Rengakos thucydides biography

This volume on Thucydides, the most important historian of the ancient world, comprises articles by thirty leading international scholars.
In Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, two important features of the historian's narrative art point to the double legacy of the.
Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general.

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(review) A. Rengakos - A. Tsakmakis: Brill’s Companion to Thucydides

Listy filologickÈ CXXXVI, 2013, 1ñ2, pp. 239ñ304 Brillís Companion to Thucydides, (eds.) ANTONIOS RENGAKOS ñ ANTONIS TSAKMAKIS. Leiden ñ Boston, Brill 2012 (2006), 947 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-23648-6, 978-90-04-23649-3. To publish a review of a book published seven years ago seems to require some preliminary justification. When Brillís Companion to Thucydides appeared for the first time as a hardcover, it somehow managed to escape attention of a redaction of this journal; the redactor thus took the opportunity of the bookís appearing as a paperback in 2012 to ask the publisher for a review copy ñ an entreaty kindly complied with by the Brill. The lapse of time, it is hoped, could in some aspects benefit the review by allowing its author to point to other, more recent handlings of the topics treated in the Companion. As explained in the introduction, 38 years have already passed from the last volume aiming at a comprehensive glance in recent Thucydidean scholarship that appeared in the series Wege der Forschung.1 Thus

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Thucydides

5th-century BC Athenian historian and general

For other uses, see Thucydides (disambiguation).

Thucydides (thew-SID-ih-deez; Ancient Greek: Θουκυδίδης, romanized: Thoukudídēs[tʰuːkydǐdɛːs]; c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.^[3]^[4]^[5]

Thucydides has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by, and constructed upon, fear and self-interest.^[6] His text is still studied at universities and military colleges worldwide

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Thucydides Philosophistoricus: The Way of Life of the Historian

‘‘I lived through the whole of the war, studying it with mature perception and in the intellectual pursuit of an accurate understanding of events. The fact that I was in exile from my own country for twenty years after my command against Amphipolis gave me the opportunity to observe affairs on both sides, no less on that of the Peloponnesians, and to reflect on them with no distraction’’2.

This passage which probably constitutes the only incontrovertible fact in Thucydides’s biography3, has been much discussed. With the exception of Luciano Canfora who argued that Thucydides was back in Athens by 411 BC the great majority of commentators accepts the fact that the writer of the Peloponnesian War returned to Athens after the end of the war4. Although Thucydides does not shed light on the reasons and the historical facts relating to his exile (φυγή)5 he is certainly far clearer on the effects that this event had on his work6. He explicitly recognizes that the conditi