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The MouseionThucydides

Thucydides

1 work in the library, 1 with an English translation.

Athenian historian and general, born at Halimous. From Wikidata; Wikipedia.

Lived
5th–4th c. BC
Wrote in
5th c. BC
Kinds of writing
History
Dialect
Attic
Analysed
168,407 words

The work

The road of the text

Follow the text from Thucydides's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like 1 are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

  • The author
  • Copies
  • Print and editions
  1. c. 460 BCThe authorBorn at Halimous, near Athens, son of Olorus, a name linked with Thrace16
  2. about 30 years later431 BCThe authorThe war begins, and he begins to write “at the very outset”1
  3. 1 year later430 BCThe authorThe plague reaches Athens; he catches it and recovers3
  4. about 6 years laterc. 424 BCThe authorAs a general in Thrace he sails to save Amphipolis, but arrives too late; he is banished for twenty years4,5,7,8
  5. about 13 years laterc. 411 BCThe authorThe narrative breaks off in mid-story in the summer of 411 BC, partway through the war's twenty-first year12,14
  6. about 7 years later404 BCThe authorThe war ends; he later writes that it lasted twenty-seven years8
  7. about 450 years laterc. AD 50CopiesAbout twenty papyrus fragments of Thucydides are copied at Oxyrhynchus between the 1st and 6th centuries AD14
  8. about 1,400 years laterc. 1450Print and editionsLorenzo Valla makes the first Latin translation, between 1448 and 145216
  9. about 50 years later1502Print and editionsAldus Manutius prints the first Greek edition, at Venice16,17
  10. about 130 years laterc. 1629Print and editionsThomas Hobbes publishes the first English translation made directly from the Greek (sources give 1628 or 1629)16
  11. about 310 years later1942Print and editionsJones and Powell's Oxford Classical Text appears in two volumes18
  12. 66 years later2008Print and editionsHornblower's three-volume commentary is completed15

Life and work

Checked against sources · 30 September 2026

He starts with his own name, and then with the war: «Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων», “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war waged by the Peloponnesians and the Athenians against one another”. He began at the very outset, sure that it would be great and noteworthy above all the wars before it.1 Even the spelling is old-fashioned: ξυνέγραψε has the ξυν- that LSJ calls the old Attic form of σύν-.2

Thucydides tells you a good deal about himself. He caught the plague at Athens and recovered: “For I had the disease myself and saw others sick of it”.3 In the eighth year of the war he was one of the generals in Thrace. When Brasidas marched on Amphipolis, the city's defenders sent for Thucydides, who was at Thasos, half a day's sail away.45 He held the right to work gold mines in that part of Thrace and was influential among its leading men.6 His ships reached Eion on the evening Amphipolis fell, and saved Eion by a night.7 He was then banished from Athens for twenty years “after my command at Amphipolis”, and he says that exile gave him time to know “affairs on both sides”, especially the Peloponnesians'.8

Then comes how he worked. The speeches, he admits, could not be recalled word for word. They are given in the language which, “as it seemed to me”, each speaker would have used, sticking as closely as possible to the general sense of what was really said.9 He describes the plague's symptoms so that anyone could recognise it if it ever returned.3 He names “the truest explanation” of the war, “although it has been the least often advanced”: the growth of Athens, which frightened Sparta into fighting.10 And he says what he hopes for the book: not “a prize-essay to be heard for the moment, but … a possession for all time”, κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί.11

He lived to see the war end: he writes that it lasted twenty-seven years, until the Spartans took the Long Walls and the Piraeus.8 Yet the book stops in mid-story. Its last sentence is about Tissaphernes: “And so he came first to Ephesus and offered sacrifice to Artemis.”12 Xenophon's Hellenica begins as if in the next breath: “After this, not many days later, Thymochares came from Athens with a few ships”.13

Debated among scholars The ending is usually taken to mean the work was left unfinished.14 Simon Hornblower, in his commentary, defends some passages of Book 8 against the charge of incompleteness and suggests that Thucydides' narrative art was changing.15

A note on the books

Thucydides did not divide his work into eight books. The division is most likely the work of later librarians, probably in the Library of Alexandria.16

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Papyri. Grenfell and Hunt found about twenty papyrus fragments of Thucydides at Oxyrhynchus, copied between the first and sixth centuries AD; two are known as P.Oxy. 16 and 17.14

Medieval manuscripts. The manuscripts editors use include Laurentianus Plut. 69.2 (Florence), Vaticanus gr. 126, Parisinus suppl. gr. 255, Palatinus gr. 252 (tenth century, annotated and corrected by John Tzetzes in the twelfth), two in Munich (Monacensis gr. 430 and gr. 228) and one in the British Library.14

Translations and print. Lorenzo Valla made the first European translation, into Latin, between 1448 and 1452.16 The first Greek edition was printed by Aldus Manutius in 1502.1716 Thomas Hobbes was the first to translate Thucydides into English directly from Greek.16

Continuations. Xenophon wrote his Hellenica as a continuation, beginning where Thucydides stops.1413

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

An ending that stops. Book 8 breaks off mid-story, and Hornblower's commentary argues about which passages there really show incompleteness, and which only show Thucydides changing his narrative art.1415

Old spellings. Thucydides writes ξυν- where later Attic has συν-, which LSJ records as the old Attic form.2 That is one reason his Greek looks different from fourth-century prose.

