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Book One
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
INTRODUCTION
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides sorted out the essential from the casual, the primary causes from the more immediate grievances and the pretexts. The latter he wrote up in great detail, devoting the whole of the first book to the background.
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
Introduction
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
because of the man who wrote its history, Thucydides the Athenian.
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides, on the contrary, was a contemporary of, and for a time a direct participant in, his war; indeed, when he decided to write his History, the subject matter lay in the future.
Thucydides • History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides described Themistocles as being ‘at once the best judge in those sudden crises which admit of little or no deliberation, and the best prophet of the future, even to its most distant possibilities’.[16]