2023-24 Academic Catalog

We will meet once a week to read and discuss Books 1 and 2 of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Thomas Hobbes’s famed translation of 1628 (subsequent books will be discussed in courses offered in the Winter and Spring terms). We will attend to the literary art and to the political and social contexts of the original Greek, as well as to Hobbes’s recontextualization of it to the England of the 1620s. This bifocal approach may provoke insights into our current predicament.