Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/506

484 484 HISTORY OF THE fleet.* Having shown by this comparison the importance of his subject, and having given a short account of the manner in which he intended to treat it, the historian proceeds to discuss the causes which led to the war. He divides these into two classes ; — the immediate causes or those which lay on the surface, and those which lay deeper and were not alleged by the parties, f The first consisted of the negotiations between Athens and Corinth on the subject of Corcyra and Potidaea, and the consequent complaint of the Corinthians in Sparta, by which the Lace- daemonians were induced to declare that Athens had broken the treaty. The second lay in the fear which the growing power of Athens had inspired, and by which the Lacedaemonians were compelled to make war as the only pledge of security to the Peloponnese. This leads the his- torian to point out the origin of this power, and to give a general view of the military and political occurrences by which Athens, from being the chosen leader of the insular and Asiatic Greeks against the Persians, became the absolute sovereign of all the Archipelago and its coasts. Connecting these remarks on the causes of the war with the preceding discussion, we clearly see that Thucydides designed to give a concise sketch of the history of Greece, at least of that part which seemed the most important to him, namely, the developement of the power depending on money and shipping ; in order that the causes of the great drama of the Peloponnesian war, and the condition and circumstances of the states which play the principal part in it, may be known to the reader. But Thucydides directs all his efforts to a description of the war itself, and in this aims at a true conception of its causes, not a mere delineation of its effects ; accordingly, he arranges these ante- cedent events according to general ideas, and to these he is willing to sacrifice the chronological steps by which the more deeply rooted cause of the war (i. e. the growth of the Athenian power) connected itself with the account of the weakness of Greece in the olden time, given in the first part of the book. The third part of the first book contains the negotiations of the Peloponnesian confederacy with its different members and with Athens, in consequence of which it was decided to declare war ; but even in this part we may discern the purpose of Thucydides, — though he has partially concealed his object, — to give the reader a clear conception of the earlier occurrences on which depended the existing condition of Greece, and a state which, like Athens, was desirous of founding its power on the sovereignty of the coasts of the Mediterranean : but states which, like Macedon and Rome, strengthened themselves by a conquest of inland nations and great masses of the continent before they proceeded to contest the sovereignty of the coasts of the Mediterranean, had yjj xal trwfjLO.ru for the basis of their power, and the xt*/ J ' aT '* xai vauriKcv afterwards accrued to them naturally. j" u'itiui Qavioai. — uipxvsTj.
 * Thucydides' reasoning is obviously a correct one in reference to the policy of