The Peloponnesian War

This powerful translation by Thomas Hobbes has long been considered the truest to the original Greek. Hobbes's eloquent and lucid style captures Thucydides' use of language in recreating the Athens-Sparta conflict. It is 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 translations that are works of art in their own right.