ABSTRACT Title of Document: THUCYDIDES ’ DANGEROUS WORLD: DUAL FORMS OF DANGER IN CLASSICAL GREEK INTERSTATE RELATIONS.

In his analysis of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides uses a single Greek word, kindunos, an extraordinary two hundred times, often with contorted grammatical and syntactical constructions which focus his reader’s attention on its use. With the assumption that Thucydides is writing for a retrospective reader who understands the outcome of the war as well as many of the smaller episodes which led to that outcome, the problem is to determine exactly why Thucydides relies so heavily on this word, particularly in instances when any number of simpler words or constructions would have provided a more straightforward explanation. To solve this problem, this dissertation examines Thucydides ’ use of the term kindunos, not on a case-by-case basis as in a commentary, but on a thematic basis by constructing broad categories that help explain one aspect of Thucydides ’ purpose. This dissertation shows that Thucydides uses the term kindunos in different ways in order to express to his reader the idea that there are two forms of danger threatening his contemporary world: external dangers and internally generated ones. The external dangers are the more easily defined. Thucydides ’ era was filled with strife and his analysis is of a twenty-seven year long war between Gree