Thucydides is a relatively late arrival to the Cambridge Companion series: he appears seventeen years after Herodotus, six after Xenophon and at the same time as Plutarch. The volume is preceded, too, by rivals in the Brill Companion and Oxford Handbook series, published in 2006 and 2017 respectively, with whom it shares a number of contributors (J. Rusten is the only scholar in all three; P.J. Rhodes, to whose memory this volume is fittingly dedicated, is also in the Brill Companion, while Low, R. Balot, E. Greenwood, R.V. Munson, and K. Hoekstra are veterans of the Oxford Handbook). It has evidently been some years in the making (Rusten's chapter was drafted before 2017), but those years have been relatively quiet ones for Thucydidean scholarship, at least by comparison with the continuing Herodotean boom and with the welcome surge of interest in the imperial Greek historians. Low's volume offers a timely chance, then, to assess the current landscape of Thucydidean studies.
The Companion is divided into three sections and 20 chapters (the bulkier Brill and Oxford volumes have 32 and 31 chapters respectively). The first section, ‘Context and Methods’, is much more about methods than context, which is represented largely by J. Grethlein's discussion of non-historiographic memory – a topic on which he has written more than once in the past. While another rehearsal of ways in which Thucydides defines his project in opposition to forensic oratory and poetry may be useful to the volume's target readership, it would have gained from a proper discussion of Thucydides’ relationship to earlier or contemporary historical writers such as Hellanicus, Antiochus and Charon of Lampsacus – not to mention Herodotus (R. Fowler's chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Herodotus fills some of the gap well, but it does not, of course, take the story as far as the student interested in Thucydides would like).
As for ‘Methods’, the approaches taken by the contributors are varied. Rhodes is especially useful on sources because, drawing on his great knowledge of Athenian institutions and inscriptions, he answers the question of what documentary sources would have been available to Thucydides. Greenwood and Rusten offer helpful accounts of the speeches and of the structure of Book 1 respectively: Greenwood unusually brings in the soundscapes of Thucydides’ battles too, while Rusten's lucid analysis of the different styles of historical writing in Book 1 makes more regrettable the absence noted above. It is perhaps surprising that this chapter is not complemented by any formal studies of the rest of the History. Instead, there is a chapter by Munson on ‘time and foresight’, which offers a sketch of the temporal perspective of the Thucydidean narrator across the course of the work. Munson fruitfully merges the type of progressive reading introduced by W.R. Connor with narratology and with Grethlein's notion of experientality – even if she quietly departs from Grethlein's reading of the Sicilian expedition by stressing (rightly in my view) the degree to which that section anticipates its own conclusion. The result is a rich and at times original reading.
Also original are some of T. Beasley's arguments in his discussion of ‘Thucydidean Self-Presentation’. While Beasley follows earlier scholarship in his observations on the differences between the Archaeology and the rest of the work, he innovates in suggesting that these differences map on to the contrast between logos and ergon and that Thucydides rejects the method of the Archaeology as associated with the competitive world of orality, by contrast with the ergon that is the account of the war itself. To me at least these claims did not seem illuminating. The logos/ergon opposition is common in Thucydides, but there seems to be no reason to apply it to the contrast between the introductory section and the rest of the work or to imagine that Thucydides was somehow dismissive of the extraordinary intellectual achievement of the former.
Most provocative of all is E. Irwin's ‘Labouring for Truth in Thucydides’. Irwin's central claim is that Thucydides has different messages for the many and for the few (that is, those who are prepared to put in the work required to understand him). If that claim smacks of Leo Strauss (a figure almost entirely absent from the volume), Irwin's approach is in other respects entirely different: unlike the ahistorical Strauss, she looks to other sources to complement Thucydides. She does not, however, succeed in clarifying just what sources Thucydides assumed would be accessible to his projected readers, as opposed to the sources that happen to be available to us. Unconvincing to me, moreover, are the claims Irwin makes on the basis of those sources. That, for instance, Thucydides occludes details of the Athenians’ expansion, so as to present them as ‘having been compelled’ to go to war ‘by a warmongering Peloponnese’ (p. 113), is hard to square with Thucydides’ claim that it was the Athenians who exerted pressure (or indeed compulsion) on the Spartans by their very expansion (1.23.6). It seems odd, moreover, to make so much of the fact that Diodorus expressly mentions (without supporting the claim) that some connected the purification of Delos with the plague: it turns out that it is this religious (and so moral) interpretation that Thucydides leaves the few to work out. To write, one might add, that the neglect of the Delian festival of which Thucydides speaks at 3.104 belonged after the movement of the tribute-money from Delos to Athens in 454 bce ‘without a doubt’ is misleading (p. 117), and not just because Diodorus placed it ‘much’ (rather than ‘some’) time before the purification (12.58.7). All this said, it is refreshing to have in the volume a voice as hostile as Irwin's to her author, and her lengthy citation of ‘the mind-numbing detail’ of one ‘tedious passage’ (p. 121, on 2.55–8) does at least offer readers the chance to assess whether Thucydides was trying to conceal from the many the impact of the plague on Pericles’ expedition to Epidaurus – or rather making that very point crystal-clear.
Part 2, ‘Themes and Content’, is consistently strong, particularly in the blending of literary and historical approaches. J. Crowley's chapter on ‘Thucydides and War’ discusses Thucydides’ presentation of military developments in the Peloponnesian War and offers a fair-minded survey of current scholarly debates on hoplite warfare. Low is fully alert to the challenges in assessing Thucydides’ account of empire. In the next two chapters M. Fragoulaki (on ethnicity) and S.B. Ferrario (on leadership) both go over ground they have covered well in monographs, but they add fresh new points too. After starting with war, the section ends on a higher plane (in terms of content) with Balot on democracy and political thought and P. Woodruff on justice and morality.
The final section, ‘After Thucydides’, is, as is now conventional, devoted to reception. It starts with a deft literary treatment by L. Pitcher of Thucydidean intertextuality in later Greek historiography – a fast-growing area of scholarship. Byzantine receptions are expertly handled by S. Kennedy and A. Kaldellis in a chapter rich both on literary re-workings and on the changing material forms of the History. The study of reception proves to be particularly useful for the way in which it illustrates conflicting approaches to how Thucydides is to be read: through authorial comments, through maxims in the speeches or through a reading of the interworking of speech and narrative across the History as a whole? Raised already in Kennedy and Kaldellis's discussion of Byzantine excerpts, this question is excellently treated in Hoekstra's learned discussion of Renaissance and Reformation readers. It crops up, too, in A. Lianeri's subtle overview of Thucydides’ role in nineteenth-century debates on historiography (this chapter will be a good starting-point for those who wish to explore her longer and more difficult discussions elsewhere) and again in J.A. Schlosser's discussion of post-Second World War realism (he predictably berates some political scientists for myopic readings, but ends with a fascinating and more surprising glimpse of Thucydides’ use in contemporary protest movements). The volume closes with an enjoyable discussion of ‘Translating Thucydides’ written by someone who has accomplished that task with considerable success, J. Mynott. Mynott shows here that his skill as a translator is grounded in a subtle understanding of Thucydidean method; his approach seems especially indebted to G. Hawthorne, one of the most quietly perceptive of recent readers of Thucydides, who sadly died before he could write his own contribution to the Companion.
The volume is well produced, except for some mistakes in Greek transliterations and for inconsistency in the use of macrons. The overall strength of its chapters and its attractive presentation (for those who use the physical copy) make it at least as good an introduction for students as its obvious competitors, and its editor is to be congratulated on a job well done – even as we are perhaps left wondering how different are the questions that a new companion 20 or 30 years from now would address.
