I’ve decided to take a decisive step in my life. I’m going to start reading Thucydides with the objective of finishing it. I’ve just cut open the pages about halfway in my copy of Alberti vol 1 (unfortunately, I’ve been unable to get a hold of the hardback version) and I’m ready. I’ve already received some advice on which commentaries to use (see posts here), but I’m asking for advice as to which English translations are recommended. For French, I suppose de Romilly is the obvious choice.
Don’t use a knife! Last time I cut the pages open with a knife (a Budé edition of Aristophanes) and they look pretty ugly now.
I have two copies of the first volume of Alberti, and by a strange coincidence, both had their pages uncut! How come no one ever read those books??! (I bought a second copy because the seller (via Abebooks) erroneously listed it as hardback. They only returned half my money.)
Paul, I recently made my esteem for Thucydides clear, so you know you have my best wishes for a rewarding journey! I greatly look forward to hearing your trip reports.
Undoubtedly you know that there is a famous English translation by Thomas Hobbes (available, I see, on Perseus inter alia loca). For your day-to-day efforts, probably you want a modern translation working off a modern edition of the original, but along the way you may want to sample Hobbes’ English literature classic.
Would you mind elaborating a bit on your choice of Alberti for the original text? (Since I need to buy something for meeting my own goal of reading the account of the Athenian plague.)
Paul, I’m not sure why you want an English translation when you have the Budé’s, but if you do, how about our own John W.’s, if that’s available? For a reasonably literal and/but accurate translation there’s Steve Lattimore’s. I used to like Crawley’s, and probably still would—I remember it as being admirably literate—but it doesn’t map on to the Greek very easily. I recommend Lattimore. I think you’d find that the most helpful.
For ordinary reading of the Greek I have to say I like the OCT, perhaps only because it’s what I’m used to. Alberti’s text is not all that different (much less different than texts of Homer, say, though undeniably better), and nor is de Romilly’s. It’s mainly a matter of how it looks on the page. I seem to remember you’re fussy about that.
For cutting pages I usually use a knife, quicker than an index card and no worse. The alternative is to have the book unbound and cut and rebound. (Prometheus, close your ears.) The advantage of cutting the pages yourself is that you can see how much you’ve read, or at any rate how much you’ve prepared to read. But it’s a real pain.
Randy, Alberti’s is the best text, based on exhaustive investigation of the manuscript tradition and on pretty good judgment.
It is a very careful translation, with maps and good notes (including notes on variant readings). The translator attempts to consistently use the same English words for key Greek words, and I found the translation “maps” well onto the Greek–useful as an aid to understanding the Greek (and, boy, did I need help).
I have Alberti’s edition, but in the end I fell back on the OCT for two wholly illegitimate reasons: (1) the format of the OCT is smaller and it’s more comfortable to use, particularly when reading in bed; and (2) the Alberti edition is too handsome to mess up by reading. If you look at the list of papyri in the third volume of Alberti, you’ll see a familiar name repeatedly.
Be forewarned, however. This is one of the saddest books I’ve ever read.
Thucydides is a long narrative of “ignorant armies clashing by night”.
. . . the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
A long story of people killing one another, cynically justifying their cruelties in pursuit of power, making gross, stupid and fatal miscalculations, in a world devoid of justice. It’s a long, drawn out tragedy without any redeeming or uplifting catharsis. If you are not already an extreme pessimist, you will lose all illusions about the inherent goodness of human beings and the possibility of influencing the course of events for the better after you read this book. You will be sadder but you will be wiser.
The reason why I want another translation beside de Romilly’s Budé (which I don’t have but I can get) is that I like to have a couple different translations when I read a text, especially when it’s as difficult as Thucydides. It’s especially helpful to have translations into different languages, as they tend to map on the Greek differently; what’s more, different translations into a single language tend to have the same choices in difficult places, because they tend copy each other and use the same secondary literature - so you have situations where e.g. translations into French render a passage as X and translations into English as Y.
It would be great actually to have John W.'s translation, but I don’t know whether it’s available and I can’t know for sure since I don’t know his full name.
Apparently Crawley is old, from the 19th century, but the Landmark edition seems to be a revised version of it. Thomas Hobbes would certainly be too old and quaint to me; I’m going to struggle with the Greek, I don’t want to struggle with the English as well!
According to the BMCR review, Lattimore is quite literal and more “demanding” than other translations, but perhaps that would make it a good crib?
