Unfinished work of Thucydides

Thucydides' statement that he described the entire war up to the surrender of Athens (V, 26, 1) must be taken in strict accordance with his words. On the whole, his work was completed; all that remained was to fix, supplement, decorate. The fact that in the published version the text breaks off at the presentation of the events of 411 is due to the following circumstances. During his stay in Athens, where he returned in the early summer of 404 after almost twenty years of exile, Thucydides introduced individual parts of his work to those who wish. There was a rumor about the work of Thucydides. The attention of Lysander's friends and henchmen was attracted by the presence in the work of detailed information about the establishment in Greek cities of political clientele, who were much more dependent on Lysander than on the Spartan state. The kings and other persons in the Spartan government, pushed into the background by Lysander, saw these actions of Lysander as the basis for the gradually carried out coup d'état by him. Authoritative information about the clientele founded by Lysander could pose a great danger to his career. Meanwhile, Thucydides, for some reason, returned to his Thracian possessions. Lysander went there too. In the fall of 404, Thucydides was murdered, and the manuscript of his work was stolen. Everything that seriously compromised Lysander was removed from it; the rest was saved and taken to Sparta. In the spring of 395, Lysander died in a battle. In the fall of 394, Agesilaus, who had returned to Sparta from Asia, searched the house of Lysander in order to find materials revealing that he was preparing a coup d'état. Along with the planted fake, books of the history of Thucydides were also discovered. After making sure that they did not contain anything fundamentally harmful to Spartan politics, Agesilaus handed the manuscript to Xenophon, an officer of his army, an Athenian exile and a credible writer. Xenophon published the intact part of the manuscript as it was, without editing it. The materials of the damaged part formed the basis of the first two books of his Hellenica.