The great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt once remarked that in the 19th century human beings gained an additional sense. He was speaking of the sense of history and the widened perspective that “new” sense gave us. Henceforth, we would view events within the pointed context of the past. The critical study of ancient texts and documents and such novel sciences as archaeology showed to us a continuum, however jagged and fractured, within which our own lives and histories assumed unexpected shadings and even, at times, some fitful illumination.

If Burckhardt was right – and I’m not entirely sure that he was – this “sense of the past,” as Henry James, his contemporary, put it, remains a troubled and difficult sense. We seem to gaze down some long arcade that leads into the most remote antiquity; the arcade is lined with shattered statues and barely discernible monuments, all the mistier the farther we gaze. From these we draw inferences meant not only to clarify that past, but (though academic historians may deny this) to help us make sense of our present.

Yet the more we know the less we seem to learn. Sometimes, in reading a historical work, the image of humanity as a Sisyphus afflicted with amnesia springs to my mind: Are we condemned to repeat the same awful actions, suffer the same devastations, only to forget them, recovering only by hindsight what the past experience of others might have taught us? Has our added historical sense afforded us any gain in immediate insight?

The Greek historian Thucydides would seem to exemplify Burckhardt’s claim. His “History of the Peloponnesian War,” which he composed in later life and left unfinished at the time of his sudden, and probably violent, death around 400 B.C., concentrates with fierce attention on the actions and maneuvers, year by year, winter after summer, of that long and disastrous conflict. He brings earlier events in by way of example but rarely uses them, as we might, to explicate present circumstances. Yet no one who reads him carefully can miss the mordant tone of many of his accounts. His history, after all, is an unsparing record of folly and catastrophe on the part of his own fellow citizens of Athens, and the sense of perspective is conveyed by his tone.

I’ve been rereading his history with fresh excitement thanks to “The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War” (Simon & Schuster, 752 pages, $25), edited by Robert B. Strassler, which contains a revised edition of the translation by Richard Crawley together with enough maps and charts, annotations and appendices, to satisfy the greediest reader. The maps in particular make a spectacular difference; inserted judiciously on almost every page so that Thucydides’s description of a battle or a skirmish, by land or by sea, can be plotted at once, they keep the reader from being overwhelmed by the many unfamiliar place-names of ancient geography.

A war that occurred more than 2,500 years ago, even one between Athens and Sparta, might appear to hold little claim on us nowadays. But Thucydides has somehow remained perennially pertinent. His analysis of the course of the war, his depiction of character, his unsurpassed evocation of the feel of battle, his superb grasp of the entire field of action extending for almost 20 years (not to mention the fact that he himself served as a general early on), accord him a kind of unassailable authority. But this isn’t all. Thucydides possessed an acute psychological perspicacity, which he employed to lay bare the motives of his protagonists, often not by stating them but by showing them, through their actions and their words. (The speeches he records are no doubt later reconstructions, but all the more compelling and artful for that.)

Thucydides says at the beginning of his “History” that he means his work to be “a possession forever.” Why? Not, I think, because he hankered after literary fame – though he is a great prose writer – but because his narrative might serve to open the eyes of later readers. Through his work we possess the means to thread a precarious path through the maze of human motives, those half-hidden impulses that lead men to embark on conquest or dominion or personal glory, usually to their ruin. His history shows the cost of such impulses. It is the secret underside of the Athenian dream of glory.

Thucydides’s account of the Sicilian Expedition in 415 B.C., the 17th year of the war, is perhaps his supreme creation. His history is rooted in human character, and so he gives us at the outset unforgettable portraits of the two chief protagonists, the wise and aging general Nicias and the glib and eel-like Alcibiades. The Athenians are abuzz with excitement over the prospect of waging war on Syracuse and of eventually seizing control of all Sicily. Nicias warns against this ambition; Alcibiades argues for it. For Nicias, Athens should not think “of grasping at another empire before we have secured the one we have already.” Sicily is far away, hard to govern; Athens is already at war with Sparta and should abandon “the mad dream of conquest.”

Nicias proves to be right, though it doesn’t save him. The description of the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, both on land and sea, is utterly gripping. The besiegers become the besieged. During the sea battle in the harbor, Thucydides notes how the spectators on the shore look now this way, now that, unable to discern in the hubbub of shouts and screams and clashing triremes who is winning and who losing. The effect is stark and vivid and unforgettable.

Again, when the Athenians try to escape by land, his description of an army blundering by night in an unknown land evokes all the pity and terror that Aristotle reserved for Attic tragedy. When finally the captured Athenians, herded and humiliated, are sequestered in the great quarry at Syracuse, where they suffer hunger and thirst under the violent sun of Sicily, we feel all the bitterness of their defeat. Of his countrymen Thucydides remarks at the close of his account, “they were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed … with a total destruction, their fleet, their army – everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily.”

Thucydides has retained a prestige and influence that his predecessor Herodotus, whom he criticized, has not always enjoyed. During the Vietnam War he was much invoked. His famous objectivity (which to me has a savage flavor) allowed him to be used by thinkers as well as ideologues of both right and left. But it isn’t so much his narrative artistry nor his command of historical pattern that render him supreme among all historians, ancient and modern. Rather, it is his unblinking focus on the truth of an actual situation, whether that truth be strategic, psychological, or moral, that makes “The History of the Peloponnesian War” his – and our – possession forever.