This essay investigates why Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, published as Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, and why Hobbes chose it to be published in 1628. It argues that Hobbes’s translation should be seen not just as a precursor to his later treatises but as part of broader attempt on the part of English humanists in the mid-1620s and early 1630s to make available to English readers the stories and exempla–the raw materials–necessary to underpin an ethical, English law of nations. Hobbes’s Thucydides, it is be suggested, was vitally concerned with the law of nations and concerned particularly with the legal justifications and moral obligations of empire.