Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Kagan Donald
Title : The outbreak of the Peloponnesian war
Year : 1969

Link download : Kagan_Donald_-_The_outbreak_of_the_Peloponnesian_war.zip

Preface. The attempt to write another book on a subject so old and so often treated requires an explanation, perhaps even a defense. Thucydides, after all, dealt with it authoritatively, and most of our evidence comes from his history. Yet it is rewarding to take up the matter once again. In the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth, to be sure, such titanic figures as Grote, Beloch, Busolt, and Meyer undertook encyclopaedic histories of Greece in which they dealt with the origins of the Peloponnesian War in detail and with great intelligence and learning. In my judgment there is, even today, no better study of the problem than the sober and magisterial account of Busolt. Therein lies one of the reasons for writing this book, for in the years since Busolt wrote, a great deal of new material has been given to us, chiefly in the form of Athenian inscriptions. In addition, more than half a century of important scholarship has illuminated Greek history. No one can write about Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War in quite the same way after the publication of the Athenian Tribute Lists, Gomme's Historical Commentary on Thucydides, or Mme de Romilly's Thucydide et l'imperialisme athenien, not to mention many other important monographs and articles. It therefore seems desirable to treat the question once again in a thorough and detailed manner, taking account of the new epigraphical evidence and the great mass of modem scholarship. ...