Thucydides designed his history as a political argument, a justification of a certain kind of politics and political analysis. The form in which Thucydides expressed his political understanding was a deliberate response to the character of contemporary political life and attitudes. He was responding to concerns raised by democracy, and his response was democratic: that is why he chose to write history. History is a way of reflecting within society, of combining autonomy with order. It is also a political mode of understanding, capable of shaping as well as expressing the interests of all members of the political order through their participation in democratic interaction.

History as a way of understanding man and how he is to be understood

To see that Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is in the same sense a response to political events and to reflections on those events as were the writings of those we conventionally call philosophers, it is essential to get beyond the appellation, ‘Thucydides, historian,’ or rather to arrive at a deeper understanding of Thucydidean history. Generic distinctions of this kind divide up the world in a modern way. Among the Greeks, statesmen (e.g. Solon) sometimes expressed themselves in verse, as did those whom we would now call cosmologists (e.g. Parmenides); the men now known as philosophers articulated their ideas in, for example, fable (Protagoras) and dialogue (Plato).