Strassler's edition presents Richard Crawley's Victorian English rendering of Thucydides alongside maps, running marginal notes, a chronology, appendices by classicists on Athenian and Spartan institutions, land and trireme warfare, currency, calendars and religious festivals, and a full index. Victor Davis Hanson's introduction reads Thucydides as a participant historian, an Athenian commander exiled for twenty years after failing to hold Amphipolis, who used that exile to watch both sides at close range. The history claims to be written for later readers rather than for immediate applause, on the assumption that human nature stays constant enough to make the war between Athens and Sparta instructive. Hanson traces how the narrative works by deliberate juxtaposition, setting Pericles at the graveside against the plague, and the destruction of Melos against the Sicilian catastrophe, so that the two cities come to stand for opposed accounts of power, freedom and necessity.