When in the year 449 B.C. Cimon died, who was the son of Miltiades (the victor at Marathon), commander of the fleet and leader of the Athenian aristocracy, his political supporters had to look for a substitute who would be able to confront Pericles, the head of the popular and democratic party that ruled Athens virtually unopposed from 461 BC
The chosen one was Thucydides, another aristocrat whose family was related to that of Cimon, of whom it seems that he was a brother-in-law, and who should not be confused with the famous historian of the same name. He came from the demo of Alopece, located east of the city and outside the walls of Athens, where he was perhaps born, although the exact date is unknown.
He was appointed because the aristocrats needed someone to balance Pericles and diminish his power, lest he become, they feared, a monarchy , as Plutarch tells.
According to Plutarch, Thucydides was inferior to Cimon in military talent, but superior to him in political tactics. Another advantage of Thucydides is that he was constantly present in Athens and did not have, like Cimon, military ambitions.
Although when referring to the Athenian politics of that time we speak of parties , in reality it is nothing more than a convention to understand each other, since there were no political parties as such. There were factions more or less defined, but whose ideological lines were quite diffuse.
For this reason, the citizens who attended the assembly, approximately 6,000 at the height of the Athenian democracy, mixed in it without taking into account their ideas, loyalties or affiliations. Thucydides realized that this weakened his faction, and ordered that the aristocrats and supporters of the oligarchy stay together and separate from the rest.
In this way he invented a political tactic that today has continuity in modern parliamentarism, where the members of a political party sit together forming a group (we have already seen how sitting to the right or left of the presidency has its origin later, in the beginning of the French Revolution). In this way he achieved, on the one hand, a visual effect of great strength, and on the other, an effective organization of the power of his political faction.
Yet Thucydides could not match Pericles, either in eloquence or political skill, and he ended up being ostracized and banished by the Assembly for ten years in 442 BC. According to an allusion by the playwright Aristophanes, it seems that this caused him a nervous breakdown that prevented him from saying a word for some time.
According to the Life of Thucydides , a biography already written in Antiquity by an anonymous author and that seems to confuse and mix the lives of the politician and the historian of the same name, after his exile he was able to go to Turios, in the south of the Italian peninsula. Thurios was the city of Sybaris, destroyed by Crotona, which the Athenians had helped rebuild elsewhere. There he was able to meet the historian Herodotus, who ended his days in that city.
It is unknown if he was able to return to Athens or if he died in exile. Some sources indicate that he was able to return and participated as a strategos in the War of Samos in 440 BC, commanding the fleet together with Pericles, Hagnon and Phormio. If that were the case, his exile would hardly have lasted two years. But it is most likely that here the story will be mixed, once again, with that of its homonymous historian, who was also commander of the fleet.
Other sources say that he was on the island of Aegina, where he carried out dark financial deals. But none of this can be confirmed. On the contrary, the political tactic he devised continues to be used almost everywhere in the world, with greater or lesser success.