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Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War Books VI and VII

A Companion to the Penguin Translation

Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War Books VI and VII( )
Author: Thucydides,
Volume Editor: Rutter, N. K.
Series title:Classics Companions Ser.
ISBN:978-1-85399-055-7
Publication Date:Mar 1998
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:Bristol Classical Press
Book Format:Paperback
List Price:AUD $34.99
Book Description:

This useful companion, keyed by bold lemmata to the Penguin translation, identifies the basic issues and raises key questions. The reader is aided by frequent cross-references and succinct comments on Thucydides' choices regarding selection and placement of material. The book is especially useful for Greekless readers of ancient history, political science or international relations coming to the work of Thucydides for the first time.

Book Details
Pages:112
Detailed Subjects: History / Ancient / Greece
Physical Dimensions (W X L X H):13.97 x 21.59 x 0.432 cm
Book Weight:0.109 Kilograms
Author Biography
Thucydides (Author)
Born into a family of Athens's old nobility claiming descent from the Homeric hero Ajax of Salamis, Thucydides pursued a political career under Pericles and served as a general in the Great Peloponnesian War of 431--404 b.c. His subsequent exile for failure to prevent a Spartan takeover of an Athenian colony in Thrace enabled him to observe the war from both sides. In his history of the war, he examines the policies and motives of the people involved with a calculated rationality that nevertheless conveys great passion. Although his narrative style is lucid and astringent, the language of the speeches that he gives his protagonists is some of the most difficult, yet rhetorically powerful, Greek from any period of antiquity. The work is deeply serious in tone. As Thucydides tells his readers at the beginning of the work, it contains nothing of entertainment value. He meant it, as he says, to be not simply a set-piece written for the delectation of an audience, but a "possession for ever."

As Herodotus was the inventor of universal history, Thucydides was the inventor of the analytical historical monograph. He wrote in conscious contrast to Herodotus, whose work is full of entertaining fable and romance. While Herodotus wrote about the past by using all manner of traditions gleaned in his travels, Thucydides considered only contemporary history to be reliable and writes as an interrogator and witness of contemporary men and events.

The gods, too, are absent from Thucydides's work, which scrutinizes human motivations as the exclusive business of history. The most powerful intellectual influences visible are the fully rational method of description and prognosis developed by the Hippocratic physicians and the tools of logical analysis and verbal argument then being forged by the Sophists. Behind these, however, lay a sense of tragedy. The history of Thucydides possesses the rhythm of a Sophoclean drama of reversal of fortune in which Athens falls from the p



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