Content area
Full text
Perez Zagorin, Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader, Princeton U. P., 2005; pb 2009; xiii + 190 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13880-0; $17.95.
There is a story (hopefully, apocryphal) of an Oxford Professor of Classics who once admitted his secret sense of relief that most of Livy's books on the 770-year history of Rome had been lost: "Imagine," he said, "all the extra reading, if we had the whole work!"
Of course, for a different reason, Thucydides' epic History is also incomplete - a fact perhaps secretly celebrated by generations of time-poor students of ancient history. Considerations of expethency, we may assume, often assuaged whatever pangs of regret they may have felt over the author's untimely death, which has robbed us of his projected rendition of the last seven years of the Peloponnesian War. Nevertheless, his surviving work is still a formidably challenging read for many, and it is for this reason that Perez Zagorin' s new book offers not only an elegantly written précis and critique of the History, but also a strong inducement for his readers to move on to the original. Thucydides would have approved, I think. After all, he did have an eye for his work's present and future currency: "My history," he famously wrote, "is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which is heard and forgotten." (PW 1.22)
As a veteran of far too many Peloponnesian War classroom campaigns, going back to "the good old days" when Thucydides' work was a set text for 3 Unit Ancient History in NSW schools, I heartily wish this Introduction for the Common Reader had been available then. I could not swear that I had ever read Thucydides from cover to cover, but reading Zagorin (Z) made me feel as if I had. It was all there - a lucid, loving, reverential account of this magisterial work, with judicious selection of and focus upon all the best bits - which swam back into my ken out of...