HERODOTUS, THUCYDIDES, AND US

...Such illustrations would increase the books' prices, but they would differentiate the translations from existing editions in an already-crowded market—and give relief to the uninitiated reader who tries to plow through the unfamiliar landscape of ancient Greece...

...Herodotus too is receiving new attention, perhaps more than Thucy-dides...

...As if to anticipate ankle-biting from philologists in classics departments, Blanco adds, "I offer no apologies...

...In the translator Robin Water-field's hands, Herodotus does not appear archaic or charming, but matter-of-fact and unpretentious—just the flavor of this native Dorian Greek's mastery of Ionic Greek prose...

...What is lost here in literary elegance from previous translations (especially the great George Rawlinson version) is gained by a more literal rendering of the Greek and the absence of artifice...

...Robert Strassler, a philhellenic businessman, recently edited a user-friendly edition of Thucydides (for which I wrote the introduction) that was chosen as a selection by both the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club...

...Thus, to judge the excellence and usefulness of this new generation of translations, we must pose two questions...

...Carolyn Dewald has provided a readable thirty-three-page introduction, but its discussion of parataxis, narrative units, associative thinking, and ring composition, will lose that same general reader who was first attracted by the beauty of the edition...

...How well do these recent editions serve this specialized academic audience...

...In all the new editions, the hundreds of pages of the text are curiously unadorned...

...If we are really to appeal to those outside the university, to convince them that reading about the history of the ancient world is not only pleasurable but vital to understanding culture, then an entirely different approach in formatting and presentation is necessary—one that is not only unlike, but perhaps even antithetical to, the usual manner in which classicists have produced their translated texts...

...Blanco and Roberts, unlike Lattimore, aim for an audience beyond the professoriat—their footnotes, though far too rare, are concise and readable and do not require knowledge of the tools of classical scholarship or the Greek language...

...Graduate students would do well to purchase Lattimore's edition for its close translation and erudite learning...

...In texts that run five-hundred pages, with dozens of strange place names in a single paragraph, maps are needed in abundance—fifty or more, rather than a mere handful...

...Like the other editions, the Oxford Herodotus has a glossary of Greek terms and foreign words, an index of proper names, and line maps...

...Written by political scientists, classicists, and historians, these "Interpretations" discuss the traditional controversies that surround the historian: Was Thucydides a realist...

...lege classics majors nor the classically minded members of the adult reading public add up to very many readers of Greek historical literature...

...All these selections touch on popular academic interests in Thucy-dides, if at times having the unintentional effect of making us forget that Thucydides was foremost a military historian and battle veteran, who described a horrific war replete with blood-curdling accounts of disease, the butchery at Mycalessus, and the slaughter on Sicily...

...These recent editions—and more are on the way—are the best of what classicists call "responsible popularization," and they make a genuine effort at using the standard scholarly protocols—introduction, text, notes, appendices, bibliography—to make a text more accessible to those outside the discipline...

...Every once in a while flukes do occur...

...Somewhat different is the Norton edition translated by Walter Blanco and edited by Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts...

...But what puts this Norton edition on the right track for general readers is the 150 pages of selected auxiliary readings at the book's end...

...Lattimore provides four maps, a list of the 141 speeches, a fine if brief introduction, and short synopses at the beginning of each chapter...

...With these two new additions, teachers may now pick and choose from over ten translations of Thucydides in print, predicating their selection of the particular edition on the emphases—historical, political, philological—of their own courses...

...His purpose is to show how the gods eventually punish the hubris of wrongdoing—the loser Xerxes is rich and arrogant, the victorious Greeks middling and modest...

...Familiar Greek names are not Latinized into their more familiar forms (the text has "Peri-kles," for example, instead of "Pericles), and Lattimore is willing to forgo the beauty and power of the Crawley or Hobbes translations, which sometimes came at the price of a literal and exact rendering of Thucy-dides' text...

...Nearly all new translations of the Greek historians are designed to capture a slice of this static market from the previous editions issued by such commercial publishers as Penguin and the Modern Library or from university presses...

...Crawley's elegant (and politically incorrect) translation of Pericles' boast that "We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy," for instance, becomes the absolutely flat "We love beauty while practicing economy and we love wisdom without being enervated...

...And they should be printed in the text, rather than at the end of the book (like the fourteen in the Norton edition...

...Mini-summaries should break up the text, to help the reader who is buried under the dozens of place and personal names that dot every page...

...Just as Lattimore's Hackett edition is ideal for classicists, so the Norton Thucydides now replaces previous paperback editions of Thucydides for advanced students...

...Students may find these editions superior to either the old Penguin or Modern Library edition, but in the end I doubt very much that the translators will convince readers outside assigned college courses to take up Thucydides and Herodotus...

...Sadly, the answer to the latter question is probably not...

...So the general public rarely buys books on the ancient world, much less translations of the Greek historians...

...A reading of some notable Thucydidean cruxes suggests that Blanco is overly modest and in fact gives us good English and often colloquial prose that is at the same time quite faithful to Thucy-dides' Greek...

