Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/448

 be truer to say that the war itself presented striking contrasts, analogous to those which a dramatic poet contrives: the dullest writer could not have wholly missed these contrasts; and if Diodorus had been the historian, his work, too, might have revealed the five acts; but Thucydides was peculiarly well fitted to bring out these contrasts with the most complete effect. He was so, because he felt the whole moment and pathos of the events themselves; because he saw them with the distinctness of intense concentration; and because, partly under the influence of language, he had even more than the ordinary Greek love of antithesis. It is obvious that the Peloponnesian war, as a subject for history, may be