History of the Peloponnesian War: Bk. 6 (BCP Greek Texts)

by Thucydides (Author), K.J.Dover (Editor)

• New

  Paperback
  1999

  $36.60

  This is an edition of Book VI of Thucydides. Its notes aim to assist translation, draw attention to features of language and style characteristic of the author, make explicit what the author took for granted in his original audience and comment on the historical background.

• Used

  Paperback
  1997

  $11.18

  Thucydides claimed that his account of the devastating war between the Athenians and the Spartans was a possession for all time . An Athenian general, he was exiled for a military failure and drew for his writing on his personal experience and information from an extensive network of contacts on both sides to the epic conflict. His work is shaped by his judgements about the exercise of power in a democracy which ruled an empire and by his analysis of the impact of war on the social fabric. Thucydides's technique draws on the culture of his time, including sophist rhetoric, the drama of Greek tragedy and the diagnostic methods of the Hippocratic medical writers. The issues Thucydides addressed are as germane today as they were in the 5th-century BC.

• New

  Hardcover
  1989

  $29.76

  Thucydides of Athens, one of the greatest of historians, was born about 471 BCE. He saw the rise of Athens to greatness under the inspired leadership of Pericles. In 430, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, he caught and survived the horrible plague which he described so graphically. Later, as general in 423 he failed to save Amphipolis from the enemy and was disgraced. He tells about this, not in volumes of self-justification, but in one sentence of his history of the war--that it befell him to be an exile for twenty years. He then lived probably on his property in Thrace, but was able to observe both sides in certain campaigns of the war, and returned to Athens after her defeat in 404. He had been composing his famous history, with its hopes and horrors, triumphs and disasters, in full detail from first-hand knowledge of his own and others.

  The war was really three conflicts with one uncertain peace after the first; and Thucydides had not unified them into one account when death came sometime before 396. His history of the first conflict, 431-421, was nearly complete; Thucydides was still at work on this when the war spread to Sicily and into a conflict (415-413) likewise complete in his awful and brilliant record, though not fitted into the whole. His story of the final conflict of 413-404 breaks off (in the middle of a sentence) when dealing with the year 411. So his work was left unfinished and as a whole unrevised. Yet in brilliance of description and depth of insight this history has no superior.

  The Loeb Classical Library edition of Thucydides is in four volumes.