Work
History of the Peloponnesian War
Ἱστορίαι
By Thucydides.
- Kind of writing
- History
- Dialect
- Attic
- Written
- 5th c. BC
- Length
- 168,407 words analysed
- Vocabulary
- 74% common words
- In the library
- 1 Greek text, 4 English translations
The texts
Each is the collection's own file, read unchanged from the Perseus Digital Library or Open Greek and Latin. The description is theirs too.
- Greek textThucydides. Historiae, Vol 1-2. Jones, Henry Stuart, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910. (1942 printing).
- English translationThucydides, Vol. 1-4. Smith, Charles Foster, translator. London and Cambridge, MA: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1919-1923.
- English translationThucydides. The history of the Peloponnesian War, Volume 1-2. Dale, Henry, translator. London: Heinemann and Henry G. Bohn, 1851-1852.
- English translationThucydides. The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Hobbes, Thomas. translator. London: John Bohn, 1843.
- English translationThucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Crawley, Richard, translator. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1914.
- English translationThucydides. Histoire de la Guerre du Péloponnése. Bétant, Élie-Ami, translator. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette, 1863.
- English translationThucydides. Histoire de la Guerre du Péloponnése, Vol. 1-2. Zévort, Marie Charles, translator. Paris: Charpentier, 1852.
- English translationThucydides. Vier Staatsreden aus Thucydides. Gürsching, Heinrich, translator. Augsburg: Wirth, 1856.
- English translationThucydides. Geschichte des Peloponnesischen Kriegs. Wahrmund, Adolf, translator. Stuttgart: Krais and Hoffmann, 1864.
- English translationThucydides. Geschichte des Peloponnesischen Kriegs. Braun, Theodor, translator. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1917.
- English translationThucydides. Die Rede des Perikles für die Gefallenen. Binding, Rudolf G., translator. Mainz-Kastel: Hanns Marxen, 1937.
- English translationThucydides. Della storia di Tucidide volgarizzata libri otto. Anonymous translator. Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1835.
- English translationHistoria Belli Peloponnesiaci. Haase, Friedrich, translator. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1869.
In The Painted Stoa
Entries that quote or point to this work's Greek.
416 BC: an island asks for justice, and an empire answersThe 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.Voting a man out of Athens for ten years, on a broken potOstracismOnce a year the citizens of Athens could decide to hold a strange election.The mines that paid for Athens' fleet, and the slaves who worked themThe 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.430 BC: a city under siege meets a disease no one could nameThe 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.427 BC: the Assembly votes to kill a city, then changes its mindThe 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 people who fed Sparta, and how Sparta kept them downThe helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.The potters' quarter and cemetery of Athens, dug for over 150 yearsThe 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.The aristocrat who led the Athenian democracy for a generationPericlesFor 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.Three teachers, a slave to walk you there, and Homer by heartGoing to school in AthensThere were no state schools in classical Athens.A crown of wild olive, a truce, and statues paid for by cheatsThe 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 secret kept by thousands for a thousand yearsThe 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.Homer's city of Agamemnon, and the graves Schliemann opened in 1876Mycenae, rich in goldHomer called Mycenae "rich in gold".How archaeologists turn soil, graves and broken pots into dates, from Thucydides to tree ringsReading 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.Minos' city in legend, and the palace Arthur Evans dug up and rebuilt in concreteKnossos 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.