As the title and quote above indicate, this site entails an analysis of the changes in writing and thought in Greek culture by examining Thucydides' history The Peloponnesian War. Furthermore this is an undergraduate project equally concerned with both style and content; that is, how the medium of writing relates to the writing itself (in this case, how the hypertext medium effects my discourse on how Thucydides' mode of historical inquiry effected what he wrote). Thus, if this meta-critical foray into the World Wide Web is of no immediate interest for you, feel free to leave at any time.
So far I have been discussing writing as if it were some independent actor; but, of course, writing needs some prime mover (or a network of prime movers) such as human volition, cultural mores, and historical situation. We finally acknowledge the importance of considering these contexts in writing, especially (since the 1960's) in the writing of history (Starr, 3); but wait a second - doesn't Thucydides' statement above contradict this relatively new stance of modern pedagogy? Indeed, that particular passage of Thucydides establishes the foundation for the conceptual paradigm which modern historical research reacts against; that is, the concept which assumes that the objective facts compromising history can provide lessons for the future (Starr, 40-42).
Subsequent historians may have used Thucydides' work as a template for the study of history and as an intellectual keystone for the notion that history provides evidence for the universality of human behavior; however, for Thucydides history is not the narrative content of events which conforms to evidence but rather it is his methodology, or form of his writing, which provides evidence enabling these events to be preserved with some credibility for posterity. Thus, history is not a storytelling of events but is an investigation and interpretation (thus an analytical rewriting) of the events. So instead of just laying out "the facts" with ostentatious grandiloquence, Thucydides thoughtfully begins his history by engaging in a dialectic on the tenuous reliance on observable facts (in I.22 he emphasizes - with perhaps a touch of hubris - the rigor of his efforts to write the most honest account of the events of the Peloponnesian War as possible). This dialectic introduces the reader to what Thucydides and Herodotus considered historie : research or investigation (Starr, 8); it also introduces the reader to Thucydides' esoteric writing style of antithesis and opposition. So clearly, history is a methodology of analysis and interpretation which Thucydides stringently applies to his History , first on the stories of the Trojan War and then on the events of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides' deliberate contrast of these two Hellenic wars - one of ancient lore and the other contemporary - show him consciously aware of the effects of his writing in both style, to persuade the reader of the authenticity of his History and content, to make the reader appreciate the magnitude and importance of The Peloponnesian War).
Upon reflecting on his years of scrutinized investigation, Thucydides began to acknowledge that the course of events of the Peloponnesian War (what we generically consider history) had as its manipulator, the "personalities and personal rivalries" of human beings (Proctor, 57). Thus, in a sense Thucydides found in the actions of people like Pericles, Alcabiades, and Nicias (to name a few) the prime mover for his historie; and we find our prime mover for The History of the Peloponnesian War in Thucydides working with a new methodology in a culture just becoming accustomed to literacy; he is the prime mover of the history of the Peloponnesian War because he is the writer-creator of The History of the Peloponnesian War. (Please don't be confused and think I am absurdly intimating that Thucydides' imagination concocted the whole war - what I mean is, we probably would not have anywhere near the relatively comprehensive knowledge about the Peloponnessian War if the artifact of Thucydides' history didn't exist). Thucydides' history is a form of writing which obviously could not exist without a system of writing; but history (or, in the Greek sense, the storage and transmission of cultrual memory) was not always linked to writing.
Once again referring to the quote above, we can detect from Thucydides' assertion that he was well aware of his position as an investigator and preserver of what he considered "the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes but of a large part of the barbarian world - I had almost said of mankind" [I, 1]. He also knows that the potent legacy of Homer still lingers in the Athens of his day (Havelock, 23). Thucydides himself intimates his distinction from Homer [I.21] as his history, in both form and content is not only a product of the transition from orality to literacy but is also a propagator of it. His history not only stores cultural memory (serving a function roughly similar to oral transmission of events), but interprets and criticizes it (a distinctive function of writing); thus, Thucydides' writing reveals a conscious awareness of his ties to Homer and orality as well as a methodology closely suited to what Havelock terms the "literate revolution" (24).
Move on to Orality and Literacy for theories on the transition from oral to written storage of Greek cultural memory.