THUCYDIDES: THE JOWETT TRANSLATION

Spartan hoplite helmet, 490 BCE. Special thanks to www.hellenic-art.com for permission to use this image.

Scanned and edited specially for Peithô's Web, our web edition of Benjamin Jowett's translation of Thucydides* includes red section links to the Perseus Project. For faster downloads, please use the Thucydides-passages tool.

BOOKS

I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.

Chapter links that mark ends of war years covered by Thucydides
1st 431 BCE	2nd 430 BCE	3rd 429 BCE	4th 428 BCE	5th 427 BCE	6th 426 BCE	7th 425 BCE	8th 424 BCE	9th 423 BCE	10th 422 BCE
2.47	2.70	2.103	3.25	3.88	3.116	4.51	4.116	4.135	5.20
11th 421 BCE	12th 420 BCE	13th 419 BCE	14th 418 BCE	15th 417 BCE	16th 416 BCE	17th 415 BCE	18th 414 BCE	19th 413 BCE	20th 412 BCE	21st 411 BCE
5.39	5.51	5.56	5.81	5.83	6.7	6.93	7.18	8.6	8.60	8.109

Table adapted from Jowett. The Pelopponesian War began in earnest when Thebes invaded Plataea in early spring, 431 BCE (2.1). Thucydides intended his history to cover all 27 years of the war, "up to the destruction of the Athenian empire and the taking of Piraeus and the Long Walls" (5.26), but the account breaks off suddenly in the war's 21st year.

USING THE THUCYDIDES-PASSAGES TOOL

You can use the Thucydides passages tool at the top of each page to grab single chapters, a range of chapters or your own groupings of chapters from the Jowett translation of Thucydides.

To display a single chapter ...

Use the format: Book number dot Chapter number. For example, the first chapter in Thucydides is 1.1 and the last chapter is 8.109.

To display a range of chapters within a book ...

Use a hyphen between the first and last chapters of the range you want. For example, 2.35-46 grabs Pericles' Funeral Oration. 5.85-116 retrieves the chilling Melian Dialogue. The second chapter number must be larger than the first: don't use 7.84-5; use 7.84-85

To display diverse chapters together on a page ...

Separate multiple requests by commas. For example, the request 4.59-64,6.33-34,6.76-80 gathers the three major speeches of Hermocrates together in one web page.

Shortcuts to passages at the Perseus Project ...

Selecting the Perseus Project Crawley translation or the Perseus Project Greek text in the drop-down box offers handy shortcuts to single chapters at the mighty Perseus Project Thucydides. You cannot grab ranges, multiple requests or add titles to these Perseus Project shortcuts.

From Thucydides, translated into English, to which is prefixed an essay on inscriptions and a note on the geography of Thucydides, by Benjamin Jowett. Second edition. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1900. Jowett's footnotes have been converted to endnotes. Be aware that: (1) Jowett's currency conversions to English pounds reflect his times, not ours, and (2) the end notes to his 1883 first edition were omitted from his revised second edition in 1900, though his footnotes occasionally refer to these omitted notes.

Special thanks to Hellenic-art.com for graciously permitting images of their ancient art and replicas of armor and weapons to appear in our Thucydides pages.

The tiled background image comes from the the Architectural Ornament collection created by the Architectural Engineering Graduate Students Association of The Pennsylvania State University.