...This audience is not enormous, numbering somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand students nationwide, almost all of them assigned Herodotus or Thucy-dides, and in very rare cases Xenophon or Polybius, as part of their required texts...

...Then eleven essays follow on aspects of Thucydides' method, style, and outlook...

...None of these new editions has illustrations, and there should be, in an ideal edition, dozens of pho-tographs—from hoplite soldiers to triremes, pictures of battlefields, and vase-paintings of Greeks at work and play...

...The edition is well produced and inexpensive, and will be used profitably by classical scholars and ancient historians who desire a literal translation and a quick review of standard reference work on Thucydides...

...Who does buy such books is the captive audience of college undergraduates and graduate students enrolled in Greek history courses and a few related classes in western civilization, humanities, and ancient literature...

...The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom...

...Through either the brilliance of the translation, or the array of aids for the general reader (maps, illustrations, glossaries, headers and footers, introductions, appendices), or perhaps the sheer beauty and quality of the published product, can any such books attract the public back to reading about the Persian Wars or the great twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War between Athens and Spar- ta...

...Still, the appendices and the bibliography seem to make the Norton edition more helpful for those in advanced political-science classes and for graduate students who work with Thucydides in such fields as historiography and international relations...

...Steven Lattimore's Hackett edition of Thucydides is unusual in that Professor Lattimore, a gifted Greek scholar, is both translator and commentator...

...And because Herodotus' history is not linear, but rather a stitched-together account of the rise of the Persian empire and the nature of Scythia, Egypt, Lydia, and early Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries, he has gained the erroneous reputation of a historian whom we read more for pleasure than for enlightenment...

...These pages are more intellectually accessible than Lattimore's specialized footnotes, but more physically inaccessible because they are at the back of the book...

...Unlike the later historian— with his methodical analysis of cause and effect, nature and culture, word and deed, and his fascination for distinguishing objective and subjective truth—Herodotus remains outside the intellectual ferment and fads of late-fifth-century Athens and so should appeal more to general readers...

...But with classics in such dire shape, we can ill afford publishing in a single year multiple new translations of Thucydides and Herodotus that are aimed at the same academic reader and not qualitatively different from one another...

...Some of these notes are between twenty and thirty lines and of little use to the Greekless reader (typically referring to the Gomme and Hornblower commentaries of the Greek text...

...About one classics major graduates in America each year for every four or five classics professors—and for every twenty journal articles written annually on ancient Greece and Rome...

...Of all the recent translations, the 704-page Oxford Waterfield and Dewald edition is clearly aimed at a more upscale reader who appreciates beautiful printing, a hard cover, and an artistic jacket...

...Dewald provides a timeline correlating the Histories with events in and outside Greece, and gives appendices on clothing, weights, money, and measurement...

...Was he secular, irrational, objective, subjective, a scientific historian, or a gifted literary artist...

...Ancient selections from Xeno-phon, Herodotus, and Plato given as "Backgrounds and Contexts" touch on some of the historiographical and philosophical concerns of Thucy-dides, and these are amplified by selections from Machiavelli and Hobbes...

...Indeed, he is currently a favorite with postmodernists and multiculturalists who have misinterpreted his excursuses as fictions and wrongly seen his genuine interest in the Eastern Mediterranean as an absence of chauvinism about the superior culture of the Greek citystate...

...But in general it is safe to say that neither the handful of colVictor Davis Hanson is the co-author, with John Heath, of the recent Who Killed Homer...

...All these practical aides could be included in a paperback edition at little additional cost...

...His aim clearly is to produce for scholars a handy literal translation of The Peloponnesian War replete with footnotes that refer to the specialized bibliography at the back of the book...

...And, far more important, are any designed to break out from the confines of the university...

...When classicists run for the national offices of their professional organizations, their CVs list the impressive number of years off from teaching that they have had on fellowships and grants—as proof of their intentions to emphasize classroom instruction...

...Perhaps the industry of academic careerism (tenure, promotion, and professional advancement through publication) helps explain why new translations are now breeding like rabbits—when formal study of the ancient world is at an all-time low...

...What were his views on hegemonic warfare...

...Blanco, an English professor, strives for readability at the expense of "the compressed, often crabbed syntax of the speeches" and has "adopted a relatively colloquial vocabulary for them and for the narrative as whole...

...Glossaries at the back are valuable, but far better are definitions of Greek terms and practices at the bottom of every page...

...The bandaged archaeologist in The English Patient had a copy of Herodotus by his bedside, and publishers reported a slight surge in sales of English transla- tions of Herodotus, as moviegoers associated a beautiful nurse and a tragic love affair with the nighttime reading of a classical text...

...In this zero-sum market, every new edition of Thucydides and Herodotus means fewer sales for any particular translation...

...There are nearly 150 pages of notes on the text that elucidate questions of topography, history, and Herodotus' references to contemporaries...

...Instead of the repetitive title and book number in small print at the top margin of the pages, we need informative headers, footers, and sidebars that on every page include dates, subsection numbers, and small synopses of the narrative...

...But today's undergraduates—who increasingly do not read more than a thousand lines of English an hour— will find little help here and may just as well use the edition of T. E. Wick, whose pocket size and larger print at least provide greater convenience...