Thomas Macaulay often read while he walked. ‘Walked out over Westminster Bridge’, he wrote in his journal for 24 November 1848, ‘and back by the Hungerford Bridge. Read the first book of Thucydides – excellent. I never liked him so much’; 26 November, ‘after breakfast – read Thucydides during some time. Finished the third book’; 1 December, ‘began the sixth book of Thucydides – very good’; 2 December, ‘walked home and began the seventh book’; 3 December, ‘finished the seventh book’; 4 December, ‘staid at home all day – a miserable rainy day – making corrections for the 2nd edition [of the History of England]. Then read the eighth book of Thucydides – not every word – but particularly the account of the Athenian revolutions.’ ‘On the whole’, Macaulay reflected later that afternoon, ‘Thucydides is the first of historians. What is good in him is better than anything that can be found elsewhere. But his dry parts are dreadfully dry; and his arrangement is bad.’

Few can have read so much difficult Greek prose so quickly; the text in a modern English translation can run to nearly 600 pages. Few certainly will have read any of it while walking through the stink and noise of London in the 1840s or, as Macaulay also had, while taking a shave. But many have read the first seven of the eight books into which the text has been divided with comparable enthusiasm. They too are drawn into the story of men in what Thucydides called ‘the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians’, ‘dealing sensibly, foolishly, sometimes catastrophically, sometimes nobly’ as Bernard Williams put it ‘with a world that is only partly intelligible to human agency’. But many have shared Macaulay's dismay in reading on. They too have found the narrative in book 8, up to what he calls the ‘Athenian revolutions’ of 411, to be ‘dull and spiritless’ and lacking in drama, an aimless sequence in which he seems ‘to grope his way like a man without a clue’; ‘a series of not even well-connected outlines’; running on ‘flat and monotonous, offering no outstanding feature as a starting point for analysis’; ‘a bald record of quarrels, back-stabbing and inconclusive struggles’ which after the account of the ‘revolution’ in Athens (more exactly a coup) ‘breaks off in mid-stream’ and offers no end; a sequence that is simply stuffed with too many facts.