the greatest of Greek, and in some respects of all historians, was a native of Attica, and belonged to the deme of Halimus, and the phyle of Leontis. His father's name is variously given as Olorus, or Orolus, but the former is assumed as more probably the correct form. His mother's name was Hegesipyle. Through her he claimed kindred with the family of Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, but the relationship is difficult to trace. It is conjectured with some show of truth, that his mother was the grand-daughter of Miltiades' wife. His age, like his parentage, is involved in much obscurity. He says himself that he lived through the Peloponnesian war, and saw it brought to a close. If the statement preserved by Aulus Gellius, on the authority of Pamphilus (xv. 23), be true, that he was forty years of age when that war broke out, he must have been born in B.C. 471. Lucian, probably in jest, records a story that Herodotus read his great work in its finished form to the assembled Greeks at Olympia B.C. 456, and that among his hearers was Thucydides, then a lad of fifteen, who was melted to tears by the recitation. The story was long accepted as authentic, but modern criticism has plausibly doubted, if not fairly disproved, its truth. True or false, however, it furnishes no clue to fixing reliably the age of the younger historian.

Not less doubtful than either of the points already alluded to is that of Thucydides' education. It is highly probable, that, living as he did at Athens, he should have enjoyed all the advantages of early culture which that city, then in the acme of its intellectual fame, was able to bestow. It is said that Antiphon of Rhamnus, the first orator of the day, was his instructor in rhetoric; and though there is no positive evidence, it is far from improbable that such really was the case. This much is certain, that Antiphon was teaching publicly at Athens when Thucydides was a youth, and that Cicero, in his eulogy on Antiphon, quotes the historian in corroboration of his praise. On somewhat similar grounds he is believed to have studied philosophy under Anaxagoras, who is known to have resided for a considerable time at Athens. That he ever practised oratory as a profession, is not known for certain. That he possessed great oratorical powers, is plain from the speeches in his history. One of the first authentic facts of his life is that recorded by himself (ii. 48), that he was in Athens at the time of the great plague, that he suffered from it, and was one of the few who escaped with life from its attacks. This happened in the second year of the war, at a time when he had not fairly committed himself to public life. Most probably it was after his recovery that he began to take a part in state affairs, and he must have shown some administrative capacity, for in the eighth year of the war (B.C. 424) we find him in command of a small squadron at Thasos, on his way to the relief of Amphipolis, then besieged by the Lacedaemonians. He arrived too late at the scene of action to effect his purpose. Amphipolis had already surrendered on favourable terms to Brasidas the Spartan general, but the seaport of Eion was saved. The loss of Amphipolis—probably the most important position of the war—was a great blow to the Athenians; and Thucydides, to avoid the punishment of death which he had reason to believe would follow his failure, went into exile, and did not return to Athens till the year B.C. 403, when the war had been brought to a close. His own statement merely records, that after his failure at Amphipolis he became an exile, but makes no mention of a formal trial or sentence. He gives no certain clue as to the place or places where these twenty years were spent. His biographer, Marcellinus, maintains, that he retired first to Ægina and afterwards to Thrace, where he possessed gold mines of considerable value. He may have had his head-quarters here, but there are the best reasons for believing that he travelled a good deal, and in the course of his travels collected materials for portions of his history. His minute descriptions of different parts of Sicily and southern Italy are such as could scarcely have been written without a personal inspection of the localities. The story, however, that he spent the whole term of his exile in Italy, and that he finally died at Thurii, a colony identified with the name of Herodotus, does not deserve a moment's consideration. The time, place, and manner of his death, it is true, are involved in much obscurity. It is pretty generally agreed among ancient writers that he died a violent death, but the scene and the cause of his death are alike unknown with certainty. One account, preserved by Plutarch, narrates that he was killed at Scaptestyle in Thrace, and that his remains were conveyed to Athens, and buried in the tomb of the family of Miltiades. Pausanias relates, that he was assassinated at Athens shortly after his return from exile, and that his grave was to be seen near the Pyre Melitides. Whether he died at Athens or not, however, the weight of evidence assigns that city as the spot where his remains found their last resting-place.

Of the domestic life of the great historian, even less is certainly known than of his public career. In the absence of well authenticated facts it may be stated, that one account describes him as having married a Thracian princess, in whose right he inherited the gold mines that gave him much of his social prestige at Athens, and among which he spent some at least of the years of his banishment. Suidas says that he left behind him a son named Timotheus, and a daughter, to whom is attributed, but on insufficient grounds, the eighth book of his History.

