How on earth am I supposed to read this?

And reading herodotus added weight to the locations in Thucydides

Hope so. I'm moving onto it for my next Greek work

The landmark edition of this book makes it so much easier to understand whats going on

just downloaded the four volumes, hope you dont let me down, user,

As someone with a PhD in History (also unemployed naturally) Why Yea Forums is obsessed with primary sources is beyond my recognition.
There are people who write about History, using multiple primary sources, previous scholarship, epigraphy, archaeology etc, you them. I truly believe one can get a better enjoyment and understand by reading a secondary source about Peloponnese War over Thucydides. The biasses/failings etc of the author aside, which I doubt would be bigger than our dude Thucydides himself.

IF you are obsessed about reading primaries, find one with good introduction, map, comments, footnotes etc. I don't know whether such a book for Thuc. exists.

holy shit

Yes. Just like that chapter in the Illiad where it's just a catalogue of the troops on both sides.

People aren't obsessed with reading primaries, they are obsessed with reading ye olde greek masters. Not for their lucid analysis, but for their manly stature.

you can't analyze history without writing notes and reading details.

I am not, I'm interested in his lucid political analysis. The speeches, the bit about Greek history in the beginning, the plague, and the stasis in Corcyra. All those are interesting, troop movements simply aren't.

Read Herodotus' Histories first.
Thucydides' book is the sequel.
Xenophon completes the trilogy.

The reason that many here are obsessed with primary sources is, the author was alive at the time the events were going on, or was at least close to living at the time and had eye witnesses.
Meanwhile secondary history by a person 3,000 years later is the equivalent of a kid hearing his dad read him a story, and then reciting it (with loss of detail) to his peers. There are often corrections against the primary source. Why? Why do they consider themselves to know more than the person that was there? Very foolish imo. Some stuff can be proven wrong with primary sources, but not always. So, I turn to those who were there over those that studied said primary source and think they may know better

People really interested will read both. But it is just way more interesting to read a book written by a man who an actual general in the war and who experienced it first hand. In some ways I'm more interested in what he thinks happened than what actually happened. That's also why I prefer Herodotus to Thucydides.
Secondary sources are useful and interesting too, they combine several accounts, point out inaccuracies or contradictions you might have missed in the primary source and give their own opinions (for example Thucydides though pericles was a dictator and the democracy was just for show, but most modern historians think it was truly a democracy with pericles being the most important figure).
They are both interesting and I'll read both, but if I had to choose one it would be the primary source.

Well, you described bad historians. Bad historians are subjective, give their 20/20 hindsights and criticize time periods or historical figures. Good historians are objective, investigate the past by analysing primary sources and then arrive at some reasonable conclusion. For example, thanks to historians we are able to know Thucydides did have a grudge against Cleon so he might have portrayed him in a bad light and thus we should be skeptical.

The average non historian can't tell a good from a bad historian. It's safer to read the primary source.

Kek

People are obsessed with reading things "the right way" because they're too much brainlets to learn giving value to things by themselves and too much pussies to improvise and rely on their wits in the absence of proper valuation.
Yea Forums is really "teenagers who just got into reading and want to impress their based literate oldbro: the mentality". That would hold even if this board would turn out to be mainly used by 30 years old.

Primary sources writers are more likely to have personal bias and vested interest into skewing the accounts that secondary source writers. Also secondary writing allows you to use multiple primary sources, contrast them, use archaeologic findings, etc.

's analogy doesn't hold because the historian are not less mature than the people who wrote the primary sources, and don't always rely on a single account. So it would be more like the adult son of the dad collecting memories not only from his dad but from all his buddies, and realizing they don't necessarily agree on everything and some of them have very biased view of one another.

This is also why the argument "do you think you know better" doesn't hold. Even contemporaries of the event can disagree among themselves on what truly happened, so why should any single primary source be held above all hindsight and evidence we can have acquired later? Think that people right now are writing accounts of current event that will be later treated as historical documents. Some of them journalists, blogger, personalities, politicians. Do you really trust all these people to give an accurate, not-too-biased and consistent account (consistent among the various writers)? Of course not.

>Primary sources writers are more likely to have personal bias and vested interest into skewing the accounts that secondary source writers
Like said, that's part of the interest in reading primary sources. I'm interested in Thucydides' bias, not some 20th century historians.

And I'll compare Thucydides' bias to diodorus suculus'

>Primary sources writers are more likely to have personal bias and vested interest into skewing the accounts that secondary source writers
Secondary historians are not immune to biases. They may have their own desires when examining something. An example would be Schleiman (probably misspelled so I apologize) looking for Troy. He dug down deep, found some jewelry and proclaimed it to come from Troy, simply because he wished it so.
Then there is the other side. Those who said Troy can not be real, as historians before them had decided this. Yet there is a city in the approximate location in the correct time frame, that was destroyed by fire and contained mycenaeans pottery. Yet some still say there is no way that this city could be Troy because troy is not real. I'm not saying it's real or not real but historians clearly have biases of their own
As such, I trust the person who was there to give a better account (albeit somewhat warped as no one is unbiased)

>There is no cure more fundamental than Thucydides for the miserable prettification of the Greeks into an ideal, which the “classically educated” youth brings with him into life as the reward for his prep-school training. One has to turn Thucydides over line by line and read his background thoughts as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in back-ground thoughts. In him, the culture of the sophists, which means the culture of the realists, reaches its perfect expression: this invaluable movement in the midst of the Socratic schools’ moralistic and idealistic swindle, which was then breaking out on every side. Greek philosophy as the décadence of Greek instinct; Thucydides as the great summation, the final appearance of that strong, strict, hard factuality that was a matter of instinct for the older Hellenes. Courage in the face of reality is, in the final analysis, the point of difference between natures such as Thucydides and Plato. Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control over himself—consequently he also has control over things . . .

