Thucydides Sentence Examples

This last tradition, which was received as an undoubted fact both by Thucydides and Aristotle, has during the last few years received striking confirmation.

The translation of Aristotle's Politics, the revision of Plato, and, above all, the translation of Thucydides many times revised, occupied several years.

The essays which should have accompanied the translation of Thucydides were never written.

Whilst under the first of these tutors, in nine months he read all Thucydides, Sophocles and Sallust, twelve books of Tacitus, the greater part of Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and several plays of Aeschylus and Euripides.

We have seen that the name of Italy was originally applied only to the southernmost part of the peninsula, and was only gradually extended so as to comprise the central regions, such as Latium and Campania, which were designated by writers as late as Thucydides and Aristotle as in Opicia.

The authors he most carefully studied at this period were Thucydides and Aristotle, and for their writings he formed an attachment which remained to the close of his life, and exerted a powerful influence upon his mode of thought and opinions, as well as upon his literary occupations in subsequent years.

His spare time was devoted to the prosecution of studies in philology and history, more particularly to the study of Thucydides, and of the new light which had been cast upon Roman history and upon historical method in general by the researches of Niebuhr.

Herodotus describes Hegesistratus as a bastard, and Thucydides says that Thessalus was legitimate.

He belonged to the school of Thucydides and Gibbon, not to that of Macaulay and Taine; he deals by preference with the rulers and leaders of the world, and he strictly limits his field to the history of the state, or, as we should say, political history; and in this he is followed by Seeley, one of the greatest of his adherents.

D6rpfeld's identification of the Dionysium, Ev Xt pvats cannot be regarded as proved; his view that another Pythium and another Olympieum existed in this neighbourhood is still less probable; but the inconclusiveness of these theories does not necessarily invalidate his identification of the Enneacrunus, with regard to the position of which the language of Thucydides is far from clear.

The existence of any third wall was denied by Leake, according to whose theory the southern parallel wall would be identical with the Phaleric. The language of Thucydides, however, seems decisive with regard to the existence of three walls.

The brilliant summary of the historian Thucydides in the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles (delivered in 430), in which the social life, the institutions and the culture of his country are set forth as a model, gives a substantially true picture of Athens in its greatest days.

His model is Thucydides (according to Bekker, Herodotus); his language is tolerably pure and correct, his style simple and clear.

By the earlier Greek authors (Herodotus, Thucydides and often in Xenophon) it is rendered by i»rapxos lieutenant, governor," in the documents from Babylonia and Egypt and in Ezra and Nehemiah by pakha, " governor "; and the satrap Mazaeus of Cilicia and Syria in the time of Darius III.

At the time of the Athenian siege Syracuse consisted of two quarters - the island and the "outer city" of Thucydides, generally known as Achradina, and bounded by the sea on the north and east, with the adjoining suburbs of Apollo Temenites farther inland at the foot of the southern slopes of Epipolae and Tyche west of the north-west corner of Achradina.

The "outer" and the "inner" city of Thucydides still held out, whilst a Carthaginian fleet was moored off Achradina and Carthaginian troops were encamped on the spot.

Of other Greek prose writers he knew Thucydides and Hippocrates; while of the poets he expresses in more than one passage the highest admiration of Homer, whom he imitated in several places.

His style, though marred by Latinisms, is clearer than that of his model Thucydides, and his narrative shows the hand of the practised soldier and politician; the language is correct and free from affectation.

He avoids not only every unusual but every superfluous word; and, although no writing can be more free from rhetorical colouring, yet there may from time to time be detected a glow of sympathy, like the glow of generous passion in Thucydides, the more effective from the reserve with which it betrays itself whenever he is called on to record any act of personal heroism or of devotion to military duty.

It is impossible to trace directly the influence exercised upon him by the great men of his time, but one cannot fail to connect his emancipation of medicine from superstition with the widespread power exercised over Greek life and thought by the living work of Socrates, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus and Thucydides.

Thucydides expressly describes the predominance of Athens as riyEgovia (leadership, headship), not as apyi 7 (empire), and the attempts made by Athenian orators during the second period of the Peloponnesian War to prove that the attitude of Athens had not altered since the time of Aristides are manifestly unsuccessful.

The fact, though not mentioned by Thucydides, was inferred from Aristophanes.

Thucydides is almost certainly wrong in saying that the amount of the original tribute was 460 talents (about £106,000); this figure cannot have been reached for at least twelve, probably twenty years, when new members had been enrolled (Lycia, Caria, Eion, Lampsacus).

