Yes, it would be better with some illustrations (if any cartoonists want to get in touch, I’m sure we can reach a mutually satisfactory deal for when we sell the film rights). That’s where this series of blog posts comes in: a Rough Guide to the most important and interesting bits of Thucydides for first-time visitors, with lots of advice on how to get around, understanding the language and culture, how to avoid getting fleeced in the bazaars of interpretation and so forth. As I said, he’s not interested in attracting lots of readers if that requires him to water down his vision.
Yes, I said it, and I’m a Thucydides nerd: until you are fully immersed in the world of Thucydides, there are substantial sections of his book that seem to go out of their way to discourage you from immersing yourself. That’s a lot of words – plenty of which are thoroughly obscure unless you already know a lot about ancient Greek history, and large chunks of which are actually rather…boring. It’s not just that it loudly advertises itself as Difficult and Challenging, disdaining popularity so long as it attracts a few of the Right Sort of readers it’s the feeling of trepidation when you actually try and lift a copy (or, if you’ve found an edition that’s less than an inch and a half thick, when you look at the size of the print they’ve had to use to make it that compact). It’s fair to say that Thucydides’ work doesn’t go out of its way to be accessible.
It’s not to everyone’s taste – indeed, Thucydides makes a big thing of the fact that many readers will be unimpressed with his work and will fail to grasp what he’s doing – but if this does turn out to be your sort of thing, then there is a lifetime’s worth of ideas to be uncovered here. Welcome to the world of Thucydides! It’s a world that is broad, deep, rich and complex, bringing together the ancient Greek past and the global present with the claim that understanding the former can help make sense of the latter.
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