That narrative is very much a personal history with honor and reputations at stake, and it was crafted without direct access to many of the principals and the kind of archival sources we take for granted now.” This conclusion may strike some as bold, even presumptuous 2,500 years removed from the destruction of ancient Greece’s city-state system, how can a contemporary observer credibly question the foremost chronicler of that event? There are several answers one might offer: among them, that historical understanding is an ongoing enterprise, not a fixed objective that no proposition is entitled to an exemption from reasoned interrogation (and certainly not on the arbitrary grounds that there should be a statute of limitations on conducting such inquiries) and that even the most penetrating of observers suffer from biases that undermine their analysis.

Frank Hoffman argued recently that observers should evaluate Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War with skepticism: “Like any historian,” he explains, “Thucydides had to create a framework for the war and had to select facts, weigh sources, and arrange a narrative.

A history of the peloponnesian war