<p>1) The Original Structure of the First Book of Thucydides' History There are eight episodes in the first book of Thucydides' History. 1. The Archaeologia, 2. The Corcyrean incident, 3. The Potidaia incident, 4. The First Spartan Assembly, 5. The Pentecontaetia, 6. The Second Assembly at Sparta, 7. Themistocles and Pausanias, 8. The First Periclean Speech. The Archaeologia and the Pentecontaetia are omitted from the present consideration, the former being the introduction and the latter a digression (εκβολη 1.97.2). The remaining six parts can be divided into three parts. The first (A) is 2 and 3, which are related to Athens; the second (B) 4 and 6, which are related to Sparta; the third (C) 7 and 8, which discuss the leaders of Athens and Sparta. Thucydides seems to have conceived that a single historical incident always has two causes behind it. In 2. two speeches are deciding factors; one is rational and the other is emotional, and the Athenian decision (1.44) is rational. 2 and 3 are the two direct causes of the war; the former has the speeches (rational and emotional) and the latter none (Cf.1.56. 2). 4 has four speeches. But, as the first Athenian speech is more likely to be a later insertion (Cf.1.77.6) and Sthenelaidas' speech is merely an emotional decision, it can be considered to have only two speeches; the first, the first Corinthian speech, is emotional, and the second, Archidamos' speech, is rational. 6 has only one speech by a Corinthian and there is no debate (hence its decision is non-rational), and his answer to Archidamos' speech misses Archidamos' arguments point irrationally. The emotional decision of 4 and the emotional argument of 6 produce the emotional decision of the Peloponnesians. 7 has two exemplary figures, the Athenian Themistocles and the Spartan. The former is a naturally rational man and the latter is an emotional man. After the two exemplary figures in 7, a most powerful man, Pericles, makes a rational speech in 8. (A) shows the rational decision of Athens. (B) shows the irrational decision of the Spartans and these (A) and (B) create the beginning of the war at the end of (C). Therefore one may conclude that Thucydides believed in reason and he thought that Athens had it and Sparta did not, and that consequently he must have believed in the victory of Athens when he was writing the original form of the first book and therefore the concluding part (1.144) of the Periclean Speech, which advises the Athenians not to wage war, can be considered as a later insertion. 2) A Note on the Pentecontaetia The Pentecontaetia is severed into two parts at 1.97. The first part deals with what happened in the first three years of the period of 50 years, and the affairs of the remaining 47 years are crammed into the latter part. The first part occupies one third of the Pentecontaetia, and the second the rest. This structure is not, as many have suggested, caused either by the different dates of composition or by the amount of information Thucydides had, but his conception of power. Thucydides' intention in writing the Pentecontaetia was to describe the development of Athenian power from 480 B.C. to 430 B.C. His conception of power governs the structure of the Pentecontaetia. Judging from the first Athenian Speech and from the Funeral Oration, one can see that the Thucydides thought that there were two periods in the course of development of power. The first is the period when the elements of power (i. e. money, wall, unification, sea-power) are established. The second is the period when these established elements are developed. This is the conception which separates the Pentecontaetia into two, and 1.97 functions as a copula between the two. After 1.97, he treats no domestic matters but only the external affairs, because he thought that the development of the Athenian αρχη would be best displayed by the description of</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>