History by the Losers?

Supposedly history is written by the winners.

Yet, Thucydides, whose history we are reading, was a loser. He wrote this history while he was in exile because his military campaign failed.

Pericles’s funeral oration is famous thousands of years later and may have even been a model for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. This great general died from the plague and his army eventually fell to the Spartans.

So what’s with the power, positive history of Athens? This history is written by losers.

Why is this history so successful?

Maybe it’s because Thucydides and Pericles knew their audience.

Amanda D wrote a great post about how Thucydides and Pericles knew their audiences: Thucydides’ was future generations and Pericles’ was the mourning. Well, we are the part of the future generation, so point for Thucydides. Also, we relate to mourning for lost loves ones. We can be a part of that audience. Jared L made that connection in his post. Point for Pericles. 

Or perhaps it was their pathos.

Since they knew their audiences, these men knew what to say to best appeal to their listeners/readers’ emotions. Both men also appealed to Athenian pride at great lengths. That powerful, positive appeal to pride rallied helped moral, as Chloe S goes into, and perhaps that is part of why it is still remembered.

Could it have been their ethos?

For as much as I’ve highlighted their losing, these two men were amazingly successful. For histories on Thucydides and Pericles to see their many, many impressive successes, click on the links. One failure doesn’t even really compare to everything they did well. They were well-known and had the credibility to back up their words. Thucydides was a trusted historian for his honesty. Pericles was a war general who understood the pain of death.

There are probably a lot of reasons that Thucydides and Pericles’ histories are remembered today—many more than we can go into in a single post. Ultimately, I think these men were winners with rhetoric. They understood the persuasive appeals, kairos, decorum, all that. So despite Athens’s military lose, their rhetoricians were winners and so the history was passed on.