'My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever,' Thucydides

Ancient Greek historian Thucydides' masterful first-hand account of the three decades of war between Athens and Sparta during the 5th century BC. It was a life-and-death struggle that reshaped the face of ancient Greece and pitted Athenian democracy against brutal Spartan militarism.

Thucydides himself was an Athenian aristocrat and general who went on to chronicle what he saw as the greatest and most devastating war of all time, applying a passion for accuracy and a contempt for myth admired by historians and journalists today. As the father of modern Realpolitik, his influence fed into the works of Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbs and the politics of the Cold War and beyond.

Thucydides' masterful account of the end of Greece's Golden Age, depicts an age of revolution, sea battles, military alliances, plague and massacre, but also great bravery and some of the greatest political oratory of all time.

Today: from the glorification to the devastation of Athens - Pericles' great funeral speech and the plague that followed.

Abridger: Tom Holland is an award-winning novelist and historian, specialising in the classical and medieval periods, who has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC.
Reader: David Horovitch
Producer: Justine Willett. Show less