Boucquey Thierry (General Editor). Encyclopedia Of World Writers. 3 volumes
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all his students eloquent, but Theophrastus most
eloquent.” Like his mentor, Theophrastus’s inter-
ests ranged from the natural sciences to logic,
metaphysics, rhetoric, poetics, politics, and ethics.
His ideas on philosophy and metaphysics built on
the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, though during
Theophrastus’s tenure at the Peripatetic, Zeno was
formulating Stoic philosophy and EPICURUS
founded his own Epicurean school at the Garden.
Diogenes Laertius, who wrote an early biogra-
phy of Theophrastus, called him “a very intelligent
and industrious man ...ever ready to do a kind-
ness and a lover of words.” Laertius attributed 224
works to Theophrastus, everything from 24 books
on law to treatises on the winds, types of sweating,
tiredness, plagues, fainting, and dizziness. The
sheer diversity and breadth of topics shows the ex-
traordinary breadth of his knowledge and the in-
quisitiveness of his mind. He wrote on abstractions
such as flattery and piety and on practical activities
such as sleep and dreams, music, and judicial
speeches. He analyzed virtually every aspect of the
natural world, from fruits and flavors to wine and
olive oil. He meditated on emotions, virtue, and
the nature of the soul and wrote manuals on king-
ship, the rearing of children, and the art of rheto-
ric. Other topics he studied included melancholy,
derangement, slander, metals, fire, and old age, to
name just a few.
What remains of Theophastus’s work, aside from
scattered fragments and quotations in texts of late
antiquity and the
MIDDLE AGES, are two treatises on
botany and assorted essays on natural sciences,
sense perception, and metaphysics. His most-
remembered work is what was, perhaps to him, his
most unimportant: the Characters, which became a
paradigm for European literature and contributed
to the development of the English essay.
Critical Analysis
The work Characters consists of a table of contents,
a preface explaining the purpose of the collection,
and 30 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect
of personality. None of the listed traits are very
pleasant or admirable. Each individual chapter is
titled with the trait under attack and commences
with a general definition, leading to a description
of the characteristic actions of a person of this sort.
Some sketches are followed by moralizing epi-
logues, which scholars suspect are later additions.
The true worth of Characters lies in the detailed
descriptions of each figure, which read like a series
of lecture notes or scribbles in a personal sketch-
book. The structure of these descriptions is uni-
formly peculiar and distinctive: Each begins with
the formula “X is the sort who . . .” and commences
with a series of modifiers listing the behaviors to
which this sort of person is prone. The details are
vivid and often hilarious. There are no virtues fea-
tured in these sketches; the characters are buf-
foons, braggarts, tricksters, and examples of all
sorts of vice.
Theophrastus, along with his students, had a
reputation for dressing finely and living well,
which may explain why so many of the characters
he writes about are parodies of stinginess. He was
also known for his elegant manners and sophisti-
cation, so several of the bumbling characters lack
social graces. The work is clearly not meant to in-
struct, either on the basis of ethical behavior or as
an example of rhetorical style; alone of Theophras-
tus’s compositions, Characters seems designed for
sheer entertainment. What moral judgments that
exist are thought to be the interpolations of later
authors. Theophrastus takes the stance of the nat-
ural scientist—studying, classifying, and remark-
ing on distinct traits, without attempting to
moralize or rationalize upon them.
The details of the descriptions clearly anchor
them in Athens in the last decades of the fourth
century B.C., revealing the city’s customs, institu-
tions, practices, and prejudices. The sketches were
likely composed over a decade or so, and most of
the internal evidence, or references within the
work, suggest dates between 325 and 315 B.C.The
descriptions abound with fascinating information
about everyday life in Athens, as can be seen in this
description of the character Obsequiousness:
Theophrastus 301
He gets frequent haircuts and keeps his teeth
white, and discards cloaks that are still good,
and anoints himself with perfumed oil. In the
marketplace he goes frequently to the money-
changers; among gymnasia he spends his time
at those where the ephebes work out; in the
theater, whenever there is a show, he sits next to
the generals. He buys nothing for himself, but
for foreigners he buys letters of commission for
Byzantium, and Laconian dogs for Kyzikos,
and Hymettos honey for Rhodes, and as he
does so tells everybody in town about it.
