Thucydides

really interesting book that examines Thucydides as a historian and a writer and his role in shaping popular understanding and scholarship of Athens. This is not however, really a book that examines Thucydides' legacy as a political thinker.

Kagan's well-written account of Thucydides reaffirms why he is rightly seen as the father of history. Kagan explains how Thucydides gathered his information, how he cross-checked his facts, and how he tried to maintain objectivity, as any modern historian would.

Not as good as Kagan's superlative The Peloponnesian War book but only because of the subject matter; wars are, for most I suspect, inherently more exciting than arguing historical fact. The twist here is that Kagan does what Thucydides did to his predecessors; he argues convincingly against the ancient historian's interpretation of the Peloponnesian War, thereby "re-inventing history". Donald Kagan's writing style is both elegant and concise as one who has read The Peloponnesian War might expect. However, if you have not read that then get it, read it and then come back and get this one.

If you are reading either or both of the above courses this makes an excellent companion. It gives additional context that cannot be covered in the course collateral - beautifully written and a superb accessory to any serious student or enthusiast.

This book is a detailed review of a 5th century BC historian ( according to many the first real historian) by a distinguished 20th century historian. Kagan's views of the natative are very inciteful. A must book for any interested in this period of history.

Thucydides is an amazing historian and Kagan did a great of providing a concise account of him and the Peloponnesian war. I have read Kagan's book on the war which I thoroughly enjoyed but I have not read the book "The Landmark Thucydides" That will take some time.

Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, Donald Kagan, Penguin, 2010 (2009), 257pp This book by the current eminent historian of the Peloponnesian War is about the first great study of that war, written by the pre-eminent historian of the subject, Thucydides. Professor Kagan raises the issue of ‘hidden agendas’ is Thucydides’ work, and how Thucydides didn’t actually hide them as such, merely left certain things unsaid or un-emphasised, which modern historians, if they chose to examine them in more detail, can use to reinterpret what Thucydides appeared to be saying. The Professor is not the first to do such a thing, for I read recently a study of the campaign of King Agis of Sparta against Mantinea, published in 1933, which both Thucydides and Kagan dismiss quite briefly – whereas Professor Woodhouse dissects the campaign and Thucydides’ brief account of it in a book almost two-thirds the size of this one, and an excellent and highly recommended one it is: King Agis of Sparta and His Campaign in Arkadia in 418 B.C. . In the current book, Professor Kagan discusses several of Thucydides’ attempts to shape opinion on such aspects of the war as – Periclean Strategy – an ‘Anaconda Plan’ which when it showed no short term results, was abandoned when military victories appeared to offer a quicker solution Athenian Democracy – Thucydides did not approve of the ‘populist’ type of democracy in force, and wanted to show that it had a negative effect on the Athenians’ direction of the war Thucydides’ own part in the loss of Amphipolis That the ‘demagogue’ Cleon was a bad influence on Athenian war aims, a poor general and a personal coward, despite being a successful commander – this being the leader who had Thucydides exiled for his part in the loss of Amphipolis… The Causes and Blame for the Sicilian Expedition – Athenian demagoguery, rather than incompetent and selfish generals (who Thucydides happened to support) Professor Kagan points out that although Thucydides appears to bias his account of events to support his own theories (apart from Cleon’s alleged cowardice), he doesn’t actually lie about events, merely under emphasises certain aspects, and that counterbalancing information can be found or deduced from Thucydides’ own writing. This is an extremely interesting book, if you are interested in the Peloponnesian War and its prime historical source; though if you know little or nothing about it, you may be confused by some of the discussions, as you will not have the full background to relate them to. The Contents are – P001: Introduction P023: Thucydides the Revisionist P035: Causes of the War – Corcyra P058: Causes of the War – From Corcyra to the Megarian Decree P075: The Strategy of Pericles P098: Was Periclean Athens a Democracy? P115: Cleon’s Lucky Victory at Pylos P140: Thucydides and Cleon at Amphipolis P162: The Decision for a Sicilian Expedition P188: Who was Responsible for the Sicilian Disaster? P223: Conclusion P335: Notes P247: Index

Well-written, interesting, informative

Yesterday I received my copy and began reading eagerly. On page 4, Kagan wrote, “In 425 the latter faction [Cleon’s] was able to win a victory at Pylos that changed the course of the war. Four hundred Spartans surrendered after the battle.” After this blatantly incorrect statement about the most important event of the Archidamian War, I stopped reading. Today I read further. On page 11, Kagan clearly misrepresents Thucydides’ use of the crucially important pair of words egra and logoi. Thucydides used this contrast in different forms, but never with the meaning that Kagan assigns to logoi. On pages 13-14, Kagan quotes a sentence from Thucydides, book 3, chapter 84 and describes it as “a splendid example of Thucydides’ method.” However, every editor and commentator brackets this chapter as an un-Thucydidean interpolation. After reading that, I threw this book out.

