INTRODUCTION

Thucydides, on the contrary, was a contemporary of, and for a time a direct participant in, his war; indeed, when he decided to write his History, the subject matter lay in the future.

His exile presumably came to an end with the Athenian defeat in 404, and he died in Athens soon after, though the exact date is unknown.

Third, there is the short section, at the beginning of the story of the Sicilian expedition, summarizing the colonization of Sicily by Greeks and non-Greeks (VI, 2–5).

the second major excursus, the Pentecontaetia.

Nevertheless, there are in Thucydides a number of significant excursuses into the past. Each has its own specific reason for being there. It is not possible to examine them all in this introduction, but three merit consideration.

Introduction

The whole excursus includes very few concrete events, and only four of those are dated: the migration of the Boeotians to Boeotia sixty years after the Trojan War and of the Dorians into the Peloponnese twenty years after that; the construction of four ships by the Corinthian Ameinocles for the Samians three hundred years before the end of the

fought between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404, with a scarcely honoured seven-year ‘peace’ in the middle.