Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/208

1 84 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE That, then, is one new fact about Thucydides, and it is Hke the others. His personal hopes were bhghted in 423 ; his pohtical and public ideals slowly broken from 414 to 404. And the man's greatness comes out in the way in which he remains faithful to his ideal of history. He records with the same slow unsparing detail, the same convincing truthfulness, all the triumphs and disasters — his own failure and exile, the awful story of Syracuse, the horrors of the ' Staseis,' the moral poison of the war-spirit throughout Greece, even the inward humiliations and exacerbated tyranny of her who was to have been the Philosopher-Princess among nations. Our conception, 'the Peloponnesian War,' we owe to Thucydides. There are in it three distinct wars and eight years of unreal peace. The peace after the first war was followed by an alliance, and it looked as if the next disturbance in the air of Hellas would find Athens and Sparta arrayed as allies against some Theban or Argive coalition. Thucydides was still working at his record of the Ten Years' War when fresh hostilities broke out in Sicily, and he turned his eyes to them. The first war is practically complete in our book. The Sicilian Expedition (vi., vii.) is practically finished, too, in itself, though not fully brought into its place in the rest of the history. It has a separate introduction ; it explains who Alcibiades is, as though he had not been mentioned before ; it repeats episodes from the account of the Ten Years' War, or refers to it as to a separate book. As the Sicilian War drew on, Thucydides realised what perhaps few men could see at the time, the real oneness of the whole series of events. He collected the materials for the time of peace and partly shaped them into history (v. 26 to end) ; he collected most of the