Was Thucydides Biased?

Thucydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE)—or, to use a transliteration of his name that is more faithful to the Greek spelling, Thoukydides—was an ancient Athenian general and historian. He is best known today as the author of the work Histories of the Peloponnesian War, a historical account of the famous war fought between the Delian League, led by the city-state of Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by the city-state of Sparta. The war lasted from 431 until 404 BCE, with an interlude of peace in the middle lasting from 421 to 415 BCE.

Since the late nineteenth century, Thoukydides has often been held up as a paragon of the “objective,” “unbiased,” “scientific” historian. Although this conception of Thoukydides is, at any rate, no longer as fashionable among scholars as it once was, it persists in popular descriptions of his work and has greatly influenced how the general public perceives him. In this essay, I intend to debunk this perception by pointing out five examples of how Thoukydides’s biases seem to influence his narrative.

Thoukydides’s reputation as an “objective,” “unbiased” historian

Thoukydides’s reputation for supposedly being “objective” and “unbiased” partly arises from the way he describes his own work. He carefully describes his method and his purpose in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.2–4, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other.”

“The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”

Thoukydides’s prediction that “the absence of romance” in his account will make it less popular is usually interpreted as an implicit dig at the earlier Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), who wrote a work, most likely in around the late 430s and early 420s BCE, titled The Histories, which was widely known among Greek intellectuals at the time Thoukydides was writing.

As I previously discussed in this post I wrote back in September 2019, Herodotos had a very different approach to history from Thoukydides. He specifically states in his Histories 7.152.3 that he sees it as his duty to record everything he has heard, regardless of whether or not he believes it. He writes, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“As for myself, although it is my business to set down that which is told me, to believe it is none at all of my business. This I ask the reader to hold true for the whole of my history . . .”

As a result of this method, Herodotos records in his Histories many outlandish legends, folktales, and stories about direct divine intervention. When he describes historical events, he often gives several different accounts of what supposedly happened, in many cases explicitly citing many different sources.

Thoukydides, by contrast, clearly wants to give his readers the impression that he has not only thoroughly researched everything he says, but also used his razor-sharp intellect to discern with decisive authority what is true from what is false and see past the biases of his sources to find exactly what really happened. Unlike Herodotos, he does not generally tell folktales or stories involving direct divine intervention and, when he describes historical events, he usually only gives one account of what supposedly happened, without citing any of his sources.

Historians from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century generally took Thoukydides at his word and saw him as the first truly “scientific” historian, an “unbiased” seeker of objective truth, and an ancient prototype of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (lived 1795 – 1886), who famously championed the notion that every historian should describe the past exactly “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist,” which means “as it really happened.”

ABOVE: Portrait of the German historian Leopold von Ranke painted in 1875 by Adolf Jebens

Von Ranke’s conception of history held sway over the discipline for many decades, but historians nowadays generally see it as naïve. The English historian Edward Hallett Carr (lived 1892 – 1982) published a highly influential book in 1961 titled What Is History?, based on a series of lectures he gave at the University of Cambridge earlier that year. In the first chapter of this book, titled “The Historian and His Facts,” Carr argues that it is not possible to write an “unbiased” history of anything, because, even if everything a historian writes is a verifiable, objective fact, the historian cannot possibly include every single fact in existence about the subject.

According to Carr, the historian must therefore decide which facts to include in their narrative, based on which facts are available to them and which of those facts they personally think are noteworthy and relevant. They must also decide in which order to present their facts, in which sort of context, and in which manner.

This process is inherently and inescapably subjective, because there are no objective criteria by which the historian can decide which facts to include and how to present those facts. Each historian will inevitably choose which facts to include and how to present them differently, and each historian’s decisions in this regard will inevitably be influenced by their personal views and experiences. Carr uses an apt metaphor (on page 23 of the 1987 second edition, printed by Penguin Books):

“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”

There are many things that I disagree with Edward Hallett Carr about. For instance, I absolutely deplore the fact that he publicly supported Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s and later publicly supported Joseph Stalin. (He somehow managed to be, at different points in his life, both a Nazi sympathizer and a tankie.) Nonetheless, as may already be apparent, on the specific matter of whether history can be “objective” and “unbiased,” I strongly agree with him.

