Thucydides is generally considered the paragon of an amoral historiographer. Even if most scholars (classicists, at least, if not historians) nowadays agree that his History is not an ideal, objective account of events ‘just as they happened’, few are happy to talk about ‘moralising’ or even moral didacticism in the work. Rather than moralising, it is common to look for Thucydides’ political views, psychological insights, political theory or personal opinions, which are assumed to be more or less hidden in the text. I would argue that, like other Greek historiographers before and after him, Thucydides did not distinguish between moral and political opinions, or between moral and practical didacticism. In this chapter, we shall search Thucydides’ History, first for the types of moralising we have seen in Polybius and Diodorus, then for other ways of teaching moral lessons, and finally we shall ask what those moral lessons might be. At the end, I hope it will be clear that Thucydides is not a lone non-moralising historiographer, but that there are features of his moral didacticism that set him apart from his predecessor and successors.

PREFACE

The introduction to Thucydides’ History is deliberately structured on the same framework as the introduction to Herodotus’ Histories: a brief proem presenting the author and his work (1.1) followed by a quick overview of ancient/mythological history (the Archaeologia, 1.2–19), followed by a second first-person statement setting out part of his methodology (1.21–2).

An important purpose of the proem is to distinguish his work from that of Herodotus, without ever mentioning the latter's name: the war (not even the account of it, but the actual war) is ‘written’ rather than ‘a presentation’, and the fact that the author himself lived through the war and experienced it is emphasised, whereas Thucydides insists that it is ‘impossible’ to find reliable information to do what Herodotus did, namely write about earlier time periods. Moreover, Thucydides’ topic is the ‘greatest disturbance there has ever been for the Greeks and a part of the barbarians’, these latter surely being mentioned exclusively for the benefit of readers who might think that Herodotus’ topic was greater in geographical scope, at least, if not in importance. We shall soon see that Thucydides and Herodotus have more in common than Thucydides is letting on.