Thucydides was born around 460 BC into an aristocratic Athenian family; his father, Olorus, is linked by historians to Thracian royalty, and the family owned gold mines in Thrace. When the Peloponnesian War broke out, Pericles pulled the countryside behind the walls of Athens to rely on the navy against Sparta’s army. Plague swept the crowded city, killing Pericles. Thucydides caught it and survived, then recorded its symptoms clinically and noted that survivors did not catch it again and could nurse the sick, one of the earliest records of acquired immunity. In 424 BC he was made a general, and that winter the Spartan commander Brasidas struck Amphipolis, the city controlling the timber Athens needed for its fleet.
Brasidas offered lenient surrender terms, and Amphipolis opened its gates before Thucydides arrived with his ships. The Athenian assembly blamed him and sentenced him to 20 years of exile. Free of enemy status and funded by his mines, he crossed into Spartan territory, interviewed people on both sides and cross-checked their accounts. Unlike Herodotus, he left out the gods and fables, focusing on politics, logistics and power, and called his work a possession for all time. He reconstructed speeches such as Pericles’ funeral oration to capture their arguments. His history breaks off mid-sentence in 411 BC, seven years before the war ended, and how he died is unknown.
- He may have drawn on the natural-cause medicine of thinkers such as Hippocrates.
- He is credited as a founder of political realism, which sees states as driven by fear, self-interest and honor.
- He disliked demagogues such as Cleon and Hyperbolus and preferred Pericles’ restraint.
- His account of the civil war on Corcyra described neighbors and family members turning on each other.
- Thomas Hobbes translated his history into English directly from the Greek.
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