Earlier versions of portions of this article were presented at meetings of the Atlantic Provinces Political Studies Association (1985), the Northeastern Political Science Association (1985), the North American Chapter of the Society for Greek Political Thought (1986), and the New England Political Science Association (1989). I wish to thank Christopher Bruell, Patrick Coby, Clifford Orwin, and anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts, and the University of Maine, the Earhart Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation for their generous financial support of the research on which this article is based.

^1. Murray, G., A History of Ancient Greek Literature (New York: Appleton, 1897), p. 198.Google Scholar

^2. Bury, J.B., The Ancient Greek Historians (London: Macmillan, 1909), pp. 140–43,Google Scholar Bury's emphasis.

^3. Ibid., pp. 144–45.

^4. See Gildin, H., Political Philosophy: Six Essays by Leo Strauss (Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1975).Google Scholar

^5. Gunnell, J., “The Myth of the Tradition,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^6. The critics include Skinner, Q., “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969): 3–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPocock, J.G.A., Pblitics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971);Google Scholar and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975);Google Scholar and, “Prophet and Inquisitor: Or, A Church Built Upon Bayonets Cannot Stand: A Comment on Mansfield's ‘Strauss's Machiavelli’,” Political Theory 3 (1975): 385–405;CrossRefGoogle ScholarGunnell, , “Myth of the Tradition”; and Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge: Winthrop, 1979).Google Scholar The allies include Mansfield, H.C. Jr., “Strauss's Machiavelli,” Political Theory 3 (1975): 372–84;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Machiavelli's New Modes and Orders: A Study of the “Discourses on Livy” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979);Google ScholarTarcov, N., “Quentin Skinner's Method and Machiavelli's Prince” Ethics 92 (1982): 692–709;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and, “Philosophy and History: Tradition and Interpretation in the Work of Leo Strauss,” Polity 16 (1983): 5–29;CrossRefGoogle ScholarTarcov, N. and Pangle, T., “Epilogue: Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Strauss, L. and Cropsey, J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3rd ed., pp. 907–38;Google ScholarNewell, W.R., “How Original in Machiavelli?: A Consideration of Skinner's Interpretation of Virtue and Fortune,” Political Theory 15 (1987): 612–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^7. Orwin, C., “The Just and the Advantageous: The Case of the Mytilenaian Debate,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984): 485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^8. de Alvarez, L.P.S., Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince: Translation, Introduction, and Notes (Irving: University of Dallas Press, 1980), p. 93.Google Scholar

^9. For some interesting reflections on Machiavellian virtù and Homeric aretē, see Ball, T., “The Picaresque Prince: Reflections on Machiavelli and Moral Change” Political Theory 12 (1984): 521–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^10. Alvarez, , Prince, pp. 51–55.Google Scholar

^11. Ibid., p. 102, my emphasis.

^12. See Strauss, , Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe: Free Press, 1958);Google Scholar and (in addition to Strauss's “allies” cited above in note 6) Orwin, , “Machiavelli's Unchristian Charity,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 1217–28;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMansfield, , The Prince: A New Translation with an Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. vii–xxiv.Google Scholar

^13. Bétant, E., Lexicon Thucydideum (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961).Google Scholar

^14. See Strauss, , The City and Man (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964), pp. 163–74.Google Scholar I am broadly and deeply indebted to Strauss's interpretation of Thucydides.

^15. This is not to say that the speeches of Thucydidean characters can be ignored, in the end, or that Thucydides does not intend for us to learn important things from the speeches of his characters. Thucydides attests to his own presence in the speeches of his characters (1. 22), and, in the end, analysis of the speeches must be essential to grasping Thucydides' understanding of things. But this is not the end; it is the beginning. I cite Thucydidean passages by the customary numbers: book, chapter, sentence (where relevant).

^16. Ironically, the Athenians benefited from the lack of “virtue” of their “motherland” (myths of autochthony to the contrary notwithstanding).

^17. Thucydides offers two assessments of Brasidas. They are sufficiently (apparently) redundant that “separatist” critics have claimed support here for their attempts to divine various stages of composition and (incomplete) revision of the narrative. But the passages are not, in fact, redundant. In this first (4. 81), Thucydides informs us that Brasidas “presented himself as just and measured [metrion, not the virtue of sōphrosynē]” before the cities. In the second (4. 108), reference to Brasidas' “justice” is dropped. Among other things, in the interim, Thucydides, himself, has “experienced,” not merely “heard about,” Brasidas.

