Thucydides
1 book in the library
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His family was wealthy and had connections with Thrace, where it held rights to gold mines. When war broke out between Athens and Sparta in 431 BC, he began at once to record it, believing it would be the greatest war yet fought. He caught the plague that struck Athens soon afterwards and survived. In 424 BC, as one of the city’s generals, he failed to prevent the Spartan commander Brasidas from taking the important city of Amphipolis, and was exiled for twenty years, a period he used to gather information from both sides of the conflict. His History of the Peloponnesian War, unfinished at his death, breaks off in the events of 411 BC. Its insistence on evidence, causes and human motives has made him a founder of history as a critical discipline and of political realism.
