Customer Reviews

A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume III: Books 5.25-8.109

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This is not a book that one takes along for some light holiday reading. Firstly because the weight would seriously affect your baggage allowance, and secondly because the price would seriously affect your available spending money.

However, if you want to study Thucydides in any great depth, then unless you know your way around an app.crit. or have the equally good, but now somewhat dated commentary by Dover, this book is not only valuable, but indispensable.

It's heavy going, even if you are familiar with ancient Greek, but it makes clear not just what Thucydides was getting at, but how he achieved the effects he does. In short this commentary covers the book not just as history but also as literature.

Perhaps the only shortfall I discovered is that Hornblower seems surprised that certain characters are re-introduced in full in the books dealing with the Athenian expedition to Sicily. He takes this as a literary device, whereas I'd assume that because books were rare and expensive in ancient Greece, Thucydides had simply taken into account that the story of the expedition is a self-contained narrative which might have been reproduced separately from the rest of the text.