[HUTTON] THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 243 
There is little else to be found I think in Thucydides’ history 
capable of throwing much light on his mind and personality. A 
man who so veiled his moral, religious, and artistic bias that the former 
is not easily understood (as in the verdicts on Nicias and Antiphon) 
while the two latter have been overlooked more or less entirely, 
until recently, is not likely to declare himself freely in smaller ways. 
There is occasionally a touch, a hint of dry sarcasm. The 
Spartan Admiral Cnemus missed attacking the Peiraeus, so he said, 
by stress of weather. “If he had wished to make a better pace the 
weather would not have been an insuperable obstacle,” (Bk IT. 93), 
observes Thucydides. There is just one speech which is not merely 
dramatic, like the Melian dialogue, but full of personal colour or at 
least of national colour: the speech of the Spartan ephor Sthenelaides 
(Bk. I. 85. 86). Thucydides actually gives the speaker’s name in this 
case, apparently because the speech is so full of character as to be too 
full of character, except as an individual type: too full even for a type 
of Sparta: more Spartan than the Spartans. 
“The greater part of the Athenian argument I cannot under- 
“stand. They have said a great deal in eulogy of Athens 
“but they have not shown that they are not injuring our good 
“allies: if they behaved well against Persia all the more 
“shame on their behaviour to-day.”’ 
There seems a touch of individual portraiture here. If the name 
were not given, it might almost seem a touch of caricature; probably 
that is why the name is given. But this speech is exceptional, not 
only in its caricature, if there be caricature, but in the giving of a name 
. to the speaker. Thucydides’ craving for the impersonal, his ambition 
to record the laws of history and not the feats of passing and ephemeral 
individuals, banishes names, broadly speaking, from his history, where 
other historians of all ages would record them. 
There is little else that occurs to me. Thucydides believes in 
fate. He isa fatalist even to the extent of believing that he can read 
fate and forecast the future, human nature being the same in all ages. 
Is it a sort of natural compensation that the man who believed in 
so little in which other men believed, who believed in so little that he 
glorifies conventionalism and conservatism just because it is 
conventional and conservative: who liked the conventional 
and conservative Nicias just because he appealed to his taste, his 
sense of manners and moderation: who canonises nothing in his his- 
tory except the moderation of aristocrats—äpiorokparias a&poros 
mporumoe (III. 82: compare VIII. 24. povor de Aaxedarpovior 
edatuovnoavres Gua éowppormoary) a moderation which no doubt, 
he would himself have admitted, is no special virtue, virtue being 
