Thucydides the Revisionist
What is a revisionist? How can Thucydides be considered a revisionist, when he seems to have been the first man to write a history of the Peloponnesian War? What received opinions existed for him to revise? In a sense all historians are revisionists, for each tries to make some contribution that changes our understanding of the past. When we use the term revisionist, however, we generally mean something more fundamental: a writer who tries to change the reader's mind in a major way by providing a new general interpretation, one that sharply and thoroughly reexamines the established way of looking at a matter.
Given that Thucydides believed in the practical importance of history, we should expect him to be eager to set straight any errors of fact or interpretation that he found. But his critical spirit was brought to bear on a larger scale than merely factual detail. He uses the evidence of Homer, for instance, to show that it was the poverty of the Greeks, not the bravery of the Trojans, that was responsible for the length of the siege of Troy. He seems to have been the first to present the view that the Peloponnesian War was a single conflict, not a series of separate wars. Many other and greater and more controversial revisions will be discussed in this and later chapters.
If we grant that Thucydides had the instincts of a revisionist, what was there to revise? The answer is: the not yet fully formed or written opinions of contemporaries. In our own day these are easy to identify. Some of us still remember them from direct experience, and, in any case, modern revisionists usually confront and argue against their opponents. Thucydides' method is different. He argues with no one by name and presents no labeled alternative views, even to refute them, but gives the reader only the facts and the conclusions distilled from them that he deems necessary after careful investigation and thought. He has been so successful with this approach that for more than twenty-four hundred years few readers have been aware that any other point of view existed. But a careful reading of Thucydides himself and other ancient sources shows that there were different opinions in Thucydides' time and that his History is a powerful and effective polemic against them. Recovering these forgotten and obscured contemporary opinions and comparing them with Thucydides' own interpretations casts an interesting light on his mind and the significance of his work.
Reprinted from Thucydides: The Reinvention of History with permission from Viking Adult. Copyright (c) 2009 by Donald Kagan
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