Despite the specificity of the detail, however,
Theophrastus’s characters do not belong only to
ancient Greece. When he summarizes the ungener-
ous person as “the sort who, if he wins the tragedy
competition, dedicates to Dionysus a strip of wood
with only his own name written on it,” even read-
ers unacquainted with this practice can guess read-
ily enough what it means. Many of Theophrastus’s
characters are universal types.
In his approach to the work, Theophrastus uses
a theory of personality predicated on the belief
that traits may be isolated and separately studied.
He inherited from Aristotle the idea that badness
of character resulted from excess or extremes. Ex-
cellence of character—what we would call virtue—
required moderating or balancing between the
extremes. While Theophrastus’s characters bor-
row from Aristotle’s Ethics, at least in their exam-
ples of vice, he also incorporates elements of
comedy and satire perfected by the dramatists, for
example
ARISTOPHANES. MENANDER’s style of New
Comedy owes much to the philosophy of character
contained in Theophrastus. After Theophrastus,
character writing was often imitated, most success-
fully by
SENECA and PLUTARCH. The works of HO-
RACE, MARTIAL, JUVENAL, and LUCIAN all demonstrate
their knowledge of the Characters.
The several existing copies of the manuscript, in
various stages of decay, owe their survival to the
frequency with which the work was anthologized
in manuals of rhetorical instruction. The character
sketch was a rhetorical exercise recommended by
CICERO and QUINTILIAN as a way of developing writ-
ing skill as well as providing an understanding of
human nature. Medieval writers borrowed the
technique of a gallery of personality portraits; the
most notable examples are the Prologue to The
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, the catalog
of the Seven Sins in Piers Plowman by William
Langland, and Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brandt.
The 1592 edition of Characters by Issac Casaubon
inspired renewed attention to the character sketch.
Renaissance writers showed a keen interest in
the literature and ideals of the ancient Greeks,
among them François Rabelais, Miguel de Cer-
vantes, Desiderius Erasmus, Michel de Montaigne,
and Ben Jonson. Several writers of the 17th cen-
tury attempted their own series of characters mod-
eled after Theophrastus, most notably Jean de La
Bruyère, who translated Theophrastus and then
continued with his own updated character
sketches. Though the technique of the literary
“portrait” belonged to the 17th and 18th centuries,
the art of describing characters through descrip-
tions of manners and behaviors was adapted by
19th-century novelists from Charles Dickens to
George Eliot. In many ways, therefore, the tech-
nique of characterization used in the modern-day
novel can be dated all the way back to the height
of ancient Greece and the work of Theophrastus.
English Versions of Works by Theophrastus
Theophrastus: Characters. Edited James Diggle et al.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Theophrastus: Enquiry Into Plants. Translated by
Arthur F. Hort. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1989.
Works about Theophrastus
Baltussen, Han. Theophrastus Against the Presocratics
and Plato. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2000.
Huby, Pamela and William W. Fortenbraugh.
Theophrastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life, Writ-
ings, Thought and Influence. Boston: Brill Aca-
demic Publishers, 1999.
302 Theophrastus
Van Ophuijsen, Johannes M. and Marlein Van Raalte,
eds. Theophrastus: Reappraising the Sources. Som-
erset, N.J.: Transaction Publications, 1998.
Thomas Aquinas, Saint (ca. 1224–1274)
theologian, philosopher
Thomas Aquinas was born at the castle of Roc-
casecca, near Naples, Italy, to a noble family. He
was sent away before he was five to be educated at
the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino,
where his father’s brother was abbot. Later he stud-
ied at the University of Naples. In this culturally
rich environment Thomas became familiar with
the writings of the Muslim thinkers AVICENNA and
AVERROËS, whose study of the Greek philosopher
ARISTOTLE, the ideas of whom had been almost for-
gotten following the collapse of the Roman Em-
pire, was beginning to attract the interest of
Christian Europe. Thomas Aquinas was among
those who studied Aristotle’s theories.
In Naples, Aquinas also met members of the
new Dominican order of mendicant friars, who led
a more austere and self-denying life than that prac-
ticed by the older established monastic orders such
as the Benedictines. Aquinas was still a teenager
when he decided to join the Dominicans. His fam-
ily opposed this decision and held him captive for
more than a year, trying to force him to change his
mind. Eventually they had to accept that their ef-
forts were wasted, and he was allowed to take his
vows in 1244.
The Dominicans sent young Thomas to
Cologne to study with the scholar Albertus Mag-
nus (later known as Saint Albert the Great, ca.