A historian should, of course, be honest. They should not lie about the evidence, deliberately omit evidence that they know might undermine their narrative, construe evidence to support a narrative that it doesn’t really support, or otherwise engage in deliberate deception. There can, however, never be such a thing as an “unbiased” history, because the historical process inherently involves elements of subjectivity.

Even leaving that matter aside, I think that very few of even those professional historians who do still maintain that historians should strive to write “objective,” “unbiased” accounts of the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” would maintain that Thoukydides is totally successful in this regard.

ABOVE: Photograph of the English historian Edward Hallett Carr, who famously challenges Leopold von Ranke’s idea of telling history “wie es eigentlich gewesen ist” in his book What Is History?

Nonetheless, the notion that it is possible to write an “objective,” “unbiased” history and that Thoukydides in particular is an exemplar of a historian who successfully does this retains influence, especially in descriptions of his work that are primarily intended for popular audiences.

Take, for instance, Thucydides: Ancient Greek Historian by Robin S. Doak, a book meant to introduce students in upper elementary school and middle school to Thoukydides, published by Compass Point Books, a publisher specializing in juvenile nonfiction. The book declares, on page 84:

“As he wrote the story of Greece’s great war, Thucydides tried to remain neutral and present an unbiased view. As an Athenian citizen, this was not an easy task. Even as he traveled around Greece interviewing soldiers and leaders, Thucydides knew that eyewitnesses would themselves be biased and unreliable.”

I’ll give Doak credit that the book says that Thoukydides “tried to remain neutral,” rather than that he actually did remain neutral, but even this I think is not totally accurate.

Oddly enough, popular media intended for adults seems to overstate Thoukydides’s alleged “unbiased” narrative even more greatly. On 7 June 2011, CBC Radio One aired an episode in its long-running radio show Ideas titled “Thucydides, Part 1: The First Journalist.” The episode’s featured guests include Carolyn Dewald, Robert A. Strassler, and Clifford Orwin, who are all respected scholars who have studied Thoukydides’s work.

The episode also, unfortunately, features Victor Davis Hanson, whose historical scholarship has always been dubious, who now spends most of his time as a far-right pundit, and who has essentially squandered whatever reputation he might once have had through involvement in ridiculous pseudohistorical projects, including the Trump administration’s 1776 Commission, which I wrote about in this article in September 2020 and again in this article in January 2021.

Nearly a decade after the episode originally aired, on 22 June 2020, CBC posted an article on their website based on the episode titled “Lessons from an ancient Athenian in an era of ‘fake news.’” The article bears the subheading: “Historian Thucydides set a standard for accurate, unbiased reporting.”

Even Wikipedia gets in on the idea that Thoukydides was “unbiased.” The current revision of the Wikipedia article “History of the Peloponnesian War” includes a subsection with the title “Neutrality.” This section declares:

“Despite being an Athenian and a participant in the conflict, Thucydides is often regarded as having written a generally unbiased account of the conflict with respect to the sides involved in it.”

To disprove this idea, I will now examine five specific examples of how Thoukydides’s biases influence his narrative.

Thoukydides’s pro-Perikles bias

Thoukydides was a wealthy aristocratic man with full Athenian citizenship. Many Athenian men of Thoukydides’s class are known to have favored oligarchy over democracy. It is unclear whether Thoukydides himself favored outright oligarchy, but it is abundantly clear that he had extremely little faith in the basic idea behind democracy, which is that the citizens of a state can be trusted to make the right decisions on behalf of the state.

He seems to have strongly believed that democracy can only work if there is at least one wise, aristocratic leader who can control the multitudes and rein in their supposed worst impulses. Consequently, he openly praises and condemns specific politicians by name based on whether he personally believed they lived up to his standards of what he thought a good leader should be like.

Thoukydides most famously openly praises the Athenian politician Perikles (lived c. 495 – 429 BCE) in the highest terms and roundly condemns all the Athenian politicians who came after him in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 2.65. He writes, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“For as long as he was at the head of the state during the peace, he pursued a moderate and conservative policy; and in his time its greatness was at its height. When the war broke out, here also he seems to have rightly gauged the power of his country. He outlived its commencement two years and six months, and the correctness of his previsions respecting it became better known by his death.”

