Description
Book SynopsisDesigned to introduce both students and general readers to a work that is an essential part of a liberal education, this book seeks to encourage readers to explore Greek author Thucydides - one of the world's greatest historians. It examines his landmark "History of the Peloponnesian War", one of the great classics of Western civilization.
Trade ReviewHonorable Mention for the 2006 Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Multi Volume Reference Works/Humanities & Social Sciences, Association of American Publishers "Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader offers an engrossing intellectual appreciation of the most important and most difficult historian in the western cultural tradition... Perez Zagorin ... brings formidable personal intelligence to major questions in Thucydidian scholarship, and his book goes well beyond the typical synthetic handbook... There is nothing else like it."--Tom Palaima, Times Higher Education Supplement "Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader is a useful book... Thucydides' ... depth and breadth remain an extraordinary reminder of how little political distance we have traveled since his time."--Peter Stothard, The Wall Street Journal "[E]specially useful as a textbook for undergraduate courses as well as for general readers curious about an ancient historian whose name has a prime place in any history of history, as well as in the study of the mature stage of the classical age of Greece."--Victor Castellani, European Legacy
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Thucydides' History and Its Background 7 Chapter 2: The Subject, Method, and Structure of Thucydides' History 23 Chapter 3: Thucydides on the Causes of the War 40 Chapter 4: Thucydides and Pericles 57 Chapter 5: Scenes from the Archidamian War 75 Mytilene, Plataea, Corcyra, Pylos Chapter 6: Dialogue at Melos, the Sicilian Expedition 100 Chapter 7: Endings 125 Chapter 8: Thucydides as a Philosophic Historian 139 Notes 163 Further Reading 185 Index 187
