Thucydides has often been assailed. Mahaffy attacked his credibility ;
Comford wrote of him as a Mythistoricus ; Bury of all people, to whom the unintelligibility of human history was almost an axiom, called him a cynic ; and many modern historians have denied him the possession of a scien- tific method. It is true that Thucydides, " like all the ancients, neglected the economic and social forces upon which modern scientific history lays so much stress," and one often wishes with Grote that he had been more corrununicative in collateral matters. It is true also that the full realization of the genuinely scientific method as applied to history only came about with the growth of natural science, especially of biology. But Mr. C. N. Cochrane has written his Thucydides and the Science of History (Oxford University Press, 10s.) expressly for the purpose of showing that the Thucydidean method was scien- tific, and was moreover based on a school of exact science which was practised at that time by the physician, Hippocrates, and his followers. "The power and originality of Thucydides lie in his having attempted to adapt the principles and methods of that science to the study of Society" ; he would bring "all human actions within the realm of natural causes." So far from the Thucydidean method being unscientific, this weighty and close-reasoned essay insists that the more perfect the methodology of the modern historian, the nearer he has approached once more to the standard set by Thucydides.
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