Com'è fatto il libro I di Tucidide: una lettura unitaria

On the structural level (which is the concern of this paper) the first book of Thucydides is built in a very rigorous fashion. Each of the two parts that compose it – i.e. the methodological Preamble, which explains the criteria of the work, and the Prelude, which tells the causes of the war -, includes a prologue which announces the following topics and outlines the order of their treatment. Thanks to the systematic use of Ringkomposition, which encompasses the various sections of the exposition within carefully planned frames of recurring phrases, Thucydides is able to manage a highly complex textual architecture and nevertheless endow it with great clarity. On the formal level the unity of the book is done by Chapter I 23, which functions as a hinge between the Preamble and the Prelude and introduces the discussion of the causes through a passage echoing both Herodotus’ prologue and the proem of the Iliad. On the conceptual level, three themes - Beginning, Cause, Responsibility - bestow unity to the book: each of them reflects in a different way the basic question of this long introduction to the Peloponnesian War, the origin of any human warfare.