A Note on the Translation

This is a complete translation of Thucydides’ history of the war between Athens and Sparta, made directly from the Greek. The source is the Oxford text of H. Stuart Jones, revised by J. E. Powell (1942), in the digital transcription of the Perseus Digital Library. Richard Crawley’s public-domain translation of 1874 was consulted only where the Greek is in doubt, and none of its wording is kept.

The work is printed in its eight traditional books. Each of the 917 chapters into which later editors divided it appears here as one paragraph, opening with its chapter number, so that any passage can be found in a Greek text or another translation. Thucydides dates events by summers and winters, and closes each year with the same formula; the English keeps his system and his formula. The work breaks off in the middle of the twenty-first year of the war, and the translation ends where the Greek does.

Thucydides is compressed and severe. His narrative reports without comment, and his speeches argue in tight antitheses of word and deed, justice and advantage, fear and honor. The English aims at the same clarity and does not soften what he states flatly. Key terms are kept the same throughout: archē is “empire,” stasis “civil strife,” and the sentence of 1.23 is rendered “the truest cause.” Peoples are named as he names them: Lacedaemonians, Hellenes, and the Medes for the Persians. In the Melian dialogue the speakers are named as in the Greek.

The 96 notes are the translator’s. They give dates, identify people, places, and institutions, and mark damaged passages, and offer no commentary.