Yeah, right... whatever...

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They sure had long breaths back then.

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Yes. That's Greek lunguage.

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:)Just saying Hello and goodbye must have taken the whole day.

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Those commas in the text must be a modern addition to make it easier to parse it. I don't think they had those in Thucydides' days, so it must have been even harder.

Kalinixta!

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surely they had SOME form of punctuation. Even the bible had various types of commas, full-stops etc. Though I'm not sure at what point in history they were put there...

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Punctuation in classical times was more or less non existent, in most cases they didn't even separate the words. yestheywrotelikethis (even worse, only capitals)

Those manuscripts I've worked with (in Latin, from 950 & 1280) didn't have any punctuation at all, but the printed matter from the renaissance has, but I don't really know enough of the subject to be precise. (Which means I'll have to pick up a book on the subject next time I pass the library).

Or does anyone know more than me?

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see below.

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Quite right. Punctuation and lowercase letters were introduced to Greek by medieval scholars.

Naturally, adding punctuation is an act of interpretation, and different editions of the classical texts do vary in punctuation not infrequently, according to the editor's interpretation of the sentence.

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Дорогой, так дело не пойдет!

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Come on, it looks impressive.

Think of it as some kind of mid-life crisis. Some people get a high speed car chariot, some a pretty new girlfriend, and some write long complicated sentences without logical stops that make them famous and frighten people for thousands of years. Or the editor went out of full stops.

Where is it from? (To lazy to bother to find out myself)

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Hmm, interesting theory. I bet Thucydides would have gotten a tremendous kick out of knowing we still study his work. He certainly intended it as "a legacy for ages to come". I doubt he envisioned anyone but Greeks of ages to come would be reading this, but hey, life's strange and interesting...

This sentence comprises the entire second paragraph of book one, chapter nine.

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When you're writing the historical masterpiece of the next two and a half millenia, maintaining gravitas is a must. Yes, it is intimidating - but it's not written for hoi polloi. Gentlemen of leisure, such as exiled generals with loads of silver mines on their hands, have to time to read.

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Oh, definitely!

All kidding aside, it is a masterpiece. It endures the test of time like no other historical work I know. His insights are so sharp! He has truly captured some universal traits of the condition and psyche of human society.

To paraphrase Whitehead, all political and military historical events following Thucydides are footnotes to his grand history.

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Is it the narration of the events or the events that serve as mere footnotes?

Whitehead is known to have said that "all Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato."
Do you have his original wording (that you paraphrased)?

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I did mean the events and not the narration, yes. The events, to an observer who's read Thucydides, must constantly remind key passages in his work.

Quite apart from that, it is probably also true that many historians since his time have followed in his footsteps, certainly in method, if not in style.

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Oh, and as for Whitehead -- I was paraphrasing from memory, of course, but looking it up now, I found: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." attributed to Whitehead. No publication is listed, and it may be apocryphal, but it sure is well-known.

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Ah! I misused the word paraphrase; there's the rub. What I meant was that I am borrowing the form of Whitehead's famous quip, for my content. I did not mean Whitehead discussed Thucydides. I really mischose the principal verb.

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"...ay, there's the rub." -- Hamlet

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