Thucydides also accepts the story of Heracleid leadership.

An illustration of this truth is furnished in profane history by the account which Thucydides has given us of the Peloponnesian War.

For most of the period in question Thucydides is the only source; and despite the inherent merits of a great writer, it can hardly be doubted that the tribute of almost unqualified praise that successive generations of scholars have paid to Thucydides must have been in some measure qualified if, for example, a Spartan account of the Peloponnesian War had been preserved to us.

Subtract 413 from 777, the remainder is 364; and 364 divided by four gives 91 without a remainder; consequently the eclipse happened in the fourth year of the ninety-first Olympiad, which is the date to which it is referred by Thucydides.

He never mentions his authorities, but amongst authors still extant he used Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus, Plutarch, Frontinus and Suetonius; amongst authors of whom only fragments now remain he drew upon Ctesias, Ephorus, Timaeus, Phylarchus and Nicolaus Damascenus.

At one of the recitations, it was said, the future historian Thucydides was present with his father, Olorus, and was so moved that he burst into tears, whereupon Herodotus remarked to the father- "Olorus, your son has a natural enthusiasm for letters."

Thucydides and Sophocles, he must have been tempted, like many another foreigner, to make Athens his permanent home.

As such he would have soon ceased to be respected in a society where literature was not recognized as a separate profession, where a Socrates served in the infantry, a Sophocles commanded fleets, a Thucydides was general of an army, and an Antiphon was for a time at the head of the state.

His aim was as definite as that of Thucydides, or Schiller, or Napier or any other writer who has made his subject a particular war; only he determined to treat it in a certain way.

Thucydides is content with a single introductory book, forming little more than one-eighth of his work; Herodotus has six such books, forming two-thirds of the entire composition.

Cicero calls his style "copious and polished," Quintilian, "sweet, pure and flowing"; Longinus says he was "the most Homeric of historians"; Dionysius, his countryman, prefers him to Thucydides, and regards him as combining in an extraordinary degree the excellences of sublimity, beauty and the true historical method of composition.

John Sterling pronounced Thirlwall "a writer as great as Thucydides and Tacitus, and with far more knowledge than they."

The founders of Megara Hyblaea settled here temporarily, according to Thucydides, in the winter of 729-728 B.C., but it seems to have remained almost if not entirely uninhabited until the Athenians used it as a naval station in their attack on Syracuse early in 414 B.C. A number of tombs were excavated in 1894, containing objects belonging to a transitional stage between the second and third Sicel period, attributable roughly to r000-goo B.C., and with a certain proportion of Mycenean importations.

He also composed commentaries on the lyric and comic poets and on Thucydides and Demosthenes; part of his commentary on this last author was first published in 1904.

The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch's Lives, and, above all, Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.

In 1494-1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less than twenty-seven editiones principes of Greek authors and of Greek works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus.

The range of studies was widened, however, at Rugby in 1828-1842 by Thomas Arnold, whose interest in ancient history and geography, as a necessary part of classical learning, is attested by his edition of Thucydides; while his influence was still further extended when those who had been trained in his traditions became head masters of other schools.

Hebrew was included, while the Greek and Latin classics were neglected; the Homilies of Macarius took the place of Thucydides.

In 424 B.C. it surrendered to the Spartan Brasidas without resistance, owing to the gross negligence of the historian Thucydides, who was with the fleet at Thasos.

This is the less improbable because it lies in the neighbourhood of a line of earthquake movement, and both from Thucydides and from Strabo we hear of the northern part of the island being shaken at different periods, and the latter writer speaks of a fountain at Chalcis being dried up by a similar cause, and a mud volcano formed in the neighbouring plain.

Her models are Thucydides, Polybius and Xenophon, and her style exhibits the striving after Atticism characteristic of the period, with the result that the language is highly artificial.

Funeral orations, such as the famous speech put into the mouth of Pericles by Thucydides, also partook of the nature of panegyrics.

The principal are - in Italian, the famous Il Galateo (1558), a treatise of manners, which has been translated into several languages, and in Latin, De officiis, and translations from Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle.

Thucydides mentions eruptions in the 8th and 5th centuries B.C., and others are mentioned by Livy in 125, 121 and 43 B.C. Catania was overwhelmed in 1169, and many other serious eruptions are recorded, notably in 1669, 1830, 1852, 1865, 1879, 1886, 1892, 1899 and March 1910.

Thucydides, Sophocles and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon's Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504.

