Thucydides was born between 460 and 454 B.C., as two passages in his work show. In book 5 he states that he lived through the whole war, "being of an age to understand events," words that suggest he was a young adult when the war broke out in 431. Moreover, he relates in book 4 that in 424 he held the position of one of the ten generals who were elected year by year to command Athenian forces. It is fairly certain that thirty was the minimum age for generals, so Thucydides cannot have been born after 454. If his birth is dated at 460 or earlier, it becomes hard to see why he wanted to assure the reader that in 431, at age thirty or more, he was really old enough to understand political-military affairs. Thus, if he was born between 456 and 454, he was between twenty-three and twenty-five when the war started, which suits perfectly his slightly defensive statement in book 5. (The birthdate of 471, occasionally still seen in minor encyclopedias, comes from Pamphilus, a scholar under the early Roman Empire, but is no more than a mechanical calculation based on the assumption that the age of forty marked the most important event of a man's life -- in Thucydides' case the opening of the Peloponnesian War in 431.)
His family background is important and brings him into relationship with other prominent Athenians.
This is a free page. This page contains 176 words. This
biography contains 5,334 words (approx. 18 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Thucydides Access Pass.
