History of the Peloponnesian War

The war that broke the Greek world, told by a general who fought in it. Thucydides of Athens set down the twenty-seven-year struggle between Athens and Sparta as it happened, stripping out the gods and omens of his predecessors to ask only what men did and why. The result is the first work of political realism: the funeral oration of Pericles, the plague of Athens, the revolution at Corcyra, the cold logic of the Melian Dialogue, and the doomed expedition to Sicily — a possession for all time, as its author intended, and still the sharpest book ever written on power, fear, and the conduct of states.