hearers. Thucydides is a philosophical historian, in the sense that he wishes to record the exact truth, in a form which may be serviceable for the political instruction of mankind. But he has not, in the sense of Plato or Aristotle, a theory of ethics or politics. Thucydides groups the observed facts of practical politics, but without attempting to analyse their ultimate laws. It might be possible to piece together Thucydidean texts and, by filling up a few gaps, to form a tolerably coherent system of doctrine; but the process would be artificial and delusive. Possibly a Shakespeare might re-create Thucydides from the fragments of his personal thought, but the breath of life would be the poet's gift; the broken lights are all that really remain. The paradoxes of one age are said to be the truisms of the next, but the violent contrast suggested by the epigram is hardly the important point to seize if we desire to trace the growth of opinion. There was a moment when the so-called paradoxes were neither paradoxes nor as yet truisms, but only rather new and intelligent opinions, seen to be such against the foil of notions which were decaying, but had not quite gone out. For instance, when Thucydides makes his speakers say, as he so often does, that the future is uncertain[1], we do more justice to the originality of the remark if we remember that in the time of Thucydides
- ↑ E.g. iv. 62, τὸ ἀστάθμητον τοῦ μέλλοντος ὡς ἐπὶ πλεῖστον καρτεῖ: vi. 9, περὶ τῶν ἀφανῶν καὶ μελλόντων κινδυνεύειν: ii. 42, τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώματος: ii. 87, νομίσαι ταῖς τύχαις ἐνδέχεσθαι σφάλλεσραθ τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, etc.
