ABSTRACT
History, as told by Thucydides, carries in the telling its critical interpretation, its pragmatic or philosophical lesson. In order to understand the satisfaction Thucydides' narrative provides, it is necessary to grasp both the nature of the events and the nature of the significance that the historian ascribes to them. War is certainly not in the opinion of Thucydides a pathetic and ridiculous commotion on the surface of the "wave of history". Thucydides, who belongs to the civilization whose supreme test he describes, fails to make clear certain details, unchanged during the thirty years of war, that are indispensable for the reader of later centuries. The quantity of technical details introduced by Thucydides in describing the Sicilian expedition may suggest the hypothesis that competition in inventions, trickery, and innovations did not play the same role in other circumstances.
