In the 1990s Fox Television aired the ‘X-Files,’ wherein the explanation for unexplained phenomenon was known and secreted away by the Cigarette Smoking Man man. That fiction morphed into the Deep State of Fox News to explain any and everything.

Flying saucers, the Deep State, Illuminati—these all give a comprehensive and meaningful explanation to the discordant kaleidoscope of daily life. So great is our need for meaning that even when prophecy fails, the believer endures the test and remains faithful to the explanation, as Leon Festinger found.

Compared with these elaborate explanations of unseen power the unadorned truth seems a poor thing. To say that U.S. President John Kennedy was struck down by a deranged man is far less satisfying to those who hunger for a profound meaning than to say Kennedy was killed by a far-reaching, nefarious conspiracy for shadowy and sinister reasons.

Occam’s razor cuts so cleanly one does not feel satisfied, yet the simple solution is usually the right one. The truth is that the explanation for most things is so simple that we look right through it. The truth is not out there, hidden; it is right before our eyes. To make that point let us consider an ancient text. It is a star that is 2,500 years away from us and yet its light reaches us and reveals something of our reality.

***

When diplomats posture, when generals call to arms, when ex-patriates fly home, when soldiers take leave of families, when presidents bluster, when heavily armed patrols clash near Khiam, along the Demilitarized Zone of Korea, or the Green Line in Nicosia, when bombs fall on Iran, it is not hidden forces that cause conflict. It is us. The truth is so simple that it is hardly satisfying to those conspiracy theorists who yearn for a larger, deeper, darker meaning, and also for those who wish to scour away their own responsibility.

Thucydides knew all of this and passed the word in his book the History of the Peloponnesian War. It is an anti X-file that reveals the secret that there is no secret. His pages show readers how men acted under pressure and in so doing he predicts how we will act under like pressure. In the words of a later reader, Niccolò Machiavelli, the stars are the same and so are the men. Despite all the cosmetic changes in life, at the bottom we remain the same. Ergo one of the best ways to predict the future is to find it in the past. 

Thucydides wrote about the famous war between the cities of Athens and Sparta, which today are two and a half hours apart by road. The war is only famous because he wrote about it. Homer implies in the Iliad that it is the poet who makes the warrior famous by recounting his exploits: Art is life preserved. Athens and Sparta had a long history of conflict before 431 BCE, and it continued after, but these have all been forgotten. What is remembered, thanks to Thucydides, is the Peloponnesian War. The irony is that we readers know the name of a war that no one who fought knew. 

His greatest accomplishment was to see in the chaos of his time a single conflict in the period 431-404 BCE, amid the tumult of war and peace and war again with shifting alliances, internal dissension, and regime changes. A lesser mind would have chronicled each campaign and reported the political machinations without seeing the whole elephant, but Thucydides stepped back from these details to find an Archimedean point on which to centre his account. That achievement can be seen more clearly if a modern comparison is considered.

School books have set in stone the beginning of World War II on 1 September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the end on 8 August 1945 with the capitulation of Japan. Cut and dried as that seems, it excludes the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), much of the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the Winter War between Finland and Russia (1939-1940), the Greek Civil War (1942-1949), and more. The conventional dates for World War II are just that, conventions. A Thucydides studying twentieth-century conflict might see that war as a single war from 1914 as a struggle between democracy and capitalism and fascism and communism to shed the skin of kings and emperors. 

Thucydides was active in Athenian politics, he served as a general officer in the war, leading a failed campaign at Amphipolis near Macedonia, and he chose exile rather than return to Athens where failed generals were always excoriated and often executed. Ambitious rivals found it easier to convince the demos that failure was due to a general’s incompetence or treachery rather than the inevitable result of strategic miscalculations or political blunders. Exile made him no less Athenian. Unlike the most famous Athenian exile of that war, Alcibiades, who readily changed sides from Athenian to Spartan and back to Athenian, and then Persian, Thucydides was always on the side of Athens, despite his many reservations, qualifications, and criticisms of Athenians. His was a loyal opposition.

