anxiously careful and so haughtily improvident of the future. His characteristic dislike of superfluous detail seems to have been allied with a certain hardness of temperament, such as is indicated by the tone of his reference to the poets[1]. His banishment may also have infused something of bitterness[2] into his recollections of the Athenian life, with all its gracious surroundings, with all its social and intellectual delights, from which he was suddenly cut off, so that he should know them no more until he came back in his old age and found them changed.
- ↑ He cites them simply as authorities for facts, whose statements often require to be modified: i. 21 § 1. Thus he makes a sort of apology for quoting so equivocal an authority as Homer respecting the power of Agamemnon (i. 9 § 4), and the size of the Greek fleet (10 § 3). His extracts from the fine passage in the Hymn to the Delian Apollo are the briefest which could establish his two points—that there was an Ionian festival at Delos, and that it included a musical contest (iii. 104).
- ↑ There is a singular suggestiveness in the speech which the exile Thucydides attributes to the exile Alcibiades (at Sparta in 415 B.C., vi. 92). It is the historian's way of showing how the pain which he himself had known might work in a disloyal character. "My patriotism," says Alcibiades, "is not for a country that wrongs me; it was given to a country that protected my rights . . . The true patriot is not he who abstains from moving against the country from which he has been unjustly banished, but he who, in his passionate love for her, strives by all means to regain her."
May not these words—καὶ φιλόπολις οὑτος ὀρθῶς, οὐχ ὃς ἂν τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ἀδίκως ἀπολέσας μὴ ἐπίῃ—have a reference to Thrasybulus and the patriotic exiles who marched from Phyle upon Athens? Just after the restoration of the democracy the point would have been peculiarly effective.
