ABSTRACT
Thucydides was one of those prophets and kings of thought who have desired to see the day of all-conquering Knowledge, and have not seen it. From this instinct all mythology takes its rise, and all the religious and philosophical systems which grow out of mythology without a break. When Thucydides records his own military failure and the exile by which the Athenians punished it, he neither extenuates the blunder nor complains of the penalty. To link the Sicilian enterprise to the origin of the war, he would have had to get completely out of himself, become 'a modern of the moderns', and study the economic situation, an entity he never dreamed of. Both historians have in view a current controversy on the subject roused by the Lacedaemonians' demand that the Athenians should expel 'the Accursed'-a 'pretext' for the war which provides Thucydides with an occasion for telling the story and correcting Herodotus.
