Bust of Pericles Inscription: “Pericles, son of Xanthippus, Athenian” Picture sourceThe question I’m focusing on in Book One centers on Thucydides’ claim for the reason for the Peloponnesian War. Not that I’m hoping to resolve the actual reasons…it’s more like I’m trying to understand Thucydides’ outlook…knowing where to take him with a grain of salt […]

The Athenian empire (and surrounding areas) around 450 BC Picture source Pentecontaetia (Greek, “the period of fifty years”) is the term used to refer to the period in Ancient Greek history between the defeat of the second Persian invasion of Greece at Plataea in 479 BC and the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. (from Wikipedia) […]

Chalcidice in northern Greece(For those that followed Herodotus, Xerxes’ canal northwest of Mount Athos is noted)Picture source “For they love innovation, and are swift to devise, and also to execute what they resolve on. But you on the contrary are only apt to save your own; not devise any thing new, nor scarce to attain […]

Map of ancient Greek world Picture source This was the first cause that the Corinthians had of war against the Athenians: namely, because they had taken part with the Corcyræans in a battle by sea against the Corinthians, with whom they were comprised in the same articles of peace. I’ll apologize about the length of […]

Bust of Thucydides Picture source Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians as they warred against each other, beginning to write as soon as the war was on foot; with expectation it should prove a great one, and most worthy the relation of all that had been before it: conjecturing […]

But Thucydides is one, who, though he never digress to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text, nor enter into men’s hearts further than the acts themselves evidently guide him: is yet accounted the most politic historiographer that ever writ. The reason whereof I take to be this. He filleth his narrations […]