Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes, 1628.

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Thomas Hobbes, 1628. 

In 1629, Hobbes published the first English translation, directly from the Greek, of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Beyond the text, this edition included a map representing Greece at the time of Thucydides, which Hobbes drew himself. Students of Literature Humanities, among other readers, may associate Thucydides’s text with pro-democratic sentiments, given the enduring popularity of Pericles’s Funeral Oration (included in the History), and it’s famous defense of Athenian democracy. However, it is likely that Hobbes may have been more attuned to the pro-monarchical aspects of the work that may be mined from its central coverage of the decline of Athenian democracy.

In his autobiography, Hobbes maintains that Thucydides was of interest to him because, of all historians, “he shows how incompetent democracy is.”