Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/507

485 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 485 especially the dominion of Athens. In these negotiations, among other things, the Athenians call upon the Lacedaemonians to liberate themselves from the pollution which they had incurred by putting Pausanias to death in the temple of Pallas ; upon this the historian relates the treasonable undertaking of Pausanias and his downfal : with which he connects, as a mere episode, an account of the last days of Thcmistoclcs. The fact that Themistocles wais involved in the ruin of Pausanias is not sufficient to justify the insertion of this episode ; but the object of Thucydides is to present the reader with the last and least known occurrences in the life of this great man, who was the author of the naval power and peculiar policy of Athens ; and in this to take an opportunity of paying the full tribute of just appreciation to the greatness of his intellectual character.* § 5. Thus much may suffice for the general distribution and plan of the work ; we now turn to the manner in which he has treated his materials. The history of Thucydides is not a compilation from books, but is drawn immediately from the life, from the author's own observa- tion, and from oral communications ; it is the first written record of an eye-witness, and bears the stamp of fresh and living truth, which can only appear in a history of this kind. Thucydides, as he tells us himself, foresaw what kind of a war it would be, and commenced his descriptions with the war itself : f in its progress, he set down the different events as they occurred, either from his own experience or from careful informa- tion, which he derived, not without much trouble and expense, from persons of both parties ; J and he laboured at his history partly in Athens before his banishment, and partly in Scapte-Hyle during his exile. At the latter place the plane-tree under which Thucydides used to write was shown long after his death. All that he wrote in this way, during the course of the war, was only a preliminary labour, of the nature of our Memoirs ; § he did not commence the actual arrangement of his materials till after the end of the war, when he was again residing in his native country. This is shown partly by the frequent references to the duration, the issue, and the general connexion of the war ; || but especially by the fact that the history was left unfinished ; whence we may conclude, that the memoirs which Thucydides had written during the war, and which necessarily extended to the surrender of Athens, were not so complete as to supply the defects of the work. There is much plausibility, too, in the statement, that of the work, as it has come down to us, the last book was left incomplete at the death of the author, and was expanded by the copyist and first added to the others by a daughter of Thucydides, or by % See Thucyd., V. 26 ; VII. 44. Comp. Marcellinus, § 21. § These are called by the ancients, i-ro^fiara, or commentarii rerum gettarum, such that we may clearly see that the historian is writing in the time of the new Spartan hegemony, this applies particularly to I. 77.
 * See Thucyd., I. 138. t I. 1. «*|«,ksv»s ibfv; KaBiffrxfttvou.
 * See Thucyd., I. 13," 93 ; II. Go; V. 26. The tone of many passages, too, is