Excerpt from Thucydides Mythistoricus The title of this book needs a word of explanation, if not of apology; for to any one who is accustomed to think of Thucydides as typically prosaic, and nothing if not purely historical, the epithet Mythistoricus may seem to carry a note of challenge, or even of paradox. But the sense in which the expression has here been used is quite consistent with the historian's much-talked-of 'trustworthiness', and, indeed, with the literal truth of every statement of fact in the whole of his work. It is possible, however, even for a writer of history, to be something much better than trustworthy. Xenophon, I suppose, is honest; but his honesty makes it none the easier to read him. To read Thucydides is, although certainly not easy, at any rate pleasant, because - trustworthiness and all - he is a great artist. It is the object of this essay to bring out an essentially artistic aspect of his work, which has escaped notice, partly because the history is so long that it is hard to take it in as a whole, and partly because the execution of the effect is imperfect, having been hindered by the good intentions with which Thucydides set out. The history, as it stands, is the product of two hardly compatible designs. It was originally planned as a textbook of strategy and politics in the form of a journal; and it is commonly taken to be actually nothing more. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Excerpt from Thucydides Histories: Book III There is to be sure no manuscript of Thucydides of such para mount importance as the Laurentian manuscript of Sophocles, and it is true that all the existing manuscripts show traces either of carelessness or, what is worse, of conscious alteration; but the faults of one manuscript can frequently be corrected by the help of others, and the errors are mostly of a definite and recurring nature, and do not affect the writer's meaning to any appreciable degree. How dangerous it is to rewrite an ancient author has recently been exemplified by the discovery at Oxyrhynchus of a papyrus fragment containing a small portion of Book IV, a book which has been treated in a very drastic manner by a distinguished editor, who is of opinion that the text of Thucydides has suffered much from the insertion of adscripts' or notes of commentators. The fragment, which is ascribed to the first century, is far from confirming this hypothesis. One fin is omitted to the great improvement of the syntax and sense (and that single words such as 8n, of, ms, can easily fall out or be inserted had been already suspected), but otherwise the text agrees in the main with the text of the existing manuscripts. The difficulties of Thucydides are therefore due to other causes than the ignorance or carelessness of his copyists. They are due in part to the nature of the man himself, in part to the conditions under which he wrote. Nor must it be too hastily assumed that the irregularities and solecisms which are found in the pages of Thucydides occur in no other Greek writer. They are to be found in all Greek writers, only in a less degree. That 'change of intention, ' of which so much is said in this commentary, could be largely exemplified from both poets and prose writers. Its frequency in Thucydides is due, in part, to the intellectual ardour and impatience of the writer. Thoughts crowd upon him too quickly; semper z'mtat sz'bz'. He begins a sentence with a plan in his mind which is upset by the intrusion of a new idea and, at the end, he is content if the thought is clear, and is not too much concerned about the grammatical correctness of his sentence. The same tendency may be seen in the writings of St. Paul and in the speeches of Oliver Cromwell, and with them it is partly due to the same cause. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.