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Hello. 50 or so years after Herodotus wrote the work that made him famous as both the

father of history and the father of lies. Another man in ancient Greece, a disgraced

Athenian general, picked up where Herodotus had left off, writing an account of the still-in-progress

war from his position in exile. His account of the war that was then raging between the

city-states of Athens and Sparta has been cited for the past 2,500 years as another form

of history, a more scientific form, rooted more in sources than first-hand accounts, and

more concerned with the political circumstances of the war and less inclined to report legends

and tall tales. That author's name, of course, was Thucydides, and his history of the Peloponnesian

war has been admired, praised, and emulated by historians for millennia. Thomas Hobbes

was a champion and translator. Friedrich Nietzsche praised Thucydides' courage in the face

of reality, and during the Cold War political scientists and philosophers of all stripes

absorbed and debated the lessons and approach of Thucydides as they searched for parallels

between Athens and Sparta on the one hand and the Cold War superpowers who were engaged

in a geopolitical grapple on the other. But who was Thucydides? What history writing

techniques did he employ, and what is the reading experience like for a general reader

today? We'll have the story of Thucydides today on The History of Literature.

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