Book 1, Chapter 1 — The State of Greece from the earliest Times to the Commencement of the Peloponnesian War
Before the war begins, Thucydides dismantles every heroic myth about Greece's past.
Summary
Thucydides announces himself as the historian of the greatest war in history and immediately sets about proving it. The first chapter is at once a manifesto and a demonstration: he will write what actually happened, not what is pleasing to hear. His evidence for the greatness of the present conflict is partly argument and partly the diminishment of everything that came before. Ancient Greece, he shows, was a world of perpetual insecurity — constant migrations, no trade, no capital accumulation, no permanence. The strong drove out the weak, the weak scattered, nothing was built to last.
The Archaeology's method is as important as its conclusions. Thucydides works from what survives: the size of ships implied by Homer's catalogues, the style of fortifications, the evidence of disease and violence in burial customs, the patterns of settlement visible in contemporary geography. He is doing what we would now call archaeology and historical sociology, in a world without those disciplines, in the fifth century BCE. His argument that even the Trojan War was a modest affair — Agamemnon's power merely that of a slightly stronger chief among many equals — was as provocative in its time as Darwin's argument about human ancestry would be in his.
The Archaeology ends by establishing the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the present war as the period in which Athenian power grew to the point where Sparta's fear of it became the deep cause of the war now beginning. Everything before is prologue. Thucydides intends the reader to understand that nothing in previous Greek experience equipped anyone to foresee or to measure what is about to happen. He writes at the start of something genuinely new, and he knows it.
- Book 1Book 1 opens not with battle but with argument.
- Book 1The immediate causes of the war begin with Epidamnus — a small colony on the Adriatic whose civil strife triggers a chain of interventions that pulls Corinth against Corcyra and Corcyra toward Athens.
- Book 1The congress at Lacedaemon is the Peloponnesian War's diplomatic overture.
- Book 1The Pentecontaetia — the fifty years between the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War — is Thucydides's compressed account of how Athens turned from war-leader to empire.
- Book 1Chapter 5 is the last diplomatic chapter before war breaks out.
- Book 2The war formally begins with the Theban attack on Plataea.
- Book 2The plague of Athens is the History's most famous sustained passage outside the Funeral Oration.
- Book 2Chapter 8 covers the third year of the war across multiple theatres.
- Book 3Book 3 opens with the revolt of Mytilene, the largest and most strategically significant of the Athenian allied cities.
- Book 3Two episodes in Book 3's second half illustrate what civil and inter-state war does to the norms that normally govern violence.
- Book 3Chapter 11 follows the Athenian general Demosthenes through a remarkable arc: from the catastrophic defeat in Aetolia, where he led light-armed Athenian troops into wooded hill country they were utterly unequipped to fight in and lost the greater part of them, to the brilliant campaign in Acarnania, where he used his knowledge of irregular warfare, learned at severe cost, to ambush and nearly annihilate a Peloponnesian and Ambraciot force.
- Book 4The Pylos campaign is the tactical and psychological turning point of the war's first decade.
- Book 4Chapter 13 moves across multiple theatres in the war's seventh and eighth years.
- Book 4Book 4's final chapter belongs to Brasidas — the one Spartan commander who combined military brilliance with political intelligence, the qualities Sparta as an institution consistently undervalued.
- Book 5The tenth year of the war produces one of history's more striking coincidences of elimination.
- Book 5The peace after Cleon and Brasidas is a peace in name only.
- Book 5The Melian Dialogue is ten pages in most editions and has been discussed for two and a half thousand years.
- Book 6Book 6 opens with the debate and vote on the Sicilian Expedition — one of the History's great scenes of collective irrationality.
- Book 6While the Athenian expedition crosses the sea, Syracuse holds its own debate about whether to believe the threat.
- Book 6With Alcibiades gone and Lamachus increasingly the operational commander, the Athenian force finally moves seriously against Syracuse in the expedition's second year.
- Book 7Book 7 opens with the Athenian position deteriorating on every front simultaneously.
- Book 7Demosthenes arrives with the reinforcements and immediately does what Nicias had been unable to do: he assesses the situation, decides on a bold stroke, and acts.
- Book 7Book 7's final chapters are the most sustained tragic narrative in classical literature.
- Book 8Book 8 opens with Athens after Sicily — a city that could not believe what it had done to itself, then could not stop the consequences.
- Book 8Chapter 25 covers one of the strangest episodes in Athenian history: the oligarchic revolution of 411 BCE, in which a conspiracy of four hundred men overthrows the Athenian democracy at the city's moment of maximum strategic vulnerability.
- Book 8The History's final chapter covers the collapse of the Four Hundred, the restoration of a modified democracy in Athens, the recall and rehabilitation of Alcibiades, and the Athenian naval victory at Cynossema — a victory that demonstrates Athens's ability to recover even now.