How History of the Peloponnesian War drew on The Histories
A documented line of influence: Thucydides demonstrably engaged Herodotus’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Histories
Herodotus · c. 430 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides · c. 411 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
9/10
On History of the Peloponnesian War’s page
- The history Thucydides is picking up — and arguing with
- His narrative deliberately begins where Herodotus left off (Sestos, 479 BCE), then drives to 431; the Histories are the explicit precursor he continues
- He kept the enterprise and threw out the method — read Herodotus first and Thucydides' colder, stricter approach reads as a direct rebuke
On The Histories’s page
- Herodotus invented the genre; Thucydides took it over
- The Histories end with the siege of Sestos in 479 BCE — and Thucydides opens his Pentecontaetia (Book 1) right there, bridging the fifty years from where Herodotus stopped to the war's outbreak in 431
- Read it first and you watch the project Thucydides would inherit, sharpen, and turn against its own founder