The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

IV

THUCYDIDES

129

the course and causes of events. Thucydides deals
with purely human elements; human brains bear
the ultimate responsibility. There is nothing
mysterious about the fact that events cannot be
foreseen. The course of events, says Pericles, may
sometimes be as incalculable by reason as the
thoughts of a man's mind. Thucydides does not
regard the plague as a divine dispensation. It
was simply an occurrence which could not be foreseen, exactly as you may not foresee the moves of
your enemy. Herodotus credits the oracles with
mysterious knowledge; Thucydides occasionally
refers to oracles, but their sole significance for him
lies in the psychical effect they produce on those
who believe them. Of the oracle which predicted
that the war would last twenty-seven years, he drily
observes that it is the only one to which people
who put their faith in oracles can point as having
been certainly fulfilled. Here he was at the same
standpoint as Anaxagoras and Pericles.' The
philosophers who had established the reign of law
had not written in vain for Thucydides.2 Chance
means for him the same kind of thing that it
means for us; it does not signify the interference
of an external will or caprice; it simply represents
an element which cannot be foretold. He recognises the operation of the unknown; he does not
recognise the presence of "things occult." And
1He speaks indeed strangely of the frequency of solar eclipses during
the war (i. 23. 3), as if they had some significance for the human race;
we may wonder what comment Anaxagoras would have made.
2 Cp. Gomperz, Griechische Denker, i. p. 61 (on Heracleitus).
K