Narrative Structure and Technique in Thucydides VI-VII

OF THE BOOK Thucydides Mythistoricus W. P. Wallace writes: "F. M. Corn ford maintained .. that Thucydides, in short, aimed not at historical accuracy, but at literary effect."' Most scholars today would take exception to Cornford's standpoint. But it is nevertheless a fact that historiography is not history, and that anyone who undertakes to record a series of historical events must bring some interpretive faculties to bear on them. In the hands of one who has "a mythological conception of the world of human acts and passions,"2 literary effect may indeed become an end in itself; but it need not be mutually exclusive with historical accuracy, if it is employed purposefully and judiciously to trans form an initially amorphous collection of data into a cohesive and integrated historical account. It may be useful at the outset to draw a distinction between accuracy and objectivity. The latter may extend to refraining even from evaluating the quality of one's sources, which can of course lead to inaccuracy, while accuracy may well be the result of careful selectivity and discrimination.3 The fact is that even the historian consummately concerned with historical accuracy must be subjective at several levels. He begins exercising his interpretive