Thucydides

Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War and established history as a discipline governed by evidence. Born in Athens around 460 BC into a wealthy family with Thracian gold-mining interests, he was old enough to observe the war from its outbreak and says he began recording it immediately, expecting it to be the greatest disturbance in Greek history. He caught the plague in 430 BC and survived, and his clinical description of its symptoms and course is one of the most detailed accounts of an epidemic from antiquity. He was elected general in 424 BC and was given the Thracian command. Failing to relieve Amphipolis before the Spartan Brasidas took it, he was exiled for twenty years — which, as he notes, allowed him to travel and hear both sides. His method broke with Herodotus completely. He excluded the gods, oracles and myth as causes, refused to include material he could not check, and stated that he had reported speeches according to what the situation demanded while keeping as close as possible to what was actually said. He distinguished the immediate pretexts of the war from its real cause, which he identified as Athenian growth and the fear it produced in Sparta. The Melian Dialogue, in which Athenian envoys tell a neutral island that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is the founding text of political realism. He recorded the Sicilian expedition's destruction and the corrosion of public language under civil war. The work stops mid-sentence in 411 BC. He probably died around 400 BC.

• Lived: 460 BCE – 400 BCE
• Nationality: Greek
• Roles: writer