Then it's not safer and more historically accurate to read primary sources, simply more enjoyable (if the writer is a good one, that is).

They aren't but in this there are actually less vulnerable than the people of the times, since they have less personal stake in the interpretations of the events (though of course this is not universal - some people do get very personal about the most autistic shit).

In the end I agree with you about bias being widespread and probably inevitable, I just don't think this makes the contemporaries more reliable in most respects than the later historians. This is also why you should read all of them, as their bias tend to not coincide.

>This is also why you should read all of them, as their bias tend to not coincide.
Agreed. It is why I read a book on the history of Sparta from it's founding up to Rome before beginning Herodotus. A book with goid notes can also provide more recent information, such as the belief that Herodotus' numbers when referring to armies doesn't always match up with other sources

you need maps

Meant fact not belief but that should be obvious

>Primary source of a guy who lived during the war and was involved in it
>Nah let's read some shit people who shove in their dumb bullshit into it
If primary sources exist there's little need to delve into other sources. If we had all of Livy all those Roman history books would be irrelevant

People should read primary sources first then delve into other sources. That way one's opinion isn't as influenced by other people. Reading primary sources and coming to your conclusions is far more meaningful than regurgitating the stuff historians say

>(for example Thucydides though pericles was a dictator and the democracy was just for show, but most modern historians think it was truly a democracy with pericles being the most important figure).
What a terrible example. Those historians are just retards who fell for Pericles' cult of personality thousands of years after the fact

never gonna make it
half of the fun for me was using Google Earth during the parts with tons geographical descriptions to help me visualize actually being there

>All those garbage versions of Pericles' orations from secondary sources
no thanks.

That makes it a great example of what I was saying...
Thucydides has an opinion and modern historians have the opposite opinion. You can read both of their proofs and evidences and make up your own opinion.

>people actually believe primary sources are more trustworthy than secondary ones
You fucking retards. Read secondary, modern sources which combine far more data from far more sources to get an accurate as possible historic account, and then read primary sources to understand how the people at that time documented their history, how they interpreted it, and how it dictated their lives.

>Livy a primary source
Starts off with myth of Romulus and Remus and even says what he's putting down on paper may not be necessarily true and says things will get less mythical he gets closer to his time
>secondary sources all of kinds
use Rome as their mouthpiece for their bullshit

You're the retard. Some works are timeless.

>guys didn't read the thread at all
>proceeds to repeat the same shit said in the first third of the thread
Thanks for your input mate.

Nice example of cherry picking. But you only know they're garbage because you compared them with version from other sources, which is pretty much what I'm advocating for in .

>guy admits he makes uses of myth
>therefore his authenticity is totally unassailable
>only modern historian use Rome as mouthpiece
>of course let's only mention Livy because there is only one primary source, and let's forget everyone who has written in his time or after him

Essentially you just like Livy and can't be bothered to read anything else. Why pretend to be part of a conversation about history then?

I know there are other people but Livy is the one who covered everything from the founding of Rome to the death of Drusus.

Thucydides was a general not some basedboy who has trouble lifting a glass of water or a book

You still need other people for other eras, not to mention it's interesting to check for inconsistencies.
If two contemporaries disagree on how an event happened it's interesting, if the agree it's also interesting. You can't do history from a single source unless you have no choice.

Kagan's a great scholar, but he tried too hard to compare history to the modern world for good boy points (i.e. WW1, Vietnam, Iraq)

I really don't get how people keep saying this
I fell for this meme (and btw don't do the same thing, Xenophon's Hellenica is entirely fucking useless and it's sad that it survived to the modern day when so much else was lost) and Thucydides was BY FAR the most enjoyable and easy to get through of the three.
There are so many genuinely riveting sections
>His telling of how the plague tore though Athens
>Pericles' speech at the funeral for the dead soldiers
>The siege, escape of the soldiers an eventual destruction of Plataea
>The siege of Melos
>Cleon being a bitch for ages but then shocking everyone by turning up at Pylos and winning the day, then going out like a madman at Amphipolis and taking Brasidas down with him
>Alcibiades and everything to do with the Sicilian expedition
The list goes on...

Thucydides is startlingly accurate, right down the the bones. Herodotus was much more enjoyable for me, mostly because he lied often and well ( the latter was the better storyteller, despite the first's detail).

Then don’t read terrible modern ‘history’ books? And your comment about Livy just proves my point. It’s interesting, but should not be read first if understanding history is your primary goal.

I hate it when people do that. The worst one has to be ROME IS JUST LIKE THE USA

>Good historians are objective

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Hellenica is genius. It's a difficult text to be sure, but certainly a useful and interesting one.

I only post to impress 5 o'clock, and even then it's just tangential (and mutual).

I don't know about his other work, but I've Just finished his Peloponnesian War book and no where in it does he do that iirc. And yes, it is annoying