Thucydides wrote for readers who already knew where Acarnania lay and what a trireme could do. This edition assumes no modern reader does, and treats that gap as the reason the history so often defeats people who attempt it.

Around Crawley's translation the editors have set maps placed beside the passages they illustrate and naming only the places mentioned nearby, footnotes on geography and on disputed or corrupt readings, appendices on Greek warfare, religion and daily life, and an unusually full index. Because Thucydides moves season by season across every theatre of the war, the edition also supplies aids for following a single region through.

Hanson's introduction takes up the historian's own account of his method — first impressions distrusted, witnesses cross-examined, sites inspected — and the compressed, difficult style that later writers from Polybius onward were praised for imitating.