R.'s Thucydides, published by Bloomsbury Academic as part of the Ancients in Action series, introduces the general reader to the historian, but will also serve a more specialised audience, offering a brief but wide-ranging introduction to important issues and trends in Thucydidean scholarship and historiography generally. The book will prove especially useful for disabusing students of the idea that a historian simply writes down ‘what happened’ rather than exerting an interpretative influence in the selection and presentation of events. Few Greek terms are used, and those that are have been transliterated and translated, making the book broadly accessible. There are four main chapters: ‘The World of Thucydides’, ‘Thucydides the Historian’, ‘Thucydides the Thinker’ and ‘After Thucydides’. A final section of further reading points the reader to important bibliography.
R. begins with a summary of Greek history, literature and philosophy prior to the Peloponnesian War, contextualising Thucydides in the various traditions that influenced the development of historiography.
The second chapter is especially useful for a reader beginning to consider the practice of historiography, with some particularly valuable subsections. In ‘Sources of Information’ R. addresses Thucydides’ methodology, including his use of oral and written sources and his general unwillingness to offer alternative accounts, in contrast to Herodotus. ‘Selection and Presentation’ demonstrates that Thucydides’ definition of accuracy differs from the literal veracity often expected of modern historians, for example in the presentation of speeches that may not be verbatim and the attribution of motives as factual even when they could not have been known. ‘Omission and Inclusion’ explores Thucydides’ choice of explanatory material as well as some of his more puzzling decisions to omit evidence that modern scholars might consider crucial. R. also offers a narratologically-influenced analysis of Thucydides’ explicit omissions (e.g. his refusal to record the number of the Ambraciot dead at 3.113.6 on the ground that it would not be believed, p. 29; pp. 45–7 offer further discussion of narratology and Thucydides).
In ‘Thucydides the Thinker’ R. offers some of his own views on the historian's treatment of the Athenian Empire, the exercise of power, and religion, among other issues. Here he encourages the reader to see Thucydides as a product of his own time rather than as the ‘supremely rational and dispassionate seeker after truth’ seen by many earlier scholars (p. 52).
The final chapter considers reactions to Thucydides from ancient to modern times. The treatment of modern reception deals largely with scholarly responses, although R. also considers the use of the work at broader cultural moments in ‘Beyond Classics’ (pp. 84–5). While valuable, greater consideration of Thucydides’ influence outside of Britain might have enriched this discussion.
R. thus effectively introduces many of the ‘big picture’ issues in historiography, while delivering a succinct and accessible digest of the state of Thucydidean studies in particular. Readers seeking to orient themselves for the first time to scholarship on the historian will be particularly well served, but even specialists will find much of interest here.
