The classic account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta that has fascinated readers of history for centuries ThucydidesOs account of the war between Athens and Sparta, begun in 431 BCE when the war commenced, is considered by many to be the first work of serious history. Applying then-new standards of evidence, impartiality, and cause and effectand, crucially, banishing the gods from his taleThucydides created a gripping, detailed narrative of the civilization-shaking clash of two imperial powers that brings to life the ancient world and its conflict. This powerful translation by Thomas Hobbes has long been considered the truest to the original Greek. HobbesOs eloquent and lucid style captures ThucydidesOs use of language in recreating the conflict, as well as ThucydidesOs special ability to portray and enliven that led to his revealing accounts of the people and events in that long war: PericlesOs funeral oration, the plague, the civil war in Corcyra, the debate between Cleon and Diodotus over the fate of Mitylene, the Melian Dialogue, and above all the ruin of the Sicilian expedition. HobbesOs rendering of The Peloponnesian Warais one of those rare translations that are works of art in their own right. David GreneOs notes clarify the few mistranslations of which Hobbes is guilty, the occasional difficulties of HobbesOs seventeenth-century English, and passages involving facts and circumstances not familiar to those who cannot read Greek. This edition also includes HobbesOs essay OOn the Life and History of Thucydides,O his address to his general readers and dedicatory epistle, and a new Introduction by Grene. Written before HobbesOs works on political philosophy, this translation sheds light on his later Leviathanaand other works and, above all, displays the intensity of the relation between the Greek historian and the seventeenth-century philosopher.