Thucydides

Thucydides was an Athenian general who lost Amphipolis to the Spartans in 424 BCE, was exiled for twenty years, and used them to write the History of the Peloponnesian War, of which he had been a participant and which he did not live to finish. He wrote, he said, not to please but as a possession for all time, and the speeches he composed for the actors, Pericles’s funeral oration, the Mytilenean debate, the Melian dialogue, and the account of the plague and the Sicilian disaster, are the founding texts of political realism. Hobbes translated him first, and every student of power since has read him.