M. has produced a wonderful book that sheds valuable light on the way in which Thucydides has been received, read and interpreted by modern writers. Providing a broad overview of the topic and drawing on a wide range of writers and texts, M. shows how Thucydides influenced ideas about the nature of history and how changing ideas about the nature of history shaped perceptions of Thucydides from the fifteenth century onwards.

Chapter 1 discusses how Thucydides came to be viewed as the ‘Historians’ Historian’. After his translation into Latin by Valla in 1452, Thucydides' history was spread more widely, several of its aspects were praised, and it was considered an important text for teaching rhetoric and the art of writing. However, before the middle of the eighteenth century Thucydides was just another classical author. His relative unpopularity was mainly due to his obscure language and the fact that his work did not include many moral examples, which was precisely the kind of thing that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers were after in historical texts. From the middle of the eighteenth century (until well into the early twentieth century) the situation changed radically and Thucydides' status and reputation were greatly elevated, aided by two trends of thought: a primarily British interest in the history of ancient Greece, and a primarily German interest in the history of classical historiography. Both trends privileged Thucydides' reliability and critical analysis of sources over Herodotus' methods, and considered the former the true originator of a genuine historiography, a ‘forerunner of the new critical historiography of the modern era’ who ‘transcended his historical context’ (p. 23), ‘a modern historian before modernity’ (p. 24). Even as the gap between ancient and modern times was growing and the methods of modern historiography were judged superior, Thucydides' objectivity and critical approach were regarded highly and were thought to provide useful examples for modern practice. There was, of course, extensive disagreement over these issues, but ‘[a]t the very least, he [i.e. Thucydides] became the one writer from antiquity about whose approach to history it was necessary to have an opinion, even if that was to reject the idea that it could serve as any sort of model in the modern era’ (p. 7).

The following four chapters treat different themes of the reception of Thucydides' history, all of which are important in appreciating Thucydides' role in the development of modern historiography. Chapter 2 focuses on Thucydides' reliability and critical approach. When in the nineteenth century history started to conceive itself as a ‘science’ as opposed to an ‘art’, Thucydides rose to prominence. His reliability was taken for granted and his own methodological statements (History 1.20–2) were taken at face value. Even those who found problems in Thucydides' account of early Greek history attributed these almost consistently not to Thucydides' critical approach but to the materials at his disposal. Thucydides was considered an important model – even modern writers who rejected him were still able to find a colleague in him. By the middle of the twentieth century more specific ideas of what a ‘scientific history’ might entail emerged and as a consequence Thucydides was little discussed. And ‘yet the tradition of identifying Thucydides as a colleague and projecting one's own attitudes and practices onto him persisted’ (p. 69).

Chapter 3 turns to Thucydides' impartiality. In promoting Thucydides as a model for historiography many writers emphasised his exemplary lack of prejudice which reinforced the truth of his account. This interest in Thucydides' objectivity was often combined with an interest in his practical experience of and expertise in war and politics, which helped him to evaluate events and could serve as a model for modern historians but also provide examples for modern rulers and statesmen. Another aspect of Thucydides' character, significant for the understanding of his work, was his rationalism – this was starkly contrasted with Herodotus' credulity. Thucydides' rationalism sparked further debates and criticisms over its extent and nature, but such criticisms were only directed towards parts of Thucydides' work and no modern writer sought to undermine or discredit the whole of his history.

Chapter 4 looks at the rhetorical nature of Thucydides' work. The ancient and humanist tradition that viewed history as a branch of rhetoric was increasingly challenged in the course of the eighteenth century, when historians strove to establish the serious and scientific nature of their discipline. Thucydides was criticised over the rhetorical nature of several aspects of his work, mostly his speeches, and this raised further questions about the rhetorical and literary nature of historiography. Thucydides' admirers argued for a close link between rhetoric and history, that is, form and content: Thucydides' style helped to convey more effectively his ideas and important lessons from the past to the reader and could offer a model for modern historians. Nevertheless, for most modern historians history and rhetoric were incompatible and modern history was completely different from anything that preceded it. The problem of rhetoric in history was clearly very hard to solve, but generally the debate did not compromise Thucydides' status as a critical historian.

The usefulness of Thucydides' work is the topic of Chapter 5. Before the eighteenth century the usefulness of history rested on its providing examples of virtue and vice (historia magistra vitae, ‘history as life's teacher’) as it was thought there was continuity between past and present. Thucydides' work was not alien to such an approach (his proclaimed aim was to benefit readers) but it demonstrably offered only a few useful examples and maxims. As the gap between past and present was rapidly growing in the course of the eighteenth century, the focus of history shifted to the study of the differences between past and present in order better to understand the present. For the majority of writers Thucydides did not attempt to teach lessons but instead aimed at providing an accurate account of the past from which conclusions could be drawn. By the mid-twentieth century Thucydides was still thought to be the inventor of historiography, but his ideas were considered essentially irrelevant to the present and had nothing to teach contemporary historians. It was not so much historians but chiefly political scientists and international relations theorists who now saw Thucydides as one of their own and continued to discuss his ideas. Thucydides' neglect was due to certain trends (already developing in the nineteenth century), such as the changing conception of the proper subject matter of history, which now involved a wider range of interests, the fact that Thucydides' approach to historical interpretation was incompatible with modern ideas and the fact that his work posed some troubling questions about the relationship between history and rhetoric. Thucydides' influence never ceased but his reception was affected by the changing conceptions of history prevailing in each period.

Two major contributions of this book are that it brings forward the centrality of Thucydides in debates about the nature of history and proper methods of historiography, and that it properly demonstrates that contemporary discussions of Thucydides originated in the early modern period. Another two points, which M. persistently presses home, deserve special notice: Thucydides has always had his detractors, and he played a key role as modern historiography strove to get a sense of its own identity. The modern idea of history may have distanced itself from Thucydides but, M. concludes, ‘is at heart, in both its ideals and its contradictions, that of Thucydides, the product of the tradition of reception of his work’ (p. 171). Scholars and students across disciplines will learn a great deal from M.'s lucid and innovative book, not least they will be prompted to revisit modern assumptions and ideas about the proper aims and methodology of history.