The History of the Grecian War: in Eight Books ... Translated by Thomas Hobbes

London: Printed by Andrew Clark for Charles Harper, 1676. Second edition of the Hobbes translation (first printed in 1629), "much Corrected and Amended. Engraved title-page by Thomas Cecill in nine compartments, with central oval portrait of Thucydides, and 5 engraved maps and plans (3 folding). [46], 357, [11] pp. 1 vols. Folio. Nineteenth-century half brown calf and marbled boards, rebacked in brown morocco with orange leather spine labels. Front inner hinge reinforced with cloth tape, inner margin of engraved title likewise (image unaffected), one small cellotape repair to verso of first folding map, map of Syracuse splitting along fold, small, marginal wormhole to first few leaves (text unaffected). Overall, a sound, sturdy, clean copy, complete with all plates. Nineteenth-century presentation inscription at the head of the first page of the dedication. Second edition of the Hobbes translation (first printed in 1629), "much Corrected and Amended". Engraved title-page by Thomas Cecill in nine compartments, with central oval portrait of Thucydides, and 5 engraved maps and plans (3 folding). [46], 357, [11] pp. 1 vols. Folio. An "Everlasting Possession": Hobbes' Thucydides. The last lifetime edition of Thomas Hobbes's magisterial translation - the first in English translated from the Greek - of Thucydides' timeless history of the Pelopponesian War and its devastating effect on Athens. Hobbes, author of LEVIATHAN, found much to learn of the "state of nature" and the breakdown of civilisation in this ancient historian's unsentimental and unflinching account of the brutalization of a great democracy by a prolonged state of war. In his introduction, Hobbes writes that "the faculty of writing history" was "at its highest" in Thucydides and that "for the principal and proper work of history being to instruct, and enable men by the knowledge of actions past to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently in the future, there is not extant any other (merely human) that doth more fully and naturally perform it than Thucydides." Thucydides himself saw the momentous implications of his story, and wrote in the first book: "To hear this History rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no Fables, shall be perhaps not delightful; but he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable; and it is compiled rather as an Everlasting Possession, than to be rehearsed as a Prize." Hobbes' translation was his first major work, published in 1629. Not exactly a bestseller, remaining sheets (with slightly altered title-pages) were issued in 1634 and 1648. This new, corrected edition appeared three years before Hobbes' death in 1679.

Thucydides and the other Greek classic works of history would become favorites of many of the Founding Fathers, with Thomas Jefferson famously writing to John Adams in 1812: " I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier" Wing T1134