1200–80). Albertus Magnus had made an extensive
study of Aristotle, and this shared interest con-
tributed to the close relationship between master
and pupil, which lasted for many years. Aquinas
moved to Paris when Albertus Magnus took up a
teaching position there in 1245. After completing
his studies, he remained in Paris as a professor for
another three years. He then spent 10 years in Italy,
much of the time in attendance on the pope, but
returned to Paris for another three years before
taking up a teaching position at the University of
Naples. A mystical experience in 1273 that made all
his work seem to him “like straw,” as he told a
friend, led to his ceasing to write, but he contin-
ued with his teaching and administrative work.
When he was about 50 years old, he was on his way
to Lyons on church business when he died, not far
from his birthplace.
Critical Analysis
Thomas Aquinas wrote more than 60 works, all in
Latin, the language of scholarship in his day. There
are sermons, biblical commentaries, polemical
tracts (he was often called on by Church leaders to
respond to controversies and potential heresies),
philosophical expositions, and theological works.
His 13 commentaries on the works of Aristotle are
still valued by students of philosophy for the help
they give in understanding Aristotle’s ideas, but as
a Christian philosopher, Aquinas probably saw
them more as a means to a clear understanding of
the unity of God’s creation.
The early medieval Catholic Church tended to
dismiss classical philosophers like Aristotle, who
had lived before the time of Christ, as pagan and
therefore irrelevant or even harmful to Christianity.
Aquinas demonstrated that Aristotle’s ideas were in
fact compatible with Christian teaching. Aristotle’s
confidence in the capacity of human reason to un-
cover the underlying order in the universe by
studying the details of creation was pursued by
Aquinas, who identified that underlying order with
God. Aristotle’s proof of the existence of a prime
mover was developed by Aquinas as proof of the
existence of God. His modification of Aristotle’s
approach was to argue that human reason could
not discover everything, and God’s revelation was
needed to discover the fullness of truth.
Aquinas’s greatest book, the Summa Theologica,
which he began around 1265 and was still work-
ing on when he stopped writing in 1273, was con-
ceived as an aid to students of theology and
metaphysics. The original title, Summa Totius The-
Thomas Aquinas, Saint 303
ologiae, may be translated as “the summary of all
theology,” and the work is indeed ambitious. It has
three parts, dealing with the nature of God, ethics,
and Christ. In a logical progression of ideas,
Aquinas takes a philosophical and theological ap-
proach to reconciling the concepts of reason and
faith. He includes commentaries by such philoso-
phers, theologians, and scholars as Avicenna, IBN
GABIROL, Averroës, AUGUSTINE, and MAIMONIDES.
Aquinas was the most important Christian the-
ologian of the European MIDDLE AGES, providing a
new balance between theology and philosophy
that held until the age of science began in the 17th
century.
Aquinas was officially recognized as a saint by
the Church in 1373, and his teachings (collectively
known as “Thomism”) have become identified
with the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.
His work is still studied by modern philosophers.
English Versions of Works by
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings. Edited by
Timothy McDermott. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1998.
A Shorter Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages
of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
Edited by Peter Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1993.
St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics: A New
Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations. Trans-
lated by Paul E. Sigmund. New York: Norton,
1988.
Works about Saint Thomas Aquinas
Flannery, Thomas L. Acts Amid Precepts: The Aris-
totelian Logical Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s
Moral Theory. Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univer-
sity of America Press, 2001.
McInerny, Ralph. A First Glance at Thomas Aquinas:
Handbook for Peeping Thomists. Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
Nichols, Aidan. Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction
to His Life, Work, and Influence. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003.
Thousand and One Nights, The (Alf
Layla wa-Layla, Arabian Nights)
(9th–13th centuries) Islamic story collection
The Arabic Alf Layla wa-Layla (The Thousand and
One Nights) is a vibrant and extensive collection
of stories brought together in the Islamic world of
the ninth–13th centuries. Also known as The Ara-
bian Nights, the original tales have Indian, Persian,
and Arabic antecedents and were likely told for
centuries before being written down.
A cycle of tales with no single author and no
single source, The Thousand and One Nights is
enormously diverse and entertaining. Long re-
garded as a collection of fairy tales, like the folklore
of the Grimm brothers or the fables of AESOP, the
tales, as Robert Irwin observes in The Arabian
Nights: A Companion, include “long heroic epics,
wisdom literature, fables, cosmological fantasy,
pornography, scatological jokes, mystical devo-
tional tales, chronicles of low life, rhetorical de-
bates and masses of poetry.”
