The Mind of Thucydides (Cornell Studies in Classical Philology)

Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010) was the author of more than thirty books on the literature and history of ancient Greece; among her many honors, she was the first woman Professor of the Collège de France, and in 1989 was the second woman elected to the Académie Française. Hunter R. Rawlings III is President of the Association of American Universities and Professor of Classics and Histor

She treats the history like a piece of intellectual art and Thucydides like an artist." Nikolaus Overtoom, Louisiana State University, H-War (May 2014) "Students at every level, from undergraduates to advanced scholars, will be grateful for this English translation of Histoire et raison chez Thucydide, the best of all Jacqueline de Romilly's many and distinguished publications on Thucydides, and one of the best books on Thucydides of any period and in any language. "Rawlings has done a great favor to students of Thucydides by making Romilly's work available to an English-speaking audience

Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book's original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides.Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Thucydides' mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. A