Thucydides and Xenophon: Political Historians of Ancient Greece
By R. James Ferguson
Journey to the West: Essays in History, Politics and Culture (1998)
Introduction: We know little about Thucydides (also transliterated as Thoukydides) except what we can glean from his own book, The History of the Peloponnesian Wars. He was an Athenian citizen, probably born around the early 450s B.C.E., and was old enough to hold the position of strategos (a general, one of the elected positions in the Athenian democracy) in 424 B.C.E. He was quite young during the earlier events he describes, and therefore had to rely on interviewing others for large sections of his account, but was of manhood age when the war proper began.
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