The Mind of Thucydides

First published in France in 1956 and now available in English for the first time, this narratological analysis of Thucydides's "History of the Peloponnesian War" highlights the power and sophistication of the Greek historian's rhetoric.

Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010) was the author of more than thirty books on the literature and history of ancient Greece; among her many honors, she was the first woman Professor of the Collège de France, and in 1989 was the second woman elected to the Académie Française. Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings is an independent translator of books including The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity by Éric Rebillard and The Mourning Voice by Nicole Loraux, both from Cornell. Hunter R. Rawlings III is President of the Association of American Universities and Professor of Classics and History at Cornell University, where he served as president from 1995 to 2003. He is the author of The Structure of Thucydides' History and a number of articles on Thucydides. Jeffrey Rusten is Professor of Classics at Cornell University, author of The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486–280, and editor of Thucydides (Oxford Readings in Classical Studies).

Rawlings has done a great favor to students of Thucydides by making Romilly's work available to an English-speaking audience. With this work Romilly revolutionized how scholars approached and studied Thucydides. Instead of analyzing the accuracy of his narrative on the Peloponnesian War, Romilly examines how Thucydides thought. She treats the history like a piece of intellectual art and Thucydides like an artist.

Timothy Rood, St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, author of Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation:

This translation is valuable in making more widely available a book which, though half a century old, has endured as a classic of Thucydidean scholarship. Reading this book will give all those who encounter Thucydides, whether in the original Greek or in translation, much more of a feeling for the texture of his language. The chapter on the Archaeology is particularly significant: it remains the most lucid analysis of Thucydides' techniques in this important section of the work.

Simon Hornblower, University of Oxford, author of Thucydides and Pindar: Historical Narrative and the World of Epinikian Poetry:

Students at every level, from undergraduates to advanced scholars, will be grateful for this English translation of Histoire et raison chez Thucydide, the best of all Jacqueline de Romilly's many and distinguished publications on Thucydides, and one of the best books on Thucydides of any period and in any language. It was way ahead of its time in its sophisticated examination of Thucydides' narrative technique.