'With icy remorselessness, it puts paid to any notion that the horrors of modern history might be an aberration - for it tells of universal war, of terrorism, revolution and genocide' Tom Holland

The long life-and-death struggle between Athens and Sparta plunged the ancient Greek world into decades of war. Thucydides was an Athenian and achieved the rank of general in the earlier stages of the war, and in this detailed, first-hand contemporary account he writes as both a soldier and a historian. He applies a passion for accuracy and a contempt for myth and romance in compiling a factual record of a ruinous conflict that would eventually destroy the Athenian empire.

Translated by Rex Warner with an introduction and notes by M. I. Finley

Rex Warner was a Professor of the University of Connecticut from 1964 until his retirement in He was born in 1905 and went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a "first" in Classical Moderations, and took a degree in English Literature. He taught in Egypt and England, and was Director of the British Institute, Athens, from 1945 to 1947. He has written poems, novels and critical essays, has worked on films and broadcasting, and has translated many works, of which Xenophon's History of My Time and The Persian Expedition, Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, and Plutarch's Lives (under the title Fall of the Roman Republic) and Moral Essays have been published in Penguin Classics.

M. I. Finley was a professor of ancient history and master of Darwin College, Cambridge. He died in 1986.