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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Hobbes, In search of the truth

Excerpts from Hobbes' Thucydides 

ELPENOR EDITIONS IN PRINT

The Original Greek New Testament
Page 5

It is not clear in any author, where, or when, or in what year of his own age he died. Most agree that he died in banishment: yet there be that have written, that after the defeat in Sicily the Athenians decreed a general revocation of all banished persons, except those of the family of Peisistratus; and that he then returned, and was afterwards put to death at Athens.
But this is very unlikely to be true, unless by after the defeat in Sicily, be meant so long after, that it was also after the end of the Peloponnesian war; because Thucydides himself maketh no mention of such return, though he outlived the whole war, as is manifest by his words in the fifth book.
For he saith he lived in banishment twenty years after his charge at Amphipolis; which happened in the eighth year of this war: which, in the whole, lasted but twenty-seven years complete. And in another place he maketh mention of the razing of the long walls between Peiraeus and the city; which was the last stroke of this war.
They that say he died at Athens, take their conjecture from his monument which was there. But this is not a sufficient argument; for he might be buried there secretly, (as some have written he was), though he died abroad: or his monument might be there, and (as others have affirmed) he not buried in it.
In this variety of conjecture, there is nothing more probable than that which is written by Pausarias, where he describeth the monuments of the Athenian city; and saith thus: "The worthy act of Oenobius in the behalf of Thucydides, is not without honour": meaning that he had a statue. "For Oenobius obtained to have a decree passed for his return; who returning was slain by treachery; and his sepulchre is near the gates called Melitides." He died, as saith Marcellinus, after the seven and fiftieth year of his age.
And if it be true that is written by A. Gellius, of the ages of Hellanicus, Herodotus, and Thucydides, then died he not before the sixty-eighth year. For if he were forty when the war began, and lived (as he did certainly) to see it ended, he might be more when he died, but not less than sixty-eight years of age. What children he left, is not manifest.

Plato in Menone, maketh mention of Milesias and Stephanus, sons of a Thucydides of a very noble family; but it is clear they were of Thucydides the rival of Pericles, both by the name Milesias, and because this Thucydides also was of the family of Miltiades, as Plutarch testifieth in the life of Cimon.
That he had a son, is affirmed by Marcellinus out of the authority of Polemon; but of his name there is no mention, save that a learned man readeth there in the place of young Timotheus. Thus much of the person of Thucydides.

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

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