V. Composition

Extract

Thucydides refers in ii. 65. 12 and v. 26. 1, 3 f., to the total duration and ending of the Peloponnesian War (cf. i. 23. 1, its ‘great length’). His work, as we have it, breaks off abruptly while narrating the events of the autumn of 411, and it is clear that no continuation beyond that point attributable to Thucydides himself was known to the Greeks of the fourth century. It would therefore seem prima facie that Thucydides embarked on the writing of his work after the surrender of Athens in 404 but died before he could complete the task. He tells us in i. 1. 1 that he started to write a history of the war as soon as it broke out; but since the intention to write the history of a war which has only just begun is most naturally realized by making jottings as it proceeds, correcting and revising them as new information becomes available, and only when the war is over converting this material into a continuous readable narrative, i. 1. 1 is compatible with the hypothesis that the whole surviving work of Thucydides was written, in the order and in the form in which we have it, after 404. Apart from explicit references (mentioned above) to the end of the war, there are other passages which tend to support this hypothesis: in iv. 81. 2 a forward reference to the war after 413, in v. 1 a reference back to iii. 104. Then there are passages containing ‘only’ or a superlative: vii. 44. 1, ‘the only occasion during this war . . .’, vii. 87. 5, ‘the greatest achievement in this war’.