be truer to say that the war itself presented striking contrasts, analogous to those which a dramatic poet contrives: the dullest writer could not have wholly missed these contrasts; and if Diodorus had been the historian, his work, too, might have revealed the five acts; but Thucydides was peculiarly well fitted to bring out these contrasts with the most complete effect. He was so, because he felt the whole moment and pathos of the events themselves; because he saw them with the distinctness of intense concentration; and because, partly under the influence of language[1], he had even more than the ordinary Greek love of antithesis. It is obvious that the Peloponnesian war, as a subject for history, may be
- ↑ The Greek instinct for symmetry and just measure sharpened the perception of contrast, and the desire of vividly expressing contrast helped to mould the language. Thus when it is said of Antigone, πασῶν γυναικῶν ὡς ἀναξιωτάτη| κάκιστ' ἀπ' ἔργων εὐκλεεστάτων φθίνει (694), it is the keenly felt opposition of things that is striving to utter itself in the forcible opposition of words. Then Rhetoric arose, with its opposition of words even where there was no commensurate opposition of things. Thucydides was partly under this influence of Rhetoric: witness his ἔργον and λόγος, etc.; but, by a reversal of the natural process, the very habit of verbal antithesis tended to quicken the observation of opportunities for its effective employment.
