No one can tell now how the memories of early sympathies may have grouped themselves in his mind as he looked out in later years from his home in Thrace on the sea over which he had sailed on the long-past day when he failed to save Amphipolis; but at least there is a twofold suggestiveness in those passages[1] which touch on the glories of Athens. There is the feeling of the man who has never lost his love and admiration for the Athenian ideal; and there is also a certain reluctance to translate this ideal into concrete images[2], as if, in the words of Oedipus after his ruin, it were sweet for thought to dwell beyond the sphere of griefs[3]. Perhaps in this very reticence the modern world may find a gain
- ↑ Most striking of all these, perhaps, is one in the speech of Nicias to the army before the retreat from Syracuse (vii. 63 § 3), where, addressing the non-Athenians, he reminds them, of the pleasure (ἡδονή) which they have derived from passing for Athenians—through their knowledge of the Attic dialect, and their imitation of Attic manners—and so being admired throughout Greece: Ἀθηναῖοι νομιζόμενοι καὶ μὴ ὄντες . . . τῆς τε φωνῆς ἐπιστήμῃ καὶ τῶν τρόπων τῇ μιμήσει ἐθαυμάζεσθε κατὰ τὴν Ἑλλάδα. Among Peloponnesians, Italians or Sicehots, the Athenian exile had ever carried about with him the consciousness of belonging to that city which was the παίδευσις Ἑλλάδος.
- ↑ Even in the Funeral Oration—that splendid monument of his grave enthusiasm for Athens—Thucydides has been restrained, whether by fidelity to the original or by his own feeling, from exceeding the limit of such abstract expressions as τὰ καθ' ἡμέραν ἐπιτηδεύματα, πόνων ἀναπαῦλαι, ἀγῶνες, θυσίαι, φιλοκαλεῖν, φιλοσοφεῖν.
- ↑ τὸ γὰρ | τὴν φροντίδ' ἔξω τῶν κακῶν οἰκεῖν γλυκύ, Oed. Tyr. 1390.
