Thucydides Historiae, Vol. I: Books I–IV

Thucydides opens his history by asking how the rivalry between Athens and Sparta became a war that engulfed much of the Greek world. In Books I–IV, the fighting begins, plague strikes Athens, and speeches and political decisions are set beside campaigns and civil conflict. His account remains one of the most demanding surviving attempts to explain a war from within the generation that fought it.

This Oxford Classical Texts volume prints those first four books in the original Greek. The text was edited by H. Stuart Jones, with J. E. Powell correcting and enlarging its critical apparatus, which records important textual readings. It is a source for close work with Thucydides' language, not an English translation or the complete eight-book History.