SOURCE: "Translation of Usener-Radermacher Text of De Thucydide," in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: On Thucydides, translated by W. Kendrick Pritchett, University of California Press, 1975, pp. 1-46.

A Greek who taught rhetoric in Rome, Dionysius was a prominent literary figure and the author of Roman Antiquities, a history of Rome from its origins to the First Punic War, and Scripta rhetorica, a collection of letters and essays on literary criticism valued for its thorough analysis and comparative method. In the following excerpt from his On Thucydides, Dionysius comments on what he views as some positive and negative attributes of the historian's style. Since the exact date of composition for this piece is unknown, Dionysius's death date has been used as the essay date.

[Thucydides] was unwilling either to confine his history to a single region as did Hellanicus, or to elaborate into a single work the achievements of Greeks and...