1 88 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE perhaps, is his use of documents on the one hand and speeches on the other. Speaking roughly, one may say that in the finished parts of his work there are no documents ; in the unfinished there are no speeches. With regard to the speeches the case is clear. Nearly all bear the marks of being written after the end of the war. The unfinished Eighth Book has not a single speech ; the unfinished part of Book V. only the Melian Dialogue. With the documents there is more room for doubt ; but the point is of great inner significance. Of the nine documents embodied verbatim in the text, three are in the notoriously unfinished Eighth Book ; three are in that part of Book V. which deals with the interval of peace; three — a Truce, a Peace, and an Alliance, between Athens and Sparta — belong to the finish of the Ten Years' War. Now, it can be made out that these last three come from Attic, not Spartan, originals ; that they were not accessible to the exile till his return in 403, and that such information as he had of them through third persons was not correct. Where they stand in the text they are inorganic. The narrative has been written without knowledge of them; in one case it contradicts them. The Truce shows that a separate truce had been made between Athens and Troezen, not mentioned in the text. The Peace differs from the narrative about Pteleon and Sermylia, and im- plies that Athens had recovered the towns in Chalci- dice. The Alliance does not contain any clause binding Athens and Sparta to make no separate alliance except by mutual consent, though the surrounding narrative both implies and states that it did (v. 39, 46). Thucy- dides's documents have all been added to the text after
