Thucydides Mythistoricus

by Francis Macdonald Cornford

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Genres: History

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2014

About the author

1874-1943. Classicist

Cornford was educated at St Paul's School and was admitted to Trinity in 1893, being elected a Scholar the following year. Cornford obtained firsts in both parts of the classical tripos in 1905 and 1907; he was awarded the Chancellor's Classical Medal in the latter year. In 1897 he applied for the Chair of Greek at Cardiff, but was unsuccessful. However, in 1899 he was elected a Fellow of Trinity. He was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Classics in 1902 and Lecturer in 1904. In 1909 he married Frances Darwin, daughter of Ellen Crofts of Newnham College and the botanist Francis Darwin.

During the First World War Cornford was a musketry instructor at Grantham and rose to the rank of Captain before transferring to the Ministry of Munitions.

In 1921 and 1928 Cornford was unsuccessfully a candidate for the Regius Chair of Greek. In 1927 he was appointed Brereton Reader in Classics and four years later became the first to hold the Laurence Chair in Ancient Philosophy, a post which he held until retirement in 1939. He was elected FBA in 1937.

Early in his academic career, Cornford became disenchanted with "Cambridge classics" with its emphasis on philology, and published The Cambridge Classical Course: an essay in anticipation of further reform in 1903. He soon allied with like-minded persons such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray and A.B. Cook in a group that became known as the "Cambridge Ritualists" who looked for the underlying thoughts and myths that underpinned classical Greece. A string of publications ensued: Thucydides Mythistoricus (1907), From Religion to Philosophy: a study in the origins of Western speculation (1912), The Origins of Attic Comedy (1914), Greek Religious thought from Homer to Alexander (1923), The Laws of Motion in Ancient Thought (1931), Before and After Socrates (1931), Plato's Theory of Knowledge: the Theaetetus and Sophist of Plato (1935), Plato's Cosmology: the Timaeus of Plato (1937), Plato and Parmenides (1939). Unwritten Philosophy and Other essays was published posthumously.

Cornford was also active politically on the Cambridge scene. In 1897 he organised a student petition in favour of degrees for women and in 1904 published an anonymous flysheet on the subject of compulsory chapel. To support rationalist moves in the University he joined with C.K. Ogden in founding the Heretics. His most famous excursion into University politics was Microcosmographia Academica, first published anonymously in 1908 and reissued many times since. In it he satirises the Cambridge system and the types of administrator that it produced. During WWI, when Bertrand Russell was deprived of his College lectureship, Cornford was one of the body of Fellows that attempted to get him reinstated.

Cornford died at his home, Conduit Head on 3 January 1943.

Reviews

[Midori · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that started so well but had such a poor end. Thucydides Mythistoricus begins spectacularly with the assumption that Thucydides was a man of his times and he did not break with his cultural environment- he was very much influenced by the Aeschylian tragedy instead- and it proceeds to an eye-opening explanation of the causes of the Peloponnesian War - the expansion of the Athenian empire to the West- but in the way, it misses the point, it slows down with digressions and clarifications, irrelevant theories and contradicting conclusions that puzzle the reader. The end is unsatisfactory, brusque and abrupt.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is at once a history and a historiographical study. Cornford assumes one has read Thucydides, but reviews what we know about the Peloponnesian War so as to make his case that Thucydides was substantially influenced in his interpretation of it by certain classical literary forms. He was not, in other words, the modern, objective historian some would like to make him out to be.

I read this while staying at Mike Miley's home in Sonoma, California.

[fedlivie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece study on Thucydides by Francis M. Cornford. Fascinating from the beginning to the end.