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Thucydides references Homer frequently as a source of information, but always adds a distancing clause, such as “ Homer shows this, if that is sufficient evidence ,” and “ assuming we should trust Homer's poetry in this case too .”
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Thucydides and references
One may come across many references of the " Vrilissos " ( or alternatively " Vrilittos ") name in some of Thucydides, Herodotus and Strabo's writings.
Oblique references to the decree in Thucydides seems to suggest its importance: the Spartans state that " war could be avoided if Athens would revoke the Megarian decree ".
Thucydides and Homer
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.
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.
The second word was Lacedaemon ( Λακεδαίμων ); this is the name commonly used in the works of Homer and the Athenian historians Herodotus and Thucydides.
They use older scholia to the classics ( Homer, Thucydides, Sophocles, etc.
It includes numerous quotations from ancient writers ; the scholiasts on Aristophanes, Homer, Sophocles and Thucydides are also much used.
They were uncritically attributed to Homer himself in Antiquity — from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides ( iii. 104 )— and the label has stuck.
The earliest written accounts of forest destruction in Southern Europe begin around 1000 BC in the histories of Homer, Thucydides and Plato and in Strabo ’ s Geography.
Despite the absence of the gods from Thucydides ' work, he still draws heavily from the Greek mythos, especially from Homer, whose works are prominent in Greek mythology.
Later, Thucydides claims that since Homer never makes reference to a united Greek state, the pre-Hellenic nations must have been so disjointed that they could not organize properly to launch an effective campaign.
Thucydides makes sure to inform his reader that he, unlike Homer, is not a poet prone to exaggeration, but instead a historian, whose stories may not give " momentary pleasure ," but " whose intended meaning will be challenged by the truth of the facts.
" By distancing himself from the storytelling practices of Homer, Thucydides makes it clear that while he does consider mythology and epics to be evidence, these works cannot be given much credibility, and that it takes an impartial and empirically minded historian, such as himself, to accurately portray the events of the past.
Jaspers also included the authors of the Upanishads, Lao Tzu, Homer, Socrates, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Archimedes, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah as axial figures.
Sieber described the library of the monastery as rich in more than a thousand texts, including religious texts and those of Pindar, Petrarch, Virgil, Dante, Homer, Strabon, Thucydides and Diodore of Sicily.
The Echinades ( Greek: per Herodotus, Thucydides, and Strabo, per Homer Echinae (, ) are a group of islands in the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Acarnania, Greece.
Homer, as we have already seen, describes the Echinades as inhabited ; but both Thucydides and Scylax represent them as deserted.
Thucydides and frequently
A quotation frequently attributed to Thucydides on the Internet, but which is in fact spurious ( ref needed ), is:
He wrote a History of Sicily from the earliest times to 424 BC, which was used by Thucydides, and the Colonizing of Italy, frequently referred to by Strabo and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
Thucydides and source
Unlike Thucydides, however, these historians all continued to view history as a source of moral lessons.
His Hellenica is a major primary source for events in Greece from 411 to 362 BC, and is considered to be the continuation of the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, going so far as to begin with the phrase " Following these events ...".
Thucydides, our main source ( Book II. 1-6 ) for the events of these few hours, in which Thebes and its Boeotian allies, lost about 12 % of their total army, regards the preemptive strike against Plataea as the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, which would go on for another 27 years.
Among the most notable were the historians Herodotus ( 484 – 425 ), who described the Greco-Persian Wars ; Thucydides ( 460 – 395 ), who wrote the great History of the Peloponnesian War ; and Xenophon ( 427 – 335 ), who, although sometimes considered a partial and poorly documented writer, in the opinion of historians left a useful source of information about the first years of the 4th century BC.
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.
Our primary source for the war, Thucydides, puts very little emphasis upon the decree in his analysis of the cause of the war, treating it as a pretext on the part of the Spartans.
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 ).
Thucydides and information
Further information is contained in the excerpts from Ctesias by Photius ; Plutarch ’ s lives of Artaxerxes II and Lysander ; also Thucydides ' History of Peloponnesian War.
However, despite Thucydides ' lack of trust in information that was not experienced firsthand, such as Homer's, he does use the poet's epics to infer facts about the Trojan War.
The Greek historian Thucydides claimed they immigrated from the Iberian Peninsula ( perhaps Catalonia ) driven by the Ligurians from the river Sicanus, drawing his information from the Sicilian historian Antiochus of Syracuse, but his basis for saying this is unknown.
In literature and history though, he follows classical models, as is evident in the precision and lucidity of his narrative acquired from Thucydides, and in the reliability of his information, qualities of special merit in the historian.
Apart from a brief mention by Thucydides, however, there is very little extant information about Pagondas or his life.
Thucydides and always
" My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides.
465 – 460 BC ), and Thucydides remarked that " Spartan policy is always mainly governed by the necessity of taking precautions against the helots.
In a celebrated passage, Thucydides stresses that " most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots ".
His edition of the De false legatione of Demosthenes will always remain a standard work, but his first two books of Thucydides ( an instalment of a long-contemplated edition ) hardly came up to expectation.
According to Thucydides ( v. 67 ), they fought on the extreme-left wing in the battle-line, the most threatening position for the hoplite phalanx: " In this battle the left wing was composed of the Sciritae, who in a Lacedaemonian army have always that post to themselves alone ".
Thucydides and such
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.
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.
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 ".
Cochrane, the son of a physician, speculated that Thucydides generally ( and especially in describing the plague in Athens ) was influenced by the methods and thinking of early medical writers such as Hippocrates of Kos.
Subsequent Greek historians — such as Ctesias, Diodorus, Strabo, Polybius and Plutarch — held up Thucydides ' writings as a model of truthful history.
A virtual cult following developed among such German philosophers as Friedrich Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that, " Thucydides, the portrayer of man, that culture of the most impartial knowledge of the world finds its last glorious flower.
After all, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality -- consequently he takes refuge in the ideal: Thucydides is a master of himself -- consequently he is able to master life.
According to Thucydides, the trireme was introduced to Greece by the Corinthians in the late 8th century BC, and the Corinthian Ameinocles built four such ships for the Samians.
Pericles had such a profound influence on Athenian society that Thucydides, his contemporary historian, acclaimed him as " the first citizen of Athens ".
Herodotus was succeeded by authors such as Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle.
Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, also partook of the nature of panegyrics.
It should be noted that classical writers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Theodore Roosevelt, are often cited as " founding fathers " of realism by contemporary self-described realists.
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.
The theory claims to rely upon an ancient tradition of thought which includes writers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.
The earliest proto-social scientific observations are to be found in the founding texts of Western philosophy ( Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Polybius and so on ), as well as in the non-European thought of figures such as Confucius.
In Thucydides ' account, the Melians express this view as follows, " If such hazards are taken by you to keep your empire and by your subjects to escape it, we who are still free would show ourselves great cowards and weaklings if we failed to face everything that comes rather than submit to slavery.
Instead it seems likely that, as with the speeches, Thucydides is looser than previously thought in inferring the thoughts, feelings, and motives of principal characters in his History from their actions, as well as his own sense of what would be appropriate or likely in such a situation.
In later antiquity, Thucydides ' reputation suffered somewhat, with critics such as Dionysius of Halicarnassus rejecting the History as turgid and excessively austere.
The principal historical sources covering the two are Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War ( VI, 56-59 ) and The Constitution of the Athenians ( XVIII ) attributed to Aristotle or his school, but their story is documented by a great many other ancient writers, such as Herodotus and Plutarch.
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