It must be admitted that … the abse

It must be admitted that … the absence of such arguments is no proof that the speeches were not composed a good deal later than the events with which they are concerned. There are the two possible explanations, the first that Thucydides wrote these speeches quite early and the second that, whenever he wrote them, he avoided the anachronism of after knowledge of later events, and these do not necessarily exclude each other: they may be complementary. But if we may suppose that Thucydides' purpose from the start was not merely to relate what happened in the field of action, but also to explain why it happened in the light of what could be known at the time, then the burden of proof rests on those who would suppose that he would not think the present could supply the necessary material for interpretation on those lines. And if Eduard Meyer is right, it seems hard to suppose that the historian would be content with preparing a narrative of events without adding, as soon as might be, the element that made his history lebensfdhig. I say 'as soon as might be', for there might be good reasons for not reaching the composition of speeches for Bk VIII and good reasons for the absence of speeches in the stretch of the history between the closing chapters of Bk IV and the Melian dialogue. Also a speech like the Funeral Speech, which has a timeless quality in the sense that it is not part of a situation, may be placed in a category of its own.