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Summary: History as Story
Review: By fortune, for me, Thucydides came first in college...followed not long after by David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest... followed by Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie. Like Gibbon, Toqueville and so many others, the story teaches.
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Summary: The first and best !
Review: I first encountered Thucydites in translations(rather difficult) from the ancient Greek in secondary school in Rome and fell in love with this book from that time on.Thucydites more or less invented history and separeted the field from mithology.His accounts concerning the war between Athens and Sparta for the Greek world leadership are first rate,honest and accurate.And all this is more surprising knowing that the author was ostracyzed (exiled) by Athens with charges of incompetence during the war.In the book there are many very fine points like Perikles speech to Athenians,the pestilence in Athens,the siege of Syracuse and the extraordinary account of conctractations between Athenians and the little island of Melos where the real nature of imperialism is fully exposed.Reconstruction of battles is very well made and professional.I think Thucydites's book is still now a great reading for everyone!
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Summary: The Originator
Review: I had a Greek teacher who loved Herodotus, and did not love Thucydides. The consequences where 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 entertainer, 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.
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Summary: Slow to start but quite rewarding!
Review: I had to read this for my Great Books class in college and LOVED it! True it starts out really slow and the scads of Greek names got so confusing I had to start writing them down to keep them straight in my head, but once you get to the battle of Thermopyle the story moves like pure drama. Great stuff.
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Summary: Unparalleled
Review: I will spare a full-blown review. But if you have the extra money or could easily afford it, I would recommend the newer more expensive edition of this book with the introduction by Victor Davis Hanson. There, you will have maps to your hearts content, including chapter summaries. This edition lacks in both of these areas. As a result, this edition gets 4 stars, while the history written by Thucydides is beyond measure.
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Summary: Read one the reviews below
Review: I'm sorry to do this but this is just too funny to pass up. One of the guys below I believe his name is Kulp titled his review "bound to be a classic." Yeah maybe we can give it a couple more thousand years and it will become a classic bub.
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Summary: Brilliant and absorbing; could do with more annotation
Review: In 431 BC war broke out between Athens, the dominant empire in Greece at the time, and Sparta, her main rival. The first twenty years of the war are chronicled in this absorbing work: book eight breaks off mid-sentence, and Thucydides' account of the last seven years of the war has not survived. Apart from fifteen pages in book one, in which he briefly recounts the events of the fifty years prior to the war, Thucydides never strays from the day-to-day and year-to-year details of the war. The only significant Greek historian who predates him is Herodotus, whose account ended where Thucydides' begins, in 479 BC; but Herodotus was a story-teller where Thucydides is a scholar. Reading Herodotus' "Histories" is more like sitting by the fire with a glass of brandy and an interesting friend. Thucydides reads like a textbook, and though this is one of his strengths, it also makes him a little harder for modern readers to approach. On the other hand, the very density of information feels quite modern, so that although the politics is alien, once you find your feet you'll be swept up by the story of a terrible war. The book is full of names, places, and account of battles and intrigues. There are several maps at the back, which are a great help, but over and over again I found that a key place wasn't on the map, and there are no notes to help out. Where is Naupactus? Who are the Carians? Where do the Illyrians come from? Unlike the Penguin edition of Herodotus, which is packed with helpful notes, this edition provides the reader very little help. Too often I found I just had to wing it, guessing the importance of a name or the approximate location of a place from context. I'd recommend having a good classical dictionary handy while you read, if you're the sort who wants these questions answered. Thucydides style is to alternate plain narration with speeches. The introduction (by Finley) makes it clear that these speeches are generally made up by Thucydides to fit what he thought would or should have been said. On the other hand, he was there for some of them, and did his best to interview eye-witnesses wherever he could, so the speeches tend to sound quite convincing. Thucydides' passion for accuracy is what makes this book special. The account of a night battle in Sicily makes it clear how hard he worked to get the details right; he comments that this account is less likely to be accurate because the witnesses he interviewed were unable to see the whole battlefield, as they could in a day battle, and there's a fascinating chapter (book seven, chapter 44) where he talks about all the difficulties of reporting factually in these circumstances. He sounds quite modern, and he is. He's the first truly modern historian, and would be worth reading for that reason alone. However, the story he tells, of twenty years of bitter conflict between two fine civilizations, is enthralling, and brilliantly told. Recommended.
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Summary: this is the first attempt at historical objectivity
Review: It is always fascinating to pick up what is regarded as a classic and read through it in a naive manner, not as a specialist but someone who just wants to learn. There are always surprises. In contrast to the looser Herodotus, his near contemporary, Thucydides sought to record an "objective truth" of the great war between Athens and Sparta, in the 5C BC. He consulted multiple sources and carefully judged what to include and what not to include, in accordance with his evolving idea of what really happened. While some of the forms, such as made-up speeches, differ from what we would do today, he set a new standard for accuracy. THe result is a work of genius, the first serious attempt at writing history rather than merely storytelling. Reading this is not always fun. There are long sections that are lists of occurences, with references to individuals who appear and disappear without followup. But there are also penetrating analyses of remarkable characters, such as Perikles, Alcidiades, and other great generals, who became reference points to the present day. Thucydides also covered political science - how institutions actually functioned - in new ways, with demonstrations of how the unleashing of passions led to their corruption or distortion. Finally, there are chilling sections with timeless insight in human conduct in war, with the full horror of the breakdown of all order and law. THis translation is also emminently readable, far better than the rigid and more literal one I first read in college. THucydides is quite eloquent in this version. There is also a good introduction to put the work in perspective.
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Summary: A controversial account of a fascinating time
Review: Reading some of the reviews of this book seems to be almost as interesting as reading the book itself! However, I do feel the need to set the record straight on a few points. While it is true that most of the content of the speeches that Thucydides records are historically inaccurate, it is a grave fallacy to say that the facts he records are "lies." As was true of all authors of the time, Thucydides' text was written to further a political, military, and social agenda. The speeches of the work are not recorded verbatim, granted, but does that make Pericles' funeral oration any less beautiful and poignant? It reminded me very significantly of Vietnam, in all honesty. Instead of holding Thucydides to a modern historical standard, why not appreciate him for the excellent speechwriter and persuasive argumentarian that he was?
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Summary: NO! You people are morons. Thucydides made this garbage up!
Review: This book is a fictional account of the war between the Delian League and the Spartans and their allies. If Herodotus was the Father of Lies, Thucydides must be the arch-fiend himself. Pericles' "beautiful" funereal oration -- made up. The only good thing about this book is the touching of the Lesbians and their tragic compelled choice between the Athenians and the Spartans. Of course, the Athenians abuse these poor Lesbians.
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