The Peloponnesian War

785 Pages·2009·3.254 MB·English

by  Rhodes, Peter John, Hammond, Martin, Thucydides

oxford world’s classics
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
Thucydides (c.460 – 400 bc) was a member of the aristocratic
Athenian family which provided the opponents of the democratic
leader Pericles, but himself became an admirer of Pericles, though
not of democracy except when guided by Pericles. His subject is the
Peloponnesian War. This was fought between Athens and Sparta,
the two leading powers of fifth-century Greece, and eventually won
by Sparta. Thucydides started work at the outset of the war in 431,
expecting it to be ‘more momentous than any previous conflict’. He
served as a general in the war, but was exiled after failing to keep the
city of Amphipolis out of Spartan hands in 424/3. He returned to
Athens at the end of the war, but although a few sentences refer to
later events his surviving narrative breaks off in the autumn of 411.
He is more narrowly focused on the war than his predecessor
Herodotus (c.485 – 425) had been on the Persian Wars at the begin-
ning of the fifth century, and his work has great intellectual power:
he was energetic and intelligent in establishing the facts and pene-
trating in his judgement of general issues; he explains events wholly
in human terms; the work is skilfully composed, with a blend of
plain and vivid narrative passages, and with speeches which often
explore the nature of power. Thucydides’ history is indeed the
‘permanent legacy’ which he intended it to be.
Martin Hammond was born in 1944 and educated at Winchester
College and Balliol College, Oxford. He has taught at St Paul’s School,
Harrow School, and Eton College, where he was Head of Classics
from1974 to 1980, and Master in College from 1980 to 1984. He was
Headmaster of the City of London School from 1984 to 1990, and
of Tonbridge School from 1990 to his retirement in 2005. He has
also translated the Iliad (Penguin, 1987), the Odyssey (Duckworth,
2000), and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Penguin, 2006). He
is married, with two children.
P. J. Rhodes is Honorary Professor and Emeritus Professor of
Ancient History at the University of Durham. He has written widely
on Thucydides and ancient Greece; one of his most recent books is
A History of the Classical Greek World 478 –323BC(2005).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
THUCYDIDES
The Peloponnesian War
Translated by
MARTIN HAMMOND
With an Introduction and Notes by
P. J. RHODES
1
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Thucydides.
[History of the Peloponnesian War. English]
The Peloponnesian War / Thucydides; translated by Martin Hammond, with an
introduction and notes by P.J. Rhodes.
p. cm.—(Oxford world classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–19–282191–1
1. Greece—History—Peloponnesian War, 431–404 B.C. I. Hammond, Martin, 1944–
II. Rhodes, P. J. (Peter John) III. Title.
DF229.T5H36 2009
938’.05—dc22
2008049469
T ypeset by Cepha Imaging Private Ltd., Bangalore, India
Printed in Great Britain by
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ISBN 978–0–19–282191–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
PREFACE
This book is a collaboration. It has been a pleasure and a reassurance
to work closely with Peter Rhodes on every aspect of the book at
every stage. I am responsible for the translation, the index, and (for
the most part) the decisions on which reading to adopt in the many
places where the Greek text is in doubt: Peter for all the rest of the
book. The process has been interactive. In a series of virtually weekly
emails we have seen and commented on each other’s drafts section by
section, and I am gratefully conscious that hardly a page of my trans-
lation has not benefited from improvements to my first draft sug-
gested by Peter.
Thucydides admired energy, inventiveness, and intellectual power,
and all these qualities are manifest in his own writing. He wrote very
difficult Greek, in (as far as we can tell) a highly idiosyncratic style.
Narrative sections are brilliantly fast and vivid (e.g. the description
of the plague, 2.47 – 54; the escape from Plataea, 3.20 – 4; the battle on
Epipolae,7.43 – 4), but when Thucydides brings his intellect to bear,
either authorially or in densely textured speeches given to politicians
or military men, on the wider and more permanent issues which inter-
ested him (e.g. the nature of power, the self-perpetuating logic of
empire, the moral collapse in civil war, the clash of rival political sys-
tems, cultures, and ideologies), his thought is complex and compressed,
set out in innovative language itself so compressed that regular syn-
tax on occasion buckles under the pressure, and a two- or three-word
phrase can need careful and sometimes contentious unpacking. The
translator needs all the help he or she can get. In addition to the
constant vigilance of Peter Rhodes, I have been very fortunate to
benefit from the generosity of Chris Pelling and Simon Hornblower.
Chris Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, very kindly read
the entire translation in draft, and his comments and suggestions have
been gratefully incorporated into the final version, much improving
what I had first written. Simon Hornblower, Professor of Classics and
Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London,
generously allowed both me and Peter Rhodes photocopies of the
