Thucydides,
author of the (incomplete) History of the War (Peloponnesian War) between Athens and Sparta, 431–404bc, in eight books.life...style In a famous sentence (Thuc. 24) Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives as the four ‘tools’ in Thucydides' workshop τὸ ποιητικὸν τω̑ν ὄνομάτων, τὸ πομυειδὲς τω̑ν σχημάτων, τὸ τραχὺ τη̑ς ἁρμονίας, τὸ τάχος τω̑ν σημασιω̑ν, ‘poetical vocabulary, great variety of figures, harshness of word-order, swiftness in saying what he has to say’. The first, third, and fourth of these criticisms are undoubtedly true. Thucydides' style has a poetical and archaistic flavour (it is often difficult to distinguish clearly between the two), as a reader sees at once when he turns from Thucydides to ...[The above entry in the OCD by Wade-Gery and Denniston, which goes back essentially to 1949, is an established classic and it seems an impertinence to attempt to replace it. But merely to reprint it would be unhelpful when Thucydides has been so intensively worked on. What follows is therefore a sketch of work on Thucydides in the quarter-century since the 2nd edition of the ... ...
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