Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War: Revisionism and the Rejection of Kleos

In his 2010 book, Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, Donald Kagan explored the ways in which Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, though evidently the first work on the topic, was nonetheless revisionist. Kagan’s work focused primarily on Thucydides’ treatment of the war, but here I place Thucydides’ history in the context his predecessor, Herodotus, in his treatment of the Persian Wars, and the broader background of Greek intellectual history. His own work, Thucydides was determined, would be educational and analytical rather than commemorative and celebratory (Greenwood).

The revisionist nature of Thucydides’ work is evident already in his treatment of the earliest centuries of Greek history (Thuc. 1.1-21), where he dismisses a number of key myths about this period. The revisionism continues in the account of the war’s outbreak as he skillfully distracts from Pericles’ role in bringing it about and the flaws in Pericles’ projected strategy. Most significantly, as Gloria Ferrari Pinney has amply demonstrated (Pinney), Thucydides sought to demonstrate that glory, kleos, was not the proper subject matter of history. The sole appearance of kleos in his narrative is in the funeral oration (Hardwick), in which Pericles opines that the greatest kleos of women was to be spoken of as little as possible: in other words, their kleos consisted in having no kleos. Pericles sidelines the greatest purveyors of kleos, Homer and the other poets, as not only unnecessary but in fact untruthful. Though it may originate in deeds, however, kleos comes through words, and it is profoundly ironic that the great wordsmith Pericles uses the funeral speech to attack speech itself (Winton).