Thucydides seems both very distant and very near to us. Distant in the sense that the battle techniques, modes of communication, names of people and of places are details mostly confusing and foreign. Near in that the broader strategic and historical conclusions sound painfully familiar. Thucydides' opening paragraphs about the Sicilian Expedition could have been read by any aspiring imperial power as proof that yhtheir attempts at overreach will always fail - but that they'll always be attempted anyhow.

Thucydides' resigned wisdom seems like this book's most distinctive and valuable quality. It's depressing, of course, that 2400 years ago someone already had figured this out, but somehow also reassuring. The details are often hard to follow, and the narrative thread wears thin by going on so any directions at once, and many sentences are train wrecks, but the grander parts still struck me as universal.