Athenian Leaders Pericles And Nicias Analysis

Comparison analysis of Athenian Leaders Pericles and Nicias based on Thucydides’ History.

This paper aim is to examine the pattern of the Athenian leaders Pericles and Nicias, which characters are distributed in the Thucydides’ History . Thucydides’ History is evidently chary of expressing the author views about leading individuals. In the first place, it will show that in the book such explicit judgments are few and mostly brief. The author is not content to accept public opinion uncritically, though he sometimes reports it, or merely to echo the views of his informants. This is an evidence of the author’s confidence about the presented information. All this show how author differs himself from the other ancient authors and include explicit verdicts on ability and characters. Thucydides takes care to impress upon

The moral behavior of individuals is not in itself important to him. The author is looking rather for military and political capacity or incapacity, because these qualities had most effects upon the course of the war. The tension between form and content is an important element in Thucydides style of writing. The author subtly leads the reader to make comparisons and contrast that reveal the meaning of the events he describes. The reader is thus made to form ideas that he considers his own, about the historical choices confronted and made by the political leaders. Thucydides was sometimes inviting challenge and reassessment, a historical rereading of his text in which details and reactions postponed or minimized in his narrative are given a second look and then seen in a new relationship, with a new weighting. Certainly he knew that his treatment of almost every major Athenian figure Pericles, Cleon, Demosthenes, Nicias,