When what Thucydides made of the war seems deficient, scholars often defend him by invoking the text's incompleteness. But to see Thucydides' History as a fragmented and precise (or imprecise) assembly of facts is to ignore its interpretative function, its striving to explain what happened, and what might happen: history never offers a neutral, value-free, account of what happened. To clarify my point, and show how reading Thucydides in this way draws out, rather than diminishes, history's complexity and subtlety, I will turn immediately to two passages which present problems if the status of history as 'text' is not acknowledged.
When what Thucydides made of the war seems deficient, scholars often defend him by invoking the text's incompleteness. But to see Thucydides' History as a fragmented and precise (or imprecise) assembly of facts is to ignore its interpretative function, its striving to explain what happened, and what might happen: history never offers a neutral, value-free, account of what happened. To clarify my point, and show how reading Thucydides in this way draws out, rather than diminishes, history's complexity and subtlety, I will turn immediately to two passages which present problems if the status of history as 'text' is not acknowledged.<br>
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