THUCYDIDES’ SOURCE CITATIONS: ‘IT IS SAID’

摘要

Ancient historical writers mention their sources of information more or less frequentlynand in various ways.1 Named sources feature frequently in Herodotus, forninstance, but rarely in Thucydides and Xenophon.2 The most common form ofncitation in these later historians, though still far less common than in Herodotus,nis the anonymous ‘it is/was said’.3 The received opinion is that these refer tonsources and Thucydides mentions them to mark his uncertainty about the accuracynof their reports;4 but the application of narratology to historical texts encourages usnto read historical narrative in terms of narrative design,5 and in those terms ‘it isnsaid’ represents the historian’s intrusion into his narrative of another perspective,na ‘focalization’ separate from his own.6 The phrase does not always distance himnfrom belief in the reported view, as Herodotus shows, who bases his history onn‘what is said’ in oral tradition;7 and as we shall see, Thucydides also uses thesenother perspectives to confirm his own. It has been noted that older commentatorsnon Thucydides explained his narrative in terms of his sources and phases of com-