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Thucydides: The Reinvention of History

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Undoubtedly Thucydides ranks among the greatest of historians. Indeed, he probably deserves to be recognized as the founder of modern history ("modern" in this case meaning a wide-ranging, fundamentally objective analysis of events). His great work on the Peloponnesian War is unmatched in its long-reaching influence. Thucydides' depiction of the great 5th century BC war between Athens and Sparta has for more than two millenia formed the basis for viewing and understanding those events. Very likely no single other work of history has ever had such an impact in forming future perception of events. In "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History", Donald Kagan -- the pre-emininent modern historian of the Peloponnesian War -- examines Thucydides' work in light of Thucydides' own claims of cool objectivity; Kagan ably demonstrates, I believe, that inevitably the ancient Greek historian did not in fact, could not indeed, wholly maintain his objectivity, certainly understandable in the Thucydides himself was a direct participant in some of the events he described. In several cases, notably Pericles' involvement in the origin of the Peloponnesian War and the doomed Athenia expedition to Sicily, Kagan presents a strong case that Thucydides has deliberately crafted an interpretation of events that ran counter to popular perceptions and, in fact, runs counter even to the evidence that Thucydides presented in his own book.

Kagan's "Thucydides" might be viewed as a companion, with differences of emphasis, to his earlier single-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. Although much of the same ground is covered in both books, the focus is different, with the ancient historian much more in the forefront of this new volume.

The book is barely over 200 pages and contains huge chunks (word for word) from Kagan's one volume history of the Great War. Since the War took place over 2000 years ago it is disturbing, in discussing what various partcipants thought or said, to find the author using such phrases as "It is inconceivable that" or "There can be no doubt that". This book will be mostly incomprehensible to the reader unfamiliar with the Great War and annoying to those who have read Kagan's previous work.

Is history just one damn thing after another? Or can we discover the underlying logic of events that will allow us to shape a better future? Herodotus' history of the Persian war is a rollicking tale with fascinating background and colorful folklore. Thucydides aimed higher. He was scrupulous about accuracy and he sought the general patterns governing political action that determined the direction events would take.

More than fifty years ago I studied Thucydides in a humanities course. I remember gripping accounts of internecine strife and praise for the leadership of Pericles - and how things ran downhill after Pericles died and rabble-rousers such as Cleon took power. Thucydides' lessons were clear: Democracy could cope with the challenges of war only when guided by a superior leader such as Pericles.

Donald Kagan shows that these conclusions were not shared by contemporaries of Thucydides - nor are they supported by the facts as recorded by Thucydides and others. Thucydides did not engage in outright deception or falsification; rather, he selected what he reported so that what he believed to be the underlying truths would stand out more clearly. He was a spinmeister.

He held that Sparta would never be content to play second fiddle to the sea empire of Athens, and he was probably right. But Sparta's discontent need not have led ruinous war.

He distrusted democracy. The evidence here shows that the fickle favor of democratic politics in Athens passed harsh judgement on those who fell out of favor or proved unlucky as events unfolded. This drove Alcibiades from leadership in Sicily to seek shelter in Sparta, a great loss for Athens. Likewise it resulted in the exile of Thucydides, another loss. Demosthenes sheltered in Naupactus rather than face judgement in Athens. Nicias' various moves regarding the Sicilian expedition whose disaster ended the Athenian Empire were largely aimed at avoiding censure in Athens. So Kagan argues.

But Athenian leadership following the death of Pericles was moderate and sensible. The debacle in Sicily appears to be the result of poor leadership and bad choices by Nicias, whom Thucydides holds up as an exemplary leader. That suited Thucidides' story, but Kagan lays out overwhelming evidence that Thucydides is wrong about Nicias and about the causes of the debacle.

This book is a celebration of the sort of critical history Thucydites launched. Thucydites would have applauded its methods, though disliked its conclusions.

The scale of this conflict and the diversity of the city states and peoples involved are amazing. The difficulties in coordinating action and in holding allies together were then and are now major factors in success (or failure). The role of chance and of personal actions was huge then as it is now.

This book sheds new light on the book that thucydites wrote as a "possesion forever." Read it.

Kagan's demonstration that Thucydides' estimations of Pericles and Nicias were counter to public consensus ignores the spirit of the ancient text. History tells us that Pericles and Nicias provided greater prudence; we already know that the Athenians catastrophically believed otherwise.

Kagan's book is essentially a historiographical study of Thucydides as a historian. The bottom line is that the author sees Thucydides as a "revisionist" historian of his period who was subject to the same limitations, professional and personal, that affect all historians.

In the introduction, Kagan puts Thucydides in the context of his society and prevailing philosophies of the time, and he addresses Thucydides own place in that society as a wealthy Athenian aristocrat who lived through and fought in the Peloponnesian War, and who was later exiled because of a perceived failure on his part as an Athenian general. The body of the book is essentially multiple case studies of key events and personalities that Kagan compares and contrasts between Thucydides interpretation of the same, and the views of other ancient historians and contemporary Athenians.

