Recently Re-Read
Thucydides, History of the Pelopennesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, revised by Donald Lateiner.
Being a democracy doesn't mean that people like you. After the Persian Wars, victorious Athens and some smaller cities formed the Delian League, to protect each other from the hated Mede.* But the Delian League soon came to resemble a protection racket run by Athens, so both the unfortunate League members and other cities who feared Athenian power turned to the mighty Spartans, who were too busy keeping the Helots down at home to bother anyone else. Embassies were sent to the Spartans, to convince them to strike a blow for freedom by destroying the world's first democracy...
Thucydides famously presents a cynical view of history, in which "the strong do what they can and the poor suffer what they must". Depressing, but...prove him wrong. The Sicilian Expedition was like a blueprint for Vietnam and Iraq.
The actual narrative is long and (due to the structure of the war itself) disjointed and repetitive, but the maps and footnotes in this edition help. It also ends in the middle of the war, in the middle of a sentence, due to Thucydides' death. Many ancient works continued the story from this point, but none had the same importance.
*Lousy Mede. I hate that guy. Always with the Zoroastrianism.
Being a democracy doesn't mean that people like you. After the Persian Wars, victorious Athens and some smaller cities formed the Delian League, to protect each other from the hated Mede.* But the Delian League soon came to resemble a protection racket run by Athens, so both the unfortunate League members and other cities who feared Athenian power turned to the mighty Spartans, who were too busy keeping the Helots down at home to bother anyone else. Embassies were sent to the Spartans, to convince them to strike a blow for freedom by destroying the world's first democracy...
Thucydides famously presents a cynical view of history, in which "the strong do what they can and the poor suffer what they must". Depressing, but...prove him wrong. The Sicilian Expedition was like a blueprint for Vietnam and Iraq.
The actual narrative is long and (due to the structure of the war itself) disjointed and repetitive, but the maps and footnotes in this edition help. It also ends in the middle of the war, in the middle of a sentence, due to Thucydides' death. Many ancient works continued the story from this point, but none had the same importance.
*Lousy Mede. I hate that guy. Always with the Zoroastrianism.