Polly Low’s introduction to this new translation makes the valid point (raised earlier in Low, 2023) that the reception of Thucydides today is greater than in his own times. What is to be found in “the story of a war between two small communities fought in the corner of the Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago” (p. xix)? As often with history, a genre Thucydides shaped rather than identified with (Beasley, 2023), it is more than about the story, but about how the story is told and interpreted. The interpretation is particularly challenging given the remoteness of events and the scarcity of corroborative sources, but this difficulty has not deterred commentators from taking a range of perspectives within histography, political science, and literary studies (evident from Forsdyke et al., 2017). In this context, the experienced classical translator Robin Waterfield revisits a text that famously aims to instruct as much as inform (1.22.4).
The translation is “primarily for history buffs and other general readers, as well as students” (p. ix), and Low’s introduction is well worth reading for those unfamiliar with the political and historical background. Her introduction succinctly covers important concepts such as that of the polis, translated throughout as “city” or “state” (rather than just transliterated), and the complex notion of Hellenic identity in a fractured political environment. There is also engagement with the purpose of the history and Thucydides’ methodology. Insightful is Low’s conclusion about the author’s motivation, “whether Thucydides in fact ever intended anyone to be able to locate a single message in the text, or was less interested in providing the answer to the problems he described than he was in the process of identifying these problems” (pp. xli-xlii). A post-structuralist corollary to this view is that Thucydides puts the onus on the reader to interpret the message.
There is minimal commentary on the process of translation, which perpetuates Jeremy Mynott’s disappointment as to “how little other recent translators of Thucydides [have] had to say about the problems involved in their endeavours” (Mynott, 2023). In particular, Mynott cites the notorious difficulty of Thucydides’ prose with its complex sentences and stylistic effects.
An illustration from book 2 is part of a passage describing the Athenian plague (430-427 BCE) and the hardship faced by those who had fled to Athens from the countryside.
οἰκιῶν γὰρ οὐχ ὑπαρχουσῶν, ἀλλ᾿ ἐν καλύβαις πνιγηραῖς ὥρᾳ ἔτους διαιτωμένων ὁ φθόρος ἐγίγνετο οὐδενὶ κόσμῳ, ἀλλὰ καὶ νεκροὶ ἐπ᾿ ἀλλήλοις ἀποθνῄσκοντες ἔκειντο καὶ ἐν ταῖς ὁδοῖς ἐκαλινδοῦντο καὶ περὶ τὰς κρήνας ἁπάσας ἡμιθνῆτες τοῦ ὕδατος ἐπιθυμίᾳ. (2.52.2)
I compare Robin Waterfield’s translation with the OUP version of Martin Hammond (2009), because coming from a major publisher, it is in wide circulation.
With no houses of their own, and forced to live in huts which at that time of year were stifling, they perished in chaotic conditions: the dead and the dying were piled on top of each other, and half-dead creatures staggered about the streets and round every fountain, craving for water. (Hammond)
There were no houses for them, they lived in shanties that were stifling in the summer heat, and they died in hellish conditions, with the bodies of the dying heaped on one another and the half-dead staggering around in the streets and at all the springs in their craving for water. (Waterfield)
Before comparing translations, we should pause to contemplate the horror of the scene and Thucydides’ humanity in focusing on the marginalised in the general carnage.
This is a complex sentence. The main clause is ὁ φθόρος ἐγίγνετο οὐδενὶ κόσμῳ but there are a number of finite and non-finite clauses tacked on, beginning with the genitive absolute οἰκιῶν γὰρ οὐχ ὑπαρχουσῶν. Waterfield feels a little more free with the Greek compared to Hammond. For example, Waterfield makes this genitive absolute a finite clause and translates καλύβαις, plural of “hut” according to LSJ, with the more emotive “shanties”. “Hellish conditions” is also a colourful rendering of οὐδενὶ κόσμῳ compared to Hammond’s more literal “chaotic conditions”. A. W. Gomme (1968/2021) notes that the participle in νεκροὶ ἐπ᾿ ἀλλήλοις ἀποθνῄσκοντες ἔκειντο is problematic, since corpses are dead, not dying, and favours a meaning closer to Hammond’s. However, I prefer Waterfield’s “heaped” to Hammond’s “were piled”, because the passive is more suggestive of an agent, people who piled up the corpses, whereas the added tragedy is that these refugees were probably denied even a rudimentary sign of respect. My purpose is not to champion one translation over another, both are accurate and fluent, but to show that Waterfield is not afraid to reshape the Greek if this communicates more fully to the reader.
Anyone evaluating a translation of Thucydides must take into account the speeches. The authenticity of the speeches of Thucydides, the balance between mimesis and historical accuracy, has long been debated, and features in Low’s introduction, but their contribution to the work is not in doubt. Simon Hornblower (1994) is correct that the force of the speeches depends largely on their role in the narrative, so it is a little contrived to isolate a portion out of context.