One might suggest that the Spartans' later betraying the cities that Brasidas liberated, for the sake of the “Peace of Nicias,” prevented Brasidas' actions from being accounted “just” by Thucydides. But I believe Brasidas, had he lived, would not have permitted the betrayal of these cities; Thucydides hints that Brasidas' ambitions in Sparta rivaled those of Alcibiades in Athens. My argument, however, would require a paper of its own. Compare Connor, W.R., Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 126–40.Google Scholar

^18. See Connor, , Thucydides, p. 205,Google Scholar for an important philological note and bibliography on the question of Nicias' “aretēn nenomismenēn” in which he directs us to, among other things, the important recent discussions of Edmunds, L., Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 141–42;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Adkins, A.W.H., “The Aretē of Nicias,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 16 (1975): 379–91.Google Scholar

^19. Murray, , History of Ancient Greek Literature, p. 198.Google Scholar

^20. Compare de Romilly, J., Histoire et Raison chez Thucydide (Paris: “Les Belles Lettres,” 1956);Google ScholarAron, R., “Thucydide et le récit des événements,” History and Theory 1 (1960–1961);Google ScholarWallace, W.P., “Thucydides,” Phoenix 18 (1964): 251–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarStrauss, , City and Man, especially pp. 163–74;Google ScholarHunter, V., Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973);Google ScholarPouncey, P., The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides' Pessimism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 13–15, 165–67;Google ScholarRawlings, H.R., III, The Structure of Thucydides'History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), especially pp. 263–72.Google Scholar

^21. These sorts of considerations are crucial for understanding many of the alleged defects of Thucydides' “history”: his “unscientific” attention to acts of piety and impiety; his apparently pointless and cumbersome “digressions”; indeed, the dramatic structure of the narrative as a whole. Connor's Thucydides is such a marvelously successful study in part because he is so acutely sensitive to the nuances of Thucydides' narrative techniques. It is worthwhile to consult Connor on any passage in Thucydides.

^22. Gomme, A.W., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945): 137,Google Scholar goes so far as to suggest that Thucydides would have eliminated this passage had he lived long enough to prepare a final revision of his “history.”

^23. For more on this “digression,” and its larger context, see Palmer, M., “Alcibiades and the Question of Tyranny in Thucydides,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 15 (1982): 103–24;CrossRefGoogle Scholar compare Forde, S., “Thucydides on the Causes of Athenian Imperialism,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986): 440–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^24. Compare Strauss, , City and Man, p. 200,Google Scholar note 65.

^25. Similarly, in an inverted way, Machiavelli's calling the “inhuman cruelty” of Hannibal a “virtue” does not necessarily mean that Hannibal, himself, would have called it a virtue, or that Machiavelli thinks he would have.

^26. Compare what follows with discussions of the “archaeology” in Connor, , Thucydides, pp. 20–32;Google Scholar and Pouncey, , Necessities of War, pp. 45–53.Google Scholar

^27. Thucydides notes that in Homer only those of the town of Achilles were called “Hellenes.” I believe this is his way of suggesting that Homeric poetry was a key factor in the advent of “Greekness,” or the “Hellenization” of the world. As for how the name of Achilles' tribe might have been appropriated by others over the generations, consider the implication of the words Thucydides puts into the mouth of Alcibiades speaking before his fellow Athenians concerning how later generations of Athenians will speak of their relationship to him (6. 16. 5).

^28. By way of contrast, the best regime that Athens ever had, at least in Thucydides' own explicit judgment, at least in Thucydides' own lifetime, the regime of the Five Thousand of 411, a measured blending of democracy and oligarchy that moved Athenian democracy in the direction of the Spartan regime, lasted but a few months (8. 97. 2).

^29. Compare Connor, , Thucydides, p. 31;Google ScholarPouncey, , Necessities of War, p. 148.Google Scholar

^30. It is remarkable, in view of many modern interpretations of the failure of the Sicilian expedition, that Thucydides takes the moment of the sailing of the second Athenian expeditionary force as an opportunity to remark not Athenian overextension in Sicily, but the world's underestimation of Athenian power and daring.

^31. I borrow the epithet from the title of Hunter's book, cited above in n. 20.

