Inferences about Thucydides ' character can only be drawn ( with due caution ) from his book.

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 ).

The date of its foundation cannot be precisely fixed, as Thucydides indicates it only by reference to that of the Sicilian Megara, which is itself not accurately known, but it may be placed about 628 BCE.

The only histories of Sparta are from the writings of Xenophon, Thucydides, Herodotus and Plutarch, none of whom were Spartans.

Thucydides here is the only one to implicate the helots: Pausanias speaks rather about Lacedaemonians who had been condemned to death.

In actuality, according to Thucydides, Hippias was the only ' tyrant '.

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 almost never names his informants and alludes to competing versions of events only a handful of times.

As Thucydides reports, the Boeotian left wing was surrounded and close to defeat, and only the Thespian contingent stood its ground.

Thucydides claims that " this was the only day on which it was possible for the citizens who formed the parade to assemble armed without arousing suspicion ".

Thucydides, however, reckons Eryx and Egesta the only two cities of the Elymi, and does not notice Entella at all, any more than the other places of native Sicanian or Siculian origin.

* 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.

The main classical authority on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, does not mention Hegetorides at all, and appears to mention Thasos itself only once, in the context of Galepsus, a colony of Thasos ( Book V of his History of the Pelponnesian War ).

Thucydides says it was the only Greek city on this coast of Sicily, which must however be understood with reference only to independent cities ; Mylae, which was also on the north coast, and certainly of Greek origin, being a dependency of Zancle ( modern Messina ).

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.

The historian Thucydides describes the Lelantine War as exceptional, the only war in Greece between the mythical Trojan War and the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC in which allied cities rather than single ones were involved.

No detailed record of the Lelantine War was produced by a contemporary author ( such as Thucydides for the Peloponnesian War ), as Greek historiography only developed 200 years later, starting with the works of Herodotus.

The Byzantine historians thus represent not only the social but also the intellectual flower of their time, resembling in this their Greek predecessors, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Polybius, who became their guides and models.

Hence it was at Naxos that the Athenian fleet first touched after crossing the straits ; and at a later period the Naxians and Catanaeans are enumerated by Thucydides as the only Greek cities in Sicily which sided with the Athenians.

Furthermore, Thucydides mentions the use of tubed flamethrowers in the siege of Delium in 424 BC.

Thucydides mentions the Acarnanians and Livy refers to the inhabitants of three Greek cities on the northern coast of the Peloponnesus as expert slingers.

In the Illiterate Book-Fancier, Lucian mentions eight beautiful copies of Thucydides made by Demosthenes, all in Demosthenes ' own handwriting.

In connection with the campaign against Amphipolis, Thucydides mentions that several settlements on the promontory of Actē were home to:

Similarly, Thucydides mentions them together with the Pelasgians and associates them with Lemnian pirates and with the pre-Greek population of Attica.

* Thrace: A region of strategic significance in the Peloponnesian War, the Chorus mentions it in line 288 in relation to the impending trial of one of the ' traitors ' there ( possibly a reference to Thucydides, who had been prosecuted by Cleon the previous year after the Athenian defeat at Amphipolis.

Thucydides distinctly alludes to it as not existing in his time as a city, but repeatedly mentions the locality, on the sea-coast, which was at that time occupied by the Syracusans, but which the Athenian general Lamachus, during the expedition against Syracuse ( 415 – 413 BC ), proposed to make the head-quarters of their fleet ; but his advice was not taken, and in the next spring the Syracusans fortified it.

Thucydides mentions Kentoripa as a city of the Sicels, hellenized in the 5th century BC.

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.

Between the 8th and 7th centuries BC the Spartans experienced a period of lawlessness and civil strife, later testified by both Herodotus and Thucydides.

An Index of banned books during that period included the works of Plato, Thucydides and Xenophon.

The richest source for the period, and also the most contemporaneous, is Thucydides ' History of the Peloponnesian War, which is generally considered by modern historians to be a reliable primary account.

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

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.

The time period that Thucydides was most likely referencing was the time between 3000 BC and 2000 BC when viticulture emerged in force in the areas of Asia Minor, Crete, Greece and the Cyclades of the Aegean Sea.

A stronger reason Webster gives for this dating is that he believes that the structure of Woman of Trachis is similar to that of Sophocles ' lost play Tereus, which Webster dates to this time period based largely on circumstantial evidence from Thucydides.

It is first mentioned by Hecataeus, and Thucydides notices it among the chief colonies of the Phoenicians in Sicily, which still subsisted at the period of the Athenian expedition, 415 BCE.

Thucydides is probably right, as against Herodotus, in asserting that the nine archons formed the Athenian executive at this period.

For a short period it was a member of the Athenian confederacy, its apostasy from which is described in a stirring chapter of Thucydides ' history of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides claims the name comes from the fact that the Strymon flows " around the city " on two sides ;< ref >

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.

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.

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.

Thucydides, a Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War, writes that the Spartan king Pleistoanax lived on Mt.

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.

It was blamed on Thucydides, although he claimed that it was not his fault and that he had simply been unable to reach it in time.

Pausanias goes on to say that Thucydides was murdered on his way back to Athens.

That Thucydides was clearly moved by the suffering inherent in war and concerned about the excesses to which human nature is prone in such circumstances is evident in his analysis of the atrocities committed during civil conflict on Corcyra, which includes the phrase " War is a violent teacher ".

Like his predecessor Herodotus, known as " the father of history ", Thucydides places a high value on eyewitness testimony and writes about events in which he himself probably took part.

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.

For Canadian historian Charles Norris Cochrane ( 1889 – 1945 ), Thucydides ' fastidious devotion to observable phenomena, focus on cause and effect, and strict exclusion of other factors anticipates twentieth century scientific positivism.

Richard Ned Lebow terms Thucydides " the last of the tragedians ", stating that " Thucydides drew heavily on epic poetry and tragedy to construct his history, which not surprisingly is also constructed as a narrative.

Thucydides and his immediate predecessor Herodotus both exerted a significant influence on Western historiography.

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.

Bury, however, have noted parallels between them: If, instead of a history, Thucydides had written an analytical treatise on politics, with particular reference to the Athenian empire, it is probable that.

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.

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.

According to Irving Kristol, self-described founder of American Neoconservatism, Thucydides wrote " the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs "; and Thucydides is a required text at the Naval War College, an American institution located in Rhode Island.