Hobbes, Thucydides and Athenian Democracy

In seventeenth-century England, intellectual and political elites shared a widespread bias against Athenian democracy, which tended to be interpreted as a dangerous class rule, where the poorest and politically untutored citizens participate in state affairs, pursuing their own interests at the expense of the commonwealth. This representation was largely based on an attentive reading of ancient authors who had had direct knowledge of Athenian political life: above all, Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon and Thucydides. Especially the latter had been playing a crucial role in creating this negative image since 1628/9, when Thomas Hobbes published his very successful translation of Thucydides, entitled "Eight Bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre". This version appears to us as a most sophisticated attempt to scrutinize the historical reality of the fifth-century Attic polis, but it also conveyed a precise political agenda by presenting the failing trajectory of the democratic Athens as an important warning to 1620s England. The present paper aims at clarifying this dual role played by the "Eight Bookes", making it clear why Hobbes’s translation deserves to be considered as an essential staging-post in early-modern English reception of Athenian democracy.