“He told them to wait quietly, to pay attention to their marine, to attempt no new conquests, and to expose the city to no hazards during the war, and doing this, promised them a favorable result. What they did was the very contrary, allowing private ambitions and private interests, in matters apparently quite foreign to the war, to lead them into projects unjust both to themselves and to their allies—projects whose success would only conduce to the honor and advantage of private persons, and whose failure entailed certain disaster on the country in the war.”

“The causes of this are not far to seek. Perikles indeed, by his rank, ability, and known integrity, was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude—in short, to lead them instead of being led by them; for as he never sought power by improper means, he was never compelled to flatter them, but, on the contrary, enjoyed so high an estimation that he could afford to anger them by contradiction.”

“Whenever he saw them unseasonably and insolently elated, he would with a word reduce them to alarm; on the other hand, if they fell victims to a panic, he could at once restore them to confidence. In short, what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen.”

“With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude. This, as might have been expected in a great and sovereign state, produced a host of blunders . . . So superfluously abundant were the resources from which the genius of Perikles foresaw an easy triumph in the war over the unaided forces of the Peloponnesians.”

For most of modern history, scholars have generally assumed that Thoukydides’s admiration for Perikles was unqualified and that he completely agreed with all Perikles’s policies. The scholar Edith Foster, however, challenges this view in her controversial book Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism, published in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. Foster argues that, although Thoukydides clearly admired Perikles, he ultimately did not agree with Perikles’s imperialistic views and that, through his narrative, he subtly undermines Perikles.

On the opposite end of the academic spectrum, the Austrian scholar of ancient history Ernst Badian argues in his chapter “Thucydides and the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: An Historian’s Brief,” in the book Conflict, Antithesis, and the Ancient Historian, edited by June W. Allison and published by Ohio State University Press in 1990, that Thoukydides deliberately distorts his history and his evidence to consistently portray Perikles and Athens favorably and Sparta unfavorably in a manner similar to a modern propagandistic journalist.

I do not entirely agree with Foster’s argument or Badian’s, but I do tend to lean more toward the Badian end of the spectrum. I do not think that Thoukydides knowingly dishonestly misrepresents his evidence to support a tendentious agenda. I do, however, think that Thoukydides generally tends to portray Perikles favorably, that he omits possible criticisms of Perikles or dissenting perspectives, and that he downplays Perikles’s role in causing the Peloponnesian War.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble herma depicting the Athenian politician Perikles, based on a Greek original dating to the fifth century BCE

Thoukydides’s total lack of speeches opposing Perikles

In his work, Thoukydides portrays many figures as delivering speeches, but he includes an explicit disclaimer in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.22.1 informing the reader that the speeches he records are not verbally accurate. He writes, as translated by John Marincola in his book Greek Historians (pages 77–78):

“And as for all the things which each said in speech either when they were about to make war or when they were already in it, it was difficult to remember precisely the exactness of what was said, both for me, regarding the things I myself heard, and for those reporting to me at one time or another from elsewhere. But as it seemed to me that each would say especially what was necessary [τὰ δέοντα] for the given occasion, so it has been written by me, holding as closely as possible to the entire argument [ἐχομένῳ ὅτι ἐγγύτατα τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης] of the things that were truly said.”

The method that Thoukydides describes here is extremely vague and scholars have hotly debated what exactly Thoukydides is trying to say for centuries. I personally find the interpretation put forth by Christopher Pelling in his chapter “Thucydides’ Speeches” in the book Thucydides. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies, pages 176–187, edited Jeffrey S. Rusten and published by Oxford University Press in 2009, most compelling.

Pelling’s interpretation is that the vagueness of Thoukydides’s statement is probably a result of the fact that he had more than one method that he used for composing speeches, depending on what kind of information was available to him. For instance, Thoukydides himself was most likely present for the debate described in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.31-45 over whether the Athenians should form an alliance with the Korkyreans against the Korinthians, which took place in the Athenian assembly in 433 BCE, before Thoukydides’s exile from Athens. The speeches in this debate may therefore be loose summaries of what Thoukydides could remember of the speeches that were actually delivered (abbreviated and abridged where necessary).

