History of the Peloponnesian War

What It Is

An account of the long war between Athens and Sparta, which ran from 431 to 404 BC, written by an Athenian who commanded troops in it and was exiled for failing in that command. Thucydides was there. He knew the men who made the decisions, and he wrote with the cold intention of producing something still useful when everyone involved was dead.

This is analysis, not chronicle. He organises the war by summers and winters, strips out the gods and the marvels that fill Herodotus, and explains events by power, fear, interest, calculation and luck. His Greek is famously the most difficult prose in the language: compressed to the point of pain, argumentative, unforgiving.

Threaded through it are the speeches, reconstructed by Thucydides as what the occasion demanded, in which Athenians and Spartans argue about what to do. They are the most quoted political prose ever written, and they are why this book is still read in war colleges and cabinet offices.

The text we have is unfinished. He did not live to complete it.

Why It Matters

It is the first attempt in the West to explain human events by human causes alone. No divine will, no fate, no punishment for pride. People, under pressure, deciding. That choice is the foundation of political science, of international relations, and arguably of modern history.

Out of it comes political realism, the doctrine that states act on interest and fear rather than justice. Hobbes translated Thucydides before he wrote Leviathan, and said he had learned from him. Every realist since works in his shadow, down to the strategists arguing today about rising powers and declining ones. The trap they keep invoking is named after him.

The book is stranger and better than the doctrine extracted from it. It is the finest study ever written of how a democracy argues with itself, how words lose their meanings during civil conflict, how fear corrupts judgment, and how a people changes when a war goes on too long.

Before You Read

This is hard. Harder than Herodotus in every respect. Thirty to forty hours, and it should be slow.

The speeches are the payload. Read them twice, read them aloud, and do not skim them out of impatience to get back to the campaign.

Maps are not optional. Without them the campaign narrative dissolves into a fog of names. The granular military detail is where most first-time readers slow down, and moving briskly through the smaller campaigns on a first read is entirely reasonable.

Which Translation to Read

• Jeremy Mynott (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 2013), published as The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians — recommended. The most intellectually honest Thucydides in English. Mynott refuses to let modern political vocabulary smuggle modern ideas into a fifth-century text, so what reaches you is the real difficulty of the argument rather than a smoothed version of it. The cost: he preserves the knottiness of the Greek, so it is not an easy ride, and the Cambridge paperback is a plain object beside the Landmark. View on Amazon →
• The Landmark Thucydides (edited by Robert Strassler, 1996, using a revised Crawley translation). The most usable edition ever made of this book: maps everywhere, dated marginal summaries, appendices, a real index. The cost: Crawley's Victorian English of 1874 is elegant in a way Thucydides deliberately is not, and the marginal summaries tell you what is coming, which is a genuine loss.
• Martin Hammond (Oxford World's Classics, 2009). The best straightforwardly readable modern translation, with an excellent introduction and notes by P. J. Rhodes. Start here if Mynott sounds like too much work. The cost: clear at the price of being less distinctive, and it smooths what Mynott preserves.

Read Mynott with the Landmark open beside you for the maps. That combination is as good as it gets in English. Rex Warner's Penguin version (1954) is the one generations read, though it makes Thucydides easier than he is.

The Folio Society has issued the Peloponnesian War as a fine edition for collectors. It is not the one to read from.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the paired speeches against each other. Thucydides constructs arguments in opposition on purpose, and the space between them is where he does his thinking. He will not do yours.

Go slowly. Ten or twenty pages at a sitting is not a failure of stamina. It is the correct speed.

Read the introduction afterwards. Almost every introduction to Thucydides walks through the course of the war, and this is a book whose grip depends on watching decisions get made before you know what they cost.

Keep a newspaper nearby. The strangest thing about reading Thucydides is how often you have to check which century you are in.

And resist the temptation to read him for the history. Read him for the argument.