implacable war which Athens kept up against Sparta for twenty-seven
years, with the hegemony of Greece for a stake, presents more than one
analogy with that which we ourselves are waging and teaches lessons
that should make us reflect. The counsels which it gives us are all
the more precious, all the more striking or profound inasmuch as the
war is narrated to us by a man who remains, with Tacitus, despite the
striving of the centuries, the progress of life and all the
opportunities of doing better, the greatest historian that the earth
has ever known. Thucydides is in fact the supreme historian, at the
same time swift and detailed, scrupulously sifting his evidence but
giving free play to intuition, setting forth none but incontestable
facts, yet divining the most secret intentions and embracing at a
glance all the present and future political consequences of the events
which he relates. He is withal one of the most perfect writers, one of
the most admirable artists in the literature of mankind; and from this
point of view, in an entirely different and almost antagonistic world,
he has not an equal save Tacitus. But Tacitus is before everything a
wonderful tragic poet, a painter of foul abysses, of fire and blood,
who can lay bare the souls of monsters and their crimes, whereas
Thucydides is above all a great political moralist, a statesman
endowed with extraordinary perspicacity, a painter of the open air and
of a free state, who portrays the minds of those sane, ingenious,
subtle, generous and marvellously intelligent men who peopled ancient
Greece. The one piles on the gloom with a lavish hand, gathers dark
shadows which he pierces at each sentence with lightning flashes, but
remains sombre and oppressed on the very summits, whereas the other
condenses nothing but light, groups together judgments that are so
many radiant sheaves and remains luminous and breathes freely in the
very depths. The first is passionate, violent, fierce, indignant,
bitter, sincerely but pitilessly unjust and all made up of magnificent