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.

The abrupt end to Thucydides ' narrative, which breaks off in the middle of the year 411 BC, has traditionally been interpreted as indicating that he died while writing the book, although other explanations have been put forward.

Cleon has sometimes been connected with Thucydides ' exile.

Finally, the question has recently been raised as to whether Thucydides was not greatly, if not fundamentally, concerned with the matter of religion.

It is no accident that even today Thucydides turns up as a guiding spirit in military academies, neocon think tanks and the writings of men like Henry Kissinger ; whereas Herodotus has been the choice of imaginative novelists ( Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient and the film based on it boosted the sale of the Histories to a wholly unforeseen degree ) and — as food for a starved soul — of an equally imaginative foreign correspondent from Iron Curtain Poland, Ryszard Kapuscinski.

" My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.

Indeed, neorealists often argue that the ordering principle of the international system has not fundamentally changed from the time of Thucydides to the advent of nuclear warfare.

Bosworth states that " Arrian has in mind Thucydides ' famous strictures of histories of the pentekontaetia, on which the passage is patently modelled ".

It is clear that Livy, or his sources, has consciously modelled the Campanian embassy after the " Corcyrean debate " in Thucydides ' History of the Peloponnesian War There are many parallels between the speech given by the Campanian ambassador to the Roman senate in Livy and the speech of the Corcyrean ambassador to the Athenian assembly in Thucydides.

According to Lord Norwich, he " has been compared to Tacitus and Thucydides.

They were uncritically attributed to Homer himself in Antiquity — from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides ( iii. 104 )— and the label has stuck.

These measures appear to have been carried out in great measure since the testimony has come to us from, ( among others, the Greek historian Thucydides ( c. 460-400 BCE ), who comments: Everyone who is capable of serving the city meets no impediment, neither poverty, nor civic condition ...

Thucydides has them stating, " We trust that the gods will give us fortune as good as yours, because we are standing for what is right against what is wrong.

This was because " judgments about the Athenian empire is certainly in large part due to the attention that Thucydides ' Dialogue has focused on it, but the feeling he displays elsewhere about that empire makes it questionable if he intended to produce the revulsion which most readers of the Dialogue feel.

However, this has been challenged ; Ernst Badian is one scholar who has argued that Thucydides has a strong pro-Athenian bias.

It has been further argued that Thucydides attributes the existence of the gods entirely to the needs of political life.

Since there appear to be some contradictions between certain passages in the History, it has been proposed that the conflicting passages were written at different times and that Thucydides ' opinion on the conflicting matter had changed.

Thucydides ' History has been enormously influential in both ancient and modern historiography.

This has striking resemblances to classical democratic ideas, as reported by Thucydides.

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.

Professor Miller, in her reinvestigation of ancient source materials has determined that they point to various dates of foundation from 758 BC ( per the Chronikon of Eusebius ) to 728 BC ( from her reconstructions of dates from Thucydides ).

According to Thucydides, although the Spartans took no action at this time, they " secretly felt aggrieved ".

" There is no more radical cure than Thucydides for the lamentably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks ... His writings must be carefully studied line by line, and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly as what he actually says.

After the Battle of Salamis-in-Cyprus, Thucydides makes no further mention of conflict with the Persians, simply saying that the Greeks returned home.

Thucydides reports that Nicias had been appointed against his preference, but offers no further detail regarding that debate.

The gods play no active role in Thucydides ' work.

However, the evidence of the Sicilian Expedition argues against this, since Thucydides discusses the thoughts of the generals who died there and whom he would have had no chance to interview.

In the antic description by Thucydides Bolbe was the name of a lake in Mygdonia, located at no great distance from the Aegean Sea.

In fact, there is no trace of this, neither in Thucydides nor in Xenophon both of whom give an account of the history of that conflict ( in History of the Peloponnesian War and in Hellenica respectively ).

In the introduction of his work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides ( 460 BC to early 4th century ) gives a short summary of earlier Greek history, stating that there were no major collective military actions by Greeks between the Trojan War and the Persian Wars.

The same writer represented Theocles, or Thucles, the leader of the colony and founder of the city, as an Athenian by birth ; but Thucydides takes no notice of this, and describes the city as a purely Chalcidic colony ; and it seems certain that in later times it was generally so regarded.

) Strabo and Scymnus Chius both represent Zancle ( modern Messina ) also as a colony from Naxos, but no allusion to this is found in Thucydides.

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.

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.

Contrary to Herodotus, who portrays the gods as active agents in human affairs, Thucydides attributes the existence of the divine entirely to the needs of political life.

In contrast, Thucydides claims to confine himself to factual reports of contemporary political and military events, based on unambiguous, first-hand, eye-witness accounts, although, unlike Herodotus, he does not reveal his sources.

Thucydides views life exclusively as political life, and history in terms of political history.

During the Renaissance, however, Thucydides attracted less interest among Western European historians as a political philosopher than his successor, Polybius, although Poggio Bracciolini claimed to have been influenced by him.

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.

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.

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.

Another author, Thomas Geoghegan, whose speciality is labour rights, comes down on the side of Herodotus when it comes to drawing lessons relevant to Americans, who, he notes, tend to be rather isolationist in their habits ( if not in their political theorizing ): " We should also spend more funds to get our young people out of the library where they're reading Thucydides and get them to start living like Herodotus — going out and seeing the world.

In the preface to his 1628 translation of Thucydides, entitled, Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes calls Thucydides " the most politic historiographer that ever writ.

Many political philosophers have interpreted the dialogue, as written in the History, as reflecting Thucydides ' personal views concerning the attack on Melos, whether or not it accurately reports the specific speeches delivered at the meeting.

Oratory also played a large part in the political life of the democracy in Thucydides ' home city of Athens.

* Stasis ( political history ), as defined by Thucydides as a set of symptoms indicating an internal disturbance in both individuals and states

* 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: 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.

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