In the conclusion Kagan basically argues that while Thucydides' history is valid and that he invented, "a new kind of history," Thucydides' history is his interpretation of the facts and events, as filtered through his own values and experience, in the same way any other historian is affected by his own prejudices. The bottom line is that Thucydides created a new way of writing history, one that we appreciate and value today, but he also provided a historical interpretation, based on fact, which reflected his views.

Any discussion of Thucydides almost always begins with a juxtaposition of the Athenian with the Halicarnassian, Herodotus. Herodotus, who wrote before Thucydides, filled his history of the Persian Wars with colorful discussions of exotic cultures, far away kings, distant geography, and, most notoriously, mythology. Thucydides, on the other hand, wrote with a clear and rational hand; his history of the Peloponnesian War is prized for its sharp analysis, an analysis that was unknown up until Thucydides and extremely rare thereafter. Herodotus, we now know, wrote to entertain the listener or reader; Thucydides wrote to get to the truth. Indeed, the Athenian prefaced his History with a direct shot against Herodotus: "To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful." In his own words, then, Thucydides wrote to depict objective. Later writers would share his attitude: Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that Thucydides "reports the facts without judging them," while Nietzsche noted that the Athenian was "the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes."

Donald Kagan, the world's foremost scholar of the Peloponnesian Wars, in his career-long interest of Thucydides and the Wars, has discovered that the belief in Thucydides' complete objectivity is mistaken. We must realize, says Kagan, that Thucydides was a contemporary of the topic about which he wrote; moreover, his history of the period differs from the interpretations of his contemporaries. Thus, either his contemporaries' interpretations of events were mistaken and Thucydides' is the truth, or (as Kagan argues in this book) Thucydides wrote to argue against his contemporaries and to put forth a different interpretation of the events of the Peloponnesian Wars. The latter is quite similar to the former, and therefore Kagan's goal in "The Reinvention of History" is to show where Thucydides differs from the contemporary vision of events and also to show where his version of history is further from the truth than what he claims. Thucydides, we learn, was less than objective, and, to use a dirty word, had an "agenda". What his agenda was is somewhat mysterious, and I do not think Kagan did a good job at addressing this issue: perhaps Thucydides was sour over his loss of Amphipolis and subsequent exile; or perhaps he hated democracy.

For example, many of Thucydides' contemporaries believed that the Peloponnesian War was a direct result of Pericles' militancy, while Thucydides himself believed that the growth of the Athenian empire played a huge role in a long series of inevitabilities that led to the war. Exactly why Thucydides chose to blame the war on Athens' empire remains a mystery, as Kagan does not address this. Thucydides would also say that under Pericles, Athens was not a democracy, but "in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen," i.e. Pericles. However, a detailed examination of the workings of Athenian government at this time reveals that Pericles did not "rule" over Athens indefinitely, but was restrained by many checks and balances. Here again, says Kagan, Thucydides puts a spin on things, and the Athenian would later go on to extoll Pericles and aristocratic leadership at the expense of what he perceived to be a mobocracy that was ever too ready to change course on the slightest whim.

Perhaps, then, Thucydides was a blue blooded defender of the aristocracy, who couldn't help but see Athens' defeat against Sparta as a result of the perils of democracy, but Kagan never goes this far to say so. Another warning to the prospective reader: this book is dreadfully boring, and one reviewer on this page has noted that much of the book is copied from Kagan's own history of the Peloponnesian Wars. The result---this book--- is a history of the Peloponnesian Wars with a few paragraphs about Thucydides thrown in here and there, pointing out where the Athenian's account of history differs from that of his contemporaries'. The most valuable thing to take away from this book---and it is indeed valuable---is the notion that Thucydides, while still a great historian, is not the bastion of objectivity that many today idolize him to be. He was, in Kagan's words, the first revisionist historian.

Donald Kagan's "Thucydides" takes a fresh and provocative look at the great historian's account of the Peloponnesian War. Combining Thucydides' own evidence with other ancient sources, Kagan disputes both Thucydides' objectivity and his conclusions; in Kagan's words (p. 234), "The purpose of Thucydides was to set before us the truth as he saw it, but his truth need not be ours."

There was a popular consensus in ancient Greece about the war's origins and course, and the reasons for Athens' ultimate defeat. The people blamed Pericles, acting more like a demagogue than a statesman, for getting Athens into the war in the first place. They felt that Cleon was "not a reckless and lucky madman but a daring and shrewd leader" (p. 139); and they blamed the Sicilian disaster on Nicias' faulty generalship.

Thucydides' conclusions about the war were the very opposite, and so, according to Kagan, Thucydides' agenda was to revise all these accepted beliefs. Thucydides' History included encomia of Pericles and Nicias, and ascribed Athens' defeat to the hubris of the democratic mob, led by inferior demagogues after the death of Pericles. Had Athens just followed Pericles' original plan, says Thucydides, all would have been well.

Whatever the truth of these events, the lucidity of Kagan's writing, and the outstanding interest of his subject, make it a book that nearly every classical history buff will enjoy reading.