ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extent to which the idea of “history from loss” is salient for Thucydides's account of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War. It is one thing to recognize that Thucydides's History is a work that is profoundly shaped by loss (the Athenians’ eventual defeat in 404 BCE, a devastating plague, Thucydides's exile from Athens) and another thing to recruit it as counter-hegemonic history in the tradition of history from below. Thucydides writes about the gains and losses sustained by an imperial power over the course of a long war. For much of the course of this war, Athens was given to projecting itself beyond the sphere of loss and imagining an exemplary classical afterlife for itself. Although Thucydides's History critiques the failure of Athens to limit its power and to recognize its own limits, he never fully relinquishes the classicizing logic of Athenian cultural imperialism according to which Athens's losses are a spur to future greatness. These contradictions are central to understanding the dynamics of loss in Thucydides's thought.