By contrast, Thoukydides records some speeches for which he is highly unlikely to have had access to accurate information, such as the Athenian general Nikias’s final speech to his men at Syracuse in 413 BCE, which is described in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 7.76–78. Nikias supposedly delivered this speech right before the entire army was killed or captured and enslaved, with Nikias himself being captured and assassinated soon afterwards. Thoukydides therefore most likely made this speech up based on what he thought Nikias might have said, based on what he knew about his personality and the situation.

ABOVE: Modern illustration printed in the 1906 book The World’s Famous Orations, Vol. 1., on page 105, depicting what the artist imagined the Athenian politician and general Nikias might have looked like (No one knows what he really looked like.)

What’s interesting is that, in nearly all cases, whenever the Athenian assembly is debating some proposal or another, Thoukydides portrays at least one person arguing for one perspective and at least one person arguing for a different perspective—except when Perikles speaks in the assembly. In these cases, Thoukydides only tells us what Perikles supposedly said and never what anyone else said, even though we know well from other sources that Perikles had political opponents and there certainly must have been at least a few people who disagreed with him.

It is unclear why Thoukydides decided not to include any speeches by people opposing Perikles. It’s possible he decided this because he didn’t have good information about those people’s speeches or because he didn’t think those people’s opinions were important enough to mention because the vast majority of people agreed with Perikles.

In either case, though, Thoukydides could have included speeches to represent opposing perspectives to Perikles. If he lacked specific information about such speeches, he could have guessed what an opponent of Perikles might have said based on what he knew about their arguments more generally in the same way he must have guessed what Nikias said in his final speech. If those who disagreed with Perikles were only a tiny minority, he still could have given this minority representation. He chose to do neither of these things.

ABOVE: Perikles’s Funerary Oration, painted in 1852 by the German historical painter Philipp Foltz

Thoukydides’s lack of emphasis on the Megarian decree

Thoukydides also greatly downplays Perikles’s role in causing the Peloponnesian War compared to other ancient authors who wrote about the subject. In around 432 BCE, Athens accused the people of the polis of Megara, which was allied with Sparta, of cultivating land that was sacred to Demeter, of harboring runaway enslaved people who they claimed rightfully belonged to Athenian citizens, and of killing the Athenian herald whom they had sent. Therefore, in order to punish Megara, Athens issued a decree of economic sanctions against the Megarians, prohibiting all Megarians from trading with Athens or any of Athens’ allies.

These sanctions were extremely devastating for the Megarians, because Athens basically controlled the entire Aegean Sea through its navy and its various allies. The Megarians appealed to the Spartans for aid. Sparta sent an ultimatum to Athens demanding first and foremost that the Athenians rescind the Megarian decree, or there would be war. The Athenians, following the advice of Perikles, voted not to rescind the decree. The Spartans therefore voted that Athens had violated the terms of the Thirty Years’ Peace and declared war.

There are at least three other ancient authors who try to explain the causes of the Peloponnesian War in surviving works, aside from Thoukydides. Most notably, the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) was an ardent critic of the war at the same time when Thoukydides was writing his histories. He wrote a comedy protesting the war titled The Acharnians, which was first performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 425 BCE, while the war was ongoing. He gives a satirical account of how the war supposedly began in lines 515–539, in which he explicitly blames Perikles and the Megarian decree.

The much later Greek historian Diodoros Sikeliotes (lived c. 90 – c. 30 BCE) gives a secondary account of the causes of the Peloponnesian War in his Library of History 12.37–40, relying on earlier ancient sources, including both Thoukydides and Aristophanes, but also other sources that have since been lost. Finally, the biographer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) gives another secondary account of the causes of the war in his Life of Perikles 29–33, once again relying on Thoukydides and Aristophanes, as well as other sources that have since been lost.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portrait bust of the comic playwright Aristophanes (left), nineteenth-century fresco depicting what the artist imagined Diodoros Sikeliotes might have looked like (center), and photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a portrait bust of a man named Ploutarchos that is sometimes thought to depict the famous biographer (right)

One thing that all the other ancient authors who wrote about the causes of the Peloponnesian War aside from Thoukydides agree on is that Athens’ issuing of the Megarian decree and Athens’ refusal (at the behest of Perikles) to rescind the decree in response to the Spartan ultimatum were massively important events in triggering the war.