Thucydides tried to write history avant le mot; so restrained is he that he speaks in his own voice about eight times in 500-plus pages of the book. On one such occasion early in the book he declares it was his intention to write a book that would last. His paramount message to posterity was that this was one war with a single meaning, not a series of transitory clashes. To substantiate that message in a bottle he rested it on facts and evidence.

The contrast has to be with that other chronicler who is routinely cited as a paternal figure in the development of History, namely Herodotus. Though the DNA of these two—Herodotus (484-425) and Thucydides (460-395)—is in the germination of history, there are differences between them. In the earlier generation Herodotus compiled and wrote a book often titled the History of the Greek and Persian Wars, and that title makes it an obvious precursor of Thucydides. Educated Athenian that he was, Thucydides was surely familiar with Herodotus, though he makes no explicit reference to him. For all that superficial similarity there is a deep divide between them. Herodotus ranges far and wide in his book from the gods to Anatolian tribes, Egyptian flora and fauna, talking fish, magic rings, and tales of griffins and dragons and he reported as fact that he was told these stories rather as the National Enquirer does today for our entertainment. Admittedly, at times Herodotus opines on the credibility of the most bizarre testimony, but he nonetheless endorses it by repetition.

Here is where Thucydides parts company with Herodotus for he seldom offers opinions, rumours, hearsay, or speculation but rather finds and orders facts to make his arguments, as Thomas Hobbes said in the preface to his translation of the book. There is another reason why the History of the Peloponnesian War has weathered the ages and that is by its inherent drama, which comes from Thucydides' decision to report in the book public debates, one hundred and forty of them. These speeches have often been dismissed by methodologists for centuries, for how could Thucydides know what was said in Corinth, Corcyra, Syracuse, Athens, Sparta, and elsewhere? To cast light on that question remember that Thucydides was an active participant in Athens for a time (he survived the plague in Athens in the first year of the war), he had a network of contacts, while banished to Thrace he observed the war there firsthand, and as an Athenian exile he travelled along the Peloponnese. He visited battlefields and hired locals to disinter cast-off weapons and sift ashes for evidence. Walking the route that armies took, he observed the local conditions. He may even have travelled to far Sicily to observe the Athenian campaign there as journalists now shadow armies in combat, and after the war he returned to Athens, where he would have interviewed many participants. In short, he used personal knowledge, a network of contacts, and field work to inform his imagination.

The History of the Peloponnesian War is a cornerstone in the wall of history. We have all read history books and with this label in mind, the easy path is to read Thucydides' book in the same way, assuming it to be a dispassionate, factual, analytical, and fair-minded window on those events, the characteristics which post-modernists say are both impossible and without value. By and large it is these things, and yet there is more to it. As much as the History of the Peloponnesian War is expository history, it is also a drama. Thucydides wrote long before the canons of book publishing decreed that the Red Sea divides non-fiction from the freedom of fiction, long before historians gathered as a self-conscious profession and elaborated the codes of conduct that bind them together and immunise them from others. As a playwright he explored themes through the collision of myriad characters and events.

There are graphic scenes of the poisonous debates, the jostling crowds, the Hoplite battles, the wild exaggerations in speeches, long sieges, the civil war at Corcyra where women climbed to the rooftops to hurl tiles upon the enemy, mob rule, or the massacre of innocents at Plataea. This is all to be expected, but as always with Thucydides there is more. There is a nightmare telling of the plague in besieged Athens that surpasses Elm Street. There is in Thucydides a twin of Aeschylus, the playwright, not just in the large-scale drama but also in the Shakespearean intensity of the characters. As with Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes, there is a moral in Thucydides.

Among the characters is the noble Pericles, who was wily enough to win favour for years with the changeable demos of Athens; Archidamus, a Spartan king who for months resisted the pressure for war and when he could resist it no longer went to war saying that he feared this war would fall to his children to finish (and he was right); Cleon, the insatiable demagogue who proved a brave if foolish man at the end; Brasidas, a Spartan general who was Athenian in his boldness; Hyperbolus, whose long, strident, and empty speeches sired the word ‘hyperbole,’ Alcibiades, who was all things to all men and women as well as a resilient and resourceful general and a protégé of Socrates; Nicias, of whom Thucydides allows himself his only personal judgement, writing that ‘he least of all of his generation deserved the terrible fate that befell him’ and who, despite a mortal illness found the strength at the final battle in Syracuse—a campaign he opposed—to urge each man to embody the city of Athens at the final hour; Athenagoras, a democratic leader in Syracuse who suspected the report of an Athenian invasion by his rival Hermocrates was a trick of the oligarchs to oppress the toiling masses and hence opposed defensive preparations; Diodotus, who in a night and a day saved the people of Mytilene with words; Gylippus, a single Spartan general who master-minded the defeat of thousands of Athenians in Sicily; and more. Of all these, who alone speaks for Thucydides?

