The Twitter Thucydides

About the book

The historian Thucydides tells us that he began working on his account of the Peloponnesian War—the great war between Athens and Sparta—as soon as it broke out. That was in 431 B.C. He was fast out of the gate, but it took him until the early 21st century to get around to tweeting about it. Between February 2015 and September 2017, Thucydides—with my help—posted an abbreviated version of his History on Twitter. In this he was following the example (plus ça change, am I right?) of his older colleague Herodotus, who at the time was just finishing up his own tweeted History. The rules for both projects were the same: one tweet per day condensing one section of the History into 140 characters or less, which was Twitter's character limit at the time. After the last tweet hit the airwaves, I made them available in paperback and for Kindle.