Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/421

there were those who thought that the future was very frequently indicated, at great moments, by signs from the gods. Herodotus, for example, would have disputed the statement that the future is uncertain, if it had been placed before him as an unlimited proposition covering such crises as the Peloponnesian war^[1]. The same consideration applies to many of the political or moral aphorisms, which may be regarded as those of Thucydides himself. They are in silent controversy with some unexpressed dissidence of contemporaries. The principle of tacit contrast pervades the whole History, as in the Funeral Oration the picture of Athens requires to be supplemented by a mental picture of the Sparta to which it is opposed^[2]. This was of the inmost nature of Thucydides: the reluctance "to speak at superfluous length^[3]" was deep in him. His general views must be measured both by the credulity and by the higher scepticism of a naive age; so gauged, they are never commonplaces, but, at the least, hints for a part of the history which he has not told in words, because he did not distinctly conceive that it could ever need to be told. "Fortune," τύχη, is the name by which he usually designates the incalculable element in human life; but this

1. See e.g. Her. i. 45, θεῶν τίς μοι . . . προεσήμαινε τὰ μέλλοντα ἔσεσθαι: vi. 37, φιλέει δέ κως προσημαίνειν ὁ θεός, κ.τ.λ. On the omens, prodigies, dreams, etc., in Herodotus, see Mure, Bk. iv. ch. 6, § 3, and Rawlinson, i. 71 f.
2. Esp. ii. 37 and 39.
3. μακρηγορεῖν: i. 68, ii. 36, iv. 59.