Though compilers can select among hundreds
of original stories, the traditional opening remains
the same. Long ago, Sultan Shahryar, bitterly dis-
appointed by the infidelity of his wife, vowed never
again to trust a woman. He proposed instead to
marry a new wife each night and have her killed
the next morning. After some time had passed, the
beautiful and clever Scheherazade developed a
plan to end the tyranny. She persuaded her father
to marry her to the sultan, then begged the sultan
to allow her sister, Dunyazad, to spend her last
night on earth with her. Just before dawn, Dun-
yazad woke Scheherazade and asked her to tell a
story. When dawn broke, the story was unfinished,
and the sultan realized he must keep her alive in
order to hear the end. By the next morning the tale
was still unfinished, and once more the execution
was delayed. This cycle continued for more than
three years—for a total of 1,001 nights—during
which time Scheherazade bore the sultan three
healthy sons, and he fell deeply in love with her.
The Thousand and One Nights entered Western
consciousness with the French translation by An-
toine Galland (1646–1715) of a Syrian manuscript
304 Thousand and One Nights, The
dating to the 14th or 15th century. His publication,
preserved at the National Library in Paris, is now
the oldest extant manuscript of the Nights. Edward
Lane undertook an English translation in 1838–41,
with large sections excised to suit the sensitivities
of 19th-century Victorians. The 1885 translation by
Sir Richard Burton, who traveled widely through
the Middle East and India (and also introduced the
English-speaking world to the KAMA SUTRA), is not
entirely faithful to the Arabic versions, mixing in
tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and François Rabelais.
Since some of Galland’s added stories have been
translated into Arabic, it is now virtually impossible
for any but the most devoted scholar to trace the
complex web of influences. Readers can therefore
simply relax into the magical world of The Thou-
sand and One Nights, losing themselves among its
colorful characters: brave travelers and lovely
princesses; capricious rulers and trickster magi-
cians; and the demons, witches, and clever genies
who constantly test human ingenuity.
Critical Analysis
The narrative technique of using a frame story to
link a series of smaller tales is a standard feature of
ORAL LITERATURE and also appears in such written
works as the PANCHATANTRA of India, OVID’s Meta-
morphoses, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Gio-
vanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. The multitude of
stories in The Thousand and One Nights are linked
by the irresistible figure of Scheherazade, who, in
Burton’s translation, is both educated and beautiful:
. . . indeed it was said that she had collected a
thousand books of histories relating to antique
races and departed rulers. She had perused the
works of the poets and knew them by heart;
she had studied philosophy and the sciences,
arts, and accomplishments; and she was pleas-
ant and polite, wise and witty, well read and
well bred.
In addition to the stories told by Scheherazade,
the other characters begin to tell their own stories,
and the narrative thread can become quite compli-
cated. Readers of The Thousand and One Nights
find this interweaving of narratives one of its most
appealing characteristics. Novelist A. S. Byatt, in
the introduction to the Modern Library edition of
Burton’s translation, celebrates this structure and
sees it as supporting a larger theme:
A character in a story invokes a character who
tells a story about a character who has a story
to tell....Everything proliferates. The Nights
is a maze, a web, a network, a river with infinite
tributaries, a series of boxes within boxes, a
bottomless pool. It turns endlessly on itself, a
story about storytelling. And yet we feel it has
to do with our essential nature, and not just a
need for idle entertainment.
For Scheherazade, storytelling is the way to ex-
tend her life. The themes of the individual stories
continually echo the themes of the larger work:
kings and powerful beings like genies constantly
demand to hear stories; the weak or oppressed are
constantly brought to judgment and must use
their wits to protect their lives; wily sages and
thieves pop out of corners to trick honest citizens
out of their earned wealth; the stouthearted un-
dertake fantastic voyages and return with remark-
able tales. Magic elements abound in the stories,
but human cleverness predominates.
An example of the nested narrative technique
appears in the tale of “The Fisherman and the
Genie,” where the genie, waiting for the fisherman
to return to fulfill a sentence of execution, is ap-
proached by an old man and a hind, and so begins
the story “The Old Man and the Hind.” The narra-
tive thread always finds itself, however; the first
story ends with the fisherman tricking the genie
into going back into his bottle, and the sly fisher-
man quickly stoppers it up.