typescript of the third and final volume (5.25 – end) of his magisterial
Commentary on Thucydides before its publication by Oxford University
Press: this has greatly assisted the second half of the translation.
vi preface
I owe further debts of gratitude to Judith Luna of Oxford World’s
Classics for her constant help, encouragement, and guidance: and
to Andrew Crawshaw for the loan year after year of his delightful
house on the island of Andros, where much of this translation was
written.
The representation in English of Greek names (people and places)
poses a familiar problem, to which there is no obvious or universally
accepted solution. The practice I have adopted in this translation is
no more consistent than any other. I broadly Latinize (e.g. -us for -os
or -ous, and c for k), but mostly retain -ei- (e.g. Peiraeus, Deceleia),
and -ou- where that assists the pronunciation (e.g. Thrasyboulus
rather than Thrasybulus) or otherwise has claim on aesthetic or ety-
mological grounds.
Martin Hammond
I add my thanks to Judith Luna, for inviting me to join in this enter-
prise and for her help on various points; and to Simon Hornblower
and the Press, for letting us see in advance the third volume of his
Commentary on Thucydides and adapt one of his maps. I thank Oxbow
Books, as successors to Aris & Phillips, for permission to reuse here,
at a different level and in a different way, some material from my
editions of Books 2, 3, and 4.1 – 5.24. Above all I thank Martin
Hammond, for being a stimulating, alert, and genial collaborator: my
understanding of Thucydides is less inadequate now than it was
before we started.
P. J. R.
CONTENTS
Abbreviations viii
Introduction ix
Select Bibliography liv
Summary and Analysis lviii
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR 1
Appendix:Weights, Measures, and Distances;
Money; Calendar 473
Explanatory Notes 475
Notes on the Greek Text 633
Index 644
Maps 709
ABBREVIATIONS
For texts of ancient works, including modern collections of text, and
for classical journals, we follow the list of abbreviations in the third
edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. Note also the following:
Barrington Atlas R . J. A. Talbert (ed.), Barrington Atlas of the
Greek and Roman World (Princeton University
Press,2000)
Brosius M. Brosius, The Persian Empire from Cyrus II to
Artaxerxes I, LACTOR 16 (London Association
of Classical Teachers, 2000)
Davies,APF J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families,
600 – 300BC (Oxford University Press, 1971)
Develin,AO R. Develin, Athenian Officials,684 – 321BC
(Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Hansen and Nielsen, M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielsen (eds.),
Inventory A n Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis
(Oxford University Press, 2004)
Pritchett,GSW W . K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War
(University of California Press, 1974 – 91; vol. i
originally published as Ancient Greek Military
Practices,1971)
RO P . J. Rhodes and R. Osborne, Greek Historical
Inscriptions,404 – 323BC (Oxford University
Press,2003; corrected reprint, 2007)
INTRODUCTION
Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War
In the second half of the fifth century bc the two leading powers in
Greece were Athens, which was democratic and innovative, and whose
navy had built up an empire in the Aegean Sea, and Sparta, which
was oligarchic and conservative, and whose army of heavy infantry
enabled it to dominate the southern part of the Greek mainland.
Athens’ continuing expansion threatened Sparta’s position in Greece,
and, prompted by the complaints from some of its allies, from 431 to
404 Sparta challenged Athens in the Peloponnesian War. A peace-
treaty in 421 seemed to acknowledge that Sparta had failed to break
the power of Athens; but the peace was inherently unstable, and after
Athens had weakened itself in an over-ambitious campaign in Sicily,
and had provoked the Persians, the dominant power in the Near
East, Sparta managed to obtain Persian support and to continue the
war until Athens was defeated.
Writing in prose was still a young art in Greece, and no Greek
prose work earlier than the second half of the fifth century survives.
The earliest prose work which does survive is the history of Herodotus
(who was born in Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, but left his home
and travelled extensively). Writing in the third quarter of the cen-
tury, he produced a wide-ranging work focused on the wars between
the Greeks and Persians at the beginning of the century, written in a
discursive manner which enabled him to include some earlier history
and material of various kinds about many peoples and places.
Thucydides was a member of one of the leading families of Athens:
he was born not later than 454 (perhaps c.460), lived through and at
least once held a command in the Peloponnesian War, and wrote a
history of that war. Book 1 contains introductory material, and the
narrative of the war begins in Book 2; the surviving narrative ends in
the autumn of 411 but includes some references to the end of the
war. He was clearly a man of great intelligence, and great determin-
ation to establish and record what happened and why (though today’s
scholars are more conscious than some of their predecessors that he
will have had his own prejudices); he was also a very careful and skil-
ful writer (though the meaning of his Greek is not always easy to