Reading Thucydides in a Time of Pandemic
On a good day Thucydides is an inscrutable read in the Greek. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the Histories of Thucydides are monument of ancient historiography. Many consider Thucydides (ca.460-395 B.C.E.) the first political scientist because of his perceptive analysis of political behavior and its motivations. Although Thucydides was deeply indebted to Homer and Herodotus, especially the latter, his eight books on the Peloponnesian War represent the West’s best first efforts at writing history from a scientific, objective…