In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses.

Thucydides reports that the Corinthians condemned Sparta's inactivity up to that point, warning the Spartans that if they continued to remain passive while the Athenians were energetically active, they would soon find themselves outflanked and without allies.

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.

Historians Arnold W. Gomme and Raphael Sealey believe, and Thucydides reports, that Alcibiades was offended that the Spartans had negotiated that treaty through Nicias and Laches, overlooking him on account of his youth.

Historians Arnold W. Gomme and Raphael Sealey believe, and Thucydides reports, that Alcibiades was offended that the Spartans had negotiated that treaty through Nicias and Laches, overlooking him on account of his youth.

Thucydides reports that the request met with some success, and the helots got supplies through to the besieged island.

Thucydides reports:

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.

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

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

However, Thucydides also reports that the Spartans had sought a declaration of war from the Peloponnesian League during the rebellion of Samos in 440, well before the Megarian Decree was passed.

The first mention of Dion in history comes from Thucydides, who reports that it was the first city reached by the Spartan general Brasidas after crossing from Thessaly into Macedon on his way through the realm of his ally Perdiccas II during his expedition against the Athenian colonies of Thrace in 424 BC.

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.

Thus, when Thucydides arrived, Amphipolis was already under Spartan control.

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.

The first written descriptions of the concept of immunity may have been made by the Athenian Thucydides who, in 430 BC, described that when the plague hit Athens “ the sick and the dying were tended by the pitying care of those who had recovered, because they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehensions.

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.

Agis, who was desperate for a victory to redeem his embarrassment at Argos, charged ahead ; but according to Thucydides, when the armies had closed to a stone's throw, " one of the elder Spartans " ( the xymboulos Pharax, according to Diodorus ) advised him not to try to correct one error ( his former defeat ) with another.

Most of these lands were previously inhabited by Thracian tribes, and Thucydides records how the Thracians were pushed to the mountains when the Macedonians acquired their lands.

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.

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

465 – 460 BC ), and Thucydides remarked that " Spartan policy is always mainly governed by the necessity of taking precautions against the helots.

* 424 Pagondas of Thebes crushes Athenian army at the Battle of Delium, Brasidas a Spartan general makes a successful campaign, Cleon exiles Thucydides for 20 years for arriving late

Thucydides ' characterization of Brasidas suggests that Brasidas united in himself the stereotypical Spartan courage with those virtues in which regular Spartans were most signally lacking.

Furthermore, the rhetoric in speech of Brasidas to the Acanthians is of noticeably higher quality than the other Spartan speeches recorded by Thucydides ( Thuc.

In a celebrated passage, Thucydides stresses that " most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots ".

Thucydides writes that during the Peloponnesian War there was a Battle of Syme near the island in January, 411 BC, in which an unspecified number of Spartan ships defeated a squadron of Athenian vessels.

However, Perdiccas once again betrayed the Athenians and sent 1000 troops to support a Spartan assault on Acarnania in 429 but they arrived too late to help ( Thucydides 2. 80 ).

Thucydides did not know the exact numbers of men on each side, but estimated that there were about 9, 000 men on the Spartan side ( the Spartan army must have numbered about 3, 500, with 600 Sciritae, about 2, 000 neodamodeis and Brasideans and about 3, 000 Arcadians on the whole ) with somewhat fewer men on the Argive and Athenian side ( about 8, 000 ), according to Donald Kagan.

Thucydides in the History of the Peloponnesian War writes They ( the Spartan hoplites ) themselves were held up by the weapons shot at them from both flanks by the light troops.

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

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.

* Antiphon defends himself in a speech Thucydides describes as the greatest ever made by a man on trial for his life.

Among them was Theramenes ; Thucydides refers to him as " one of the leaders of the party that put down the democracy — an able speaker and a man with ideas.

Thucydides, a man of strong oligarchical inclinations, had also been prosecuted for military incapacity and exiled by a decree proposed by Cleon.

Just as the Athenians were preparing to sail home, on August 28, there was a lunar eclipse, and Nicias, described by Thucydides as a particularly superstitious man, asked the priests what he should do.

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.

When members of the state went forth to found a new colony they took with them a brand from the Prytaneum altar to kindle the new fire in the colony ; the fatherless daughters of Aristides, who were regarded as children of the state at Athens, were married from the Prytaneum as from their home ; Thucydides informs us that in the Synoecism of Theseus the Prytanea of all the separate communities were joined in the central Prytaneum of Athens as a symbol of the union ; foreign ambassadors and citizens who had deserved especially well of the state were entertained in the Prytaneum as public guests.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ".

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 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.

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.