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

134 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

fident that the eloquent and fascinating portrait of
Athens, drawn by Pericles, did not in the historian's
opinion correspond to reality. It was the Periclean ideal. And Thucydides knew perfectly well
that the claim that Athens was the school of liberal
education for Greece would have been scouted
by other states; and, as a matter of fact, it did not
become anything of the kind till after the Peloponnesian war. Again, it seems more than doubtful
whether Thucydides approved of the Periclean
policy of bringing all the inhabitants of Attica into
the city. The length at which he dwells on the
unpleasant consequences of this arrangement, his
pains in showing how distasteful it was to the
people, suggest that he considered it a measure of
highly questionable wisdom.
He certainly looked on Pericles as the most
successful statesman who had recently guided the
counsels of Athens. But he saw him, like all his
other dramatis personae, in a dry light, and, as I
have suggested, he has presented one side of the
statesman's mind with a certain veiled irony.
The dramatic detachment of Thucydides readily
produced the impression that he was unpatriotic.
He allows every party to state their case as
strongly and persuasively as possible. But while
he wrote not as a patriot but as a historian, it is
Athens, not Sparta, the Athenian Empire, not the
Peloponnesian Confederacy, in which the interest
of the narrative centres throughout. As to the
questions at stake and the issues involved in the