Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/504

482 482 HISTORY OF THE quently, lie had excluded everything pertaining either to the forei-n relations or the internal policy of the different states which did not bear upon the great contest for the Hegemony, or chief power in Greece : but, on the other hand, he has admitted everything, to whatever part of Hellas it referred, which was connected with this strife of nations. From the first, Thucydides had considered this war as a great event in the history of the world, as one which could not be ended without deciding the question, whether Athens was to become a great empire, or whether she was to be reduced to the condition of an ordinary Greek republic, surrounded by many others equally free and equally powerful : he could not but see that the peace of Nicias, which was concluded after the first ten years of the war, had not really put an end to it ; that it was but interrupted by an equivocal and ill-observed armistice, and that it broke out afresh during the Sicilian expedition: with the zeal of an interested party, and with all the power of truth, he shows that all this was one great contest, and that the peace was not a real one.* § 3. Thucydides has distributed and arranged his materials according to this conception of his subjeet. The war itself is divided according to the mode in which it was carried on, and which was regulated among the Greeks, more than with us, by the seasons of the year : the campaigns were limited to the summer; the winter was spent in preparing the armaments and in negotiation. As the Greeks had no general sera, and as the calendar of each country was arranged according to some peculiar cycle, Thucydides takes his chronological dates from the sequence of the seasons, and from the state of the corn-lands, which had a consi derable influence on the military proceedings ; such expressions as, "when the corn was in ear," or " when the corn was ripe,"t were suffi- cient to mark the coherence of events with all needful accuracy. In his history of the different campaigns, Thucydides endeavours to avoid interruptions to the thread of his narrative : in describing any expedition, whether by land or sea, he tries to keep the whole together, and prefers to violate the order of time, either by going back or by anticipating future events, in order to escape the confusion resulting from continually breaking off and beginning again. That long and protracted affairs, like the sieges of Potidoea and Platsea, must recur in different parts of the history is unavoidable ; indeed it could not be otherwise, even if the distribution into summers and winters could have been given up. For transactions like the siege of Potidaea cannot be brought to an end in a luminous and satisfactory manner without a complete view of the position of the belligerent powers, which prevented the besieged from % This is in answer to the censures of Dionysius, de Thucydide judicium, r. IX., p, 826, Reiske.
 * Thucyd. V. 26. j- zti^i infloXnv tr'trou, dx/^d^vre; rov' tr'irov, &C.