How does Mynott compare with the Landmark approach, Hylander? Are there maps and such? Are the notes still useful if I have a commentary on the Greek text at hand?
Does anyone know the Oxford World Classics version by Martin Hammond? I have his Odyssey, which is a a good literal albeit in my opinion slightly dull rendition. All Oxford World Classics I’ve read are very high quality.
The reason I chose Alberti is that people here have told us that it’s the best text. Besides, the font and layout is very beautiful. But the Budé has the advantage of having the Greek text and a translation in the same book.
I’ll report my progress while I go, and hopefully you can help me along the way. I have no specific plan except that I suspect that I’ll progress rather slowly.
How does Mynott compare with the Landmark approach, Hylander? Are there maps and such? Are the notes still useful if I have a commentary on the Greek text at hand?
I haven’t worked my way through Landmark (which is essentially Crawley), as I have to some extent through Mynott, but from what I’ve seen, Mynott hews much more closely to the Greek, very scrupulously. Mynott provides good maps and notes, but not as many as Landmark, which has lots and lots of maps. If you have a commentary, I think Mynott’s maps and notes would be sufficient. Landmark’s notes are geared to readers who don’t know Greek at all, while Mynott’s notes are helpful to, if not necessarily aimed exclusively at, readers who know at least some Greek, in explaining ambiguities and difficulties in the Greek, as well as discussing some textual issues. Landmark has a number of helpful essays on various aspects of Greek institutions.
Does anyone know the Oxford World Classics version by Martin Hammond? I have his Odyssey, which is a a good literal albeit in my opinion slightly dull rendition. All Oxford World Classics I’ve read are very high quality.
I don’t know this either, but I have to agree that the Oxford World Classics series, from what I’ve seen, maintains a very high quality. For Thucydides – for your purposes, as an aid to reading the Greek – I think you would want a more literal, even if slightly dull, rendition.
Apparently the OWC edition has notes by Rhodes, a prominent historian of ancient Greek, who has produced very good editions of much of Thucydides in the Aris & Phillips series, with English translation.
I have to admit something. This is emphatically only I, but I have great difficulties in using translations, which results to my own detriment, no doubt. I do check translations of ancient literature every now and then, but for some reason whenever I consult them, I always feel very filthy afterwards. I feel I have cheated, let myself down. That I should be able to go through this without cheating. And I fear I will be found out. Of course the counter-argument is that it is in the same way actually also cheating to consult dictionaries and grammars. The mind is full of cognitive dissonance.
Therefore I would probably only allow myself to use nothing but dictionaries, grammars, monographs, and commentaries (and possibly articles) even with Thucydides. That no matter how big a difficulty and how long ever it takes, I have to get to the meaning by my own effort, unaided. That would no doubt result in failure. I don’t write this to say Paul cannot use translations, as he definitely can and quite probably should. I suppose I write this for my own psychoanalysis…
I think use of translations is not necessarily bad. It depends on your level of attainment and the difficulty of the text. In this case, Paul intends to read the whole of Thucydides, and Thucydides is a very difficult author: even the ancient Greeks had trouble with him, as Dionysus of Halicarnassus attests. I think it would not be efficient never to resort to a good translation on encountering a difficulty, after having tried to solve the issue. I resorted to Mynott’s translation when I read Thucydides – frequently. Personally, I would never have managed to get through Thucydides if I had spent hours and hours pondering each conundrum.
With less difficult authors, where difficulties occur less frequently, maybe it would be better avoid translations as an aid as much as possible.
And for readers tackling real Greek without extensive experience, translations can be helpful to check one’s own understanding of the text, in addition to solving problems.
My personal feelings on the use of translations are very similar to Timothée’s, but using them after having worked through all the possibilities in the text as a reality check can be very useful. One’s Greek should also get to the point where using a translation does not adversely affect the learning process, but aids it.
With thanks to those who have enquired, my translation of Thucydides has been completed, but is currently languishing until I decide what to do with it (probably some form of print on demand). I’m sorry not to have expedited its appearance, especially since (as it follow’s Alberti’s text, and is fairly literal) it might have been of some use in this context.
Lattimore’s version is good, but be careful - early printings contained a significant number of inadvertent omissions (mostly minor, though somewhat longer in one instance). I understand that at least some of these were rectified in later printings.
Good luck to Paul, and anyone else tackling Thucydides - a very demanding, but immensely rewarding, exercise - and thanks to all who discussed Thucydidean problems with me during my work on my translation.
