Thucydides: On the Early History of the Hellenes

The theme of this reading is that it is talking about the early times of the Hellas. In this reading Thucydides talks about the events that took place in Ancient Greece during this time period. This reading makes it apparent to us on how much the people were influenced by the environment and how the leaders got the land that they did.

   
Several things came to mind when I was reading this was. I actually found that because there were so many names, I had to look up a lot of them so I could better understand the reading. Through doing this I found out that the followers of Hellen were named Hellenes after the Trojan War which is why the religion was named Hellas. The name "Hellen" is known as the woman that describes the Trojan War, but Hellen is actually the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha and was a very powerful leader in Phthiotis. The second thing that came to mind was that in the reading, the Corinthians were brought up. After researching I found that this name was given to the people of Corinth. The final thing that I found was that Minos was the ruler of the sea who happens to be the grandfather of the King of the Cretans that were in the Trojan War.

After reading this reading, I thought that it was really sad that the citizens of this place did not really have a place that was truly their home. I could not even imagine how that must have felt! Or the fact that they were being invaded so much on land and sea, that they had to move so much from place to place. This is sad because then it's like there is really nothing for them to do, and they could practically never hold a healthy lifestyle. This to me would relate to fugitives on the run, kind of, or people who are less fortunate than I am and can't afford to truly live in a place they can call their own, or grow up in an environment thats not well balanced.

In the reading, it talk about how in 500 BCE the Old Testament of the Bible was written. I honestly had no clue that it was written such a long time ago. After reading this I was able to gather the fact that Corinth was the root of Corinthians in the Bible! I found this really intriguing that the Corinthians books of the Bible were actually connected to the Corinthians from this actually reading. This made reading this more fascinating due to the fact that it connected to the Bible, I just really liked that.

This reading relates to the text because we talked about how Thucydides was an Athens resident who was taken over by Sparta, yet he was the author of this reading. This therefore would make Thucydides have a loss. So, he was not a winner, he was more like a politician than a victor. Yet, in class it was said that the victors of war were those who wrote history. However after reading an studying this reading, this definitely looks to me to be not entirely true.