does—by comments of his own. The victims of aggression, indeed, the Plataeans or Melians, appeal to a higher justice than the right of might, and Thucydides hints that his sympathies are with them[1]; but that is all. The abstention is characteristic. On the whole, it may be said that he evinces a personal liking for moral nobleness[2], but refrains from delivering moral judgments[3], as if these would imply laws which he was not prepared to affirm or deny. But he insists on discovering a rational basis for action. If a man or a State pursues a certain line of policy, there must be some intelligible reasons, he feels, which can be urged for it. This desire to enter into the mind of the actors—to find the motive behind the deed, and to state it with all possible logical force—is the mainspring of the oratory in Thucydides, in so far as this is his own creation. It is an element of dramatic vividness; sometimes also of dramatic untruth, when the reasonings supplied by the historian to his actors are subtler than would probably have occurred to the speakers or commended themselves to the
- ↑ Not expressly, but by the naked repulsiveness in which he exhibits the "right of might."
- ↑ As Professor Sellar says ("Characteristics of Thucydides," Oxford Essays, 1857): "His own feeling shines out in such expressions as this,—'Simple-mindedness, which is mostly an ingredient in noble natures' (iii. 83). The speeches attributed to Pericles are especially expressive of generous ideas of man."
- ↑ It is enough to instance the manner in which he relates without comment the treachery of Paches to Hippias (iii. 54), and the assassination of two thousand Helots by the Spartans (iv. 80).