Translations function as commentaries. If you use one you might as well use both. Commentaries of the technical sort require the reader to adopt the point of view (framework) from which the commentary was written. This is a major hurdle to get over. Translations are less demanding.
If you want to cut something out, abandon the lexicon[1]. With the commentaries and translations the ancient lexicon serves only one purpose, it’s a concordance, that’s why I still use it. It’s somewhat more convenient than searching TLG which I do a lot.
[1] I didn’t come up with this idea. A veteran professional translator suggested it. It didn’t make sense to me at the time but now it does. If you can instantly find every place a word is used and read it in context, the glosses in the lexicon can be relegated to the status of interesting suggestions, and then you ignore them.
It amazes me that Matthew Arnold wrote this in the mid 19th century. As someone who grew up reading post-apocalyptic novels of the late 50s, seeing the movie On the Beach when I was in sixth grade, living at ground zero in Seattle, certainly don’t need to be told about the futility of war. I discovered Ferlinghetti in 1959. It took me four decades to discover the line in Dover Beach, alluded to in Ferlinghetti’s Autobiography, 1958.
I have seen the ignorant armies
on the beach at Dover.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, excerpts from Autobiography, Jam Session, Ralph Gleason, 1958.
I haven’t read much literary criticism regarding Thucydides, is Dover Beach a fair reflection of his attitude?
In this paper I argue that he presents his war as an extreme manifestation of a specific pattern of catastrophe with a lengthy literary pedigree, and that it is this pattern, often portending the total collapse of the society, that his work readies the reader to recognize.
Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War as Multifaceted Disaster
Rachel Bruzzone, Bilkent University
I found this article while searching for a discussion the apocalyptic cataclysms describe in TH 1.23.3. I was specifically looking for an explanation of the language that refers to stories passed down which were unreliably attested[1]. Rachel Bruzzone has an interesting take on this. Wasn’t able the link the site but a search for the quote from her paper should get you there.
“Apocalyptic cataclysm” is not how I would describe Thucydides’ narrative of the Peloponnesian War, and I’m not sure that it aptly describes the final metaphor in Dover Beach, which is a metaphor for all human life and activity in a world that is devoid of meaning, not a breakdown of society. Thucydides’ story is simply one of people senselessly and stupidly killing one another and getting killed. Sparta and, even in defeat, Athens remained cohesive political entities (although in some cases there was a breakdown of society–the Corcyrean stasis being the foremost example). For me Matthew Arnold 's metaphor captures the sense I had after reading Thucydides through to the end.
Thucydides’ text ends mid-sentence. The last book is very different from the previous books. There are no speeches; there is simply a flat narrative of who did what and to whom, more like Xenophon’s History (which continues where Th. left off), as if Thucydides was overwhelmed with sadness and had simply given up trying to make sense of events out of exhaustion and despair.
Matthew Arnold was of course steeped in the Greek and Roman Classics. Earlier in the poem he mentions Sophocles (“Sophocles long ago/Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery”), and he wrote a famous essay on Homer. He was, after all, the son of Bradley’s Arnold. He wrote Dover Beach on his honeymoon and addressed it to his wife (“Ah, love, let us be true/To one another!”). Some honeymoon.
Hylander - I read your post with much interest. A few stray comments:
(1) The Arnold in ‘Bradley’s Arnold’ was Thomas Kerchever Arnold (1800-53), whereas Matthew Arnold’s father was Dr Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), best remembered nowadays (if at all) as the Headmaster of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, but also an editor of Thucydides (with notes concentrating mainly on historical and topographical issues).
(2) While it is true that there are no speeches in Book 8 (as in Book 5), there are quite a few reports of them in indirect discourse: was this a new technique Thucydides was trying out (for whatever reason) in this phase of his work?
(3) Much of the fighting, and the constant making and breaking of treaties, must certainly seem futile to us; yet as well as reporting all this, Thucydides can also be regarded as using it as the basis for advocating a more rational approach to political decision-making, which recognises the unpredictability of the future, and the fact that those resorting to war frequently find that it grows beyond their control, with disastrous results. The ability of human beings to learn from Thucydides’ lessons is, of course, very much an open question, but I did not come away from my own reading of Thucydides with quite the same sense of bleakness as you.
(I bought a second copy because the seller (via Abebooks) erroneously listed it as hardback. They only returned half my money.)