Mary Nichols’s insightful study of Thucydides argues that “free and responsible history and politics stand or fall together” (p. 15). Because human action is determined by necessity only in part, cities like Athens can be arranged to encourage and protect their citizens’ free way of life, their capacity to act “from within” and be held responsible for their action (p. 26). Similarly, those who try to account for human action are both bound and free: bound to the historical record, but free to arrange and interpret it. Nichols suggests that Thucydides uses his freedom as a historian to sustain political freedom, especially as embodied in Pericles’ vision of Athens.

Nichols’s Thucydides is neither a scientist who accounts for human action by appealing to nature nor a constructivist, appealing only to convention. The first approach might be said to take its bearing from the facts in Thucydides, the latter from the speeches. The challenge in understanding Thucydides is to account for both. Leo Strauss, Clifford Orwin, and others have attempted to do that by stressing Thucydides’ humanity—meaning in part his ability to transcend the perspective of his own polis, indeed of politics. Nichols disagrees. Her Thucydides is “more cognizant of the restraint of time and place on his own thought,” more willing to take seriously the freedom available to cities and citizens, and at least as concerned with particulars (such as distinctive individuals) as with universals (p. 14). Thucydides resembles less a philosopher concerned ultimately, perhaps exclusively, with nature than an enlightened statesman whose concern with nature never eclipses care for the particular settings, like his own city, in which nature is made visible. Nichols argues that a free and responsible historian has a home.

On Nichols’s reading, Thucydides reflects his own historical project in several of his protagonists. He resembles Brasidas in some respects, Alcibiades in others, and Themistocles in quite a few. But it is Pericles, of all the eminent Athenians the most at home in his native city, who serves as Thucydides’ ideal. Pericles’ sole rule over Athens might be thought to undermine democratic freedom. Nichols suggests, to the contrary, that Pericles demonstrates “the very possibility of freedom for deliberation and choice” (p. 28). He does so by presenting the war as the Athenians’ free choice, “a fight on the part of the Athenians to preserve their freedom” (p. 30). The funeral oration distills Pericles’ ideal. Athens is strong and self-sufficient; nothing is forced upon it; the city acts “from within,” motivated only by love of the noble or beautiful, not fear of the gods or the law. Free and tolerant, the Athenians take after their city. Pericles’ rhetoric distracts the Athenians’ attention from the bodies of the war dead and, later, the plague victims. His Athens is all speech, no flesh. We are free insofar as we are moved to act by speech rather than necessity.

Nichols further explores the relationship between freedom and speech through an incisive analysis of the Mytilenean debate at Athens and the Spartans’ trial of the Plataeans. Both episodes involve rebel cities that have been subdued, and both present their conquerors with a choice between leniency and vengeance. Athens, owing to its openness to persuasion, chooses leniency; the Spartan judges hardly listen to the pleas they permit the Plataeans before settling on vengeance. We are meant to draw a clear moral: “By juxtaposing the deeds of these two cities in comparable circumstances, Thucydides shows the superiority of Athens” (p. 74).

Not every Spartan resembles the judges at Plataea, however, nor does every Athenian resemble the noble Diodotus. In the concluding chapters of her work, Nichols considers the two figures in Thucydides who most transcend their native cities.

Brasidas, “the Athenian among the Spartans,” leads a ‘crusade’ for freedom in northern Greece that would have forced his native city “to live up to its noble reputation” as Greece’s liberator, had it succeeded (pp. 79–80, 102). Its failure demonstrates the limits of man’s claim to surpass the city. Without Sparta making good on his promises to Thracian cities, Brasidas’s noble actions are themselves not “truly good” (p. 103). Brasidas, for all his brilliance, shows that “in politics, no one can be a one-man show” (p. 104).