Unable at first to cope with their unfamiliar ideas, he determined to become a scholar, and until 1628 was engaged in a careful study of Greek and Latin authors, the outcome of which was his great translation of Thucydides.

Nothing else is known of his doings 1 The translation, under the title Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides the son of Olorus, interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greek by Thomas Hobbes, secretary to the late Earl of Devonshire, appeared in 1628 (or 1629), after the death of the earl, to whom touching reference is made in the dedication.

Thucydides, however, unhesitatingly reckons them among barbarians.

According to Thucydides the war, which was ' Some historians prefer to call it the Second Peloponnesian War, the first being that of 457, which ended with the Thirty Years' Peace.

The very narrative even of Thucydides himself shows that the " war " was not a connected whole.

Thucydides expressly warns us not to regard the period of this book as one of peace, and yet the very contents of the book refute his argument.

Some critics think on these and other grounds that Thucydides wrote and published bks.

The view taken by Thucydides that Sparta was the real foe of Athens has been much modified by modern writers.

There has been considerable discussion as to the exact figures, the evidence in Thucydides being highly confusing, but it is most probable that the available fighting force was not more than half that of the Peloponnesian confederacy.

The policy, which Thucydides and Grote commend, had grave defects - though it is by no means easy to suggest a better; e.g.

This was not only the worst disaster which befell any powerful state up to the peace of Nicias (as Thucydides says), but was a serious blow to Corinth, whose trade on the West was, as we have seen, one of the chief causes of the war.

This idea is disproved by Thucydides' own narrative, which shows that down to 418 (the battle of Mantinea) Sparta tolerated democratic governments in Peloponnesus itself - e.g.

His models are Thucydides and Herodotus.

The magnificent palace of Minos - there seems no reason to withhold from it the name of the great prince whom Thucydides recognized as the first to hold the empire of the sea - perished by the flames, and it evidently had been plundered beforehand of everything that a conqueror would regard as valuable.

His style, modelled on that of Thucydides and unreservedly praised by Photius, is on the whole pure, though somewhat rhetorical and showing a fondness for Latinisms.

Thucydides, who quotes this passage to show the ancient character of the Delian festival, seems to have no doubt of the Homeric authorship of the hymn.

Thucydides notices as a popular mistake the belief that Hipparchus was the eldest son of Peisistratus, and that consequently he was the reigning " tyrant " when he was killed by Aristogiton.

Against the theory which sees in Peisistratus the author of the first complete text of Homer we have to set the absolute silence of Herodotus, Thucydides, the orators and the Alexandrian grammarians.

Herodotus and Thucydides seem to tell us all that they know of Peisistratus.

A school-fellow who followed him to the university has described in glowing terms evenings in his rooms, "when Aeschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day.

The operations at Pylos, described by Thucydides iv.

Though differing on many points, they agree in thinking (I) that the island of Sphagia is the ancient Sphacteria, Palaeokastro the ancient Coryphasium or Pylos; (2) that in 425 B.C. the lagoon of Osman Aga was navigable and communicated by a navigable channel with the Bay of Navarino; (3) that Thucydides, if the MS. reading is correct, underestimates the length of the island, which he gives as 15 stades instead of 24 (nearly 3 m.), and also the breadth of the southern channel between it and the mainland.

But in spite of all this we are forced to acknowledge that, as a master of what we may perhaps call "narrative history," he has no superior in antiquity; for, inferior as he is to Thucydides, to Polybius, and even to Tacitus in philosophic power and breadth of view, he is at least their equal in the skill with which he tells his story.

Here the product of the age of Pericles remains unsurpassed still; the works of Herodotus and Thucydides standing along with those of Pheidias as models for all time.

Poetry, as Thucydides complained, is a most imperfect medium for fact.

In Thucydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science.

From the sublimity of Thucydides, and Xenophon's straightforward story, history passed with Theopompus and Ephorus into the field of rhetoric. A revival of the scientific instinct of investigation is discernable in Timaeus the Sicilian, at the end of the 4th century, but his attack upon his predecessors was the text of a more crushing attack upon himself by Polybius, who declares him lacking in critical insight and biased by passion.

The first Roman historian who rose to the conception of a science and art combined was Sallust, the student of Thucydides.

From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides.

Thucydides, however, applies the term to all his own predecessors, and it is therefore usual to make a distinction between the older and the younger logographers.

