ABSTRACT
A little over a decade ago a new Thucydides began to emerge. The older and more familiar Thucydides, the scientist, the rationalist, the pupil of the Sophists and the Hippocratics who had “grasped and applied the principles of scientific method with such success that his work constitutes a standard of presentation” is still to be seen, most commonly in the company of scholars of the older generation. 1 But frequently now, especially from younger classicists, there come reports of quite a different Thucydides, one who is almost the opposite of his predecessor. The self-effacing scientific historian, whose principal characteristic was cool detachment and whose ultimate goal was “objectivity,” has been replaced by a passionate and engagé writer whose “pent-up intensity of feeling and of thought” seems to some writers “almost alarming.” 2 Although no consensus has yet been reached, there is a suspicion that this intensity strongly influences—even molds—his work. The great model of scientific historiography is now suspected of being “a critic of that scientific attitude towards history.” 3
