War Classics – Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War

The Peloponnesian War – a titanic struggle for control of Greece between the opposing forces of Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC – is known to us largely through the writings of a single individual. He was Thucydides, a wealthy Athenian who was himself a minor participant in the war. He was not the first historian of the Classical world – that was Herodotus, who was some 20 years his senior – but he was the first to adopt a recognisably professional approach to his subject. Where Herodotus retailed anecdotes with varying degrees of accuracy, Thucydides set out to produce a sober, reliably researched chronicle of his own time. He was deeply interested in the complex causes of