Although certain translators have tended to re-
gard The Thousand and One Nights as no more
than engaging tall tales, and to collect them as The
Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, these ostensibly
diverting stories carry a prickly subtext. Certain
tales seem uncannily modern, as in the tale of “The
Thousand and One Nights, The 305
Ebony Horse,” where a sage creates a flying ma-
chine that an enterprising prince learns to oper-
ate. Moreover, close readers will observe that the
Nights offers an intriguing series of lessons on
public relations. The tales expose a broad view of
all classes and levels of society, creating a stage
where kings rub elbows with street thieves.
Through frequent praises and invocations, Allah
serves as a constant presence and a unifying force
that binds the tales; Burton’s translation illumi-
nates this in its opening and closing addresses to
MUHAMMAD. Characters of different races and reli-
gions populate the Nights, offering glimpses into
the diverse world of the Middle East. The seem-
ingly riotous tales of crosses and double-crosses
include useful advice on how to operate within a
society where it is accepted that women occupy
subordinate positions, class differences are distinct
and insurmountable, and rulers have the power to
distribute justice, grant life, and demand death.
The Thousand and One Nights has had a pro-
found impact on all the cultures it has reached. In
their childhoods, the English poets Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth and the Victo-
rian novelist Charles Dickens immersed them-
selves in tales of the Arabian nights; both Marcel
Proust and Edgar Allan Poe saw themselves as
Scheherazades of sorts. Twentieth-century novel-
ists have composed modern versions of oriental fa-
bles—for example, Salman Rushdie in Haroun and
the Sea of Stories and Naguib Mahfouz in Arabian
Nights and Days. The Nights have sparked the
imagination of filmmakers and musicians, and al-
most any child has heard at some point, and in
some version, the tale of Aladdin and his enchanted
lamp, the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, and
the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Many a
child has perhaps wished for a lamp containing a
wish-granting genie without realizing the true
moral of Aladdin’s story: that genies are tricky crea-
tures and wishes are dangerous things.
Some maintain that The Thousand and One
Tales is an achievement unparalleled by any work
of literature in any other culture. Its sheer volume,
diversity, and complexity are unrivaled. It sheds
light on the culture of its creators, and it contin-
ues to spark the imagination of new generations
with its promise of magic and its lesson that story-
telling is the only sure way to achieve immortality.
English Versions of The Thousand and
One Nights
The Arabian Nights. Translated by Husain Haddawy.
New York: Everyman, 1990.
Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One
Nights. Translated by Richard Burton. New York:
The Modern Library, 2001.
The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night. 4 vols.
Edited by E. P. Mathers and J. C. Mardrus. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Works about The Thousand and One Nights
Caracciolo, Peter L., ed. The Arabian Night in English
Literature: Studies in the Reception of Thousand
and One Nights into British Culture. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1988.
Hovannisian, Richard and Georges Sabagh. The
Thousand and One Nights in Arabic Literature and
Society. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1997.
Irwin, Robert. The Arabian Nights: A Companion.
New York: Penguin Books, 1994.
Thucydides (ca. 460–ca. 400 B.C.) historian
Very little is known about the life of Thucydides,
particularly his early years. He was born and raised
in Athens as an aristocrat,“son of Olorus,” as he de-
scribed himself, and apparently relished his status.
Athens and Sparta were both military super-
powers; the former ruled the seas and the latter
boasted the world’s greatest army. After the Greek
city-states unexpectedly defeated the powerful Per-
sian Empire in the early fifth century B.C., the al-
liance between Athens and Sparta disintegrated.
The allies became adversaries, each struggling for
dominance, leading to the Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides fought for Athens in the war, and
by 424 B.C., he had been designated a general. Sta-
tioned in the Balkans in a region called Thrace, he
306 Thucydides
failed to thwart the capture of the strategically po-
sitioned port city of Amphipolis. When he de-
scribed the incident in his only known work, the
History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides de-
fended his good intentions, saying that even
though he “sailed in haste with seven ships,” the
citizens surrendered before he could reach them.
For this mistake, he was exiled from Athenian ter-
ritory for 20 years, until the end of the war, when
Sparta, with the aid of Persia, annihilated the
mighty Athenian navy, cut off the food supply
until the city surrendered, and installed an oli-
garchy at Athens.
From adversity arose opportunity. “Because of
my exile,” Thucydides wrote, “I was enabled to
watch quietly the course of events.” Like his older
colleague HERODOTUS, Thucydides became an ob-
server and investigator of both warring factions.
