When Aristotle in the Poetics tried to compare poetry and history, he famously declared that poetry was ‘more philosophical and more serious than history’ (φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν), for poetry deals with the universal (τὰ καθόλου), history with the particular; and as he elaborated, universal means ‘the kind of thing it suits someone to say or do κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον (according to likelihood or necessity), the particular, what Alcibiades did or suffered’ (Poetics 1451b3ff.). Thucydides might have been surprised or disappointed by this. His hopes for the usefulness of his History and the degree of universality it would have, given human nature, imply a seriousness of purpose that goes far beyond merely relating what had happened. As M. Weçowski has recently noted, Thucydides' successors seemed unable to grasp his synthesis of ‘wisdom’ and ‘history’ for which Herodotus paved the way, and Aristotle's reaction may not be untypical of later Greek readers of the fifth-century historians. By contrast his readers of the Renaissance and early modern period, most notably Thomas Hobbes, took Thucydides as a source of wisdom in politics, a crucial tool for the developing study of political science, seizing upon the universality (to put it another way) of Thucydides' History.