In Thucydides’ view, the Peloponnesian War, fought on and off for thirty years between the two leading Greek cities of Sparta and Athens, had to be understood with respect to human politics and power struggles, not-as Homer had earlier seen the Trojan War, or as Herodotus had explained the Greek wars against the Persians-by referring to quarrels among the gods on Mount Olympus.
Writing at the end of the fifth century BC, he was attempting something never done before: an aggressively rational, apparently impersonal analysis of the history of his own times, utterly free from religious modes of explanation. Maybe the contorted language has something to do with the novelty of his enterprise. Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian War in almost impossibly difficult Greek. National Museum of Archaeology, Naples/AISA/Everett Collection
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