Alcibiades, who appears “Athenian at Athens and Spartan at Sparta” (p. 141), as well as Persian in Persia, would seem to present a stronger case than Brasidas for the possibility of freedom from one’s city. We glimpse in his malleability and his rejection of conventional constraints some resemblance to a philosopher appealing from nomos to phusis, or perhaps a historian who reports on a war from both sides. Alcibiades’ ultimate ambition, however, is to return home, “to repossess his city” (p. 20). By virtue of being possessed, Athens would seemingly lose the free way of life that Pericles considered its essence. If Athens is essentially its way of life, then the city has no essential link to Attica or even to the particularity of “Athens,” since another city could develop a way of life equally free. Alcibiades, however, does not consider the essence of Athens to lie in its regime. As Nichols says, “it is apart from any regime that Alcibiades ‘loves his city.’. . . It seems that for him there is something more fundamental to Athens than the regime” (p. 166). It is to this “something more fundamental” that Alcibiades, for all his freedom from the city, wants to return.

In her final chapter, Nichols argues that Thucydides achieves the homecoming that eludes Alcibiades. In the two major “digressions” of the history, Thucydides reflects on his own work as a historian. In his discussion of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Thucydides shows himself more committed to truth than his fellow Athenians and more accepting of the limits of his knowledge, since he acknowledges that no one can say for certain who mutilated the Hermae. In a digression on Themistocles in Book 1, Thucydides shows that it is possible to be an Athenian while exiled from Athens, as Thucydides himself was. Themistocles, who is “worthy of wonder” and who exemplifies the daring and intelligence that Pericles considered Athenian, “serves as a model for Thucydides himself” (pp. 178–180). But he is not a perfect model. Themistocles wants his bones returned to Attica after his death, which suggests a devotion to the city independent of its regime. Like Alcibiades, Themistocles thinks that there is something more to Athens than the regime that Pericles praises.

For Nichols, Thucydides instead follows Pericles: “[H]e understands Athens not merely as the land on which the city is located but, more important, as the regime that makes Athens a city in which freedom of thought and action can be found” (p. 181). Writing his history is Thucydides’ “homecoming” insofar as it allows him to repossess the city without destroying it, to preserve the city not in its material existence but as a memory or speech that can generate wonder and inform his readers’ lives. As Nichols notes, however, Pericles is not an ideal that Thucydides follows slavishly. Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” speaks of women’s lamentations only as having been completed, whereas Thucydides allows us to hear them; Pericles refers to the plague only in passing and does not acknowledge his having suffered personally, whereas Thucydides describes the disease in grisly detail and notes that he himself survived it. Nichols argues that Thucydides confirms and extends Pericles’ views of Athens by disclosing the truth about his—and his city’s—weakness.

It is hardly a damning criticism of Nichols’s fine book to notice that it presents Thoukudidês Athênaios as more Athenian than Spartan. Nichols notes that Thucydides’ point of origin does not prevent him from admiring Brasidas, and she notes, too, Thucydides’ praise of Spartan moderation. But when it comes to comparing Athens’s failure to relieve Potidaea with Sparta’s failure to relieve Mytilene, Athens is excused and Sparta condemned. Brasidas, the most Athenian of the Spartans, is praised at length, but Archidamus and Gylippus appear only on the margins. Can more be said for Sparta’s place in Thucydides’ depiction of freedom, responsibility, and homecoming? As Nichols notes, the Spartans do not often talk to themselves about their own city, self-reflection being more characteristic of Athens, but when they do, they do not use the term politeia. They refer often to “the fathers” as a standard of proper behavior (see esp. 1.85.1, 2.11.1–2, 2.74.2).

What is it about Sparta that is difficult to capture in speech, and has more to do with the ancestral than the universal? What is recognizably Athenian under Peisistratus’s “tyranny” and the rule of the Five Thousand, under the rule of the “first man” and the more tumultuous politics that follow his death? It is certainly not soil that defines Athens or Sparta, but it may be something more elemental, enduring, and resistant to philosophical analysis than Pericles’ (or Aristotle’s) notion of politeia. Attending to Sparta’s contribution to Thucydides’ view of politics might help us to understand more sympathetically than Nichols does the nostalgia of Alcibiades and Themistocles, with their apparent indifference to regimes.

Nevertheless, Nichols shows convincingly how free thought and free politics go together in Thucydides’ history. Her compelling interpretations bring the work to life as a study of freedom fit not only for philosophers but also for statesmen and citizens.