However, this excerpt from book 7 gives a flavour of how the speeches are rendered. Before inflicting a final defeat on the Athenians in the ναυμαχία off Sicily (413 BCE), the Syracusan leadership address their army:
Ὅτι μὲν καλὰ τὰ προειργασμένα καὶ ὑπὲρ καλῶν τῶν μελλόντων ὁ ἀγὼν ἔσται, ὦ Συρακόσιοι καὶ ξύμμαχοι, οἵ τε πολλοὶ δοκεῖτε ἡμῖν εἰδέναι (οὐδὲ γὰρ ἂν οὕτως αὐτῶν προθύμως ἀντελάβεσθε), καὶ εἴ τις μὴ ἐπὶ ὅσον δεῖ ᾔσθηται, σημανοῦμεν. Ἀθηναίους γὰρ ἐς τὴν χώραν τήνδε ἐλθόντας πρῶτον μὲν ἐπὶ τῆς Σικελίας καταδουλώσει, ἔπειτ᾿, εἰ κατορθώσειαν, καὶ τῆς Πελοποννήσου καὶ τῆς ἄλλης Ἑλλάδος, καὶ ἀρχὴν τὴν ἤδη μεγίστην τῶν τε πρὶν Ἑλλήνων καὶ τῶν νῦν κεκτημένους, πρῶτοι ἀνθρώπων ὑποστάντες τῷ ναυτικῷ, ᾧπερ πάντα κατέσχον, τὰς μὲν νενικήκατε ναυμαχίας, τὴν δ᾿ ἐκ τοῦ εἰκότος νῦν νικήσετε. (7.66.1–2)
Syracusans and allies, we’re sure that most of you are aware of the glory of what you’ve already achieved and know that future glory is at stake in the coming contest, because otherwise you wouldn’t have applied yourself so assiduously to your duties. But it may be that some of you don’t see this as clearly as you should, so we’ll spell it out. The Athenians, who already had the largest empire of any Greeks, past or present, came to this country with the intention of enslaving Sicily first, and then, if things went well for them here, of doing the same to the Peloponnese and the rest of Greece. No one before you had ever offered resistance to their navy, the instrument with which they gained all their possessions, but by now you’ve won several battles against them at sea and you have every reason to think that you’re going to defeat them again now.
Again, Waterfield shows flexibility in handling the Greek. For instance, the vocative “Syracusans and allies” is fronted, which reads easier than beginning with a long subordinate, Ὅτι (That) …, sequence. The lexis is also informal in places, giving a flavour of spoken language. Examples are the contractions, “we’re…we’ll…you’ve”, and the idiomatic “we’ll spell it out” for σημανοῦμεν (literally, “we will show by a sign”). However, sensibly the translation does not go too far in colloquialism, as that would undermine the gravitas of the pre-battle address. Semantic accuracy is also not sacrificed. For instance, Waterfield follows Kenneth Dover (1965/2021) in translating ἐκ τοῦ εἰκότος as “you have every reason to think” rather than Charles Forster Smith’s “in all probability” (Smith, 1923).
This is a translation which does much to convince the reader of why Thucydides matters. The narrative is highly readable because it does not follow the Greek text slavishly but makes judicious changes that retain the sense and original feel in a contemporary style. The reader will find portions difficult, but Thucydides and the questions he raises are difficult. Crucially, Waterfield’s translation does not obscure the central themes in Thucydides and why the description of a localised conflict has wider repercussions for how we conceive of and represent war. Given that two and a half millennia later there is no sign that humans have progressed beyond using war as an instrument of conflict resolution, the tragic paradox of fighting to end fighting, Thucydides remains grimly fascinating.
References
Beasley, T. (2023). Thucydidean Self-Presentation. In P. Low (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides (pp. 31–49). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dover, K. J. (Ed.). (2021). Thucydides. Book VII. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1965).
Forsdyke, S., Foster, E., & Balot, R. (Eds.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of Thucydides. Oxford University Press
Gomme, A. W. (2021). A historical commentary on Thucydides. Vol. 2, The Ten Years’ War. Books II-III. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1968).
Hammond, M. (2009). Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War (P. J. Rhodes, Ed.). Oxford University Press.
Hornblower, S. (1994). Thucydides. Duckworth.
Low, P. (2023). Introduction. In P. Low (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Thucydides (pp. 1–14). Cambridge University Press.
Mynott, J. (2023). Translating Thucydides. In P. Low (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides (pp. 317–330). chapter, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, C. F. (Trans.). (1923). Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War, Volume IV: Books 7-8. General Index. Loeb Classical Library 169. Harvard University Press.