This volume explores the relationship between Thucydides and ancient Greek historiography, sociology, and culture. Drawing on modern anthropological enquiries on kinship and the sociology of ethnicity and emotions, it argues that inter-communal kinship has a far more pervasive importance in Thucydides than has so far been acknowledged.
Best known for his account of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (c. 454–c. 395 b.c.) was an Athenian general and historian. This valuable commentary addresses the most famous part of Thucydides’s narrative: the Sicilian Expedition (books 6–8.1), which resulted in a major defeat for Athens. Designed for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Greek, Martha C. Taylor’s student-friendly text is the first single volume in more than a century to focus on the expedition and the first to include the Melian Dialogue (5.84–116), considered the “prelude” to the invasion. Many beginning readers of Thucydides require assistance with the author’s often difficult constructions. In her notes to the text, Taylor breaks down Thucydides’s convoluted sentences and explains them piece by piece. Her notes also explain the author’s many historical and literary references. In her in-depth introduction, Taylor provides students with all the information they need to begin reading Thucydides. She discusses what we know about the Greek author—and what we do not—and she analyzes his unique language and style. To place the Sicilian Expedition in historical context, she summarizes the events leading up to and following the Sicilian Expedition, and she examines important aspects of Athenian democracy, including Thucydides’s presentation of the Athenian boule, the city’s advisory citizen council. In addition to textual and historical commentary, this volume includes three maps; an appendix addressing the epitaph of Perikles (2.65.5–13), in which Thucydides appears to contradict his later presentation of the Sicilian Expedition; source suggestions for student term papers on relevant topics; and a general bibliography. Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue and Sicilian Expedition is designed for use with the Oxford Classical Text of Thucydides, which is available online.
Human communities thrive on prosocial behavior. This book demonstrates from a wide range of perspectives how such behavior is anchored and promoted in classical antiquity by a varied and conceptually rich discourse of ‘valuing others’.
Since antiquity, Book 8 of Thucydides’ History has been considered an unpolished draft which lacks revision. Even those who admit that the book has some elements of internal coherence believe that Thucydides, if death had not prevented him, would have improved many chapters or even the whole structure of the book. Consequently, while the first seven books of the History have been well examined through the last two centuries, the narrative plan of Book 8 remains an obscure subject, as we do not possess an extensive and detailed presentation of its whole narrative design. Vasileios Liotsakis tries to satisfy this central desideratum of the Thucydidean scholarship by offering a thorough description of the compositional plan, which, in his opinion, Thucydides put into effect in the last 109 chapters of his work. His study elaborates on the structural parts of the book, their details, and the various techniques through which Thucydides composed his narration in order to reach the internal cohesion of these chapters as well as their close connection to the rest of the History. Liotsakis offers us an original approach not only of Book 8 but also of the whole work, since his observations reshape our overall view of the History.
This study enriches the dialogue on how societies often use myth to construct political, social, and cultural identity---hardly unique to the ancient Greeks, it is rather a human phenomenon for a culture to embrace an identity grounded in a putative ancestry that is expressed in the traditional stories of that culture. --Book Jacket.
In The Shape of Herodotean Rhetoric, Vasiliki Zali offers a fresh assessment of Herodotus’ rhetorical awareness. Redressing the usual view that considers Thucydides as a significant jump from earlier authors in the rhetorical tradition, Zali attempts to find a place for Herodotus. The volume explores the direct and indirect speeches in Herodotus’ fifth to ninth books, focusing in particular on the ways in which they highlight two major narrative themes: the fragility of Greek unity and the problematic Greco-Persian polarity. Through discussion of case studies and Herodotus’ literary background, Zali brings Herodotus’ sophisticated rhetorical system to life, examines the ways in which this system affects Herodotus’ authority, and demonstrates that Herodotus occupies a crucial place in the development of rhetoric.
This book addresses the question of how and why history begins with the work of Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War is distinctive in that it is a prose narrative, meant to be read rather than performed. It focuses on the unfolding of contemporary great power politics to the exclusion of almost all other elements of human life, including the divine. The power of Thucydides' text has never been attributed either to the charm of its language or to the entertainment value of its narrative, or to some personal attribute of the author. In this study, Darien Shanske analyzes the difficult language and structure of Thucydides' History and argues that the text has drawn in so many readers into its distinctive world view precisely because of its kinship to the contemporary language and structure of Classical Tragedy. This kinship is not merely a matter of shared vocabulary or even aesthetic sensibility. Rather, it is grounded in a shared philosophical position, in particular on the polemical metaphysics of Heraclitus.
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is the earliest surviving realist text in the European tradition. As an account of the Peloponnesian War, it is famous both as an analysis of power politics and as a classic of political realism. From the opening speeches, Thucydides' Athenians emerge as a new and frightening source of power, motivated by self-interest and oblivious to the rules and shared values under which the Greeks had operated for centuries. Gregory Crane demonstrates how Thucydides' history brilliantly analyzes both the power and the dramatic weaknesses of realist thought. The tragedy of Thucydides' history emerges from the ultimate failure of the Athenian project. The new morality of the imperialists proved as conflicted as the old; history shows that their values were unstable and self-destructive. Thucydides' history ends with the recounting of an intellectual stalemate that, a century later, motivated Plato's greatest work. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity includes a thought-provoking discussion questioning currently held ideas of political realism and its limits. Crane's sophisticated claim for the continuing usefulness of the political examples of the classical past will appeal to anyone interested in the conflict between the exercise of political power and the preservation of human freedom and dignity.