And while Thucydides, a man of empathy and passion, was proud that he had written his history “not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time (1.22.4),” The Peloponnesian War turns out to be no dry chronicle of abstract cause and effect. No, it is above all an intense, riveting, and timeless story of strong and weak men, of heroes and scoundrels and innocents too, all caught in the fateful circumstances of rebellion, plague, and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are. Victor Davis Hanson Professor of
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