In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Thucydides (or Thoukydides) (c. 472 BC – c. 400 BC) was an ancient Greek historian, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens. This work is widely regarded a classic and represents the first work of its kind.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

And they are most rightly reputed valiant, who though they perfectly apprehend both what is dangerous and what is easy, are never the more thereby diverted from adventuring. (translation by Thomas Hobbes [2] )

But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger. [1]

"the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

Misattributed [ edit ]

(1) "A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools."

Widely attributed to Thucydides in books and online. In fact misquoted from Sir William Francis Butler, Charles George Gordon (1889), p. 85, where it reads: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." [3]

(2) "Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most."

Popularised by Colin Powell, this quotation is not found anywhere in Thucydides.[1] It comes originally from the 19th-century author F.B. Jevons, in his book A History of Greek Literature: From the Earliest Period to the Death of Demosthenes, writing about prose style[2]; it was then quoted, without attribution, by classicist Charles Forster Smith, including in the introduction to his Loeb translation of Thucydides[3], which probably explains why later readers thought he was actually quoting from Thucydides.[4]

(3) "History is philosophy teaching from examples."

This is an ancient misattribution: it appears in a third-century Ars Rhetorica attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus: "The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples" (XI.2). The phrase appears nowhere in Thucydides; it might be interpreted as a response, by an unknown admirer of Thucydides, to the argument of Aristotle (Poetics 1451b11) that history is inferior to poetry because it deals only with the particular, "what Alcibiades did and suffered", rather than the general.[4]

(4) "Justice will not come to Athens until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are injured."

This is often attributed to Thucydides (and sometimes, in a slightly different form, to Benjamin Franklin), but it actually comes from ancient accounts of the life of Solon, for example in Diogenes Laërtius' Lives of Eminent Philosophers I.59 and Plutarch's Solon 18.5.

(5) "Peace is only an armistice in an endless war."

Popularised by the movie Wonder Woman, where the line is spoken by general Ludendorff and 'recognised' by Diana as coming from Thucydides.[5] It is not found anywhere in Thucydides; it does resemble a line in Plato's Laws, discussing the customs of the Cretans: "“Peace,” as the term is commonly employed, is nothing more than a name, the truth being that every State is, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other State" (Laws 626a).

(6) "A collision at sea can ruin your whole day."

Ascribed to Book IX, which is a clue that it's a joke as Thucydides wrote only eight books. This was invented by a student at the US Naval War College in 1960, and then quoted as a genuine line from Thucydides in the Reader's Digest in 1962.[6]

(7) "Stories happen to those who tell them."

Attributed to Thucydides by a number of guides and blogs about becoming a writer (e.g. Lucy McCormick Calkins, The Art of Teaching Writing (Heinemann, 1994), pp. 21 and 23). A variant, "Great stories happen to those who can tell them", is associated with the radio and tv presenter Ira Glass [7], who used it in a 2001 podcast. The original source may be Paul Auster's The Locked Room, the third part of his New York Trilogy (Faber & Faber, 1987), p.222: "Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said."

(8) "Hope is an expensive commodity. It makes better sense to be prepared."

The first part of the quote is a variant of Thucydides 5.103.1 (most translations say something like "Hope is prodigal by nature" (J. Mynott) or "[Hope's] nature is to be extravagant" (R. Crawley)). The second part, however, comes from the foreword of Richard Peston's biosecurity thriller The Cobra Event (Orion, 1998), p.xii; Peston quotes Thucydides and then comments himself, but both sentences have since been taken together and ascribed to Thucydides.[4]

(9) "You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely."

Although this looks exactly the sort of thing that a demagogue like Cleon might say, there is no trace of this line or anything like it in Thucydides. Many ancient law-codes include punishment for bearing false witness; for example, the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi from c.1772 BCE: "3. If a man, in a case (pending judgment), bear false (threatening) witness, or do not establish the testimony that he has given, if that case be a case involving life, that man shall be put to death. 4. If a man (in a case) bear witness for grain or money (as a bribe), he shall himself bear the penalty imposed in that case."[5]. However, the most likely source of this quote is the second Discourse of Isocrates, addressed to Nicocles, section 29: "Visit the same punishment on false-accusers as on evil-doers."[6]

(10) "Knowledge without understanding is useless."

One might imagine someone characterising Thucydides' aims in these terms, but it's not a phrase he ever uses. It is most likely a version of Confucius, Analects II.XV: "Learning without thinking is wasted effort; thinking without learning is dangerous”.[8]

(11) "The tyranny Athens imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself."

Not Thucydides - whose history broke off before the end of the war and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens - but journalist Chris Hedges, originally in a graduation speech at Rockford College, Illinois.[9] Repeated in later articles, the wording changes (the original had “the Athenian leadership” imposing tyranny, not Athens), and it comes to be attributed directly to Thucydides.[10] [11]

(12) "The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language."

Used as a chapter epigram in Richard Kreitner's Break It Up: secession, division, and the secret history of America’s imperfect union (Little, Brown, 2020) and quoted in a New Yorker article by Robin Wright.[12] This comes from a letter written in 1860 by the political scientist Francis Lieber to his son, and reads in full: "It sometimes has occurred to me that what Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peloponnesian War applies to us. The Greeks, he said, did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke Greek. Words received a different meaning in different parts."[13]. Lieber's final sentence is a garbled version of Thucydides 3.82.4; the rest is his own invention.