Donald Kagan-Yale's Sterling Professor of Classics and History-delivers a compelling new look at revisionism in Thucydides' classic History of the Peloponnesian War. To determine how accurate and dispassionate the Athenian general really was, Kagan exposes his epic to an enlightening and thorough analysis. Using contemporary and modern sources, Kagan reveals the exiled aristocrat's biases, prejudices, and his clear intention to spin events in his...

"CHINA AND THE UNITED STATES ARE HEADING TOWARD A WAR NEITHER WANTS. The reason is Thucydides's Trap, a deadly pattern of structural stress that results when a rising power challenges a ruling one. This phenomenon is as old as history itself. About the Peloponnesian War that devastated ancient Greece, the historian Thucydides explained: "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Over the past 500...

"An enlarged version of the Page-Barbour lectures ... delivered at the University of Virginia in the spring of 1962." Bibliographical footnotes.

Analysis of the background, plan and methods of Thucydides' "History", and the political and intellectual forces which influenced his thought and style.