Any discussion of Thucydides almost always begins with a juxtaposition of the Athenian with the Halicarnassian, Herodotus. Herodotus, who wrote before Thucydides, filled his history of the Persian Wars with colorful discussions of exotic cultures, far away kings, distant geography, and, most notoriously, mythology. Thucydides, on the other hand, wrote with a clear and rational hand; his history of the Peloponnesian War is prized for its sharp analysis, an analysis that was unknown up until Thucydides and extremely rare thereafter. Herodotus, we now know, wrote to entertain the listener or reader; Thucydides wrote to get to the truth. Indeed, the Athenian prefaced his History with a direct shot against Herodotus: "To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful." In his own words, then, Thucydides wrote to depict objective. Later writers would share his attitude: Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that Thucydides "reports the facts without judging them," while Nietzsche noted that the Athenian was "the grand summation, the last manifestation of that strong, stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes." Donald Kagan, the world's foremost scholar of the Peloponnesian Wars, in his career-long interest of Thucydides and the Wars, has discovered that the belief in Thucydides' complete objectivity is mistaken. We must realize, says Kagan, that Thucydides was a contemporary of the topic about which he wrote; moreover, his history of the period differs from the interpretations of his contemporaries. Thus, either his contemporaries' interpretations of events were mistaken and Thucydides' is the truth, or (as Kagan argues in this book) Thucydides wrote to argue against his contemporaries and to put forth a different interpretation of the events of the Peloponnesian Wars. The latter is quite similar to the former, and therefore Kagan's goal in "The Reinvention of History" is to show where Thucydides differs from the contemporary vision of events and also to show where his version of history is further from the truth than what he claims. Thucydides, we learn, was less than objective, and, to use a dirty word, had an "agenda". What his agenda was is somewhat mysterious, and I do not think Kagan did a good job at addressing this issue: perhaps Thucydides was sour over his loss of Amphipolis and subsequent exile; or perhaps he hated democracy. For example, many of Thucydides' contemporaries believed that the Peloponnesian War was a direct result of Pericles' militancy, while Thucydides himself believed that the growth of the Athenian empire played a huge role in a long series of inevitabilities that led to the war. Exactly why Thucydides chose to blame the war on Athens' empire remains a mystery, as Kagan does not address this. Thucydides would also say that under Pericles, Athens was not a democracy, but "in fact a government ruled by its foremost citizen," i.e. Pericles. However, a detailed examination of the workings of Athenian government at this time reveals that Pericles did not "rule" over Athens indefinitely, but was restrained by many checks and balances. Here again, says Kagan, Thucydides puts a spin on things, and the Athenian would later go on to extoll Pericles and aristocratic leadership at the expense of what he perceived to be a mobocracy that was ever too ready to change course on the slightest whim. Perhaps, then, Thucydides was a blue blooded defender of the aristocracy, who couldn't help but see Athens' defeat against Sparta as a result of the perils of democracy, but Kagan never goes this far to say so. Another warning to the prospective reader: this book is dreadfully boring, and one reviewer on this page has noted that much of the book is copied from Kagan's own history of the Peloponnesian Wars. The result---this book--- is a history of the Peloponnesian Wars with a few paragraphs about Thucydides thrown in here and there, pointing out where the Athenian's account of history differs from that of his contemporaries'. The most valuable thing to take away from this book---and it is indeed valuable---is the notion that Thucydides, while still a great historian, is not the bastion of objectivity that many today idolize him to be. He was, in Kagan's words, the first revisionist historian.

