HistoryBook · -400
The Peloponnesian War
Thucydides
Thucydides covers the war between Athens and Sparta as a participant and an exile, and reconstructs the speeches on both sides. The Melian Dialogue, where Athens tells a small island that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is still quoted in international relations seminars.
Why you should read this
Thucydides breaks from Herodotus by treating war and politics through cause and human motive rather than divine intervention, and historians in the empirical tradition still point back to his insistence on eyewitness verification. Dense and analytical, closer to political science than to storytelling.
- Field
- History
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 400 BCE
- Themes
- Ancient HistoryHistory
