THUCYDIDES'S USE OF DOCUMENTS 189 403, and imply a new and more ambitious aim for his history. When he wrote the Ten Years' War he gave no documents — not the peace of 445, nor the treaties with Rhegion and Leontini in 433, nor even that with Corcyra. The same with his Sicihan War ; there is not even the treaty with Egesta. He began his history as a true ' chronicle of the war by summers and winters.' He enlarged it to an attempt at a full and philosophic history of Athens in her diplomatic and imperial relations. When he was cut off from documents he saw their value, and when the opportunity came back, embodied them in his history as they stood recorded on the stones. The great political speeches were not recorded ; he knew that they expressed the inner meaning of the time, and he did his best to re- member or recreate them. Here again his work is unfinished. He has only nine documents in all, and the collection seems to a certain extent fortuitous. Three of them, more interesting than important, are mere abortive and apparently secret treaties between Sparta and Persia. He must have got these through some private channel, perhaps from the same source — Kirchoff thinks, Alcibiades — as the Argive and Spartan documents in Book V. Many more documents would have been needed to make up his ideal history ; and many more of the dissertations and digressions, the explanations of internal policy and social change, which are now almost confined to the first two books and the introduction to Book VI. Even the documents which he has got, have not, as we have seen, been fully utilised. There were still some small errors in the narrative, which documentary evidence could help him to correct. There were some considcr- 14