Books to read it in

  • H. S. Jones and J. E. Powell, Thucydidis Historiae, 2 vols (Oxford Classical Texts, 1942).18 The Greek in the reader is Jones's Oxford text, in Perseus's copy (its file gives the dates 1910 and 1942).19
  • Richard Crawley's translation (1914 edition) and Thomas Hobbes's (the 1843 reprint of his English Works).19 The English translations in the reader, beside French, German, Italian and Latin versions.
  • G. B. Alberti, Thucydidis Historiae, 3 vols (Rome, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1972–2000).20
  • S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, 3 vols (Oxford University Press, 1991–2008).1521 The commentary to read beside the text.

Where this comes from

Sources (21)
  1. Thucydides 1.1, in the reader
  2. Liddell–Scott–Jones, Greek–English Lexicon: the entry σύν, “old Att. ξύν” (Perseus Digital Library)
  3. Thucydides 2.47–48 (the plague), in the reader
  4. Thucydides 4.104, in the reader
  5. Thucydides 4.116.3, in the reader (the winter of Amphipolis ends the war's eighth year)
  6. Thucydides 4.105.1, in the reader
  7. Thucydides 4.106, in the reader
  8. Thucydides 5.26, in the reader
  9. Thucydides 1.22.1, in the reader
  10. Thucydides 1.23.6, in the reader
  11. Thucydides 1.22.4, in the reader
  12. Thucydides 8.109, in the reader
  13. Xenophon, Hellenica 1.1.1, in the reader
  14. Wikipedia, History of the Peloponnesian War (where the text stops; the manuscripts; Oxyrhynchus)
  15. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.01.24 on Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 3 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  16. Wikipedia, Thucydides (his birth and family, Valla, Hobbes, the eight books)
  17. Wikipedia, Editio princeps (Thucydides, Aldus Manutius, Venice, 1502)
  18. Oxford University Press, Thucydides, Historiae (Jones and Powell, Oxford Classical Texts)
  19. Perseus's copies of Thucydides shown in the reader; each file's header names its edition (Jones's Oxford text; Crawley, Dent 1914; Hobbes, 1843)
  20. G. B. Alberti, Thucydidis Historiae: volumes and years (The Great Thinkers)
  21. Oxford University Press, Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides

We checked every statement above against these sources on 30 September 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to Thucydides's Greek.

The Melian DialogueIn the summer of 416 BC an Athenian fleet of thirty-eight ships anchored off Melos, a small island that wanted no part in the war between Athens and Sparta.OstracismOnce a year the citizens of Athens could decide to hold a strange election.The silver of LaurionThe fleet that beat the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC was paid for with silver dug out of the hills of southern Attica.The Plague of AthensIn the summer of 430 BC, with the Spartan army burning the fields of Attica and the whole population crowded inside the city walls, a disease broke out in the port of Piraeus.
All 18 entries
The Mytilene debateIn 427 BC the Athenian Assembly voted, in anger, to put to death every grown man of Mytilene and enslave the women and children.The helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.The KerameikosJust outside the city wall of Athens, where the Sacred Way left for Eleusis and the road ran out to Plato's Academy, lay the Kerameikos: the quarter of the potters, and for more than a thousand years the city's great cemetery.PericlesFor about thirty years in the middle of the fifth century BC, the most powerful man in Athens held only an office the Assembly filled by vote every year: general.Going to school in AthensThere were no state schools in classical Athens.The Olympic GamesEvery four years for more than a thousand years, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean travelled to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia to watch naked men run, wrestle, box and race chariots.The Eleusinian MysteriesEvery autumn for about a thousand years, crowds walked the fourteen miles from Athens to Eleusis to be initiated into the Mysteries of Demeter and her daughter Persephone.Mycenae, rich in goldHomer called Mycenae "rich in gold".Reading the layersIn the winter of 426 BC the Athenians dug up every grave on the sacred island of Delos and carried the bones across the strait.Knossos and the labyrinthHomer knew Knossos as "a great city" where Minos was king, and later Greeks told of the labyrinth that Daedalus built there for the Minotaur.Love, sex and marriageA Greek marriage was a deal between two households, made so that a man would have legitimate children to inherit his house.The householdA Greek oikos was more than a house.SlaveryGreek cities had slaves, and classical Athens, the city that invented democracy, had a great many.Women's livesAlmost everything we read about Greek women was written by men.

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