Other scholars have brought to the fore the literary qualities of the History, which they see in the narrative tradition of Homer and Hesiod and as concerned with the concepts of justice and suffering found in Plato and Aristotle and questioned in Aeschylus and Sophocles.Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides, Princeton, 1994. Richard Ned Lebow terms Thucydides "the last of the tragedians", stating that "Thucydides drew heavily on epic poetry and tragedy to construct his history, which not surprisingly is also constructed as a narrative".Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic vision of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 20. In this view, the blind and immoderate behaviour of the Athenians (and indeed of all the other actors)—although perhaps intrinsic to human nature—leads to their downfall. Thus his History could serve as a warning to leaders to be more prudent, by putting them on notice that someone would be scrutinizing their actions with a historian's objectivity rather than a chronicler's flattery.See also Walter Robert Connor, Thucydides (Princeton University Press, 1987).
Other scholars have brought to the fore the literary qualities of the History, which they see in the narrative tradition of Homer and Hesiod and as concerned with the concepts of justice and suffering found in Plato and Aristotle and questioned in Aeschylus and Sophocles.Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides, Princeton, 1994. Richard Ned Lebow terms Thucydides "the last of the tragedians", stating that "Thucydides drew heavily on epic poetry and tragedy to construct his history, which not surprisingly is also constructed as a narrative".Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic vision of Politics (Cambridge University Press 2003), p. 20. In this view, the blind and immoderate behaviour of the Athenians (and indeed of all the other actors)—although perhaps intrinsic to human nature—leads to their downfall. Thus his History could serve as a warning to leaders to be more prudent, by putting them on notice that someone would be scrutinizing their actions with a historian's objectivity rather than a chronicler's flattery.See, also Walter Robert Connor Thucydides (Princeton University Press, 1987).