Thoukydides, by sharp contrast, describes the Megarian decree itself very briefly in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.139 in just a few sentences. He says that the Spartans told the Athenians that war could be averted if the Athenians would merely agree to rescind the decree, which implies that the decree was immensely important, but he otherwise gives very little information.

It is almost bizarre that Thoukydides devotes so shockingly little time to explaining this decree, which all the other ancient authors characterize as having had such a fundamentally important role in causing the war and which even Thoukydides himself admits was the final proximate cause.

Thoukydides devotes many chapters to describing in great detail the Siege of Potidaia and the conflict over Aigina. We would therefore naturally expect him to spend at least as many chapters describing in great detail all the events that led the Athenians to consider the Megarian decree in the first place, the process of the Athenians debating whether to pass it in the assembly, and all kinds of other details. Instead, he sums it all up in just a few sentences.

Thoukydides shifts the focus for the cause of the Peloponnesian War away from the Megarian decree and instead offers his own rather vague hypothesis that the war was simply inevitable due to “the growth of the power of Athens” and the “alarm” this caused for the Spartans. He writes in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.23, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“To the question why they broke the treaty, I answer by placing first an account of their grounds of complaint and points of difference, that no one may ever have to ask the immediate cause which plunged the Hellenes into a war of such magnitude. The real cause I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lakedaimon [i.e., Sparta], made war inevitable. Still it is well to give the grounds alleged by either side, which led to the dissolution of the treaty and the breaking out of the war.”

Thoukydides repeats this hypothesis two more times in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.88 and 1.118.

Thoukydides’s explanation for the war has, in turn, given rise to the notion of the “Thoukydides trap,” which claims that, when there are two powerful states—one that has been in power for some time and one that is rising in power—they are likely to go to war.

Some scholars agree with Thoukydides that the Peloponnesian War really was caused by the growing power of Athens and the “alarm” this caused for the Spartans. Many, however, disagree. I personally think that Thoukydides’s affinity for Perikles leads him to underestimate the importance of the Megarian decree in causing the war.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Delian League, which was essentially the Athenian Empire, in 431 BCE on the brink of the Peloponnesian War

Thoukydides’s anti-Kleon bias

In marked contrast to his generally positive portrayal of Perikles, Thoukydides generally portrays the Athenian politicians who came after Perikles in a negative light. There is, however, arguably no one in his entire history whom he portrays worse than the Athenian politician Kleon, the son of Kleainetos. Thoukydides seems to have despised Kleon with an intense, burning passion, although we do not know why he hated him so much.

Thoukydides portrays Kleon as a corrupt, bloodthirsty, warmongering demagogue. He introduces him in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 3.36, calling him “βιαιότατος τῶν πολιτῶν τῷ τε δήμῳ παρὰ πολὺ ἐν τῷ τότε πιθανώτατος,” which means “the most violent of the citizens in the populace who was at the time by far the most powerful man in it.”

Thoukydides then proceeds to portray Kleon as delivering a bloodthirsty speech in which he argues in front of the Athenian assembly that the Athenians should maintain their previous decision to slaughter all the men of the city of Mytilene and sell all the women and children into slavery. In Thoukydides’s narrative, an obscure man named Diodotos, son of Eukrates, who is not attested in any other surviving sources, speaks out against Kleon and successfully convinces the Athenians to show mercy to the Mytilenians by arguing using realpolitik that slaughtering all the Mytilenian men and selling all the women and children into slavery would be bad for Athens.

Later, in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 5.16, Thoukydides claims that Kleon deliberately tried to keep Athens at war and prevent the city from making peace so that the public would continue to be distracted from the many crimes he was committing. He writes, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“. . . Kleon and Brasidas, who had been the two principal opponents of peace on either side—the latter from the success and honor which war gave him, the former because he thought that, if tranquillity were restored, his crimes would be more open to detection and his slanders less credited . . .”

