Not Lost in Translation

A new translation of Thucydides is an occasion to be celebrated. An Athenian, Thucydides is the historian of the war that dealt a devastating blow to the city-states of ancient Greece in the fifth century B.C. The Peloponnesian War was a 27-year-long conflict between the two major power blocs of the historian’s world, one led by his own country, Athens, and the other led by its rival, Sparta. Only one side could win but, in the end, both sides paid a price in blood, treasure, and spirit. A disaster but one that in Thucydides’ hands offers one of civilization’s most powerful learning experiences.

After more than 2,400 years, The Peloponnesian War remains a monument. The book is read not just by students of the classics or of ancient history but also by political scientists and strategists. It appears on the syllabi of college courses in international relations as well as in history, and it is required reading at the U.S. Naval War College, a school that offers advanced studies to American naval and military officers as well as to government officials and to officers of international navies. The great naval theorist and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan served as the college’s president, so what better place could there be for Thucydides, a onetime admiral himself?

In the aftermath of the Vietnam war, it seemed important to assign a book at the Naval War College about the mistakes that a democracy may make in wartime, and The Peloponnesian War is pitiless in reporting those errors. In his lament on the outbreak of the Second World War, “September 1, 1939,” the poet W. H. Auden tipped his hat to Thucydides and to the Greek’s analysis of his country’s bungling, anguish, and downright crimes during its decades-long war. Rigorous as Thucydides’ work is, it is also as rich as any novel in its cavalcade of unforgettable characters. But it’s not a novel. Often cited as one of the most important works of strategy ever written, it is in a league with Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. It is, in short, just what its author boasted that it was: a possession for all time.

The Peloponnesian War is not, however, an easy read. It wasn’t in its Greek original, and it is hard to render it into flowing English without sacrificing the sometimes-cranky character of the original. Robin Waterfield has struck a nice balance.

Waterfield is an excellent Hellenist, an accomplished translator, and a fine writer. He is to be congratulated on having produced a fluent and readable translation. Some may grouse that in his original Attic Greek Thucydides is neither. In fact, his writing was infamous for its difficulty even in antiquity and among native Greek speakers. But a translator ought to meet the readers halfway, especially in these times. It is hard enough to get people nowadays to read any classic text, even a short and elegant work like Machiavelli’s The Prince. Thucydides is not short. This book, including introduction, notes, maps, and an index, is 752 pages long. A little smoothing out of Thucydidean prose to ease a reader’s experience is a small price to pay for getting the reader on board. And Waterfield does smooth things out.

For example, he translates “Hellenes” as “Greeks”—although the people we call “Greeks” always referred to themselves as “Hellenes,” “barbarians” as “the non-Greek world”—although the Greeks did not hesitate to stigmatize foreigners as barbarians—and “medizing”—a term derived from the ancient Greek habit of confusing the Persians with another Iranian people, the Medes—as “collaboration with the Persians.” In the opening words of the book, Waterfield identifies Thucydides as “Thucydides of Athens” rather than, as it states in the Greek original, “Thucydides an Athenian.” The reader might wonder what difference it makes. The Greeks thought of themselves as a community. Thucydides never speaks of Athens as “Athens,” the way we might speak of “Russia” or “Canada.” Instead, he refers to Athens as “the Athenians,” to Corinth as “the Corinthians,” and so on and so forth for the other Greek states. But “Thucydides of Athens” is easier for a modern reader than “Thucydides the Athenian,” as Waterfield, with his superb ear for language, surely concluded.

We get a sense of Waterfield’s approach as a translator by having a look at the way he renders in clear English prose a famously difficult and unclear passage in Attic Greek. In that paragraph, Thucydides explains his methodology regarding the speeches that he includes, and which complement the narrative that is the bulk of the work. Those speeches, which appear from time to time at key moments, are one of the highlights of the book. They are the vehicles in which Thucydides highlights paradoxes and contradictions in policies followed by various actors, and the vessels into which he pours his own philosophy. They are the highly rhetorical products of a culture that prized oratory.

Thucydides states that it was difficult for him to remember precisely what a speaker said, whether he heard the speech himself or relied on a report from someone who had. His policy, therefore, was as follows:

What I have written is what I think each speaker is most likely to have needed to say about the immediate issues, while keeping as close as possible to the overall purport of the speech as actually delivered.

A literal translation might read something like:

The things that I thought necessary for each person most likely to say concerning the events at the time, holding as closely as possible to the whole sense of what they truly said, so it has been said.

Clearly, I am no translator, even if the reader grants me an indulgence for a particularly thorny passage. As Polly Low says of it in her learned and readable introduction, “This is, even by Thucydides’ often elliptical standards, an extremely hard sentence to decode.” After all, what does Thucydides mean by “the things that I thought necessary for each speaker most likely to say about the events at the time”? By “necessary” does he mean “called for by the occasion” or “necessary given someone’s personality or point of view” or “necessary according to Thucydides”? Waterfield’s rendition works well. And Low is a distinguished scholar of ancient Greek international relations and an excellent choice to write the introduction and notes.

Some of the translator’s choices are open to question. For example, he renders the famous passage in Pericles’ Funeral Oration, in which the speaker praises Athens as “the education of Hellas” as “an example for Greece,” thereby omitting the pedagogical aspect that the speaker wishes to emphasize. Translating “the Lacedaemonians [i.e., Spartans] generally are the least likely to do something daring” as “there’s no one who has less stomach for taking risks than the Lacedaemonians” is a little free, although vivid. Waterfield’s frequent use of contractions such as “it’s,” “there’s” or “we’re” seem too informal for the austere Thucydides. But these are small points.

The important thing is that Waterfield has produced a Thucydides for today’s readers, and one that comes with supplementary materials to help them make sense of a very complex text. His is a distinguished addition to existing English translations of Thucydides. This book will help bring readers back to the classics, and few achievements by an author can be greater than that.

The History of the Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides, translated by Robin Waterfield
Basic Books, 752 pp., $40

Barry Strauss is Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is the author of, most recently, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

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