RECENT RESEARCH ON THUCYDIDES

Thucydidean scholarship can seem rather like the Hydra.The sheer quantity of literature has long been daunting.That literature, like its subject, is often austere; it remains multilingual; it is increasingly scattered across journals and edited volumes.But most Hydra-like of all is its multi-disciplinarity. Thucydidean scholarship spans literature, history, philosophy, political science, international relations and morewhich, on the one hand, reflects something of the text itself, but, on the other, poses more or less unique challenges for the student.I will focus on scholarship from the last fifteen years or so (and will hardly scratch the surface of that); but that story of fragmentation really goes back half a century, at least, despite intermittent attempts at counteracting it.That fragmentation continues to yield a rich variety of approaches and indeed questions: some of these we are at the start of reckoning with, others are very old and now appearing in new forms.But the deepest questions remain those that reach across disciplinary dividesabove all: what do we really want from Thucydides' text?Since the final volume of S. Hornblower's masterly commentary, there has been a proliferation of introductory resources and reference works. 1 For the complete novice, there is now a volume in the 'Very Short Introduction' series. 2 On top of the old Brill Companion, which remains valuable, we now have a wide-ranging Oxford Handbook and a more focused Cambridge Companion. 3 In English alone, there are new, student-oriented commentaries to Books 1, 3, 6 and 7. 4 'Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics' commentaries on Books 1 and 4 are in preparation.Three major new English translations have been published 5one very recentlyas well as a translated selection of speeches.