What version of Thucydides does Yea Forums recommend? Is the landmark edition the way to go?
>inb4 read the original text in Greek
I may learn Greek at some point, but English is my first language
What version of the Peloponnesian war is the best?
What version of Thucydides does Yea Forums recommend? Is the landmark edition the way to go?
Gavin Garcia
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Elijah Lopez
I read the Landmark Herodotus and it was great so I'm sure Landmark Thucydides is too. I personally found Everyman's version of Thucydides very tough to get through (I couldn't get past like page 50) probably partly because of the translation & lack of maps.
Jose Kelly
Read Hobbes’ version. Quite beautiful prose in itself
Logan Edwards
>inb4 read the original text in Greek
you already know the answer it seems. translation is for plebs
Connor Nguyen
The Cambridge edition, which is Mynott's translation. The most recent translation of Thucydides into English. Very literal but readable, includes maps and plenty of extra material. Better than the Landmark edition because of its more accurate translation. I guess you can get the Landmark for its extra material, but if you only can get one edition of Thucydides, then go for the Cambridge one.
Daniel Gonzalez
Yeah, the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought version is the best single edition available.
Jose Cook
Thucydides' Greek is way too fucking hard to puzzle out, so even as a classics PhD candidate at a top uni you rely on translations. My advisor jokes that Thucy is so difficult and we are so removed from Greek that if new Thucy fragments or books were found, not enough the most talented profs could read them. He's exaggerating, but the point stands.
Landmark is great (not the trans, the edition as a whole w maps etc).
Zachary Gutierrez
r*tard, this isn't true. thucydides was a very clear writer. it's sorting out the context that is difficult since he was one of the first long-form historians. the context is confusing in english as well due to lack of knowledge of the events that occurred then.
Jaxon Jones
perseus.tufts.edu
whole text available online for free user
Ryder Ortiz
Is the translation the landmark uses really archaic? I read it's a 19th century translation. If it's pretty difficult to read I may just go with Cambridge since it is more recent
Does the hobbes version have maps/notes? I found these to be helpful when reading Herodotus
Easton Hill
lol
>The number of people who can understand the whole of Thucydides can easily be counted, and there are parts of it not even these can manage without a grammatical commentary.
You know who said that? It's okay, we all know you don't. Hint: it wasn't a 21st century pseudo lit cockmongler like yourself, it was fucking Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2100 years ago. Thucydides is famously the most difficult of all Greek prose. I know you're a liar and probably a child, but yes, I am still mad. Fuck I miss when lit at least pretended to care about books
Luke Diaz
I'm reading the Landmark Version at the moment, really enjoying it. Wish I had used the Landmark Version for Herodotus as well (I read the Penguin edition).
The translation is fine, it's late 19th century. In the introduction Strassler says he edited it slightly, breaking some of the very long sentences into multiple parts, but left the speeches untouched apart from changing them from British to American spelling. Definitely get the Landmark edition OP IMO
Noah Wood
ur still wrong r*tard, stay mad lmao
Luis Young
You are the reason Yea Forums is bad. You personally
Landon Powell
>Self censoring yourself
Retard
Adam Baker
>that guy
Angel Mitchell
Currently reading the Oxford World Classics edition, it has a few maps in the back which are helpful but honestly if you're just reading to find out where stuff happened you're going about this the wrong way
Connor King
am i the only person constantly distracted by the endless footnotes in landmark editions? its like reading in 4d.
Colton Turner
Write out a small paragraph of grammatically correct Greek then, smart guy.
Jacob Ward
I got the penguin Herodotus as well. I've enjoyed it, but flipping to the back for maps gets old
Bentley Ward
Geography is important in war, flipping back and forward can be annoying. That said, I have a full size poster of a map of ancient Greece so I didn't get the landmark myself, but I can see how it would be very useful.
Carson Nguyen
You should know that it’s poor form to inb4 as op.
Jacob Anderson
Why do landmark translations have to suck so bad? If they didn't fuck up the text they would have been the definitive version of these texts.
Jaxon Mitchell
I'm reading Thucydides without any maps for the most part. I memorised the majority of Greek locations from reading Herodotus and Plutarch. If I need to find where a certain place is then I just go on Google maps.
Owen Wright
The new ones (Ceasar) are good. The old ones are probably public domain because Strasser couldn't afford a new translator for his new series.
Nicholas Brown
>Is the translation the landmark uses really archaic?
Who said anything about it being "archaic"? It's just not as accurate as Mynott's because the Landmark translation takes liberties with the syntax in order to adapt it to 19th century English sensibilities. For example, the Landmark translation is famously very aphoristic, but Thucydides's Greek isn't. That's the liberties I'm referring to: it packages Thucydides's thought into easy and convenient aphorisms and maxims, thereby "conveying the meaning" but not the argumentation and difficulties it actually poses. Difficulty here does not matter, since Thucydides is difficult in itself and 19th century English syntax and rhetoric is not difficult to understand. My point is that Mynott's translation is better because it's more accurate to the Greek original.
Hunter Green
I know a lot of places, but there's more minor places I don't know and don't want to stop and pull up a map online
Adrian Hall
is accuracy better than readability though. "accurate" often means "rendered into tortured and indigestible prose by some academic pedant with no ear for English"
many such cases
Xavier Howard
Don't project your anxieties and prejudices onto a text or translation. Mynott's rendition reads well, as much as Thucydides can be said to "read well". Accuracy and readability are not mutually exclusive at all, and the Landmark edition, for all its aphoristic style and rhetoric flare, is pretty cumbersome, in my opinion. Still readable and enjoyable, to be sure, but not as accurate and enjoyable as Mynott. Hell, if you want prose that sounds fancy, you are better off with Hobbes's translation, and yet it would not be readable enough because it's fucking Thucydides.