One might suppose that if Thucydide

One might suppose that if Thucydides chooses to center everything around the story of the siege in this way, it is because the siege itself interests him. As a historian of war, of strategy itself, he would naturally bring to military details the interest of a technician, and the pages that concern us would transmit, in a more precise manner, his sense of siege-craft. Such an interpretation should be dismissed. Evidence against this view is readily furnished by the account itself. No technical detail is given, neither the nature nor the exact placement of the various constructions is provided, and the operations are so incompletely described that we even find, several chapters later(7.43.4), three camps that had never been mentioned.