‘Thucydides of Athens wrote the war’ (1.1.1). Many translators have said that he wrote the history of the war. Others could say that he wrote a history, one of the many that could have been written. But both, the question of history aside, would understate him. The verb he uses, sungraphein, with which he also often signs off his account of a year, was unusual and in a world in which prose was still rare, ambiguous. Literally ‘to depict together’ and by extension ‘to bring together in writing’, it can allow us to read him both to say that he wrote up the information he had and constructed the war to make it the one we should know. He may mean both.

Events, erga, things done (1.22.2), were as they were; if they happened they happened and had to be recovered. There is no reason to doubt that Thucydides investigated the reports he received ‘with the utmost concern for accuracy’ and was in reporting as truthful as he could manage. Likewise with the speeches, even if he had more often than not to resort to imagining what the speaker in question would ‘most appropriately’ have said in the circumstances in which he found himself. And in writing all this down he sought the authority that writing gave. The most extreme contrast would have been with the vagaries of oral exchange in the conditions of internal war, where ‘simplicity’ of spirit – as Hobbes translates it, ‘sincerity’ – ‘was laughed to scorn and vanished’ (3.83.1). ‘Men assumed the right to reverse the usual values in the application of words to actions’ (3.82.4), and nothing said could be trusted. The comparison would have been with the aspiration of the Athenian general Nicias. Wanting to be sure he could convey the predicament he found himself in in Sicily in 414 and fearing that a messenger's oral account ‘would fail to report the true facts, whether through lack of ability in speaking or failure of memory or a wish to indulge mass opinion’, Nicias sent a letter so that those in Athens ‘should deliberate with a view to the truth of the matter’ (7.8.2).