The opening repudiates many princip

The opening repudiates many principles of ancient rhetorical composition. It does nothing to ease the reader into the subject matter or the approach. It abjures blandishments, ingratiations, or promises, except the bald statement that Thucydides, even at the beginning of the war, expected that it would be "great and most worth relating of all previous events." But the nature of this greatness is not specified for many chapters. Initially, there is only the assertion that this was the greatest kinesis, movement or dislocation, for the Greeks or even for most of mankind. The assertion seems excessive: What of the dislocations that followed the Trojan War or the immense movements and destruction of the second Persian invasion? Almost immediately we lose sight of the Peloponnesian War and its effects, "the moral as well as the material loss--the fabric of society nearly broken, both intellect and virtue weakened or abused." Instead the focus turns to a negative point--that the events of early Greek history were never of large scale. Nor are the arguments in support of this position always compelling. The lovers of Herodotus are understandably outraged: "Thucydides magnifies his own subject at the expense of the wars of Hellene and Barbarian, ludicrously missing the oecumenical significance and wantonly compressing the duration and magnitude of the Herodotean theme.