Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

THUCYDIDES (c.460400 BC) was a member of the aristocratic Athenian family which provided the opponents of the democratic leader Pericles, but himself became an admirer of Pericles, though not of democracy except when guided by Pericles. His subject is the Peloponnesian War. This was fought between Athens and Sparta, the two leading powers of fifth-century Greece, and eventually won by Sparta. Thucydides started work at the outset of the war in 431, expecting it to be more momentous than any previous conflict. He served as a general in the war, but was exiled after failing to keep the city of Amphipolis out of Spartan hands in 424/3. He returned to Athens at the end of the war, but although a few sentences refer to later events his surviving narrative breaks off in the autumn of 411. He is more narrowly focused on the war than his predecessor Herodotus (c.485425) had been on the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century, and his work has great intellectual power: he was energetic and intelligent in establishing the facts and penetrating in his judgement of general issues; he explains events wholly in human terms; the work is skilfully composed, with a blend of plain and vivid narrative passages, and with speeches which often explore the nature of power. Thucydides history is indeed the permanent legacy which he intended it to be.

MARTIN HAMMOND was born in 1944 and educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. He has taught at St Pauls School, Harrow School, and Eton College, where he was Head of Classics from 1974 to 1980, and Master in College from 1980 to 1984. He was Headmaster of the City of London School from 1984 to 1990, and of Tonbridge School from 1990 to his retirement in 2005. He has also translated the Iliad (Penguin, 1987), the Odyssey (Duckworth, 2000), and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Penguin, 2006). He is married, with two children.

P. J. RHODES is Honorary Professor and Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Durham. He has written widely on Thucydides and ancient Greece; one of his most recent books is A History of the Classical Greek World 478323 BC (2005).

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Translation Martin Hammond 2009
Editorial material P. J. Rhodes 2009

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2009

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thucydides.
[History of the Peloponnesian War. English]
The Peloponnesian War / Thucydides; translated by Martin Hammond, with an
introduction and notes by P.J. Rhodes.
p. cm.(Oxford world classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780192821911
1. GreeceHistoryPeloponnesian War, 431404 B.C. I. Hammond, Martin, 1944
II. Rhodes, P. J. (Peter John) III. Title.
DF229.T5H36 2009
938.05dc22
2008049469

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ISBN 9780192821911

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THIS book is a collaboration. It has been a pleasure and a reassurance to work closely with Peter Rhodes on every aspect of the book at every stage. I am responsible for the translation, the index, and (for the most part) the decisions on which reading to adopt in the many places where the Greek text is in doubt: Peter for all the rest of the book. The process has been interactive. In a series of virtually weekly emails we have seen and commented on each others drafts section by section, and I am gratefully conscious that hardly a page of my translation has not benefited from improvements to my first draft suggested by Peter.

Thucydides admired energy, inventiveness, and intellectual power, and all these qualities are manifest in his own writing. He wrote very difficult Greek, in (as far as we can tell) a highly idiosyncratic style. Narrative sections are brilliantly fast and vivid (e.g. the description of the plague, 2.4754; the escape from Plataea, 3.204; the battle on Epipolae, 7.434), but when Thucydides brings his intellect to bear, either authorially or in densely textured speeches given to politicians or military men, on the wider and more permanent issues which interested him (e.g. the nature of power, the self-perpetuating logic of empire, the moral collapse in civil war, the clash of rival political systems, cultures, and ideologies), his thought is complex and compressed, set out in innovative language itself so compressed that regular syntax on occasion buckles under the pressure, and a two- or three-word phrase can need careful and sometimes contentious unpacking. The translator needs all the help he or she can get. In addition to the constant vigilance of Peter Rhodes, I have been very fortunate to benefit from the generosity of Chris Pelling and Simon Hornblower. Chris Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, very kindly read the entire translation in draft, and his comments and suggestions have been gratefully incorporated into the final version, much improving what I had first written. Simon Hornblower, Professor of Classics and Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London, generously allowed both me and Peter Rhodes photocopies of the typescript of the third and final volume (5.25end) of his magisterial