Thucydides: The History of the Peloponnesian WarĤ. This three-volume edition presents exactly such primary sources of classical antiquity historians.ġ. Some of the more notable ancient writers include Herodotus, Thucydides, Arrian, Plutarch, Polybius, Livy, Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus. Primary sources are those sources closest to the origin of the information or idea under study. Historians have two major ways of understanding the ancient world: archaeology and the study of source texts. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Thucydides is in four volumes.Most of what is known of the ancient world comes from the accounts of antiquity's own historians.Īncient history is the aggregate of past events from the beginning of writing and recorded human history and extending as far as post-classical history. Yet in brilliance of description and depth of insight this history has no superior. So his work was left unfinished and as a whole unrevised.

His story of the final conflict of 413–404 breaks off (in the middle of a sentence) when dealing with the year 411. His history of the first conflict, 431–421, was nearly complete Thucydides was still at work on this when the war spread to Sicily and into a conflict (415–413) likewise complete in his awful and brilliant record, though not fitted into the whole.

The war was really three conflicts with one uncertain peace after the first and Thucydides had not unified them into one account when death came sometime before 396. He had been composing his famous history, with its hopes and horrors, triumphs and disasters, in full detail from first-hand knowledge of his own and others.

He then lived probably on his property in Thrace, but was able to observe both sides in certain campaigns of the war, and returned to Athens after her defeat in 404. He tells about this, not in volumes of self-justification, but in one sentence of his history of the war-that it befell him to be an exile for twenty years. Later, as general in 423 he failed to save Amphipolis from the enemy and was disgraced. In 430, the second year of the Peloponnesian War, he caught and survived the horrible plague which he described so graphically. He saw the rise of Athens to greatness under the inspired leadership of Pericles.

Thucydides of Athens, one of the greatest of historians, was born about 471 BCE. The digital Loeb Classical Library extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

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