THE HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

Inglorious Greeks.

We think of the ancient Greek Thucydides as the father of modern history. He wrote a literate, literary History of the Peloponnesian War that relied on sourced evidence, personal experience, and an argument that the study of the past helps us live in the present. He also shaped great orations less as transcriptions of actual speech than as highly curated, rhetorical performances. Waterfield’s new translation of his history makes voices come alive in idiomatic modern English. Pericles’ famous funeral speech, for example, has a directness that resonates with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and with the arching cadences of John F. Kennedy: “When it is by their actions that men have proved their valor we are required to show them honor by our actions.” Pericles comes off as a quotable adviser for our times: “For it isn’t easy to find the right balance in a speech when even people’s grasp of the truth is insecure.” Or take this description of the plague in words all too familiar to us now: “The grimmest aspect of the disease was the despair that afflicted people when they realized they were sick; once they had made up their minds that there was no hope, they were well on the way to giving up without a fight.” Thucydides has been used and reused to justify a range of political positions, from virtuous diplomacy to transactional realpolitik. For readers new to the history, the excellent introduction by Polly Low offers a clear guide to the worlds of Greek politics and power and to the tensions between democracy and oligarchy, revealing an ancient world as fractured, as fraught, and as full of personalities as our own.

A magnificent achievement, making ancient history live in a vernacular for our time.