The Landmark Thucydides Author: Visit Amazon's Thucydides Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1416590870 | Format: EPUB
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Thucydides'
History of the Peloponnesian War is one of the great books in the Western tradition, as well as its first true historical narrative. Editor Robert Strassler has annotated this classic text to make it more accessible to modern readers and added dozens of maps for easy reference. A helpful introduction places Thucydides in proper historical context and a series of short appendices focus on particular aspects of life and war during the period. But the bulk of the book itself, where Thucydides chronicles the long struggle between Athens and Sparta, enjoys an unexpected freshness on these pages--partly due to Strassler's magnificent editorial labors, but mostly because it's a great story resonant with heroes, villains, bravery, desperation, and tragedy. Every library should have a copy of Thucydides in it, especially libraries on military history, and
The Landmark Thucydides is without question the best version available.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Strassler, an unaffiliated scholar of classical studies, has remedied many of the flaws of Richard Crawley's 1874 translation of The Peloponnesian War. He has added descriptive paragraph-by-paragraph synopses, topic headers on every page, numerous maps keyed to the adjoining text, explanatory footnotes, an extensive index, an excellent introduction by Victor Davis Hanson (California State Univ.), and 11 appendixes (by various scholars) on politics, warfare, and society in the Greece of the fifth century B.C.E. What the editor has done he has done well, creating a valuable basic reference for students of ancient history. His work has only two flaws: it lacks a substantial bibliography, having only a two-page "concise" one; and the price will put it out of reach of many institutions. For academic libraries and others with large history collections.?James F. DeRoche, Alexandria, Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Hardcover: 752 pages
- Publisher: Free Press; Revised edition (April 1, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1416590870
- ISBN-13: 978-1416590873
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.8 x 1.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
This is a review of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War rather than Strassler's edition of it, as many of the other reviews more or less are. But hats off to Mr Strassler! He should receive an award, a salary increase, a villa on the Riviera...Something commensurate with his painstaking and infinitely helpful notes and elaborations and maps, maps, maps!-Now I know where everything is. The previous editions of Thucydides I've read were rather scanty on maps (i.e., They didn't have any.) All readers of this edition owe Strassler a bundle for making us more successful readers of an author who, at times, can be a bit on the difficult, if not to say inscrutable, side. What do we have to learn from Thucydides? As several reviwers have pointed out, Thucydides intended his opus as a work for the ages. But what were "the ages" supposed to glean from this first thorough account of war in the Western world?... Why men go to war? How to prevent war? How to be successful in war? What it means to go to war?...Just what did he intend? Nobody really knows the answer to the question. But I've read the work several times (never with a clearer understanding than after fnishing the Strassler edition) and have some ideas that might prove helpful. First off, one thing Thucydides almost certainly meant by declaring that his work was for the ages was that war is a permanent condition of mankind. Man has always and will always go to war. It's part of what we would call human nature or (if we wanted to be upscale about it), man's genetic make-up. This means that man is not, as Aristotle famously intoned, the rational animal, but irrational to the core. But, still, what does this really mean?
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