The complete Hobbes translation with notes and a new introduction by David Grene.
This powerful translation by Thomas Hobbes has long been considered the truest to the original Greek. Hobbes's eloquent and lucid style captures Thucydides' special ability to portray and enliven that has provided us with the most revealing accounts of the people and events in that long war: Pericles' funeral oration, the plague, the civil war in Corcyra, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of Mitylene, the Melian Dialogue, and above all the ruin of the Sicilian expedition. Hobbes's rendering of The Peloponnesian War is one of those rare translations that are works of art in their own right.
David Grene's notes clarify the few mistranslations of which Hobbes is guilty, the occasional difficulties of Hobbes's seventeenth-century English, and passages involving facts and circumstances not familiar to those who cannot read Greek. This edition includes Hobbes's essay "On the Life and History of Thucydides," his address to his general readers and dedicatory epistle, and a new Introduction by David Grene. Written before Hobbes's works on political philosophy, this translation sheds light on his later Leviathan and other works and, above all, displays the intensity of the relation between the Greek historian and the seventeenth-century philosopher.
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