Some historians agree with Thoukydides’s portrayal of Kleon as a villainous, corrupt, warmongering demagogue. Other historians vehemently disagree and think that Thoukydides has done Kleon dirty. I, however, am going to sidestep this controversy, because, even if we assume that Thoukydides’s opinion of Kleon was completely justified, there is no denying or escaping the fact that Thoukydides had an opinion of Kleon and that this opinion influences how he portrays him in his historical account.

For instance, Thoukydides may very well have had good evidence that Kleon was a corrupt liar and that he supported the continuation of the war, but he cannot have possibly known for certain what Kleon’s private motivations were for supporting the continuation of the war. When he says that Kleon supported continuing the war because he thought the war would make his crimes less “open to detection” and his slanders more widely believed, this can only be an assumption on his part—one that is undoubtedly influenced by his well-attested dislike for Kleon.

Thoukydides’s anti-female bias

As I have already mentioned near the beginning of this article, Thoukydides’s approach to history is often contrasted with that of his predecessor, Herodotos of Halikarnassos. Unlike Thoukydides, Herodotos mentions women all over the place in his Histories. Carolyn Dewald tallies up all the passages mentioning women in Herodotos’s Histories in her article “Women and Culture in Herodotus’ Histories,” originally published in the journal Women’s Studies, volume 8, issue number 124. She counts 375 separate passages.

Within the first five chapters alone (Histories 1.1–5), Herodotos mentions four different mythological women: Io, Europe, Medeia, and Helene. He retells many memorable and often quite lengthy stories about or involving women throughout his Histories. Additionally, large parts of his Histories consist of ethnographic surveys of various foreign cultures and, whenever he describes a certain culture, he usually describes the women of the culture in question, their lives, and their experiences.

Herodotos even devotes significant attention to individual women in the main narrative of his Histories, which is about the wars between the Achaemenid Empire and various Greek city-states in the early fifth century BCE. He notably devotes extensive attention within this narrative to Queen Artemisia I of Karia, who incidentally happened to be the ruler of his native city of Halikarnassos at the time of his birth. He writes about her in his Histories 8.68–69, 87–88, 93, and 101–103 and he makes her a central figure in his account of the pivotal Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE.

ABOVE: The Battle of Salamis, painted in 1868 by the German Academic painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach, showing what he imagined the Battle of Salamis might have looked like based on Herodotos’s account, with Queen Artemisia I of Karia in the very center

Thoukydides, by sharp contrast, almost never mentions women at all in his entire Histories of the Peloponnesian War. He never says anything whatsoever about what any woman thought about any of the events he describes, nor does he ever say anything about what any woman’s experiences during the war were like. This exclusion of women from his narrative is probably deliberate. Thoukydides notably portrays Perikles as saying in his famous “Funerary Oration” in Histories of the Peloponnesian War 2.45.1–2, as translated by J. M. Dent:

“The living have envy to contend with, while those who are no longer in our path are honored with a goodwill into which rivalry does not enter. On the other hand if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad.”

In other words, according to Thoukydides’s Perikles, glory for men is to be talked about and remembered forever, but glory for women is the exact opposite: to be as obscure and forgotten as possible.

The scholar David Harvey has written an article titled “Women in Thucydides,” which was originally published in spring 1985 in the journal Arethusa, volume 18, issue number 1, pages 67–90, and can be accessed through JSTOR for those who have access. In the paper, Harvey takes count of every single place where Thoukydides mentions women or a woman, quoting every instance.

Harvey notes that the Histories of the Peloponnesian War is over nine hundred chapters in length. Throughout the entire work, Thoukydides only mentions twenty individual women in total. Of these, he only mentions eight individual women by name; the rest are all anonymous. Additionally, he only mentions seven individual women in the course of his main narrative; all the other mentions occur in digressions about earlier events.

Thoukydides only mentions women in the plural a grand total of twenty-six times. In twenty-one of these instances, he only mentions women as one of the generic components of a polis, often alongside children and sometimes alongside men. In many cases, when an army sacks a certain city, he says that the army slaughtered all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery. In nearly all his mentions of women, he describes other people doing things to them and he only rarely describes women themselves doing things. On two occasions, though, he does mention that women were involved in fighting. He treats this as shocking and exceptional.

