As we have come to expect from the VSI series, this book packs a huge amount into its 125 pages: R. sketches both the intellectual and the geopolitical contexts of Thucydides’ life, concisely summarises the events of the war he described, discusses key themes in his work, including the use of speeches, the influence of epic and tragedy and his understanding of the dynamics of events, and provides an overview of its reception from antiquity to the present. She devotes little attention to the problem of translating and interpreting Thucydides’ notoriously difficult language – somewhat surprising, from an author who collaborated on a new English edition (Blanco & Roberts, 1998) and who provides her own translations here – but otherwise touches at least briefly on more or less every topic one might look for. The organisation of the material sometimes puzzled me, almost as if a kaleidoscope of individual paragraphs is intended to contrast with Thucydides’ rigid chronological framework; but since the book is short and engaging enough to read in one or two sittings, the fragmentation of the discussion is less of an issue.

R. notes (p. 54) how Thucydides presents his material in a manner intended to convey to readers that there is no uncertainty regarding questions of fact. She in contrast does not eschew phrases like ‘I imagine’ and ‘I believe’; she speculates about what Thucydides might have done with himself had the Peloponnesian War not come along, sides with the view that the work is ‘intensely personal’ rather than ‘severely impersonal’, and suggests that, while she would never label Thucydides an optimist, she wonders if his pessimism has been exaggerated. This gives a good sense of the sorts of questions and debates that most interest her; this account is most thought-provoking in its characterisation of Thucydides’ work as a totality, identifying recurring themes such as the role of the tragic and considering the links between his life (such as we know of it) and his literary efforts. Other points, however, are presented in a more Thucydidean manner, with little hint of the controversies and competing interpretations that lie behind them.

R. is interested in what Thucydides is, not for the most part in what has been said about his work. She takes it for granted that he wrote ‘history’ (‘revisionist history’, indeed), barely noting that this generic label is retrospective and anachronistic. Thucydides’ account of the war was, she asserts, shaped to convey what it had to teach us about his main interest, human nature – where one might just as plausibly argue that ‘human nature’ is for him the thing that helps explain events, rather than the thing to be explained, not least because his account of the human thing (as R. indeed notes) is really quite impoverished, focused not just on men alone but on a limited part of their lives. And she unhesitatingly labels Thucydides a political scientist as well, ‘the patron saint of political realism’ (p. 94), without any acknowledgement of how far this contentious reading is usually presented as an outright contrast to the idea of him as a historian, emphasising the search for normative principles over the establishment of facts. One gets little sense that the question of what kind of text Thucydides wrote and how it relates to what we now think of as ‘history’, central to interpreting his ideas for at least the last 250 years, remains a live issue.

I am clearly not an ideal reviewer for this book, not just because it is intended for general readers rather than academic specialists, but also because I have strong views about what sort of introduction is really needed for those new to Thucydides: one that opens up the problems of understanding his work rather than closes these down. Nothing R. presents is inaccurate, but some of it could be considered misleading, insofar as it ignores the existence of many critical debates and uncertainties. This may be too much to demand from a Very Short Introduction, but the book does not do enough to discourage the tendency for people to accept the first story they hear from an authoritative-sounding source, rather than enquiring critically into the past.