T nHE question whether Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War on rolls, of papyrus or of some other material, or on flat sheets, has an important bearing on some of the problems which arise from any critical study of his work; the solution of these problems affects our estimate of this author as a writer and as a historian. The date or dates, and the circumstances, of the composition of Thucydides' history were discussed by ancient as well as modern critics. Among the modern scholars doubtless the first important discussion was that of K. W. Kruger in 1832, Untersuchungen ulber das Leben des with an Epikritischer Nachtrag in 1839, both reprinted in his Kritische Analekten in 1863. In the main Kruiger expressed the traditional belief, reflected, for example, in Plutarch De exilio, c. 14; Marcellinus 25 and 47; Cicero De oratore ii. 13. Of course these ancient writers had little if anything more than we have now on which to base their opinion, and that is chiefly the two passages in which Thucydides himself speaks of his own work, namely, i. 1 and v. 26. At the same time this is the natural view, that Thucydides, as indeed he tells us explicitly, took notes and collected information from the very beginning and during the course of the war, and then, as he unfortunately does not tell us, after the war was over wrote up these notes into the connected narrative of his book. No one in any age would publish a book about a war before the war was over, or fail to review the events of the war in the light of the situation at its close-least of all one who had so high a conception of the functions of a historian as Thucydides evidently had. And yet anyone in Thucydides' time might naturally have supposed that in 421 B.C., when a general treaty of peace had been made and properly confirmed by the most binding oaths, and when also a separate agreement between the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians had been signed, uniting these two chief parties to the war in the