Hi all. Summer break coming up which means time for reading. I would like to read the two books in the title, The history of the Peloponnesian war by Thucydides and Hellenica by Xenophon.
I would like to know what you guys found to be the best version/translation of these books? I also seem to have trouble finding a book which contains all books 1-7 of Hellenica, I can only find books containing book 1-4 of Hellenica.
Bonus question - is there any book out there equivalent to Mary Beards SPQR just about Classical Greece?
There's an excellent range of choices for Thucydides, a much more limited range for the Xenophon.
For Thucydides, the most current translation is the one by Martin Hammond for the Oxford World's Classics series. The Penguin edition translated by Rex Warner is fine too, but Hammond has much better explanatory notes, and the prose is just more ... current.
Some people swear by The Landmark Thucydides, which does have outstanding notes and other supplementary material, but to my mind it's automatically ruled out because it uses the archaic Crawley translation, and life's too short for that. The Smith translation in the Loeb series is also very antiquated, and that doesn't even have the good supplementary materials to offset the unpleasant translation.
So for Thucydides, Martin Hammond is the clear stand-out for me.
For Xenophon, obviously I don't know where you've been looking that you can find only books 1-4, but that kind of thing will be the case if you stick to something like the Loeb series. Loeb editions only stand any chance of being good if they're relatively recent (post-1980) editions. And that isn't the case for Xenophon.
For Xenophon's Hellenica, Rex Warner has again done a translation for the Penguin Classics series. {EDIT: it's titled 'A history of my times'.} It's pretty long in the tooth (published 1966), but there are no more recent translations as far as I'm aware. So that'll be my recommendation here. The competitors are over a century old: H. G. Dakyns (published 1891) and the Loeb edition translated by Carleton Brownson (published 1918). In practice, there isn't actually any competition for Warner. It's a shame we don't have something on par with Hammond's Thucydides, but such is life.
For your last question, I wouldn't say there's anything really comparable to Beard's SPQR in terms of both competence and good writing: you can get competent, and not too dry, but I wouldn't say there are any general histories that are engaging in the way that Beard is. The AskHistorians book list has a section on ancient Greece: the section headed 'Classical Period' is probably what you're after, but I'd also highlight Cartledge's Ancient Greece: a history in eleven cities, which covers a larger timespan more selectively.