Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

Some people stretch this as far back down as maybe 400.

But most people, I think, would say it was quite a bit earlier, maybe around 430, that he passed away.

Or at least that is what we can derive from his work, that he was still around to see the event of 431.

But then after that, very quickly, we stopped being very confident about how much more he saw.

And so we assumed that he might have died.

Generally, yes, although we don't know how long he worked at it.

So we have no idea of Thucydides who says, I started taking notes at the beginning of this work because I knew it was going to be important.

And I wrote it all the way to the end, which no one ever had.

He didn't finish it.

But it would have been helpful if Herodotus made some kind of comment like that, but he didn't.

And so what we have is essentially just, as I already mentioned, these moments in the story when he looks ahead to things that haven't happened yet at the time where he is in his narrative.

It looks ahead to later events in Greek history.

And we can get a sense from that of how much he saw, like how long he was around for, and also what was presumably happening around him for him to be taking notes about these things.

So it's usually assumed that this was a long-term endeavor, that he was working on this for decades, and that he was presenting parts of it as he went.

So he was going through different cities and states and essentially saying, you want to hear the story of this or that?

Essentially presenting it as a piece of entertainment, like the Rhapsodes were presenting their poetry, he was presenting his histories.

And that may well have meant that he was sort of honing it and working at it and building pieces of it, building blocks of it for a very, very long time until maybe into the 430s or even beyond that.

May well be true, yeah.

So one of the ways in which we interpret this is we get this sneer from Thucydides, who is obviously a very serious and very dry and very sort of serious-minded person, who makes this little jab saying, okay, my history is a possession for all time, not as an entertainment for the moment, not as a little bit of fun at a symposium or a festival where you have these performances going on.

And so from that, we usually assume that he's talking about Rhodesist there.