All Thoukydides’s references to women are extremely brief. He never tells any memorable stories about women. The most amount of text he ever spends talking about an individual woman is only eight lines—in contrast to Herodotos, who often devotes multiple chapters to telling stories about individual women.

ABOVE: Detail of an Attic red-figure pelike dating to between c. 480 and c. 470 BCE, depicting a woman working as a street vendor

As Harvey points out in his paper, there are many instances where we would expect Thoukydides to mention women and yet he clearly deliberately avoids mentioning them. For instance, he does not mention women at all in his account of the plague of Athens in 430 BCE (Histories of the Peloponnesian War 2.47–54), despite the fact that many women almost certainly caught the plague, many almost certainly died from it, and many almost certainly served as nurses for the sick. He does, however, mention how the plague affected birds and dogs (2.50).

He also never mentions Perikles’s partner Aspasia of Miletos (lived c. 470 – c. 400 BCE), despite the fact that other authors claim that she was involved in causing the war (including Aristophanes in his Acharnians, lines 515–539, and Ploutarchos of Chaironeia in his Life of Perikles, chapters 24–25, 30, and 32) and Plato even claims in his Menexenos 235-236 that she was an accomplished orator and that she wrote some of Perikles’s speeches for him. Thoukydides is very concerned with describing both the causes of the war and Perikles’s speeches, so his complete failure to mention Aspasia in any way, even for the sake of refuting the idea that she had something to do with the cause of the war, is almost downright bizarre.

Thoukydides does mention in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 8.12.2 and 8.45.1 that there was personal conflict between King Agis of Sparta and the general Alkibiades, but he completely neglects to mention that the reason for this conflict was because Alkibiades had an affair with Agis’s wife Timaia, an affair which resulted in great scandal, which is described in other sources.

It is clear that Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War is an exclusively male history, in which only the deeds and experiences of men seem to matter. As I noted earlier, this is a highly unusual aspect of Thoukydides’s work in particular, not a characteristic of Greek historiography in general. In Thoukydides, women are not just marginalized; they are almost completely omitted.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble herma depicting Aspasia of Miletos, based on a Greek original dating to the fifth century BCE

Thoukydides’s pro-slavery bias

One final bias that Thoukydides shares with virtually every other ancient Greek author whose works have survived is a pro-slavery bias. Quite simply, Thoukydides assumes without question that slavery is natural and morally acceptable, that it is wrong for enslaved people to run away from their enslavers, and that it is wrong for anyone to give refuge to an enslaved person who has run away.

He never at any point in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War says anything about what enslaved people thought of the war or how they experienced it. When he reports in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.139 that one of the reasons why the Athenians passed the Megarian decree was because they accused the Megarians of giving refuge to enslaved people who had escaped from Athens, he says nothing about who these enslaved people were, why they ran away, why they decided to flee to Megara specifically, or how they were received in Megara. He also treats the accusation of harboring escaped enslaved people as a legitimate reason for issuing economic sanctions.

Similarly, Thoukydides often reports that, after the sack of a city, the sackers killed all the men and sold all the women and children into slavery, but he says nothing about what happened to any of the newly enslaved women and children after that. They simply disappear from his account once they become enslaved because, after that point, he sees them as no longer relevant.

Thoukydides’s pro-slavery bias is not surprising, since, as I have mentioned, it is a bias that basically every other ancient Greek author shares. Nonetheless, it is a bias that we should certainly pay attention to and call him out for when reading his work.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an Attic black-figure neck amphora by the Antimenes Painter dating to between c. 530 and c. 510 BCE depicting people (probably slaves) gathering olives, currently held in the British Museum

Conclusion

Thoukydides was a great historian and his Histories of the Peloponnesian War remains undoubtedly the single most important surviving source of information about that war. He was not, however, “unbiased.” He clearly had a perspective on what he was writing and his narrative is inherently shaped by his perspective.

We should not blame Thoukydides for this, since every person who has ever written anything about any subject at any point in history has had some kind of bias. Thoukydides’s account is a work of great literature and he includes so much information that it is possible to make arguments against him based on the information he himself provides. If we should blame Thoukydides for anything, it is his arrogant claim to be above bias, rather than his bias itself.