SOURCE: "Speeches and Personalities in Thucydides," in The Ancient Historians, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970, pp. 88-101.

In the following excerpt, Grant defends the "accuracy" of Thucydides's speeches, basing his argument on an examination of contemporary Greek notions of the purpose of public speech. He speculates that Thucydides believed that individuals in history were "there to reveal underlying causes " of the course of history; therefore, their speeches are not only vital to written history, but also are accurate inasmuch as they articulate those underlying causes.

Thucydides' history would not have been at all the same without the speeches. This device, which seems so strange to us in a historical work, had been adapted by Herodotus from Homer, and Thucydides—who after all came from Athens, where talk was a fine art— carried its employment a good deal further. Twenty-four per cent of his whole work consists of such orations, which...