The Landmark Thucydides

The Landmark Thucydides - The Barnes & Noble review

The Landmark Thucydides is an excellent recounting of the Peloponnesian War. OK, it's the only one I've read, so I've really nothing to compare it to, but it was really good.

The translation was easy to read and follow. The editor included an abundance of maps which made it a simple matter to follow the action of the history as it progressed. The appendices contained valuable information about the culture and government of the era which is assumed knowledge in the text. The footnotes were often interesting when they weren't just map coordinates, but I also thought that there were too many of them which repeated the same information throughout the book.

So why would I read such a book for fun? Stubborn curiosity tops the list of reasons, I think. I say "stubborn" because it took several months work my way through the book.

Although Thucydides doesn't mention much that is autobiographical, his History is basically an eyewitness account of a conflict which helped to shape the political world as we know it today. It is also a fascinating glimpse at a society that we often assume is familiar. After all, wasn't Athens the "birthplace of democracy"? Aren't we familiar with the mythology of ancient Greece? It is interesting to see their version of democracy worked out day-by-day, and to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak, just what sort of role their myths played in their everyday lives. In this sense, ancient Greece is not as familiar as one would expect.

What was surprisingly familiar, however, was the politics and motivations of the individuals mentioned in the History. Time and again I marvelled that our technological advances have achieved nothing in the realm of human relations. The world today appears so different from the one that existed 2400 years ago. But the people, politicians, generals--they are still with us. They are us. We haven't changed at all.

SET - 10/10/2000

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