He was permitted to return to Athens in 404 B.C.,
but he must have died within a few years of his re-
turn, for he never completed his History of the
Peloponnesian War.
Critical Analysis
Whatever his feelings about his exile, Thucydides
wrote History without rancor or prejudice. He
gives equal attention to both parties, who perpe-
trated brutality and bloodshed in an acquisitive
and ruthless grasp for power. His History is an im-
portant treatise on the nature and causes of war, its
impact and consequences, and under what cir-
cumstances it will continue to disgrace and destroy
civilization.
Unlike Herodotus, who often digresses during
his history of the Persian War, Thucydides remains
focused on recording military events and their im-
plications. He divides History of the Peloponnesian
War into three military phases. The first covers the
conflict between Sparta and Athens, which lasted
from 431 to 421
B.C. The second covers the Atheni-
ans’ expedition into Sicily and its failure during the
years 415 to 413 B.C. The third phase covers the
new war between Sparta and Athens, which lasted
from 413 to 404 B.C., although Thucydides’s writ-
ing ends in 411 B.C.
The historian begins his opus by clarifying his
methodology and assuring readers that his conclu-
sions are reliable, based on the “clearest data.” He
acknowledges, however, that memories are imper-
fect, impressions fallible, and eyewitnesses biased.
Unlike “the compositions of the chroniclers that
are attractive at truth’s expense” (presumably
Herodotus), “[t]he absence of romance in my his-
tory will...be judged useful by those inquirers
who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid
to the interpretation of the future....I have writ-
ten my work . . . as a possession for all time.”
Thucydides concludes in his introduction, “The
real cause” of the Peloponnesian War was “the
growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which
this inspired in” Spartan territory, which “made war
inevitable.” Important throughout the History is his
ongoing comparisons of the two antagonists.
Athens was a democracy that had only recently
gained influence in Greece. Because its power was
naval, its economy was a commercial one. Thucy-
dides believed, incorrectly, that Pericles, a states-
man and military commander of the time, perfected
Athenian democracy; thus, he includes several of
Pericles’ speeches in Book II of his History.
In Sparta, government was controlled by a
handful of powerful men, and the city-state was
known for its long-standing power and military
prowess. As its forces were land-based, so was its
agrarian economy. If Athens was enterprise and in-
novation, Sparta was fortitude and discipline.
A turning point in the war occurred after the
revolt of Mytilene, the chief city on the prosperous
island of Lesbos, home of the lyric poet SAPPHO.All
of Attica had been ravaged by the Spartans, and
Athens had been blockaded. Teeming with refugees
who had fled the countryside, the city succumbed
to overcrowding, creating abysmal sanitary condi-
tions and a plague that killed Pericles. During the
Mytilene uprising, Athens was still reeling from the
devastation, but its forces nevertheless laid siege to
Mytilene, which finally succumbed when condi-
tions there became intolerable.
The rulers of Athens were in no mood to be
magnanimous in dealing with the insurrectionists;
Thucydides 307
the assembly voted to slaughter the men and sell
the women and children. A warship was promptly
dispatched, but the assembly soon regretted its de-
cree. Wholesale extermination would eliminate
potential friends as well as foes; it might trigger
rebellion rather than suppress it; and Mytilene had
military and monetary resources that could help
Athens defeat Sparta. Even though Cleon, Pericles’
successor, insisted that mercy was not in the em-
pire’s best interests, cooler heads prevailed, and the
two cities eventually became allies.
Throughout the remainder of the History,
Thucydides characterizes Athens as increasingly
bloodthirsty and repressive, and less the idealis-
tic, enlightened force depicted at the beginning.
He emphasizes how the Athenians compromised
their principles, gave way to revenge, attained a
feverish level of ruthlessness, and justified mur-
der for political gain despite their democratic
ideals.
Just one example of this overriding desire for
power appears in Thucydides’ account of the con-
flict between Athens and Melos. Melos was a
colony of Sparta that endeavored to remain neutral
during the Peloponnesian War. Athens, affronted,
tried to force an alliance with the small island city-
state, to no avail. According to Thucydides, during
a conference between councils for the two entities,
the Athenian representative asserted that the “will
to power” is a fundamental human drive and, es-
sentially, that “might makes right”:
[We] both alike know that into the discussion
of human affairs the question of justice only
enters where the pressure of necessity is equal,
and that the powerful exact what they can, and
the weak grant what they must....For...of
men we know, that by a law of their nature
wherever they can rule they will. This law was
not made by us, and we are not the first who
have acted upon it; we did but inherit it, and
shall bequeath it to all time, and we know that
you and all mankind, if you were as strong as
we are, would do as we do.