The subject of Thucydides' great work is the Peloponnesian war, which lasted from B.C. 431 to B.C. 404. From the political and moral agencies which he found at work in Greece at the commencement of that war, he foresaw that the struggle would be the most important and the most severe that had ever taken place in his native land. Accordingly he began to collect the materials for his work from the day on which war was declared. His social position opened up to him the best sources of information. Of some of the most important events and movements he was himself an eye-witness. What he did not actually see with his own eye, he spared no pains or time in verifying from the accounts of others. And the result of all his labours is a work which, as a mere repertory of well-ascertained facts, is surpassed by no production of any statistic of modern times, who has enjoyed all the latest appliances of science for collecting and verifying details. Due regard being had to the age in which it was produced, the history of Thucydides must be admitted by every candid student to be a perfect marvel of accuracy; and the more carefully the book is perused, the more strongly will this impression force itself upon the mind of the reader. Unlike most other ancient historians, he appreciated fully the advantages of chronology, and is careful to narrate events as nearly as possible in the order of the time when they happened. The incidents are chronicled according to the summers and winters of the years in which they took place. All the negotiations carried on by the states which took part in the struggle are recorded, when possible, in the very words of the ambassadors. When that was impossible, the substance of their speeches is given, as closely as convenient, in the very words of the orators. Another respect in which his work stands out in marked contrast with almost all extant, certainly with all ancient histories, is its impartiality. Although the events which he describes took place many of them under his eyes, and all of them during his lifetime; and though he was himself a native and a citizen of the state which took the lead in everything that was done and suffered, he writes as coldly and impartially as if he had been a citizen of another state, describing events that had happened in another country ages before his birth. Except from a few incidental hints, it would not be easy to gather from the body of the work whether the author were an Athenian or a Spartan, and it is impossible fairly to make out on which side his own personal sympathies are enlisted. Rarely does he digress from the subject matter in hand. When he does so, it is never with a view to impress on the reader his own personal importance, or that of the country to which he belonged, or to startle or delight him with picturesque descriptions of great scenes or events. Not unfrequently this very sternness of treatment gives a force to his bare narrative that all the arts of rhetoric would have failed to reach. His descriptions of the plague at Athens, and of the miserable expedition of the Athenians against Sicily, produce from this cause an effect that is absolutely tragic. When he indulges in a digression at all, it is only to trace to their sources the causes of the events previously described, and the action of the various states upon each other. Details of the personal characters of the principal actors, social changes, and home politics, are things that find little favour in his sight. The predominance in his mind of the reflective faculty impelled him irresistibly to speculation on the general causes and political principles on which the course and issue of events depended. In his subtle power of appreciating and tracing these causes, he had no equal, and indeed no rival, among ancient writers of history.

The style of Thucydides is well adapted to the subject he took in hand to describe. Utterly devoid of useless ornament, it presents the very maximum of strength and energy. The ordinary flourishes of rhetoric find no place in his work. Every word has its own meaning and its own place, and is carefully weighed before it is set down. Conciseness, a rare virtue among a people of glowing imagination and warm temperament like the Greeks, is with him carried to an almost vicious extreme. And the consequence is, that of all the old historians, Thucydides is by far the most difficult to comprehend. While the thought is always as clear as crystal, the expression is not unfrequently obscure and involved. In the speeches, in particular, with which his work abounds, this defect is conspicuous; and even Cicero, an accomplished Greek scholar, is driven to confess that these are sometimes hardly intelligible. Difficult they undoubtedly are; but so well have the details of the Peloponnesian war been investigated in recent times, that there is no chapter in the work of its best chronicler, however perplexing, which the modern student, if he choose, may not understand through all its obscurities both of grammatical structure and historical allusion.

The editions of Thucydides, as may readily be imagined, are very numerous. The Greek text was first published by Aldus, at Venice, in 1502. The second notable edition was that of Henry Stephens, in 1564, which comprised the Latin translation by Valla. Immensely superior to all that preceded it, is the German edition of Bekker, Berlin, 1821, in 3 vols. 8vo. Subsequent, and, in some matters of detail, better editions are those of Porpo, Leipzig, 10 vols. 8vo, 1821–28; Göller, 2 vols. 8vo, Leipzig, 1826; and Arnold, 3 vols. 8vo, Oxford, 1830–35. The translations of Thucydides' history are likewise very numerous. It was translated into French by Claude Seyssel in 1527, and subsequently by Levesque in 1795, and by Gail in 1807. The last and perhaps best German translation is that of H. W. Klein, Munich, 1826. Hobbes' English translation is well known. It was based chiefly on Latin versions, and was executed for the sake of the political writing of the original. More accurate are those of W. Smith, which appeared in 1753; of S. T. Bloomfield, published in London in 1829; and of the Rev. H. Dale, 2 vols., 1848.

THÜMEL, MORITZ AUGUST VOX, a German writer of distinction, was the second son of a family of nineteen children, and was born at Schönfeld, near Leipzig, on the 27th of May 1738. After passing through the University of Leipzig, where he made many friends, and among others he was fortunate enough to secure the esteem of an old advocate, who left him at his death 24,000 dollars, he retired in 1783 to Sonneborn, where he continued to reside for the most part until his death, which took place at Coburg on the 26th of October 1817. The literary fame of Thümel was established by his Wilhelmine, "a comic poem in prose," first published in 1764. It is considered a masterpiece of polished humour and playful satire. His greatest work, however, is the one entitled Reise in den Mittäglichen Provinzen von Frankreich (Travels in the Southern Provinces of France), in 10 vols., 1791–1805; which, like Sterne's Sentimental Journey, is more a web of fiction than of travels, and glitters all over with humorous pleasantry and satirical observation. A complete edition of his works has been published in 6 vols., and a biography by J. E. von Gruner in 1819.