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Thucydides at Amphipolis1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2015

J. R. Ellis
J. R. Ellis*
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Extract

Posterity has on the whole judged Thucydides not ungenerously over his failure to save Amphipolis in the winter of 424. Although some of those who have attempted to analyse the military circumstances of the loss, almost wholly from the historian’s own account, have found him culpable in some way, most scholars have preferred not to add their condemnation to that of the Athenian demos. Rather the majority have tended towards the non-committal or have celebrated what they have seen to be the author’s resolute determination, in his failure to present a palpable self-defence, not to be diverted from the primary aims of his work. Gomme even suggested reasons why Thucydides may actually have been in the right and why, by consequence, his exile may have been a perversion of justice. But in the end, of course, as Gomme and many others have realized, we simply do not have the evidence to judge with any certainty.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antichthon , Volume 12 , 1978 , pp. 28 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © Australasian Society for Classical Studies 1978

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References

2 For example, Grote, History of Greece v 328 ff.; Busolt, Griechische Geschichte iii 1154.4.

3 See Grundy, , Thucydides and the History of his Age i2 30; Finley, Thucydides, p.200.Google Scholar

4 Historical Commentary on Thucydides (hereafter HCT) iii 586 f.

5 Hermes 90 (1962), 276 ff. (repr. in Thukydides, ed. Herter [Wege der Forschung 98] (Darmstadt, 1968), 620 ff.).

6 276.

7 277.

8 On this distance see Gomme, HCT iii 586 f.

9 op. cit.

10 Grundy, , 1 230Google Scholar n.l, infers from Thucydides’ silence on Eukles’ fate that he was not banished. But then Thucydides mentions his own exile only in a quite different context and for a different reason, so that his silence cannot be given much weight. Grundy also notes that the Oinobios of Dekeleia who was a strategos in 410 (Meiggs & Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions No. 89, line 47) may have been a son of Eukles, and the son’s political success would be unlikely were his father in disgrace. This might be a useful point did it not rest on the most speculative of identifications.

11 Gomme,.HCT iii 586 f.

12 285–7.

13 HCT iii 587.

14 ibid. 577.

15 ibid. 584.

16 Bauman, R.A., Acta Classica 11 (1968) 170–81,Google Scholar argues that the missing link needed to elucidate the account is the despatch by signal fire of an answering message from Thucydides, at Thasos, to Eukles to the effect that he would not comply with the request for help. The reconstruction depends, in my view, on an over-literal inference from the touches in the narrative inserted to pre-condition us to accept that Thucydides’ best endeavours were thwarted by local apostasy.