But the earlier portions of the book, while ali leading up to this grand climax, are really a kind of universal cultural history, mingling fact, anecdote, and myth, of the entire known world during the time immediately preceding and contemporary with Herodotus's own period.
In a manner sometimes confusing, sometimes enchanting, he mixes journalism, geography, ethnography, anthropology, fables, travelers' tales, and marketplace philosophy and moral- izing. Though he writes in prose and about real rather than legendary events, he is nearer to Homer [2, 3] and to art than to the modern historian and so-called scientific history. The later Roman critic Quintilian said he was "pleasant, lucid, dif- fuse." Ali three adjectives are precise.
Hence the beginning reader should not seek in him a clear and, by present-day standards, correct account of the Greek-Persian Wars. He should be read, at least at first, in great long gulps, almost carelessly. He should be read for the stories, the digressions, the character descriptions, the fantastic oddments of information about the manners and customs of dozens of ancient peoples. And he should be read for the plea- sure of meeting Herodotus himself—sometimes gullible, sometimes skeptical, always humane, humorous, curious, and civilized. Don't worry overmuch about who is who and what is where. The absorption of specific facts is less important than immersing yourself in the broad, full, buoyant Herodotean river of narrative. The Greek critic Longinus, who said of him "He takes you along and turns hearing into sight," gives us our cue—just to go along and see things.
C.F.
9
THUCYDIDES
ca. 470/460-ca. 400 B.C.E.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Called by Macaulay "the greatest historian that ever lived," Thucydides belonged to a highly placed Athenian family and saw Athens at its height under Pericles. He was himself involved as a general in the war he chronicled. In 424 b.c.e., as a consequence of his failure to relieve the Thracian town of Amphipolis, he was removed from his command and banished, enduring twenty years of exile before being pardoned. In his history he refers to this crucial episode with brief, cold, third- person detachment. During these twenty years he traveled about in Sparta and elsewhere seeking and verifying the facts that form the material of his book. A tradition states that he was assassinated, perhaps in 400 b.c.e.
Never finished (it breaks off in 411 b.c.e.) but somehow a satisfying whole, his history records the great Greek Civil War between the imperial forces of Athens and the coalition headed by Sparta. The emphasis is almost entirely on the second half of the war, of which in his mature years Thucydides was a con- temporary. This phase began in 431 b.c.e. and ended in 404 b.c.e. with the defeat of Athens, perhaps the most hopeful civi- lization the world has ever known and to whose purely intellec- tual eminence we have never since attained. Thucydides knew he had a great tragic subject. He devoted to it limited but mag- nificent talents of whose worth he was quite aware. With calm confнdence he states that his work will remain "a possession for ali times." So far he has not been proved wrong.
Though Thucydides and Herodotus [8] are partially con- temporary, they have little else in common. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides does his best to be what we now call a scientific historian. He believes the proper ordering of sufficient facts plus the exercise of a powerful mind can explain historical processes. He rejects entirely ali fuzzy explanations, such as Herodotus^ childlike notion of an avenging Nemesis, ever alert to punish arrogance like that of the Persians. He scorns omens, oracles, and prophecies; he does not need the gods. He analyzes the motives, rarely idealistic, that impei leaders and so precipitate great events. He supplements his extraordinary psy- chological insight with notable understanding, considering his time, of the demographic and economic forces that underlay the Peloponnesian War.
Where Herodotus is gossipy and digressive, Thucydides is austere and unified. He is not a cultural historian, but a politico-military one. He is skeptical, charmless—and, let us admit, difficult. He cannot be read except with one's full atten- tion and is one of those writers who yield more with each rereading. Finally, he is the first historian to grasp the inner life of power politics. Hobbes [43], Machiavelli [34], and Marx [82] are, each in a different way, his sons.
Despite his severity and aristocratic denial of emotion, he grips the serious reader. Of the forty speeches he puts into the mouths of his historical personages, at least one, Pericles's Funeral Oration (Book II), is a supremely great dramatic monologue. Masterpieces also, though of differing kinds, are his accounts of the plague at Athens (Book II), the Melian dialogue (Book V), and the terrible Sicilian expedition (Books VI and VII) that signaled the end of Athenian dominance.
C.F.
SUN-TZU 10
SUN-TZU
ca. 450-ca. 380 B.C.E. The AH ofWar
Very little is known about the life of Sun-tzu [Sunzi]^except that he is a real Chinese historical figure, a younger near-con- temporary of Confucius [4]. His name was Sun Wu (the hon- orific suffix -tzu simply means 'Master), and the brief testi- mony of early historical records suggests that he had a successful career as a general and military planner in one or more of the kingdoms of the Warring States Period into which China dissolved in the waning centuries of the Chou [Zhou] Dynasty. Some time after his death, probably in the early to mid-fourth century b.c.e., his disciples wrote down what they remembered of his teachings. The Art ofWar is a more unified and doctrinally coherent book than the Analects, which suggests to some scholars that it was written down over a shorter period of time and by a group of people personally well-versed in Sun-tzu's teachings. In any case, the book attributed to Sun- tzu set the standard for ali subsequent Chinese writings on military matters.
It is in some ways strange that The Art of War has been so highly esteemed, and so much imitated, as it has been through- out the history of traditional China. From pre-Confucian times, and even more so under the influence of Confucius and his school, Chinese social philosophy has downplayed the political role of warfare, and has insisted that military matters had to be kept firmly under the control of a civilian bureaucracy; little praise or honor was accorded to personal military prowess. (A famous Chinese proverb says "Do not take good iron to make a nail, do not take a good man to make a soldier.,>) On reading The Art of War, one sees that the apparent paradox resolves itself; it becomes clear that Sun-tzu was more a philosopher than a strategist, one who taught that the best victory is attained
without a battle. Sun-tzu was a realist who recognized that war- fare sometimes could not be avoided, and then must be pur- sued with the utmost vigor to a successful conclusion; his spe- cial talent lay in teaching rulers how to deploy their forces to maximum advantage. But he never glorifies warfare; his voice is that of a mature man dealing with the world as it is, not of a glory-seeking adolescent hero. Sun-tzu would not have had much use for Achilles (Homer [2]).
For Sun-tzu, the overall goal of the military strategist is plain: to maximize the effectiveness of whatever forces a ruler might have at his command. If the force be inherently great, choose a suitable target and a sufficient reason for attack, and crush the enemy with a single blow. If the force be weak and inadequate, find ways to elude, deceive, ambush, and exhaust the enemy so as to even the odds. Like Machiavelli [34], Sun- tzu did not trouble himself about the legality or morality of his methods; espionage, sabotage, and deceit were ali fair play. It was, he insisted, best not to fight at ali; if it became necessary for a state to fight, its ruler had no moral obligation greater than preserving the state's existence through victory.