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190 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE able omissions. His account of the tribute is obscure for want of detail. He says Thera was not in the Empire in 432, and does not explain how she came to be paying tribute in 426.^ He says little about treaties and proposals of peace, little of finance, little of Athenian political development or military organisation. There is not so much ' background,' to use Mr. Forbes's word, to his history as to that of Herodotus. But the com- parative fulness of Book 1. in such matters is perhaps an indication of what the rest would eventually have become. Thucydides's style as it stands in our texts is an extra- ordinary phenomenon. Undeniably a great style, terse, restrained, vivid, and leaving the impression of a power- ful intellect. Undeniably also an artificial style, obscure amid its vividness, archaistic and poetic in vocabulary, and apt to run into verbal flourishes which seem to have little thought behind them. Part of this is explicable enough. He writes an artificial semi- Ionic dialect, ^w for fiera, rjv for eav, irpdaaco for TrpaTTO). The literary tradition explains that. Literature in Greek has always a tendency to shape itself a language of its own. He is overladen with antitheses, he instinctively sees things in pairs; so do Gorgias and Antiphon. He is fond of distinguishing between synonyms ; that is the effect of Prodicus. He is always inverting the order of his words, throwing separate details into violent relief, which makes it hard to see the whole chain of thought. This is evidently part of the man's peculiar nature. He does it far more than Antiphon and Gorgias, more even than Sophocles.' His own nature, too, is responsible for the crowding of matter and thought that ^ C. I. A. 38 ; c/. 37.