History of the Peloponnesian War

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.

Knowledge must lead to understanding. In the field of history, even when largely restricted to contemporary history, that meant trying to grasp general ideas about human behaviour, in war and politics, in revolution and government.

because of the man who wrote its history, Thucydides the Athenian.

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

The word for ‘inquire’ in Greek is historein, and the man who was first responsible for a sustained inquiry, a historia, into the past was Herodotus.

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.

The Mytilene debate is a good point of departure.

The conclusion is that the speeches are not what we should call historical reporting in the same sense as the narrative.

Herodotus wrote the first book about Greek history.