I do not propose to dissect every c

I do not propose to dissect every chapter of the Archaeology. The same sources, used in precisely the same way, and the same kind of reasoning are found throughout it. "Terms of intellectual discernment" or, more precisely, expressions of personal judgment abound. Chapter 3, for in­stance, relies mainly on Homer as its source: the absence in his poems of a common name for all the Greeks at Troy Thucydides uses as proof of his own assumption that Greece achieved nothing collectively before the Trojan War. Here too Homer's evidence is framed by the expres­sion, "it seems to me," (3.2, and picked up as "as I think," in 3.3). Similarly, chapter 4 about Minos' naval power is based on tradition: Thucydides' statement that Minos cleared the sea of pirates to secure revenues is his own interpretation of that tradition, an inference, as the phrase "probably," indicates. Even when he has left the "mythical" period behind, personal expressions do not disappear. In chapter 13 the Corinthians are said to be the first to have had triremes built, and it appears that Ameinokles, the Corinthian, built four ships for the Samians. Clearly, Thucydides is still working with data that we would term "oral tradition." On the whole, in other words, the sources he cites and the reasoning he employs throughout the Archaeology are uniform. He thus reconstructs the past. What is lacking in his reconstructions, however, is the contribution of the nineteenth century to the discipline of history, source criticism. No matter how painstaking he considered his pur­suit of truth, how reliable his evidence, or how reasonable the conclusions he drew from it; no matter how much he understood that caution was necessary in the face of poetic exaggeration, he must nonetheless accept both the poets and oral tradition as his factual basis. He just did not have at his disposal the tools of source criticism or the means of evaluating documents used by the contemporary professional historian. Uncertainty and doubt he might express, but without ancillary disciplines like archaeology, comparative literature, or linguistics his efforts to criticize his sources, or even his opportunities to verify them, remain minimal.