In 416 B.C., the Athenians inflicted on Melos
and other Greek city-states what it had spared
Mytilene: massacre, slavery, and occupation.As the
war persisted, Thucydides portrayed Athenians as
becoming weak in body and spirit, fractious and
factious; he saw the ideal of Athenian democracy
deteriorating as a result. According to Harvard
professor John H. Finley, Jr., the end of the History
expresses “a mood of fear, instability and division”
among the Athenians.“As description, the account
of the slow death ...ofAthens’strength and hope
is Thucydides’ masterpiece and one of the master-
pieces of all historical writing.”
Classics scholar H. C. Baldry writes:
Thucydides’ proud claim to immortality has
proved correct: his book is still absorbing read-
ing....His swift narrative ...breathes the
spirit of contemporary rationalism yet has an
old-fashioned flavor; it is concise and austere,
yet forceful and impassioned. [Thucydides is]
deeply moved by Athens’ folly . . . and its disas-
trous results; yet he austerely surveys the whole
story as a clinical example of human behavior
under the stresses of imperialism and war.
As such, the History of the Peloponnesian War in-
fluenced a host of Greek writers, politicians, and
historians, including
XENOPHON, Cassius Dio (ca.
164–ca. 229), Polybius (ca. 200–ca. 118 B.C.),
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and more recently
author Lewis Lapham. More importantly, however,
Thucydides’ History has influenced the perception
of war—its philosophy and politics—throughout
the ages and up to the present day.
English Versions of Works by Thucydides
On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: Selections from
History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by
Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub-
lishing, 1998.
The Peloponnesian War: The Complete Hobbes Trans-
lation. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Buffalo,
N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998.
308 Thucydides
Stories of Thucydides. Retold by H. L. Havell. Indy-
Publish, 2004.
Works about Thucydides
Lapham, Lewis. Theater of War: In Which the Republic
Becomes an Empire. New York: The New Press,
2003.
Palmer, Michael. Love of Glory and the Common
Good: Aspects of the Political Thought of Thucy-
dides. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Rood, Tim. Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Stahl, Hans-Peter. Thucydides: Man’s Place in History.
Cardiff: The Classical Press of Wales, 2002.
Titus Livius
See LIVY.
Titus Lucretius Carus
See LUCRETIUS.
Tristan and Iseult (Tristam and Iseut)
(1100s–1200s)
Tristan and Iseult are a fictional pair of lovers who
dominated the Western European medieval imag-
ination. The story of their adulterous love even be-
came part of the King Arthur story cycle.
Tristan (also rendered as Tristam or Tristram) is
the favored nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, and
he is sent to accompany the king’s new bride, the
Irish princess Iseult (also rendered as Iseut, Isolt,
Isolde,Ysolt, etc.), on her boat ride to her new hus-
band in Cornwall. On the voyage, Tristan and
Iseult mistakenly drink a love potion that was in-
tended for her and King Mark; consequently, they
fall passionately in love. Once they arrive at court,
they continue to conduct their affair in secret. King
Mark loves both his nephew and his wife, so when
some of his knights and courtiers tell him they sus-
pect Tristan and Iseult, he initially refuses to be-
lieve them. Finally, the king finds out about their
affair, and the pair are sent off in exile, where they
continue to meet.
In several versions of the story, Tristan marries
a princess of Brittany named Iseult of the White
Hands; even though he performs the marriage in
an attempt to forget his one love, he is still so ob-
sessed with Iseult that he marries the princess only
because she has the same name. Tristan is mortally
wounded, and he sends word to Queen Iseult to
come to him. Iseult sets out to meet her lover and
heal him, but she arrives after his death, and she
dies of grief. The two are buried side by side.
The origins of the Tristan and Iseult story may be
Celtic; the place- and character names derive from
Cornish and Welsh, and references to King Mark
and Tristan appear in Welsh bards’ story collections
of the 11th century. But two 12th-century French
romances are the earliest surviving sources. One is
by a poet called Béroul, and the other is by a man
who calls himself Thomas à Angleterre (Thomas of
England). Both versions are unfinished, but an Old
Norse translation of Thomas’s version is complete.
