'The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men," the Greek historian Thucydides wrote, and we moderns will always be ready to wake them from the slumber of their fame. ...
Tracy Lee Simmons. WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD Tracy Lee Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia For Greek And Latin and director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. *Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, by Donald Kagan, Viking.
'The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men," the Greek historian Thucydides wrote, and we moderns will always be ready to wake them from the slumber of their fame.
One of the most eminently and, now, predictably quotable figures of the classical world, Thucydides assuredly deserves his press. Few so well understood the machinations of the human heart and mind when facing the extremities of the human predicament - plague, betrayal, defeat and abject humiliation in war - and fewer still could distil the hard-won wisdom of experience into tight, shimmering phrases and radiant, lapidary passages, which is why so many generations of students have had to read him.
