Translator’s Note

Herodotus wrote the first book about Greek history.

Thucydides sorted out the essential from the casual, the primary causes from the more immediate grievances and the pretexts. The latter he wrote up in great detail, devoting the whole of the first book to the background.

But they could not have said everything attributed to them, and they said important things the historian omitted. Our trouble is that it is normally impossible to distinguish, though my credulity stops short of believing that Pericles ever said in the Athenian Assembly that ‘your empire is now like a tyranny’ (II, 63, echoed by Cleon in III, 37 wit

Politics, like philosophy, was a Greek ‘invention’.

Thucydides accepted Herodotus’ chronology, the Boeotian migration took place about 1190 B.C., the Dorian migration about 1170.

Yet there is not even a hint of the decree in the book.9 In a different vein, there is the way he deals with civil strife.

the second major excursus, the Pentecontaetia.

It was necessary only to bridge the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars; and Thucydides did that by writing a brief digression (I, 89–118), in which he singled out some important events that occurred between 479 B.C. and the beginning of the Corcyra affair in 435.