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Entry | Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. A new Translation by Rex Warner

Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. A new Translation by Rex Warner

Typology: Translation | Language: English | Place of publication: London | Publisher: Penguin Books | Year: 1954

Greek Text: no

Content: Complete Work

Rex Warner (1905-1986), writer, teacher, and translator, Professor at the University of Connecticut for eleven years starting in 1962. Warner studied Classics at Oxford. Some of his early politically engaged works condemned fascist and Nazi regimes. Later, he focused on historical novels set in the classical world – his Imperial Caesar, published in 1960, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. During World War II, he served in the British Home Guard. From 1945 to 1947, Warner was director of the British Institute in Athens. He also translated Aeschylus, Euripides, and Plutarch. ODBN

Rex Warner's version gained wide popularity, to the point of inspiring a dedicated commentary: Cartwright, Historical Commentary on Thucydides: Companion to Rex Warner's Penguin Translation (Michigan, 1997). The translation was revised, with a new introduction by M.I. Finley, and appendices, in 1972 – see Finley-Warner 1972.

Text (note: the book's heading incorrectly dates Warner's first translation to 1916, due to a digitization error).

Translation’s intermediaries

Translation partly indebted to Hobbes and Crawley.

Related editions:

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner with an Introduction and Notes by M. I. Finley

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Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. A new Translation by Rex Warner

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