For 2400 years, Thucydides' account of the great war between Athens and Sparta has been the classic example of how a democracy can defeat itself. An eyewitness, Thucydides recognized in the disastrous outbreak of political frenzy a prolongedd act of suicide. The war shattered the Greek city states and marked the downfall of the glory that was Greece. Hobbes, too, was witness to political catastrophe—civil war threatening England, and on the Continent that breakdown of civil order which posterity would call "the Thirty Years War," as the Peloponnesian War had been called. Hobbes saw, as Thucydides had, the repeated folly that men commit. Against the turbulent background of the early 17th century, in the ageless English of King James's day, he wrote "by long odds the greatest translation of Thucydides in English."
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