form of the Athenian constitution; its special importance for the history of the war lay in the use which Alcibiades was making of it to procure his own recall. This is perhaps the only point in the extant part of the Eighth Book at which the usual practice of Thucydides would lead us to expect the dramatic emphasis; and just here it is found. Peisander brings his opponents to admit that the case of Athens is desperate without the help of Persia. "This, then," he says, "we cannot get, unless we adopt a more temperate policy, and concentrate the administration in fewer hands, so as to secure the confidence of the king, . . . and recall Alcibiades, the only man living who can gain our end[1]." In a revision of the book Thucydides would possibly have worked up the speech of Peisander at greater length[2].
§ 11. As regards the language of the speeches, Thucydides plainly avows that it is chiefly or wholly his own[3]. The dramatic truth, so far as it goes, is in the matter, not in the form. He may sometimes indicate such broad characteristics as the curt blunt-
- ↑ viii. 53.
- ↑ The absence of military harangues, too, in Book viii. is sufficiently explained by the absence of any good occasion for them. The sea-fights at Euboea (95) and Cyzicus were hardly such: and the narrative breaks off before the more decisive actions of Cynossema and Aegospotami. The question has been discussed lately in an essay, De Thucydidei Operis Libri viii. indole ac natura, by Paul Hellwig (Halle, 1876).
- ↑ i. 22, where the ἀκρίβεια αὐτὴ τῶν λεχθέντων is opposed to the ξύμπασα γνώμη.
