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An Introduction for the Common Reader
Perez Zagorin Book Description Reviews Table of Contents Class Use and other Permissions . For more information, send e-mail to permissions@press.princeton.edu This file is also available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format Introduction OF ALL THE HISTORIANS of war past or present, the ancient Greek Thucydides, author of the History of The Peloponnesian War , is the most celebrated and admired. His book, written in the fifth century BCE, is one of the supreme classic works of Greek and Western civilization that continues to speak to us from across the vast gulf of the past. Over the centuries a universal judgment has come to esteem it as one of the greatest of all histories. The famous nineteenth-century English historian Lord Macaulay, whose History of England itself became a classic, declared, "I have no hesitation in pronouncing Thucydides the greatest historian who ever lived." The account Thucydides wrote of the twenty-seven-year war of 431-404 between Athens and Sparta is taken up with the details and actions of warfare on land and sea, but also with much, much more. It is equally a story of diplomacy and relations among the Greek city-states, of political values, ideas, and argument, of the success and failure of military plans and strategy, of renowned and striking personalities, and most fundamentally, of the human and communal experience of war and its effects. Its time is the later fifth century, an era in which Sparta, one of the two great powers of Greece, was a formidable militaristic society organized for war, and Athens an intensely vital democracy that ruled over a large empire of subject city-states and stood at the height of its unequalled achievements as a creative center of culture, intellect, literature, and art. | |
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