I have read and re-read Donald Kagan’s four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War and, to most who have read that outstanding work, his book on Thucydides will be disappointing. For someone who has not read either that full history of the war or its one-volume condensed version, it is a concise summary of Kagan’s view on the standing of Thucydides as a historian and a critique of his methods. However, large sections of the text are lifted straight from his earlier works with, at most, minor corrections. The Introduction and the Conclusion, apart from being repeats of earlier works and other concerns, have as much to do with Kagan’s own political views as with Thucydides. On a positive note, the nine chapters forming the body of the book set out Kagan’s view that Thucydides was a revisionist who tried to contradict views about the war held by many of his contemporaries. Although Thucydides claimed to be impartial, Kagan shows he was sometimes deliberately misleading in his presentation and that those generally-held views were more likely to be correct than Thucydides’ revisions. These include his attempting to minimise the responsibility of Pericles for starting the Peloponnesian War and proposing a strategy that had to succeed quickly or bankrupt Athens, ignoring the successes of later leaders who abandoned Pericles’ strategy or attributing them as mere chance and minimising the responsibility of Nicias, whose policies followed those of Pericles, for the disaster in Sicily. However, although Kagan provides some background information, these issues were probably better considered in the context of a narrative of the events they relate to, as they were in Kagan’s history of the war, rather than in isolation. On the other hand, the volumes of Kagan’s history of the war were published up to 40 years ago, long before the contributions of more recent researchers. The passages recycled from his earlier works are not modified on account of later interpretations, so the whole does not present a coherent and considered final opinion. The period from the late 1960s to the 2000s was also that when Kagan began to express his defence of history as a search for the truth through detailed and objective research, not just to explain events, but also to provide examples, give warnings and indicate likely developments in human affairs by reference to the past: the approach first adopted by Thucydides. Just as Kagan shows that Thucydides had an agenda, Kagan’s agenda is a plea for politics, wars and diplomacy to be studied as the central themes of history rather than just trivial and short-term compared to the society, economy and geography of the peoples and places studied. Kagan regrets that social and economic history is replacing political history as the proper object for the study of history. His history of the Peloponnesian War is an outstanding contribution to the form of historical enquiry on which he has spent his career. This cut-and-paste consideration of Thucydides is, however, hardly the best support for his advocacy of political history.

It is a revised edition in some part with the same words and figures of the book "The pelloponesian war". Practically a book focusing only some aspect of the war. Because is smaller more easy to hand!!

Ample footnotes, very readable, brilliant focus on the composition and rhetorical style of Thucydides’ epic. Follow-up with Jennifer Roberts’ more recent The Plague of War to get a high quality perspective of ancient geopolitics, strategic thinking, and social context.

This was a very helpful book to read along with Thucydides. Connor embraces the complexity of Thucydides' writing and offers an interpretation that demonstrates how the literary character of the history contributes to Thucydides' political teaching. He explicitly rejects the tendency to focus on the stages of writing or on Thucydides' flaws as a writer as solutions to seeming inconsistencies in the text. Rather, he demonstrates that these are part of a bold style of writing, through which the reader is encouraged to examine and reexamine the same fundamental issues as the work goes on in light of new events. Highly recommended for anyone undertaking a serious study of the Peloponnesian War.

Very useful interpretation of Thucydides organized by book. I reference while teaching the text to help inform lectures and discussion.

A prof recommended this to me, but frankly I think if you're reading Thucydides on a short timetable, you're better off just reading Thucydides. Thucydides isn't Clausewitz (or Mahan)...meaning, Thucydides is relatively easy to read....and the few chapters I read of this book didn't help prime me or my analysis of Thucydides, so I just went back to the original text. Of course, we blow through Thucydides at NWC, and I tried to read them at the same time. If you have lots of time (or are such a Type-A that you're looking at this book well in advance...you know who you are....) then it can't hurt to read it. Hmmmm...actually, if you have lots of time, I would read Thucydides more than once instead of this book - Thucydides is pretty darn good! I would also read Handal's Masters of War (available on Amazon) if you are looking a general, academic military strategy reference. It really helps with Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. Has Mao, too.

I had time to read just one secondary work on Thucydides to prepare for my graduate exams and I lucked out in happening upon this one. It certainly isn't a replacement for the original but an extremely helpful commentary on it, drawing out the major themes and analyzing how Thucydides' presentation of events affects our understanding and judgment of them. A basic thesis of Connor's (and one that I find persuasive) is that many seeming "anomalies" of the work which other scholars have attributed to external factors such as Thucydides' sources, in other words have seen as errors or deficiencies, in fact are choices with a literary function. Connor's style is eminently clear and readable and has a seriousness and dignity worthy of his subject.