I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight, which is now making me wish I were rereading Thucydides.

Sefton, lying on the floor in her little bedroom, was reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War. She lay flat on her front, propped up by her elbows, her bare feet, protruding from her corduroy trousers, crossed. Of course she had read this work many times before, but there were certain parts to which she passionately returned: so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible. As she read tears began to stream down her face.

"When the day came Nicias led his army forward, but the Syracusans and their allies kept attacking in the same fashion, hurling missiles and striking them down with javelins on all sides. The Athenians pushed on to the river Assinarus, partly because they thought, hard pressed as they were on all sides by the attack of numerous horsemen and of the miscellaneous troops, that they would be somewhat better off if they crossed the river, and partly by reason of their weariness and desire for water. And when they had crossed it they rushed in, no longer preserving order, but everyone eager to be himself the first to cross, and at the same time the pressure of the enemy now made the crossing difficult. For since they were obliged to move in a dense mass they fell upon and trod one another down, and some perished at once, run through by their own spears, while others became entangled in their trappings and were carried away by the current. The Syracusans stood along the other bank of the river, which was steep, and hurled missiles down upon the Athenians, most of whom were drinking greedily and were all huddled in confusion in the hollow bed of the river. Moreover, the Peloponnesians went down to the river's edge and butchered them, especially those in the river. The water at once became foul, but was drunk all the same although muddy and dyed with blood, and indeed was fought for by most of them. At length when the dead now lay in heaps one upon the other in the river and the army had perished utterly, part in the river and part--if any got safely across--at the hands of the cavalry, Nicias surrendered himself to Gylippus."

There is great patience in the retelling of this scene, a formal yet inexorable patience, which to me is why it is, all at once, "so cool, so elegant, so beautiful, so terrible." It is like Picasso's Guernica or Civil War photographer Matthew Brady's portraits of death . . . which, even though they are neither physically nor artistically similar to this passage, share its horrible, eloquent, patient narrative of destruction.

The translator was Charles Forster Smith (1852-1931), who published his first versions of Thucydides in 1886. As I've discovered in my anthology research, many of these nineteenth-century classicists were extraordinary translators, perhaps because they adopted the rhetoric of the nineteenth-century novel: the enfolded clauses, the balanced repetitions, the metrical pacing of fine prose. There is, in a way, something of George Eliot's all-seeing eye in this passage. It is so clear and forgiving and ruthless.