Thucydides Mythistoricus (Routledge Revivals) Paperback – 14 August 2015

A truly excellent approach to Thucydides. Full of insight. Five star!

This book is essential for the study of Thucydides. Its standpoint was a great novelty when it appeared in 1907, and it has been read and quoted by practically everyone who has since had something to say on the subject. It is therefore fortunate that it is now available in a Kindle edition. Unfortunately though the abundant Greek quotations that the book contains have not been digitized with care and teem with printing mistakes that make most of them unreadable (except perhaps to an expert philologist who can reconstruct the Greek from the gibberish that appears on the screen). When I first downloaded the book to my iPhone and iPad I complained about this to Amazon. I was told that the faults I found were not Amazon's fault, but Apple's, who has not provided the said devices with access to polytonic Greek. This is true indeed, and all kinds of diacriticals are shown when I view the book on my Mac, using the Kindle for Mac application. But this does not eliminate the typos but rather makes them more obvious: e.g. on p. 152, quoting Plutarch, de malignitate Herodotis 3 (855D), Kindle for Mac offers this: αί γὰρ εκί καὶ παρατροὶ τήδ ίστορία. This is supposed to stand for: αἱ γὰρ ἐκβολαὶ καὶ παρατροπαὶ τῆς ἱστορίας. And, believe me, this is very far from being an exceptional case.