In the Library
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides, 411 BCE
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 15 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Richard Crawley (1874)
- Chapters
- Chapters 26
- Length
- Length 204k words
£1.99
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the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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If you like this, try
Parallel Lives
Plutarch
Plutarch's lives of Pericles, Nicias and Alcibiades retell this war through the men who led it, filling in the characters Thucydides kept behind their speeches.
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The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli does the same thing in a hundred pages and as advice, taking the Athenian line that power obeys necessity and calling it statecraft.
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Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes translated this history first and then wrote his answer to it, building a whole political science on the fear that Thucydides was content to record.
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About the book
An Athenian general, exiled after failing to relieve Amphipolis, sets down what he has seen and heard of the long war between Athens and Sparta. Thucydides composed this history near the end of the fifth century BC and called it a possession for all time, written for those who would understand the political truth that recurs. He records the plague that gutted Athens, the Mytilenean debate over whether to massacre a city, the Melian Dialogue in which the strong tell the weak that justice exists only between equals. The book breaks off mid-sentence, the war unfinished, the author dead. What survives is the cold light he turned on power and what it does to the men who hold it.