History begins with hard choices. In Thucydides: Book I, the great Athenian witness sets down the opening movement of the struggle that reshaped the Greek world, and Charles D. Morris brings it forward in a modern English translation that reads with firmness and restraint. This is a classical history text with the pulse of lived experience: clear-eyed, unsentimental, and intensely human. Book I maps the background to the conflict, tracing the causes of the Peloponnesian War and the Athens-Sparta rivalry across 5th century Greece. Thucydides does not trade in legend; he builds a new kind of ancient Greek historiography, weighing evidence, motive, and power in language that shapes how we think about war and statecraft. For readers drawn to ancient Greek politics, this classics study edition serves equally well as an ancient history student reader or a Herodotus history companion. Set alongside Xenophon's Hellenica, it works as a Xenophon Hellenica companion, framing the long arc of classical Athens and Sparta and the hard logic of empire. Morris's rendering keeps the argument crisp, making this an entry for newcomers as well as a dependable text for rereading. Whether you come for strategy, rhetoric, or the moral pressure of decision, Book I offers the essential prologue that every classicist returns to. Collectors prize its authority and presence too. Republished by Alpha Editions in a careful modern edition, this volume preserves the spirit of the original while making it effortless to enjoy today -- a heritage title prepared for readers and collectors alike.