Book 1 Summary and Analysis

The incomplete text recounts the history of the Peloponnesian war and famously ends mid-sentence several years prior to the conclusion of the war. The Peloponnesian war was fought in ancient Greece from 431 to 404 BC between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesian League, an alliance of city-states led by Sparta.

The text of Thucydides has been exhaustively studied from a variety of scholastic viewpoints. It has been translated into English on several occasions and nearly every new edition or version incorporates additional linguistic elements or constructions. The structure of the text is therefore particularly well understood, and to aid scholars and readers a traditional approach to paragraph enumeration has been used for decades; many modern editions feature running paragraph notation. Scholastic editions carry this idea forward and feature traditional sentence enumeration as well—these editions are particularly useful as they allow...