232 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Cleon, until the democratic enthusiasm of Grote on behalf of dema- 
gogues, threw a light into dark places and cast a shadow on the seeming 
impersonality of the historian’s history. The defence may be an 
adequate defence of the silence of Thucydides on moral themes, of his 
comparative silence about the ‘“frightfulness” of Athenian policy 
or the ‘‘frightfulness” of the war generally: I think it is: but where the 
facts do not speak for themselves, where they need interpretation, 
it is a dead loss to the modern reader that Thucydides either records 
facts without explanation, as, for example, the mutilation of the Her- 
mae, or does not think them worthy of record at all. 
If Herodotus or Plutarch had covered the same ground with the 
same advantages, what a different place the Athens of Pericles and 
Socrates would be for us to-day! How infinitely more real and more 
alive! Plato and Aristophanes have done something to fill the gap 
but neither can be expected to fill it well: and each is justified, and 
even compelled, by his special subject matter to leave it largely un- 
filled. We had a right to expect from Thucydides as an historian 
records which cannot be required of dialogues on philosophy and still 
less from the frank caricatures of ancient comedy: and least of all 
from the conventional and, so to speak, Sunday-school sermons and 
religious services of ancient tragedy. 
After all this generalising and all this more or less vague beating 
of the air in which Thucydides moved, let me come down closer to 
details and endeavour to seize a few points of his mind—unseized 
it-may be by the Germans yet—and publish them before this Society. 
It appears to me that perhaps the most curiously salient or crucial 
passage for plumbing the depths of Thucydides’ personality is that 
in book VII-(VII. 86) which records his judgment on the career and 
character of Nicias. Itis an extraordinary verdict. Here is a general, 
who has been condemned already in the history, at least by implication, 
for lack of vigour: who has been condemned explicitly for superstition 
(@etacués VII. 50): whose unscrupulous politics in the matter of 
Pylos, where he risked defeat for Athens for the sake of discrediting 
a rival, have been frankly stated: whose selfishness in remaining in 
Sicily rather than face complaints and recriminations at home, ob- 
viously sacrificed Athenian to personal interests and was afterwards 
emphatically contrasted for this reason by Plutarch the moralist 
with the unselfish patriotism of a much more obscure general, one Leo 
of Byzantium: whose craving for life even at the bitter end, when every- 
thing else but life was lost, has been recorded without comment: 
and yet after all these materials furnished us for a verdict more or 
less unfavourable to Nicias, the historian concludes: 
