SOURCE: "What Thucydides Takes for Granted" and "Thucydides' Self-imposed Limitations," in A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1945, pp. 1-25, 25-29.

Gomme, a scholar of Greek letters, was the author of Essays in Greek History and Literature (1937). In the following excerpt, he first describes the economic, military, and political contexts and assumptions of Thucydides' work and then documents what the historian elected to exclude.

General Economic Conditions

Thucydides was well aware of the importance of the economic factor in history. In his sketch of the early development of the Greek states in his opening chapters he lays more stress on it than on anything else, both in general (e.g. 2. 2-4, 7. 1) and for particular states, as Athens (2. 5) and Corinth (13. 5), and particular events, as the Trojan war (II). But he does not give a general survey of economic conditions in Greece in the last third of...