Zagorin thucydides biography

  • This book is a concise, readable introduction to the Greek author Thucydides, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost historians of all time.
  • History has been shaped by his lifelong engagement with the classical historian, Zagorin,.
  • Perez Zagorin (hereafter Z.), emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, has written distinguished books in the field of early modern Britain.

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    Thucydides was an Athenian general, “the father of political history,” and a gifted analyst of power, chance, and necessity in international affairs. The History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the war between Sparta and Athens (435–411 BCE) and is meant as “a possession for all times.”

    Very little is known about his life but for what he himself has conveyed through his own work. We learn from The Peloponnesian War that Thucydides was a general who saw combat in the war (4.104.4; 4.105.1), that he contracted the plague that struck Athens between 430 and 427 and would take the life of Pericles (2.48.3; 3.87.3), and that he was eventually exiled by the democracy for his failure to save the city of Amphipolis from the Spartans (5.26.5).

    About his background, he informs us:

    “The general who had come from Athens to defend the place, sent to the other commander in Thrace, Thucydides son of Olorus, the author of this history, who was at the isle of Thasos, a Parian colony, half a

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    Perez Zagorin (hereafter Z.), emeritus professor of history at the University of Rochester, has written distinguished books in the field of early modern Britain and Europe.1 His long avocational interest in ancient history has borne fruit in a masterfully crisp and balanced general introduction to the best of classical historians.

    The “common reader” of Z.’s title fryst vatten now, sadly, a fond figment of the bookish imagination. Even those few who commonly read do not commonly read Thucydides. Still one knows what he means. This book will in fact be most useful to an audience of undergraduates and other “intellectually curious people,” to whom its enthusiastic tone fryst vatten well suited: “[Thucydides’] book . . . fryst vatten one of the supreme classic works of Greek and Western civilization that continues to speak to us across the vast gulf of the past” (p. 1).

    In his “Introduction” (1-6), Z. describes the iconic status of Thucydides as a hi

  • zagorin thucydides biography

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    Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader

    "Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader offers an engrossing intellectual appreciation of the most important and most difficult historian in the western cultural tradition. . . . Perez Zagorin . . . brings formidable personal intelligence to major questions in Thucydidian scholarship, and his book goes well beyond the typical synthetic handbook. . . . There is nothing else like it."—Tom Palaima, Times Higher Education Supplement

    "Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader is a useful book.... Thucydides' ... depth and breadth remain an extraordinary reminder of how little political distance we have traveled since his time."—Peter Stothard, The Wall Street Journal

    "[E]specially useful as a textbook for undergraduate courses as well as for general readers curious about an ancient historian whose name has a prime place in any history of history, as well as in the study of the matu