Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/209

 COMPOSITION OF HIS HISTORY 185 material for the final Dekelean or Ionian War (viii.). He has a second prologue (v. 26) : " The same TJmcydides of Athens has written these, too, in order, as each thing fell, by summers and tvinters, until the LacedcEinonians and allies broke the empire of the Athenians and took the Long Walls and the Pircsus." Those words must have been hard to write. He never reached the end. It is characteristic both of the man and of a certain side of Athenian culture, that he turned away from his main task of narrative to develop the style of his work as pure literature. Instead of finishing the chronicle of the war, he worked over his reports of the arguments people had used, or the policies various parties had followed, into elaborate and direct speeches. Prose style at the time had its highest development in the form of rhetoric ; and that turn of mind, always characteristic of Greece, which delighted in understanding both sides of a question, and would not rest till it knew every seeming wrongdoer's apology, was especially strong. The speeches are Thucydides's highest literary efforts. In some cases they seem to be historical in substance, and even to a certain extent in phrasing ; the letter of Nikias has the look of reality (vii. II ff.), and perhaps also the speech of Diodotus (iii. 42). Sometimes the speech is historical, but the occasion is changed. The great Funeral Oration of Pericles was made after his campaign at Samos ; ^ he may have made one also in the first year of the war, when there were perhaps hardly fifty Athenians to bury. More probably Thucydides has transferred the great speech to a time when he could use it in his history.^ ^ Ar. Rhet. 1365 a 31, 1411 a i ; Plut. Per. 28.
 * W. M. in Hermes xii. 365 note.