Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians; he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.
Thucydides wrote the story of the first democracy in history, and of the fortunes and fall of its empire, but his pages contain the modern world-scene in miniature. The tale is told by a great political thinker, whose penetrating insight and dramatic power caused Macaulay to call him the 'greatest historian that ever lived.' His work, slightly abridged, is here presented in translation with an introduction and notes.
In the preface to his 1628 translation of Thucydides, entitled, Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, political philosopher Thomas Hobbes calls Thucydides "the most politic historiographer that ever writ."A hundred years later, philosopher David Hume, wrote that: "[T]he first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of real history. All preceding narrations are so intermixed with fable, that philosophers ought to abandon them to the embellishments of poets and orators"
Product Details
- Author: Thucydides
- ISBN-13: 978-0195002188
- Published on: 1960-12-31
- Originally published (aprox. date written): 400 BC
- Original language: Greek
- Binding: Paperback
- 402 pages
