02 May 2013

from Bluff Your Way in the Classics (Ross Leckie)

Thucydides (460-400 BC)

By means of making up speeches in his History for the people who made up the war in which they say what he thought they thought they did or ought to, might have, could have done, thereby explaining, commenting, elucidating and rationalising in accord with a History written not for the applause of the moment but for all time and resting on what he himself saw and on the reports of others, after careful research aiming at the greatest possible accuracy in each case, he wrote a history of and, to a large extent, created the Peloponnesian War.