History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides is said to be notoriously difficult to translate, and scholars have vigorously debated his text. Such debates about words and their meaning are themselves fitting to Thucydides’ work. He acknowledges that his “history will seem less easy to read because of the absence in it of a romantic element” (47-48). He states that he is not trying to entertain but to educate: Unlike poets and “prose chroniclers,” Thucydides is concerned with conveying truths about the war and, more broadly, human nature that will benefit his audiences. His dense and difficult style may be a product of his intention to employ language in the service of analysis and enduring truth rather than flights of fancy and fleeting entertainment.

Thucydides employs two conventions that appear in ancient Greek literature and philosophy in 5th-century Athens: speeches and dialogue.The History of the Peloponnesian War contains a total of 141 speeches delivered by Spartans, Athenians, and allies on both sides and one dialogue, the Melian Dialogue. Among the speeches, Pericles’ Funeral Oration, delivered in Book 2, is one of the most famous.

Thucydides claims to reproduce speeches and dialogue in their speakers’ own words. He then adds, contradictorily, that owing to lapses of memory he had to creatively reconstruct speeches he heard himself or secondhand, from eyewitnesses.