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Thank you.

Hi, everybody. From Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for being here today.

There are very few historians in all of the human past whose work has stuck around quite like that of Thucydides.

The Athenian wrote a long, sobering, and insightful history of the war between Athens and Sparta, a war in which he himself participated.

His account of the Peloponnesian War has cast an extraordinarily long shadow over the

discipline of history, our understanding of that conflict, and even our basic grasp of how

states interact with each other. But how should we understand Thucydides? That's the fundamental

question we're going to be asking today, and to answer it, we couldn't

possibly have better guests, two of them.

Robin Waterfield is a classical scholar, translator, and editor specializing in ancient

Greek history and philosophy.

His translations of ancient Greek works are among the best ever done, and if that weren't

enough, he's also the author of numerous books, including one of my favorites, dividing the spoils, the war for Alexander the Great's empire. Polly Lowe is professor in the department of classics in ancient history at Durham University, and she's one of the world's leading experts on Thucydides. She recently edited the Cambridge Companion to Thucydides. They don't just let you do that if you don't know what you're doing. And she has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and books. Robin Waterfield and Polly Lowe, thank you so much for joining me today. Oh, well, thank you for inviting us. Thanks for having us. So what drew each of you to Thucydides? What has pulled you to him and kind of kept your attention there for a while?

Because he's a massive genius.

And I like spending my time in the company of massive geniuses.

I mean, both Polly and I will first introduce to him at school.

This is, you know, if you have a certain type of education in England, you're going to come across some of the easier bits with lucidities when you're in the sixth form at least at school. And that's certainly how I first came across him. I mean, in those days, of course, you're ploughing through the text, um, you know, but even, even then, I could see that he was somebody to be reckoned with,

and I've just waited 50 or 60 years since I first met him to do the translation.

What about you, Pauline? Yeah, so as you said, yes, I encountered him first at school,

but then actually moved away from him a bit when I was doing my doctoral work because I felt he sort of dominated things too much and I wanted to just sort of see what the world was like without Cusidides in it.

Also, I felt like I wasn't really up to the challenge of engaging with him, to be honest, but then realized that actually one has to get to grips

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