^32. It is perhaps worth noting that in the middle of the “archaeology” Thucydides graphically anticipates modern archaeology: he bids his readers to imagine the day in the future when all that will remain of Athens and Sparta will be ruins (1. 10). And he puts the lesson into the mouth of Pericles: all things pass away (2. 64. 3). The description of Mycalessus before her tragedy recalls Thucydides' description of “old Athens,” which had to be destroyed as a consequence of Pericles' strategy for defending Athenian imperialism (2. 14–17), which Thucydides places immediately before the hubristic dazzle of the Funeral Oration.

^33. An outstanding recent contribution to the literature on these passages is Orwin, C., “Stasis and Plague: Thucydides on the Dissolution of Society,” Journal of Politics 50 (1988): 831–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^34. On “biaios didaskalos” compare Connor, , Thucydides, p. 102,Google Scholar n. 57; and Pouncey, , Necessities of War, p. 182,Google Scholar n. 5.

^35. It is this, more than anything else, I believe, that separates Thucydides from modern authors like Hobbes, whose description of the “state of nature” is virtually lifted from his own translation of Thucydides' account of the Corcyrean stasis. Connor, Thucydides, p. 104, remarks, “The illusion of progress is shattered. The constancy of human nature, the premise upon which much of the analysis of the Archaeology is based, remains, but its implications are deeply pessimistic. … No longer is there a suggestion that knowing the recurrence of events will enable us to draw useful inferences about the future (1. 22. 4). The past will recur, but that recurrence has become a threat, not a promise.” Compare Pouncey, , Necessities of War, pp. 43–44, 151–57.Google Scholar

^36. Diodotus gives the most “Thucydidean” speech in the narrative, the speech that comes closest to expressing, if it is not identical to, Thucydides' own view of political life. Diodotus successfully opposes Cleon, the great political nemesis of Nicias before the advent of Alcibiades. This “Diodotus,” the profoundest speaker in Thucydides' narrative, is otherwise unknown. His name might be translated “gift of Zeus” and he is said to be the son of “Euchrates” (“power well–wielded”), another wonderful example, I believe, of Thucydides' artfulness. Compare Ostwald, M., “Diodotus,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 20 (1979): 5–13.Google Scholar

^37. In the Corcyrean stasis, the Cleonian view of justice as vengeance rules supreme. On the heels of Cleon's destruction, in the Mytilenean Debate, of distinctions between enemies, allies, and subjects (3. 38), comes the destruction of the distinction between enemies and fellow citizens at Corcyra. The democrats eventually slaughter the oligarchs at Corcyra, just as Cleon counseled the slaughter of democrats and oligarchs alike at Mytilene. On Diodotus' debate with Cleon, see Orwin, , “The Just and the Advantageous”; and, “Democracy and Distrust: A Lesson from Thucydides,” The American Scholar 53 (1984): 313–25;Google Scholar compare Cogan, M., “Mytilene, Plataea and Corcyra,” Phoenix 35 (1981): 1–21;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides'History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 50–65.Google Scholar

^38. As the above note indicates, it is not unreasonable that “moderate” Athenians should prefer Cleon dead.

^39. See Palmer, M., “Love of Glory and the Common Good,” American Political Science Review 76 (1982): 825–36,CrossRefGoogle Scholar for elaboration.

^40. Compare what follows with accounts of Nicias' career in Connor, Thucydides, pp. 158–209, 236–37;Google ScholarEdmunds, , Chance and Intelligence, pp. 109–42;Google ScholarPouncey, , Necessities of War, pp. 117– 30;Google ScholarStrauss, , City and Man, pp. 200–209;Google Scholar and Westlake, H.D., Individuals in Thucydides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968),Google Scholar chapters 6 and 11.

^41. For the best brief elucidation of Thucydides' perspective, see Bruell, C., “Thucydides' View of Athenian Imperialism,” American Political Science Review 68: 11–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

^42. Connor, Thucydides suggests that Thucydides' point “is not whether Nicias' conduct is true aretē, but that he acted in ways that he and his society considered to be aretē. This is not malice, as Bury, J.B., Ancient Greek Historians … [p.] 119Google Scholar suggested, nor a sneer at Nicias' merely ‘conventional’ virtue, but a way of emphasizing the failure of Nicias'own expectations” (p. 205, n. 53). Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence, maintains that “Thucydides' judgment on Nicias is … limited to the kind of death he died and is made from the point of view of Nicias' own expectations” (p. 142). But Edmunds does not argue why Thucydides should wish to reflect or endorse this point of view.

^43. Compare Strauss, , City and Man, p. 150.Google Scholar