Les préliminaires de la guerre : prolégomènes à la lecture du premier livre de Thucydide

The first book is the only one in the usual eight-book division which Thucydides himself conceived as a book. Therefore one is fully entitled to study it as an organic whole, where the historian exposes the principles of his narrative, the etiology and the preliminaries of the War which he sets in the context of the development of the Greek political entities and of the logics of power and supremacy leading the two rival powers to conflict with each other. - An organic whole ? This is the question in which our inquiry originated. We show that the composition of book I still contains the marks of a fascinating reciprocal action between Thucydides as a subject and the object of his work, viz. the war or rather the wars which he had set to narrate. Instead of accepting the flattening view of Thucydides' work which is generally now the opinio communis, we try to give back all its abrupt relief to this work through taking into account the « archaeology » of book I and studying it in rigorous detail based on thorough examination of the original, not on the pale copies formed by more or less doctored and arranged translations. It is impossible to understand the famous chapters named Archaeology and Pentecontaetia without analysing their « archaeology » or genesis and uncovering the strata of their composition. The study of the unfinishedness which more or less markedly characterizes the whole work sheds light on the way Thucydides wrote and composed it. The historian was prevented from finishing the rewriting made necessary by the evolution of his subject (from the Archidamian War to the Peloponnesian War) and by his changed perception of it. This would be enough to see in this text an exceptional piece of evidence. We also make a determined attempt at answering various nagging questions of Thucydidean scholarship, e. g. which event was thought by Thucydides to be the beginning of the conflict, what was his view of « universal schemes » in history, what is one to think of his former reputation of unbiasedness ?

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