Professor Debra Hamel

The Twitter Thucydides Professor Debra Hamel

Thucydides of Athens wrote an account of the great conflagration of his age, the Peloponnesian War, which began when the Spartans invaded Athenian territory in the summer of 431 BC and ended with the Athenians' surrender in early 404. Thucydides served as one of Athens' generals in 424 but was exiled from the city afterwards for a period of twenty years, during which time he researched and wrote his unfinished masterwork, History of the Peloponnesian War. Debra Hamel spent more than four years posting an abbreviated version of Herodotus' History of the Persian Wars to the Twitter account @iHerodotus. The project, begun in 2010, was concluded in early 2015. Hamel then started again, this time tweeting Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War to the Twitter account @iThucydides. Each of the 917 sections in Thucydides' text was ultimately summarized in a single tweet of 140 characters or less, with one tweet posted per day. The project took just over two and a half years to complete. The final tweet was posted on August 5, 2017. This book contains the entire tweeted History. It is the author's hope that this abbreviated version of the History will attract readers to Thucydides who might otherwise not read him at all.