Hobbes, In search of the truth

Excerpts from Hobbes' Thucydides 

Page 12

But indeed, whosoever shall read him once attentively, shall more distinctly conceive of every action this way than the other. And the method is more natural; forasmuch as his purpose being to write of one Peloponnesian war, this way he has incorporated all the parts thereof into one body; so that there is unity in the whole, and the several narrations are conceived only as parts of that. Whereas the other way, he had sewed together many little histories, and left the Peloponnesian war, which he took for his subject, in a manner unwritten: for neither any part nor the whole could justly have carried such a title.

Fourthly, he accuseth him for the method of his first book: in that he deriveth Greece from the infancy thereof to his own time: and in that he setteth down the narration of the quarrels about Corcyra and Potida, before he entreateth of the true cause of the war; which was the greatness of the Athenian dominion, feared and envied by the Lacedmonians.

For answer to this, I say thus. For the mentioning of the ancient state of Greece, he doth it briefly, insisting no longer upon it than is necessary for the well understanding of the following history. For without some general notions of these first times, many places of the history are the less easy to be understood; as depending upon the knowledge of the original of several cities and customs, which could not be at all inserted into the history itself, but must be either supposed to be foreknown by the reader, or else be delivered to him in the beginning as a necessary preface.

And for his putting first the narration of the public and avowed cause of this war, and after that the true and inward motive of the same; the reprehension is absurd. For it is plain, that a cause of war divulged and avowed, how slight soever it be, comes within the task of the historiographer, no less than the war itself. For without a pretext, no war follows. This pretext is always an injury received, or pretended to be received. Whereas the inward motive to hostility is but conjectural; and not of that evidence, that a historiographer should be always bound to take notice of it: as envy to the greatness of another state, or fear of an injury to come.

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Cf. Thucydides: Democracy of the Best & A history of Ideas   Papacy

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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greeks-us/hobbes-thucydides.asp?pg=12