History of the Peloponnesian War

By Thucydides

Book Overview

Thucydides called his account of two decades of war between Athens and Sparta "a possession for all time," and indeed it is the first and still the most famous work in the Western historical... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140440399
• ISBN13: 9780140440393
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 656 Pages
• Weight: 0.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.0" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

Greatest Of All Greek Historians

The greatest of all Greek historians was the Athenian general Thucydides (455-400 B.C.E.). Thucydides' classic work, "History Of The Peloponnesian War", provides us with the historical framework for 5th century Greece, a golden age of intellectual achievement and creativity rarely equaled in human history. This history is by far the best account of the bitter war between Athens and Sparta as well as the only surviving contemporary record of the rise of the Athenian empire. Thucydides as a master story teller doesn't just cover the battle scenes, he records the great political speeches of Pericles, leader of Athens, and Lysander leader of Sparta with great acumen. He is recognized as the first historian to actually go and get eyewitness accounts, visit battlefieilds and research documents and records. This work took him over 20 years and it shows! The lessons he teaches about imperial over reaching and unreasonable peace settlements are prescient today as they were during his times. President Woodrow Wilson, read this book on his voyage across the Atlantic to the Versailles Peace Conference and vociferously fought the other Allies in making unreasonable demands of the Germans. Wilson learned the dangers that the world would be placed in by backing the Germans into a corner politically and economically from Thucydides book. I recommend this timeless classic to anyone who is interested in political philosophy, and history. I also recommend you read it with David Cartwright's "A Historical Commentary On Thucydides.

The Originator

I had a Greek teacher who loved Herodotus, and did not love Thucydides. The consequences were not, perhaps, what you might expect. In the event, when we studied Herodotus, she would chatter on about the background, the characters. When we came to Thucydides, without nearly so much to entertain her, we just read the Greek. Good thing, too. Herodotus' Greek is not elegant, and it is not pure Attic. But it is accessible to the relative novice. Thucydides, on the other hand, is about as hard as it comes - made worse by the fact that he is most accessible where he is least interesting, which is to say in the passages of pure battle narrative. It is in the "reflective" passages - where his "characters" are trying to explain or justify their actions, or where he is simply trying to make sense of an appalling calamity - that he is most obscure. Is this an accident? I think not. Thucydides is, after all, an originator. He is perhaps not quite the first to give us a narrative of events, but he is surely the first to try to make sense of it all. And to recognize the path taken by his own beloved country as the course of stark strategy. It is the story, in short (at least at one level) of how a nation perhaps too rich and too self assured, can go terribly wrong. It was fashionable to cite Thucydides in the dark days of the Vietnam War. I wonder if the comparison shows us too much flattery. For Thucydides' story is not only a story about the arrogance of power. Athens at its best was a priceless treasure. Anyone can throw away an opportunity, but some opportunities are better than others. Suggestion: of all the readers who responded to the challenge of Thucydides, none met it more dramatically than Thomas Hobbes, the British political philosopher who began his career by fashioning the first great English translation of the Peloponnesian War. Hobbes' 17th-Century translation is perhaps not the most accessible, and I gather it is not the most accurate. But Hobbes has a gnarly directness of his own, and echoes of Thucydides reverberate through just about everything he later wrote.

An entertaining and well-written history

This is the most objective and readable contemporary history ever written. Only in classical Greece could a work at once so sympathetic and objective be created. Thucydides was an Athenian and served as a general in their army, but first and foremost he was a Greek. Because of this he did not slander Athens' enemies or feel the need cast the Athenians' actions in a glorious, righteous light. Every chapter shines with brilliance and humanity, particularly the section on the plague which hit Athens when it was already in a crisis. I'm actually tempted to call this 2,000 year old history a page-turner.

The best translation of Thucydides yet.

The Hobbes translation and David Grene's intelligent and relevent notes make this the best version of Thucydides I have yet read. While I am not a scholar in this area, I feel that this is probably the grandest history ever written and that the Hobbes translation does it justice. It has been said that at best a translator is not merely changing the work from language to language but giving it a new life. Hobbes succeeded briliantly in this, and I feel that through Mr. Grene's notes, the translation is as near to the original as one can get.