Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader

"A perceptive, well-informed, concise, and readable introduction to Thucydides for the nonspecialist. Perez Zagorin has done a service to readers by composing such a vigorous and succinct book."--Barry S. Strauss, Cornell University

"Lucid and engaging. This is an intelligent and helpful companion to the first-time reader of Thucydides."--Josiah Ober, Princeton University

"Perez Zagorin addresses the main points in Thucydides with sound judgment and estimable intelligence. His choice of topics is expert, as is his treatment of different scholarly views. This is an ideal overview of Thucydides, which at times is as gripping as Thucydides himself."--George Klosko

"Professor Zagorin has written a valuable companion for readers of Thucydides. His observations are full of learning, good sense, and wisdom."--Donald Kagan, Sterling Professor of Classics and History, Yale University

Tom Palaima - Times Higher Education Supplement

Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader offers an engrossing intellectual appreciation of the most important and most difficult historian in the western cultural tradition. . . . Perez Zagorin . . . brings formidable personal intelligence to major questions in Thucydidian scholarship, and his book goes well beyond the typical synthetic handbook. . . . There is nothing else like it.

Perez Zagorin (1920-2009) was the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rochester and a fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. He was the author of many articles and a number of books, including "How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West" and "Francis Bacon" (both Princeton).