Beskrivning
Beskrivning
Classic political realism.Thucydidesof Athens was born about 471 BC. He saw the rise of Athens to greatnessunder the inspired leadership of Pericles. In 430, the second year ofthe Peloponnesian War, he caught and survived the horrible plague thathe described so graphically. Later, as general in 423 he failed to saveAmphipolis from the enemy and was disgraced. He tells us about this, notin volumes of self-justification, but in one sentence of his history ofthe war—that it befell him to be an exile for twenty years. He thenlived probably on his property in Thrace, but was able to observe bothsides in certain campaigns of the war, and returned to Athens after herdefeat in 404. He had been composing his famous history, with its hopesand horrors, triumphs and disasters, in full detail from first-handknowledge, along with the accounts of others. The war was really three conflicts with one uncertain peace after thefirst; and Thucydides had not unified them into one account when deathcame sometime before 396. His history of the first conflict, 431–421,was nearly complete; Thucydides was still at work on this when the warspread to Sicily and into a conflict (415–413) likewise complete in hisawful and brilliant record, though not fitted into the whole. His storyof the final conflict of 413–404 breaks off (in the middle of asentence) when dealing with the year 411. So his work was leftunfinished and as a whole unrevised. Yet in brilliance of descriptionand depth of insight this history has no superior. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Thucydides is in four volumes.
