Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- Principal dates
- Biographical notes
- Greek deities, heroes and mythological figures
- Greek terms for distances, coinage and the calendar
- Map 1. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 2. Peloponnese and Central Greece
- Map 3. Western Asia Minor and Hellespont
- Map 4. Sicily and South Italy
- The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
- Appendix 1 Notes on the Greek text: variations from the OCT
- Appendix 2 Thucydides in the ancient world: a selection of texts
- Bibliography and further reading
- Synopsis of contents
- Synopsis of speeches
- Glossary
- Index of names
- General index
Appendix 1 - Notes on the Greek text: variations from the OCT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Introduction
- Principal dates
- Biographical notes
- Greek deities, heroes and mythological figures
- Greek terms for distances, coinage and the calendar
- Map 1. Greece and the Aegean
- Map 2. Peloponnese and Central Greece
- Map 3. Western Asia Minor and Hellespont
- Map 4. Sicily and South Italy
- The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians
- Appendix 1 Notes on the Greek text: variations from the OCT
- Appendix 2 Thucydides in the ancient world: a selection of texts
- Bibliography and further reading
- Synopsis of contents
- Synopsis of speeches
- Glossary
- Index of names
- General index
Summary
I have commented briefly in the introduction (pp. xxvi–xxvii) on the very different circumstances in which what we think of as ‘texts’ were written and disseminated in the ancient world. We do not have an exact copy of the work that Thucydides wrote, either in its original form or with such revisions as he made himself as he proceeded with it over the course of twenty-five years or more. He did not live to complete the work or the revisions, and in this sense there never has been a single, authoritative ‘master text’, which we could in principle recover. Moreover, even in Thucydides’ day, the versions produced by successive scribes will have contained copying mistakes, which other scribes will have attempted to correct, so introducing further mistakes, and no two ancient copies will have been identical in every respect. Our own texts are derived from just a few medieval manuscripts that also differ from each other and are themselves derived from these earlier versions, many times recopied.
There is a huge scholarship on this textual tradition. See J. S. Rusten's edition of book II (1989), pp. 28–32 and his Thucydides, pp. 481–2 for a summary and a list of some of the main works.
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- ThucydidesThe War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, pp. 581 - 590Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013