Pericles may have declared in a funeral oration:

Pericles had such a profound influence on Athenian society that Thucydides, his contemporary historian, acclaimed him as " the first citizen of Athens ".

* 401 Thucydides, Greek historian, leaves account of Golden Age of Pericles and Peloponnesian War at his death ( History of the Peloponnesian War )

The ambitious new leader of the conservatives, Thucydides, accuses the leader of the democratic faction, Pericles, of profligacy and criticises the way Pericles is spending money on his ambitious building plans for the city.

His stance is supported by the ecclesia, so Thucydides ' efforts to dislodge Pericles from power are defeated.

* As a result of his failure to effectively challenge Pericles, the Athenian citizens ostracise Thucydides for 10 years and Pericles is once again unchallenged in Athenian politics.

Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, also partook of the nature of panegyrics.

** Thucydides ' estimate of Pericles ' qualities and the causes for Athens ' eventual defeat.

The phrase became known to English scholars probably from Pericles ' Funeral Oration, as mentioned in Thucydides ' History of the Peloponnesian War.

The motto of the Hellenic Navy is " Μέγα το της Θαλάσσης Κράτος " from Thucydides ' account of Pericles ' oration on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.

Some of the most important figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the physician Hippocrates, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Phidias, The leading statesman of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens.

He alludes to other notable male figures, such as Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles and Thucydides, and casts doubt on whether these men produced sons as capable of virtue as themselves.

* Thucydides ( politician ): The leader of the opposition to Pericles, he is mentioned here as the victim of an unfair trial motivated by Cleon.

* Thucydides: The political rival of Pericles, he is mentioned in line 947 and earlier in The Acharnians in relation to a trial in which slick lawyers took full advantage of his old age.

Socrates says this, and then proceeds to name names, including Pericles and Thucydides.

The Menexenus consists mainly of a lengthy funeral oration, satirizing the one given by Pericles in Thucydides ' account of the Peloponnesian War.

In a model like Pericles in Thucydides, or George Washington's farewell address in American History, the Venetian Doge Moncinego had long ago warned Venice not to overextended itself in a land empire.

* Stesimbrotos of Thasos, opponent of Pericles and reputed author of a political pamphlet on Themistocles, Thucydides, and Pericles.

In the following passage, Thucydides recorded Pericles, in the funeral oration, describing the Athenian system of rule:

After the death of Pericles, Athens was led by a succession of leaders Thucydides described as incompetent or weak leaders.

Some scholars note the similarity between Machiavellian and the Greek historian Thucydides, since both emphasized power politics.

... 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.

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.

There is not much trace of Thucydides ' influence in Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince ( 1513 ), which held that the chief aim of a new prince must be to " maintain his state " his power and that in so doing he is often compelled to act against faith, humanity and religion.

Thucydides, Hobbes and Machiavelli are together considered the founding fathers of political realism, according to which state policy must primarily or solely focus on the need to maintain military and economic power rather than on ideals or ethics.

Thucydides wrote: Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but the temples and the ground-plan, distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaemonians was at all equal to their fame.

Thucydides only mentions this period in a digression on the growth of Athenian power in the run up to the Peloponnesian War, and the account is brief, probably selective and lacks any dates.

Lewis declares that, " Thucydides, with his strong feeling for the power and glory of Athens, may have seen this differently and regarded the Melians ' heroics as foolish and unrealistic ; and the fact that they had been offered a relatively painless alternative might affect his view of the massacre.

In his emphasis on sea power, Thucydides resembles the modern naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose influential work The Influence of Sea Power upon History helped set in motion the naval arms race prior to World War I.

Thucydides traces the development of Athenian power through the growth of the Athenian empire in the years 479 BC to 432 BC in book one of the History ( 1. 89-118 ).

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

The idea, though not the wording, has been attributed to the History of the Peloponnesian War by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who stated that " since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

* Volume 24 Thucydides on the nature of power, A. G. ( Arthur Geoffrey ) Woodhead ( 1970 )

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 describes how Athens's control over the League grew:

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.

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.

Theramenes protested strongly against the building of this fortification, arguing that its purpose was not to keep the democrats out, but to be handed over to the Spartans ; Thucydides testifies that his charges were not without substance, as the extremists were actually contemplating such an action.

Thus the Spartans killed over 200 of the Plataean defenders " among which were 25 Athenians " according to Thucydides.

For instance, while Thucydides considered the number of over 1, 000 Greek ships sent to Troy to be a poetic exaggeration, he uses Homer's catalog of ships to determine the approximate number of Greek soldiers who were present.

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.

* Cleon: The populist leader of the pro-war faction and a frequent target in later plays, he is mentioned here in connection with four issues-1. some political or financial loss he had suffered as a result of opposition from the class of knights ( hippeis ); 2. his prosecution of Thucydides ( in which context he is named only by his deme ) 3. his imputed foreign lineage ; 4. his prosecution of the author over the previous play.

Thucydides states that Eurymachus was " a man of great influence at Thebes ," and that the Platean, Naucleides, arranged with him to bring in " a little over 300 " Theban troops in the middle of the night, for a sneak attack.