SOURCE: "To The Readers," in Hobbes's Thucydides, edited by Richard Schlatter, Rutgers University Press, 1975, pp. 6-9.

Hobbes was an eminent English philosopher best known for his Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil (1651), in which he presented his theory of social contract. In the following preface to his 1629 translation of Thucydides's History, Hobbes praises the historian's objectiveness and vivid, descriptive style.

It hath been noted by divers, that Homer in poesy, Aristotle in philosophy, Demosthenes in eloquence, and others of the ancients in other knowledge, do still maintain their primacy: none of them exceeded, some not approached, by any in these later ages. And in the number of these is justly ranked also our Thucydides; a workman no less perfect in his work, than any of the former; and in whom (I believe with many others) the faculty of writing history is...