Bought this book in Newport at the end of our epic summer 2023 PCS. Started reading it to get ahead for the school year. Incredible historical research undertaking by Strassler to make it understandable and less dense to read. I read the entirety of the first four books, but due to time constraints only read key speeches and the paragraph summaries for books 5-8.

From the S&W Syllabus: Thucydides covers all nine Strategy and War course themes in his account of this war, compelling his readers to think through the interrelationship of policy, strategy, and operations and the integration and application of naval power.

If read for its rhetorical content, as "propaganda" of a sort, then this otherwise dry piece of intellectual history becomes a fascinating work focused on creating cultural meanings. ( )

If you ever wanted to tackle Thucydides, this is the way to do it. It's beautifully laid out, with helpful maps and other material. The reading experience is profoundly moving, not really for the style but for the sheer weight of human folly on display. This should be required reading for politicians of all stripes. ( )

This bad-boy took me literally years, off-and-on, to finish, a true exercise in patience. The annotations, especially the summaries in the margins were extremely valuable, as were the interesting glossary chapters. If you're going to read Thucydides, read this wonderful edition. Only Strassler could make this palatable.

What an amazing civil war! Imagine a 3-decade long war with NYC against Boston. Yonkers, Queens, Newark, Hartford, Lawrence, and Lowell side with Boston. Cambridge, Providence, Worcester, New Haven Albany, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Cincinnati side with New York. A full-out civil war, with cruelty, deceit, bullying, scheming and conniving at every turn. What a slog. I'm very happy that I finished it. ( )

I'm rating this at 5***** primarily for the quality of this "Landmark" edition edited by Robert B. Strassler. Personally, I find most of Thucydides a very tedious read because of the "chronicle" style in which he writes, which follows the history of the Peloponnesian War in strict chronological order and fails to give a good presentation of the overall strategy of individual land and naval campaigns. (Book VI, the history of the Sicilian Campaign, is an exception, probably because not much else occurred in other combat theaters during that period so that the Sicilian events proceed largely uninterruptedly.) My own particular interest was the "treason of Alcibiades," considering his involvement with Socrates and his presence in Plato's dialogues.

What makes it possible to get through this lengthy history is the high quality of annotations and the numerous maps included in this edition (which seems typical of "Landmark" editions). If you read straight through, you'll find much of the footnoting repetitive, as are the numerous maps, but the editor's goal is to protect the reader from the need to flip back and forth to a "maps section" by providing a new map, however repetitive, within a couple of pages of the referring text. Also, the repetitiveness of the annotations (I don't know how many times the terms "hoplite" and "pelast" are footnote-defined) makes the text readable for someone who is not going through sequentially from start to finish, which makes this a useful edition for classroom use. The excellent maps are particularly helpful in a text that concentrates so much on military history, both land and naval warfare.

This "Landmark" edition also includes eleven appendices on such subjects as Athenian and Spartan society, military and naval warfare, religion, coinage, and other topics.

I'm not at all urging the reading of Thucydides, but if you're going to read him, use this "Landmark" edition (ISBN 978-0684827902). ( )