Abstract

This chapter explores why Hobbes produced an edition of Thucydides. In offering an interpretation of this edition in context, the chapter addresses Hobbes’s view of relations between commonwealths and, in particular, of wars of expansion; his analogy between individuals and commonwealths; and the evidence for and the nature of his humanism. Hobbes’s concerns are clarified by considering the domestic and international politics of the 1620s and the contemporary use of classical texts to promote England’s intervention in wars abroad. Hobbes’s critical view of such intervention also encourages us to discern aspects of his later works that have been neglected.