Greek Sources on the History of Ancient Thrace

III. Thrace in Thucydides' "Archaeology" I 2-12 and II 14-17

Abstract

The passages from the Peloponnesian War which constitute Thucydides' so-called 'Archaeology' are 12-20 and 1114-17. They have been and are being studied with the awareness that the text and the subtext are invaluable testimonies to the history of ancient Greece between the two wars, the Trojan and the Peloponnesian, which, as the author himself suggests, are portents of new ages. Is it not strange, then, to assert in the very title that in the same descriptions may be found evidence of Thrace, or that - even! - Thracilus is invisibly present in them? In the literature on Thucydides no such inquiry could naturally be made. This study is the third in the sequence following those devoted to Hecataeus and Herodotus published in previous volumes of the GSU-IF. In them I have attempted to apply, where fully (Hecataeus), where approximately (Herodotus), the stratigraphic principle of analysis of written records by a single author. What was new was that the stratigraphic principle was combined with the so-called conditional problem situation, the most simplest explanation of which is any level of analytical result is at the same time the basis of a new alternative, i.e. a new hypothetical construction. The method applied to the passages mentioned in the title (1 13-20 are excluded because they concern Greek political history up to the Peloponnesian War) has yielded unexpected but not strange information about Thrace, if Thrace is conceived in a south-eastern ethno-cultural sense. The most general reason for success was that Thracian reality was diachronic to Greek. But this will become clear later.