Since antiquity, Thucydides has been recognised as a complex, multilayered and idiosyncratic author; a model for some (though with little consensus about which aspects or qualities are worthy of imitation) and a problematic figure for others. His apparently limited subject matter, war and politics, becomes on closer scrutiny diverse and many-stranded; his apparently straightforward year-by-year narrative of events is revealed as cunningly crafted, permeated with a guiding intelligence and hidden agenda; he offers no explicit lessons, but countless readers have been convinced of the existence of insights and principles ready to be extracted. Over the last century, it has become ever clearer that the protean or indeterminate nature of the text has given rise to contradictory interpretations and often incompatible traditions of understanding. No individual monograph can hope to encompass such variety; a single author can only ever offer a partial, subjective reading that nevertheless claims to capture the true essence of Thucydides (even if, as in G. Hawthorn's 2014 Thucydides on Politics, it is a reading that insists on the absence of any unified or unifying theme in the work). There is a strong case that the most useful, if not always the most inspiring, books on Thucydides in recent years have been the multi-author collections that offer a variety of different, even contrasting perspectives: A. Rengakos & A. Tsakmakis’s Brill's Companion (2006) and, in a very different style, the collection of old and new articles put together by J. Rusten for the Oxford Readings in Classical Studies series (2009).
This substantial volume – 770 pages, 40 chapters – does not render those two volumes wholly redundant, but it will certainly become the first choice for anyone wishing to develop their knowledge and understanding of different aspects of Thucydides’ work. It offers a superb line-up of contributors, drawn not only from different fields of classical studies and ancient history but also from political theory (one of the other disciplines in which Thucydides plays a significant role), from renowned elder statesmen of the subject like W.R. Connor, C. Orwin, H. Rawlings and J. Rusten to the leading figures in recent debates (too many to list, but almost everyone you might expect is here), and exciting younger scholars like S.N. Jaffe and T. Joho. The chapters are divided between four roughly equal sections: the first, ‘Thucydides as Historian’, offers one chapter on his method from S. Forsdyke and then focuses on his accounts of major historical developments – early Greek history, the Pentekontaetia, the Athenian empire, the causes of the war, the Sicilian Expedition and the like – and their relation to what else we know about the events described. Section 2, on ‘Thucydidean Historiography’, is more philological, considering issues of composition, narrative, characterisation, authorial comments and the use of speeches; Section 3, on ‘Thucydides and Political Theory’, discusses a wide range of cross-cutting themes and topics within the work, such as religion and piety, political passions, international law and anarchy, human nature, and necessity, with a recurring focus on the reconstruction of Thucydides’ own views. Finally, Section 4, on ‘Contexts and Ancient Reception’, considers his predecessors, contemporaries and successors in different genres, especially historiography, up to Procopius and other late-antique historians.
It is impossible, in this sort of review, to offer more than a sketchy account of the wealth of this volume's contents without invidiously singling out certain authors on the basis of my personal inclinations. My unsystematic test is that I have found something useful here, and usually something worth strongly recommending to students, for every single one of the 20 seminars I am teaching this year on Thucydides. Each chapter, in the best tradition of such handbooks, offers a succinct summary of key debates and the latest scholarship on a particular theme or topic, at the same time as developing an original and thought-provoking reading of important interpretative questions. There is no pretence at being the last word on any subject, but anyone with a broad general knowledge of Thucydides will find this the ideal starting-point for deeper investigation, while the suggestions for further reading are judicious. This is not a cheap volume, but it is an essential purchase for anyone seriously interested in Thucydides and certainly for any university library.
Where I have quibbles is not with individual chapters but with certain aspects of the way the volume as a whole has been conceived and organised; these are scarcely fatal flaws, but they seem worth discussing for what they reveal about different approaches to the study of Thucydides – and also mean that, while this book should be first on your list for a multifaceted overview, it certainly is not the only thing one needs to read. First, the division into thematic sections replicates the different traditions of interpretation and scholarship not only in subject matter, which makes a fair amount of sense, but also in authorship; that is, virtually all the authors in Section 3 identify themselves as political theorists of one sort or another (all North American), rather than any classicists or ancient historians (with the exception of V. Wohl on political passions) having the opportunity to offer a historical or philological perspective on political and social themes, while all the other chapters are provided from scholars working in classical studies, rather than offering an International Relations perspective on the causes of war (actual and alleged) or a strategic studies view of battle narratives. I am not certain if this over-values political theory by granting it a near monopoly on political questions, or over-values classical studies by granting it a monopoly on every other topic.
One of the most interesting and important debates in current Thucydidean scholarship is precisely the confrontation of the ‘social scientific’ and the ‘historicist’ Thucydides, with different disciplines having radically different ideas both about the nature of Thucydides’ work and about how it should be read and deployed. The editorial approach here effectively ducks any hint of such a conflict – and in fact the choice of political theorists also tends to sidestep the significant differences between, say, hard-line Neo-Realists and Straussians when it comes to reading Thucydides, by preferring authors who work largely in a tradition of humanistic textual exegesis. If one deliberately seeks out conflict, it is easy enough to identify different assumptions and opinions between the historians of Part 1, the classicists of Parts 2 and 4 and the political theorists of Part 3, in their views about the nature of Thucydides’ work and its relation to historical reality (past or present), but these differences are scarcely visible if you are not already familiar with the relevant debates. The decision to frame the introduction around summaries of different chapters, rather than a more evaluative or analytical discussion of the overall topic, means that the opportunity to present Thucydides and his interpretation as a problem, including in different disciplines and traditions of thought, is missed.
This distinction between sections is even marked typographically: while almost all the authors cite at least a few phrases of Thucydides’ own words, the classicists often leave these in the original Greek while the political theorists invariably transliterate. Knowledge of Greek is not assumed, but there is a risk that certain readers (especially from outside classical studies) could be deterred from engaging with those chapters. The problem is not just that readers who access Thucydides through translations – quite possibly a majority these days – are being ignored or marginalised; the whole issue of translation, absolutely vital for making sense of the author of such complex, difficult and often ambiguous Greek, is neglected. Attentive readers may be puzzled by encountering, in different chapters, different versions of the same passages – R. Crawley, S. Lattimore, J. Mynott or the author's own version – without any explanation of the choice, or of its implications, or any proper discussion of the way that translations and interpretations may become mutually dependent. There are some interesting discussions of translation issues within individual chapters, but no wider discussion of the problem, nor any attempt at linking such discussions via the index. One can easily imagine the difficulties involved in trying to get all authors to agree to use the same translation – but that is precisely why there should be more explicit discussion of the issue.
My third quibble is that, while it is excellent to see extensive discussion of the reception of Thucydides in antiquity (though still, I regret, with little attention to Lucian), the decision to omit any discussion of post-classical receptions is problematic. The justification (p. 16) that this would make an already long book unwieldy is reasonable enough, if reception is considered as a separate topic; but modern interpretations of Thucydides, in different disciplines, are so clearly shaped by the traditions of reception (Thucydides as scientific historian or historical artist, Thucydides as political philosopher or IR realist, Thucydides as Nietzschean sceptic etc.) that many of the questions discussed in these chapters make only limited sense without at least some knowledge of this background.
In brief, compared with my personal, idiosyncratic conception of the topic, this collection offers an overview of Thucydidean studies that is less complicated, controversial and polemical, less problematic and more straightforward – and at the same time sometimes oddly inconsistent, where a more direct confrontation of different perspectives, and explicit staging of the major debates, would have helped explain the existence of these inconsistencies. But this remains a magnificent achievement and an enormously useful volume, as a basis for further research and more expansive debates between different disciplines.
