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

III

THUCYDIDES

87

attempt of Pericles on Epidaurus) with a bare
mention. But in other cases his silence is a judgment. He rejects, for instance, by ignoring, the
connexion which the gossip of the Athenian
streets alleged between the private life of Pericles
and the origin of the war. But it must be allowed
in general that, in omitting, Thucydides displays a
boldness and masterfulness on which no modern
historian would venture.'
His omissions are closely connected with a
general feature of his work. If the first fundamental principle of his ideal of history was
accuracy, the second was relevance; and both
signify his rebound from Herodotus. Discursiveness as we saw was the very life-breath of the
epic history of Herodotus; the comprehensiveness
of the Ionian idea of history enabled him to spread
about through a wide range, to string on tale to
tale, to pile digression on digression, artfully, yet
as loosely as the structure of his Ionic prose.
Thucydides conceived the notion of political
history, and he laid down for himself a strict
principle of exclusion. His subject is the war,
and he will not take advantage of opportunities
to digress into the history of culture. He excludes geography, so far as brief notices are not
immediately necessary for the explanation of the
1 Thus no modern historian, probably, would have omitted to note the
psephisma of Charinus, which followed up the decrees excluding Megara
from the markets of Athens and her empire, by excluding Megarians
on penalty of death from the very soil of Attica. Thucydides would have
said that it did not affect the outbreak of the war.

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