After the signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, the assassination attempt against him, and his defeat in the elections, Eleftherios Venizelos, in self-imposed exile in Paris, decided to engage in the translation of Thucydides. […] His translation was done without the complex of the specialized philologist who, out of fear of missing some verbal form of the original, disregards whether he will squeeze the reader into some awkward formulation that will interrupt the flow of his thoughts, thus disregarding the right to enjoyment that one of the greatest authors of our civilization offers you.

He rendered the Greek of Thucydides into his own Greek. In the language he spoke and thought in. Today we call this language “simple καθαρεύουσα”. Venizelos's Thucydides is proof, one of the proofs that refute the arguments of our linguistic Manichaeism. This condemned καθαρεύουσα as an artificial language. Our education has exiled it, ignoring that significant works of our literature, thus an important chapter of our culture, have been written in καθαρεύουσα. When a language can create literature, it is not artificial at all.

The rendering of Thucydides by Eleftherios Venizelos is one of the literary monuments of modern Greece.

From the introductory point of Takis Theodoropoulos: The political history of Thucydides is certainly a Greek invention. It is about the search for power in the relations of societies, but specifically in the city-state, an ideal cradle for the development of civilization. The dedication to the spirit of the city presupposes a commitment from the citizen, a commitment related to the Christian faith in the immortality of the soul. Without this dedication, Plato and Aristotle could not have dedicated some of their most important works to the good of the state.

From the introductory note of Thanos M. Veremis.