The History of the Peloponnesian War

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Oxford University Press, 1943 - History - 399 pages
Thucydides wrote the story of the first democracy in history, and of the fortunes and fall of its empire, but his pages contain the modern world-scene in miniature. Ancient Greece is twentieth-century Europe, incapable of union, tearing itself to pieces in wars it did not desire but could not avoid. Here are familiar modern phenomena -- democracy and imperialism, the class struggle, the revolutionary spirit, the technique of aggression, cynical Real-politik, the importance of sea-power, even quisling and evacuation problems -- together with a brilliant account of campaigning in Sicily. The tale is told by a great political thinker, whose penetrating insight and dramatic power caused Macaulay to call him the 'greatest historian that ever lived'. His work, slightly abridged is here present in translation with an introduction and notes.

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Contents

PREFACE
xi
BOOK I
33
From the end of the Persian to the beginning
47

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About the author (1943)

Thucydides (between 460 and 455 BC-circa 400 BC) was an ancient Greek historian.

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