Thucydides - Quotations About Thucydides

Quotations About Thucydides

And after, Thucydides, in my opinion, easily vanquished all in the artfulness of his style: he so concentrates his copious material that he almost matches the number of his words with the number of his thoughts. In his words, further, he is so apposite and compressed that you do not know whether his matter is being illuminated by his diction or his words by his thoughts. (Cicero,De Oratore 2.56 (55 B.C.))

In the preface to his 1628 translation of Thucydides, entitled, Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes calls Thucydides

"the most politic historiographer that ever writ."

A hundred years later, philosopher David Hume, wrote that:

he first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations are so intermixed with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon them to the embellishments of poets and orators. ("Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations", 1742)

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the best antidotes for Platonism were to be found in Thucydides:

"My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are most closely related to me owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality-- not in "rationality," and still less in "morality." There is no more radical cure than Thucydides for the lamentably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks... His writings must be carefully studied line by line, and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so rich in unuttered thoughts... Thucydides is the great summing up, the final manifestation of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality-- consequently he takes refuge in the ideal: Thucydides is a master of himself-- consequently he is able to master life." (A Nietzsche Compendium, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici)

W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939", written at the start of World War II, contains these lines:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.