BCP Greek Texts - Böcker

This school/university student edition of "Thucydides: Book I" by E.C. Marchant, consisting of Greek text, extensive philological notes and indexes, is supplemented by a useful later introduction and bibliography by Thomas Weidemann, covering the context and aims of the work and giving essential background to the events described.

Plato's Socrates, in prison and being urged to flee execution, raises in acute form, and for the first time in European thought, a central question: is it right to disobey the state? Socrates' controversial answer in "Crito" has generated much contemporary literature, but no English commentary of the Greek text for seventy-five years. This new edition aims to provide an up-to-date literary and philosophical analysis suitable for a wide range of readers, including those with post-beginners Greek. It represents an ideal introduction, not only to the social and philosophical world of Classical Greece, but also to the personality of one of its greatest thinkers.

Book VI of Thucydides deals, through its speeches in particular, with Athenian motivation towards sending the great expedition to Sicily, with the attitudes of various factions involved, and with the seeds of the expedition's ultimate disastrous conclusion. It contains memorable sections on Alcibiades, on the Athenians' excitement at the sailing, on the mutilation of the Herms and a digression on the fall of Athenian tyranny a century earlier. This edition, with introduction and notes, is designed to help senior school and university students read, understand and enjoy Thycydides. Its notes aim to assist translation, draw attention to features of language and style characteristic of the author, make explicit what the author took for granted in his original Greek audience, comment on the historical background, and offer grounds on which to reach decisions as to whether the author's historical statements are true or false.