The Fall of the Athenian Empire-(A New History of the Peloponnesian War) Donald Kagan - (1987)

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PREFACE
rebelled against them, but also later against Cyrus, son of the Great King,
who provided money to the Peloponnesians for a navy. Nor did they give in
until they destroyed themselves by falling upon one another because of private
quarrels.
This passage implies that even after the disaster in Sicily and the new
problems it caused, Athens might still have avoided defeat but for
internal dissension. A study of the last decade of the war enables us
to evaluate Thucydides' interpretation of the reasons for Athens' defeat
and the destruction of the Athenian Empire. It also makes possible an
examination and evaluation of the performance of the Athenian democracy
as it faced its most serious challenge.
For the course of the war, after Thucydides' account breaks off in
411, we rely directly on several ancient writers, only one of whom
was contemporary with the events he described, and none of whom
approached the genius of Thucydides. Modern historians of the classical
period like to follow, when they can, the narrative historical
account that they judge to be the most reliable, and they tend to prefer
it to other evidence from sources that they consider less trustworthy.
Whatever its merits in general, this practice is unwise for the period
between 4' I and 404 B. C. Of the extant writers of narrative accounts,
Xenophon alone was a contemporary, and his Hellenica presents a
continuous description of the events of that time. It is natural, therefore,
that modern historians should at first have preferred his Hellenica
to the abbreviated, derivative, and much later account of Diodorus
and to the brief, selective biographies of Plutarch, which were aimed
at providing moral lessons and were written even later.
The discovery of the papyrus containing the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia
in 1906, however, changed the situation drastically. Although its author
is unknown, the work seems to have been a detailed and careful
continuation of Thucydides' history. As G. L. Barber notes, "the
papyrus indicates a strict chronological arrangement by summers and
winters, competent criticism and analysis of motives, a first-hand
knowledge of the topography of Asia Minor, and certain details found
in no other work on the period."' Several studies have found the
superiority of the Oxyrhynchus historian's work over Xenophon's Hellenica
to be most striking in the accounts of naval battles, but there
has been a growing tendency to prefer the papyrus version to that of
lG. L. Barber, "Oxyrhynchus, The Historian from," Oxford Classical Dictionary, zd
ed. (Oxford, 1970), 766.