It is true that, as a matter of fact, the earliest uses of the word (the verb /xXoa04Eiv occurs in Herodotus and Thucydides) imply the idea of the pursuit of knowledge; but the distinction between the aogios, or wise man, and the 4nXoaoa50s, or lover of wisdom, appears first in the Platonic writings, and lends itself naturally to the so-called Socratic irony.

Oxford he did not find wholly congenial to his intensely earnest spirit, but he read hard, and, as he afterwards said, "Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution."

He wrote a History of Sicily from the earliest times to 424, which was used by Thucydides, and the Colonizing of Italy, frequently referred to by Strabo and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.

He took a leading part in establishing the oligarchy of the Four Hundred at Athens in 411 B.C., and was assassinated in the same year (Thucydides viii.).

If Thucydides is justly accounted the first political historian, Ari may be fitly styled the first of scientific historians.

Biographers have delighted to relate how painfully Demosthenes made himself a tolerable speaker, - how, with pebbles in his mouth, he tried his lungs against the waves, how he declaimed as he ran up hill, how he shut himself up in a cell, having first guarded himself against a longing for the haunts of men by shaving one side of his head, how he wrote out Thucydides eight times, how he was derided by the Assembly and encouraged by a judicious actor who met him moping about the Peiraeus.

Hence it resulted that, while Plato, Thucydides and Demosthenes were the most universally popular of the classical prosewriters, the text of Demosthenes, the most widely used perhaps of all, was also the least pure.

He translated Ferguson's Fall of the Roman Republic and Goldsmith's History of Greece, and added two volumes to Bauer's Thucydides.

An attack on Eion was foiled by the arrival of Thucydides, the historian, at the head of an Athenian squadron.

See in particular Thucydides, ii.-v.; what Diodorus xii.

Many illustrious Athenians - Cimon, Miltiades, Alcibiades, the historian Thucydides - traced their descent from Ajax.

See SY Racuse (for the siege operations), commentaries on Thucydides and the Greek histories.

The character of Cleon is represented by Aristophanes and Thucydides in an extremely unfavourable light.

Thucydides, a man of strong oligarchical prejudices, had also been prosecuted for military incapacity and exiled by a decree proposed by Cleon.

From 1810 to 1812 he travelled in France, Switzerland and Italy, and on his return to Paris published an Essai critique sur la topographic de Syracuse (1812), designed to elucidate Thucydides.

These measures have been interpreted as an appeal to the baser instincts of the mob, but this assumption is entirely out of keeping with all we know of Pericles' general attitude towards the people, over whom Thucydides says he practically ruled as a king.

We must, then, admit that Pericles sincerely contemplated the good of his fellow-countrymen, and we may believe that he endeavoured to realize that ideal Athens which Thucydides sketches in the Funeral Speech - an Athens where free and intelligent obedience is rendered to an equitable code of laws, where merit finds its way to the front, where military efficiency is found along with a free development in other directions and strangles neither commerce nor art.

In spite of an unusually large crop of scandals about him we cannot but believe that he bore an honourable character, and his integrity is vouched for by Thucydides in such strong terms as to exclude all further doubt on the question.

The scanty traces which remain have not been systematically excavated except in the neighbourhood of the Dipylon; the discovery of sepulchral tablets built into the masonry illustrates the statement of Thucydides with regard to the employment of such material in the hasty construction of the walls.

Possibly Thucydides, who in the passage referred to is dealing with the question of defence, included a portion of the contiguous long walls in his measurement; this explanation derives probability from his underestimate of the length of the long walls.

Thucydides lays emphasis on the fact that in these meetings Athens as head of the league had no more than presidential authority, and the other members were called 614cµaxot (allies), a word, however, of ambiguous meaning and capable of including both free and subject allies.

The only other fact preserved by Thucydides is that Athens appointed a board called the Hellenotamiae (ra,aias, steward) to watch over and administer the treasury of the league, which for some twenty years was kept at Delos, and to receive the contributions (06pos) of the allies who paid in money.

Owing to the silence of Thucydides and other reasons, many scholars regard it as merely a cessation of hostilities (see Cimon and Callias, where authorities are quoted).

Hunt, who have also produced fragments of the Paeans of Pindar and many other classic texts (including a Greek continuation of Thucydides and a Latin epitome of part of Livy) in the successive volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and other kindred publications.

In an elaborate memoir 2 he showed that the ancient solar eclipses described by Herodotus, Thucydides, and others, which seemed to require an increased value of the secular acceleration of the moon's mean motion to bring them into line with modern results, might safely be neglected, the ambiguity of the accounts in each case rendering uncertain either the totality of the eclipse or the place from which it was visible.