Classic political realism. Thucydides of Athens was born about 471 BC. He witnessed the rise of Athens to greatness under the inspired leadership of Pericles. In 430, during the second year of the Peloponnesian War, he contracted and survived the terrible plague that he described so vividly.

Later, as a general in 423, he failed to save Amphipolis from the enemy and was disgraced. He recounts this not in volumes of self-justification, but in a single sentence of his history of the war—that he was destined to be an exile for twenty years. He likely lived on his property in Thrace during this time but was able to observe both sides in certain campaigns of the war, returning to Athens after its defeat in 404.

Thucydides had been writing his famous history, filled with hopes and horrors, triumphs and disasters, in rich detail based on first-hand knowledge, along with accounts from others. The war was essentially three conflicts with one uncertain peace after the first; and Thucydides had not unified them into a single narrative when death arrived sometime before 396.

His history of the first conflict, 431–421, was nearly complete; Thucydides was still working on this when the war expanded to Sicily and into a conflict (415–413) that was likewise complete in his awful yet brilliant record, though not integrated into the whole. His account of the final conflict of 413–404 abruptly stops (in the middle of a sentence) while covering the year 411. Thus, his work remained unfinished and as a whole unrevised. Yet in terms of brilliance of description and depth of insight, this history is unmatched.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Thucydides is available in four volumes.