Customer Reviews

Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation (Oxford Classical Monographs)

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Tim Rood's book has become a must read for students of Thucydides, a rare accomplishment for an author so widely written about. Rood, building upon the foundations of W.R. Connor's 1984 THUCYDIDES and the work of Simon Hornblower, which are both scrupulously noted, applies the theoretical approach of narratology to Thucydides' history. In short, narratology, when applied to historical works, argues that we read the text not as an objective representation of past reality but as a rhetorical product. To this end, Rood and the narratologists suggest applying tools culled from the workshop of literary criticism to help explicate the text, e.g. focalization, temporal anachrony, etc.

This is an obviously salutary approach, judging by the results. Many passages that have long frustrated critics have been addressed from fresh angles and the history as a whole has been given a new explanation. The theoretical approach will frustrate those who are used to more conventional approaches and the insistence on the non-objective status of historical texts is always a kind of heresy to some. But for those willing to accept (or overlook) these matters, there is much to admire in Rood's incisive and careful analyses.

As a relative new-comer to the delights of Thucydides I was at first a little in awe of the author's obvious scholarship. The book was rigorous and well-ordered, as I had expected, having heard much of Timothy Rood's abilities while at University. In particular, the areas of the book where Mr Rood moved from the specific to the general were a delight, and I hope that he should see fit to expand his horizons a little were he to author another work in this field. Chapter 5 of the book, where he animadverts to the inevitable tension between the narrative and dialogic elements of the "History", is particularly luminous. Areas that could have been explicated better include the bizarre episode involving the bathing of soldiers' feet in hot water, referred to in Chapter 7, something that has mystified Thucydides scholars for years, and the barely comprehensible references to drunkenness that pepper later parts of the "History". Aside from those few omissions and a litter of singular infelicities of expression in the last two chapters, the work is a numinous one, indispensable for all advanced students wishing to immerse themselves, to quote Gustave Sephier, in "the clamorous and vociferating uproar of Thucydidean narrative".