Any biographer may want to treat his subject sympathetically, but to avoid awkward questions results in a feeling that the truest picture obtainable has been lost. Thrasybulus and the New Athenian Empire, 393-389 BC', pp. However, Thrasybulus' new prominence was just as brief, in command of a fleet charged with restoring the Empire, for a time relatively successful in the Aegean, he was murdered in Pamphylia. The truth may, nevertheless, have been far less rosy. It is clearly evident that Buck's work has a tendency to become a general history of the Greek city-states for the years between 412 and 389, although the account is always clear and concise and, as such, will be useful as a guide both for students and teachers.
Some errors are discernible and require attention.
Thucydides is not remembered for his praise of many Athenian statesmen, and he certainly has nothing to say about Thrasybulus in Book 8. It is conceivable that he would in time have come to identify an aristocratic Thrasybulus as the closest any Athenian of that period came to emulating the greatest man of Greek democracy, but ex silentio the argument must remain a conjecture. Furthermore, had Thucydides felt any deep or fervent admiration for Thrasybulus he could have inserted a comment when in the process of rewriting the history at precisely the moment that that politician was supposedly the 'darling' of the demos . In sum, while we may admire his apparently adroit handling of many endeavours in Athenian public life and various military adventures, Thrasybulus was essentially colourless when compared, as he was all too often, with famous or infamous contemporaries such as Thrasyllus, Archinus, Conon, Anytus and, of course, Alcibiades. For all the worthy attempt, Buck has done little in this study to alter that image.