The Landmark Thucydides

Customer Reviews

• I can't believe I read the whole thing.

  Ladies and gentlemen, think twice before you begin to battle with Thucydides. It is not for the faint of heart. It was truly a Herculean labor to get through this. I rank it in my top five most boring books of all time, and that's saying a lot. I've read all of Herodotus and Tacitus. I've read every Greek and Roman tragedy. I've read Mommsen's complete history of Rome, and every word of Gibbon. Heck, I've even read every life in Plutarch. Never have I encountered such a challenge. I know this is supposed to be such a classic, and I can see why, but by great Poseidon's trident it is almost impossible to read! Every paragraph you'll be referring back to the maps to find the 8 towns mentioned, and tearing your hair out at the fact that you'll have to wait 50 more pages before Thucydides returns to the story he was just telling about some triremes off the coast of Sicily. Will they or will they not set up a trophy?
  
  That being said, this edition is good. The maps are useful, if distracting, and the summaries on the side are a godsend.
  
  If you get laid off from your job, maybe give it a go - but you have been warned!
  
  

• Comprehensive and thorough

  An extremely comprehensive and thorough treatment of Thucydides. It helps to read all the battle descriptions with some maps on the sides. The translation is strong and the added articles makes this a very worthy buy for any classicist. I highly recommend using it for any class on Thucydides.

• Superior Annotated Edition of the Great Classic

  In this review, I will not seek to add to the already excellent and comprehensive discussion of this book's many merits outlined in the five-star and four star reviews.
  
  What I can say is that I have been using this book as a teaching aid in my ancient history class. While it is far too complex a work to assign even in excerpts to grades 9-11 unless the students are exceptional, older classics students and college students will find this annotated version of Thucydides' seminal work a literal godsend. It is rich not only in the most up-to-date translations, but generous with explanatory maps and editorial commentary that explains what the old master historian is talking about and, most importantly, "why" he is talking about it. The result is an accessible Thucydides that becomes not only user friendly to the amateur reader of classic Greek literature, but also the master student and educator. It has been a welcome addition to my library as a reference tool, and I had forgotten how interesting the "grand old man" was, even when the scholarship of thousands of years has sometime proven him wrong or modified his perceptions, something I think he would have both loved and applauded.
  
  This excellent book is worth the money. But, I note that while I have not had the binding issues that others have had, I can easily see how the glue binding could come apart. So, "tenting" and exposing the binding to heat are probably very bad ideas.
  
  A worthy effort that produced a very worthy book.
  
  Recommended without reservation.

• The Children's Fall-Apart Thucydides

  The biggest problem with this book is that it falls apart. I am reading it for a class, having read other editions (2) before, and I was afraid to return it to the library in the condition it was in after I read one chapter, until I went to class and found that EVERYBODY's books were falling apart! Most had purchased from Amazon or third party Amazon, but weren't willing to go through what it takes to get a credit.
  Secondly, in the introduction, the authors claim that the reason Thucydides didn't complete the work is that he died. This is highly controversial at best. My own fanciful hypothesis, based on another edition (Great Books), which states that he seems to have lived long after the work ends, is that he had changed his viewpoint, and could no longer write a unified work.
  The third problem is the "cliff-notes" in the margins of the book. This is not really reading Thucydides! I am doing my best to
  disregard them. Neither these, nor the numerous footnotes are included in the Amazon excerpt. This is misleading.
  The 2 page glossary is good, and the maps are fine but ill placed; I would like one big colored fold-out map at the end, or a few at most. Many of the footnotes, the numbering of which is confusing at first and unexplained,refer either to the maps or glossary.They are distracting from getting the gist of Thucydides, which lies in his excellence as a rhetorician, and his presentation of classical Greek political philosophy and reality.
  All these interruptions remind me of the textbooks of public schools, which I also find a detriment to education.It takes me about four times as long to read this edition as any other, because of the distracting material .Maps are available on the internet if one needs them.
  Now the actual translation is extremely readable as one can see from the excerpt shown by Amazon, and it and the appendices
  are well worth saving. Please first put the book into a readable condition ( I am saving mine for class only, as I don't want it to fall apart anymore, so that I will have to pay the library). Next remove the cliffnotes! Allow the reader to interpret this wonderful author!
  We are grownups! Third, put all the maps in the back, and allow the reader to use them at leisure. Take out the distracting and
  unenlightening footnotes. And finally, allow that the reason the work ends before the War ends is a great mystery.
  The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War
  Cynthia C. Kegel, Ph.D.
  
  

• The perfect replacement for your old Modern Library edition of Thucydides

  I wish I'd had this fat volume back in the 1960s, when I was first making my way through Thucydides in my Introduction to Greek and Roman class. We used the Jowett translation -- admittedly a classic, but painfully slow going. I had read the first several chapters of this book before I thought to check what translation it used, and I was surprised to discover it was Richard Crawley's work of 1874. It certainly reads much more modern than that. There are explanatory footnotes crowding the bottom of every page, providing context for the history and the language. It can break up the flow of the story if you allow yourself to keep glancing back and forth between the text and the notes, but I'd rather have them on the relevant page than gathered all together in the back. The eleven appendices provide in-depth discussions of the Athenian and Spartan social and political systems, the role of religion in the 5th century BC, naval warfare, calendars, currency, and so on. I really have only one small complaint, which is the general uselessness of the many small, black-and-white situational maps scattered throughout. They're often repetitive -- it was a pretty concentrated theater through most of the war -- and each one comes with a "helper" map, to remind you exactly where Greece is. And many of the footnotes refer to locations on the maps, an inch or two away, which is unnecessary. I would have been happier with a single, large, color map with all the details and ancient place-names in one place. But it's an excellent book nevertheless.