Thucydides

Ancient Greek · 460 BCE to 400 BCE

Born around 460 BCE into a wealthy Athenian family of the Halimous deme, Thucydides son of Olorus inherited gold mines in Thrace and the political connections that came with rank. His father's name was Thracian, linking him to the royal house of Thrace and to Miltiades, the victor of Marathon. He grew up in the Athens of Pericles, during the brief calm before the long war that would consume his life and his subject. When fighting broke out between Athens and Sparta in 431 BCE, he resolved at once to record it, believing it would be greater than any conflict before. He caught the plague that swept the city in 430 and survived, leaving the most clinical account of an epidemic in ancient literature. Elected general in 424 BCE, he failed to relieve the city of Amphipolis from the Spartan Brasidas and was sent into exile for twenty years, a misfortune that gave him leisure and access to both sides. The History of the Peloponnesian War, his only work, broke with the gods and oracles of earlier writers to seek causes in human nature and the calculus of power. He reconstructed speeches as men would plausibly have spoken them, framed the Funeral Oration of Pericles and the Melian Dialogue, and called his book a possession for all time. The history breaks off in mid-sentence in the winter of 411 BCE, its final years unwritten. He died around 400 BCE, perhaps by violence, the manner and place uncertain, leaving the work he had labored on for a quarter century unfinished.