Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (also Thomas Hobbes of Malmsbury) was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on greed and fear of death, and support for an absolute monarchical form of government. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.He was also a scholar of classical Greek history and literature, and produced English translation of Illiad, Odyssey and History of Peloponnesian War.