social and intellectual life of his age[1]. The simplest explanation of it is that he did not conceive such details as requisite for the illustration of his purely political subject. The art and poetry of the day, the philosophy and the society, were perhaps in his view merely the decorations of the theatre in which the great tragedy of the war was being played. Though he wrote for all time, he did not conceive of an audience who would have to reconstruct this theatre before they could fully comprehend his drama[2]. No writer has ever been at once so
- ↑ The names of Aeschylus, Sophocles (the poet), Euripides (the poet), Aristophanes, Pheidias, Ictinus, Anaxagoras, Socrates, are among those which Thucydides nowhere mentions. In addition to Helen (i. 9) and Procne (ii. 29), only four women are named in the whole History, and not one of them has the slightest human interest in reference to the war—Chrysis and Phaeinis, successively priestesses of the Argive Hera (ii. 1, iv. 133); Stratonice, the sister of Perdiccas (ii. 101); and Archedice, the daughter of Hippias (vi. 59). The Parthenon is alluded to as a treasury; and the Propylaea are noticed—as a work which had reduced the balance in it (ii. 13 § 3, where ἐν τῇ ἀκροπόλει = ἐν τῷ ὀπισθοδόμῳ).
- ↑ Thucydides can, indeed, imagine a time when Sparta shall be desolate, and only the ruins of Athens shall remain; i. 10 § 2, Λακεδαιμονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρημωθείη . . . Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων, κ.τ.λ. But he has no conception of a time when the Hellenic civilisation that he knew should have passed away. Thus Pericles says that Athens (unlike Troy or Mycenae, he means) needs no Homer to persuade posterity of her greatness: she has established on every shore imperishable monuments of her power for evil or good, where the ἀΐδια μνημεῖα are the Athenian settlements on conquered or on friendly soil. Cf ii. 64, ἢν καὶ νῦν ὑπενδῶμέν ποτε . . . μνήμη καταλελείψεται, κ.τ.λ.,—where the μνήμη assumes a purely Hellenic standard.
