“My vacation, my preference, my cure for all things Platonic has always been Thucydides. Thucydides, and perhaps Machiavelli’s Principe, are most closely related to me in terms of their unconditional will not to be fooled and to see reason in reality, – not in ‘reason’, and even less in ‘morality.’
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
“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 day’s sail from Amphipolis” (1.104.4). [Read More]
Thucydides’ “History” is devoted to painstaking description of the cities engaged in the greatest and most terrible war known to him (I.I, I.23) and is meant to be “a possession for all time” (I.22.4). [Read More]
Clifford Orwin of the University of Toronto interprets Pericles’ famous “Funeral Oration” and the power and limits of political oratory.