A French prose version of the story dates from the
mid-13th century, and this is the version that in-
corporates Tristan into the world of King Arthur
and the quest for the
HOLY GRAIL. This extremely
popular version was translated into Italian, Spanish,
and even Russian and Polish, spreading the
Arthurian tales into Southern and Eastern Europe.
German medieval literature, however, not only
produced the earliest complete version of Tristan
and Iseult (1170–90), but also one of the great
works of medieval literature, the Tristan of
GOTT-
FRIED VON STRASSBURG (1200). Gottfried’s poem is
incomplete, but it is masterful in its exploration of
the characters’ psychological states. Gottfried uses
the fatal love potion as a metaphor for “love at first
sight.” Even though he focuses on the joy that their
love brings them, Gottfried does not neglect the
pain and betrayal that the affair causes every char-
acter involved. This version of the Tristan and
Iseult legend was enormously popular and influ-
ential, inspiring Richard Wagner’s great 19th-
century opera Tristan und Isolde.
Tristan and Iseult 309
The Tristan and Iseult story inspired other writ-
ers not usually associated with the Arthurian cycle.
MARIE DE FRANCE wrote a lai, or short song, called
“Chevrefoil” (“Honeysuckle”) about Tristan and
Iseult, arranging one of their rendezvous in the
woods. Other short works or fragments from longer
ones depict episodes based on the famous lovers.
Several surviving short poems in French describe
incidents in which Tristan pretends madness or dis-
guises himself as a wandering minstrel or beggar in
order to visit Iseult while he is in exile. The story was
so popular that it even appeared in the tapestries
and textiles that decorated medieval castles.
Part of the appeal of the Tristan and Iseult leg-
end stems from its time period and the culture that
produced it; Tristan is the knight as courtly lover,
while Iseult combines fidelity to her lover with re-
sourcefulness in meeting him. The overwhelming
power of their attraction to each other, as well as
the painful consequences of their love, overrides
any moral or ethical problem that their affair poses
to readers, and their troubled passion has set the
tone for literary depictions of romantic love for
most of Western world literature.
Critical Analysis
The earliest French versions of the Tristan and
Iseult story differ in tone and emphasis. Medieval-
ists have called the Béroul version the “common
version” because it takes a commonsensical and ac-
tion-oriented approach to the narrative. When it
focuses on the lovers’ duplicity, it seems to regard
their cleverness as admirable rather than despica-
ble. When Iseult pleads her innocence before King
Marc and King Arthur, she and Tristan plot for
him to disguise himself as a leper and help carry
her across a marshy brook. Thus, when she swears
that the only men who have been between her
thighs are her husband and the leper who carried
her over the marsh, she technically tells the truth.
Finally, the Béroul version contains earthy mo-
ments that are both humorous and disturbing.
When King Mark tries to punish Iseult and Tris-
tan the first time, he initially plans to burn them
alive. When a leper proposes that a better punish-
ment would be to give Iseult to the leper colony,
Béroul spares no detail in describing why this
would be worse than death:
No lady in the world could tolerate
A single day of relations with us!
Our ragged clothes stick to our bodies; . . .
When she sees our squalid hovels
And shares our dishes
And has to sleep with us,
And when, instead of your fine food, sir,
She has only the scraps and crumbs
That are given to us at the gates....
Marc agrees this is a fate worse than death and
hands Iseult to the lepers.
Thomas à Angleterre’s narrative does not focus
on the main characters’ trickery and action as
much as it does on their psychological states and
the effects the adulterous relationship has on other
characters. This version, called the “courtly” ver-
sion, is not simply more refined but more con-
cerned with how the two main characters’ passion
has consequences for themselves and others. Tris-
tan chooses to marry Iseult of the White Hands in
Brittany because he imagines that marriage will
offer him a release from physical frustration since
he is separated from Queen Iseult. Yet as Thomas
describes his thought process, this is not a simple
problem that can be solved by substituting one
woman for another:
When they cannot have their desire
Or what they love most,
They do what is in their power to do;
Out of desperation they will do something
Which often increases their pain twofold,
And, seeking to be free,
They yet cannot break the bond.
Instead of finding peace within his marriage,
Tristan feels little attraction toward his wife and
guilt for betraying his true love and causing Iseult of
the White Hands to feel rejected and bitter. Iseult,
on the other hand, does not enjoy any pleasure with
310 Tristan and Iseult