Product Description

Recounts the ancient war between Athens and Sparta in the translation by the seventeenth century British philosopher.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #918167 in Books
• Published on: 1989-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 668 pages

Customer Reviews

The best rendition of Thucydides into English yet!
Steven Lattimore is a master translator of a difficult author. Thucydides invented Athenian intellectual prose; his work was meant not merely to be recited but read and studied; hence he avoids the overly simplistic antitheses that are the hallmarks of forensic prose. He deliberately avoids the easy Ionic style characteristic of Herodotos whose prose is made easy by frequent repetition of etymoligically similar words. Thucydides, furthermore, invented argumentation in prose language (so far as we know). Hippocrates may give conditions, symptoms, causes and cures; Thucydides makes generalizing propositions and argues for their truth value. He often uses sentences extending into what are in English whole paragraphs. All this makes his writing difficult to read and interpret and doubly difficult to translate. This translation overcomes the difficulties and yet leaves the reader the impression from the original that he is dealing with something well worth his effort. The many ponderous speeches that pepper the original are rendered in a refreshingly original manner. Lattimore has brought off a tour de force with this magnificent effort.

The best translation of Thucydides yet.
The Hobbes translation and David Grene's intelligent and relevent notes make this the best version of Thucydides I have yet read. While I am not a scholar in this area, I feel that this is probably the grandest history ever written and that the Hobbes translation does it justice. It has been said that at best a translator is not merely changing the work from language to language but giving it a new life. Hobbes succeeded briliantly in this, and I feel that through Mr. Grene's notes, the translation is as near to the original as one can get.