Style and Necessity in Thucydides

Auteur

Tobias Joho, Lecturer in Classics, University of Bern Tobias Joho is a lecturer at the Department of Classics of the University of Bern in Switzerland. His research interests include ancient Greek historiography and the modern fascination with ancient Greece. He has published journal articles on various aspects of Thucydides and contributed an essay entitled "Thucydides, Epic, and Tragedy" to the Oxford Handbook of Thucydides. He has also written scholarly articles on Jacob Burckhardt's reflections on the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, on both Burckhardt's and Nietzsche's engagement with the "agonal spirit" of the Greeks, and on the distinctive style of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities.

Texte du rabat

Thucydides is well known for his fondness for abstract nominal phrases. As Joho shows in this book, these constructions often imply that people are passively exposed to events. Unlike Thucydides' predecessors, however, he anchors necessity not in the divine but in the constraints imposed by human nature.