420 HISTORY OF GREECE. against a man who, as an historian, has earned the lasting admi. ration of posterity, my own, among the first and wannest. But in criticizing the conduct of Thucydides the officer, we are bound in common justice to forget Thucydides the historian. He was not known in the latter character, at the time when this sen- tence was passed : perhaps he never would have been so known, like the Neapolitan historian Colletta, if exile had not thrown him out of the active duties and hopes of a citizen. It may be doubted whether he ever went home from Eion to encounter the grief, wrath, and alarm, so strongly felt at Athens after the loss of Amphipolis. Condemned, either with or without appearance, he remained in banishment for twenty years ;* nor did he return to Athens until after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war. Of this long exile, much is said to have been spent on his prop- erty in Thrace : yet he also visited most parts of Greece, enemies of Athens as well as neutral states. However much we may deplore such a misfortune on his account, mankind in general have, and ever will have, the strongest reason to rejoice at it. To this compulsory leisure we owe the completion, or rather the near approach to completion, of his history : nor is it less certain that the opportunities which an exile enjoyed of personally consulting neutrals and enemies, contributed much to form that impartial, comprehensive, Pan-Hellenic spirit, which reigns generally throughout his immortal work. Meanwhile, Brasidas, installed in Amphipolis about the begin- ning of December, 424 B.C., employed his increased power only the more vigorously against Athens. His first care was to recon- stitute Amphipolis; a task wherein the Macedonian Perdikkas, whose intrigues had contributed to the capture, came and person ally assisted. That city w r as going through a partial secession and renovation of inhabitants, and was now moreover cut off from the port of Eion and the mouth of the river, which re- mained in the hands of the Athenians. Many new arrangements must have been required, as well for its internal polity as for its external defence. Brasidas took measures for building ships of war, in the lake above the city, in order to force the lower part of the river: 2 but his most important step was to construct a
1 Thucya. v, 26. * Thncyd. iv, 104-103