It is only a matter of time before a mogul realizes the cinematographic possibilities of the book and offers a CGI blood-and-guts account of it like Alexander and Troy for that prepubescent, pimpled audience of boys to which Hollywood bows. It has one valuable quality to a film producer: no one owns the copyright! But wait! There is a sombre film version of the History of the Peloponnesian War produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1991 called ‘The War that Never Ends,’ which is rather like a play reading of important speeches, and though it takes liberties with the text, it captures the austere dignity and insight of the book. The film repays the effort to find it.

When Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago created the Great Books series in 1947 to educate the post-war world, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War was included. It has since suffered the fate of many of its shelf mates, namely, being reduced to a single sentence to convey the meaning of the whole book. One line! There are many examples of this alchemical reduction. Thomas Hobbes's majestic Leviathan, a study of political authority and life, is reduced to a passage about life in the state of nature being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ as though there is nothing else of note in the book. Equally, Niccolò Machiavelli's subtle Prince is reduced to a phrase he never wrote, ‘the end justifies the means.’

What sentence is Thucydides reduced to? That would be:

The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.

It is all too likely that this sentence has been cited more times, both in formal writing and spoken words, than the whole of the rest of the book. In so doing, it is assumed that it is Thucydides' judgement that it is the way of the world. Consequently, theorists of international relations in their legions cite Thucydides as a founder of the school of thought of Realism according to which all states seek self-interest at all times with the correlate that force will be used to that end. Self-interest is short term, it is narrow, and it is material; such is the human condition. There are many mutations of Realism but all of its many mansions feature a picture of Thucydides over the fireplace. Ask Ai Claude, Grok, or ChatGP for founders of realism in international relations and Thucydides will be named. Disagree as much as they do about everything else, Realists respect the paternity of Thucydides.

This agreement has become an article of faith and consequently its DNA is rarely put to the test in the Realism literature, but that is the aim here. Is Thucydides the intellectual sire of Realism? What is his genetic profile? That lightning bolt line—the strong do what they will and weak suffer what they must—has blinded scholars to its meaning. If we extract, amplify, and analyse it within the helix of Thucydides’ DNA it proves to be much more entwined than the constricted strand of Realism.

That examination leads to the conclusion that Thucydides shows how Athens has become finally and fatally corrupt and, worse still, that those who think like those Athenians fail to realise the most obvious rule of life: things change. That line is the dramatic denouement of the moral tale Thucydides sets before the bar of eternity. Look around: its truth is always with us.

The line is spoken by an unnamed Athenian in a private meeting. The dialogue occurs in the fifteenth year of the war which is the middle of the war and the middle of the book. It occurred on the island of Melos in the southwestern Cyclades archipelago of the Aegean Sea, a place of neither strategic nor military importance. (Melos is where a goatherd found the Roman statue Venus di Milo in 1820.) Styled the Melian Dialogue it is cast as a contest between Athenian Realpolitik and Melian Idealism by the international relations theorists. The story goes something like the following.

Athens sent a fleet to Melos in 415 BCE to demand that it come into the war on its side. Seven hundred years earlier, Melos had been settled by Dorian people from Laconia, making them distant cousins of the Spartans. While the war had criss-crossed the sea it had not touched Melos until one day the Athenians arrived —in force—with a demand for immediate Anschluss with greater Athens. Today! Now!

***

When the war had begun years earlier Thucydides portrayed Athenians as moderate. In an early debate at Sparta two Athenians who happened to be there —not official representatives, but rather businessmen or religious pilgrims—attended the public meeting, and according to Thucydides they rose to speak for Athens. They are judicious, not bellicose; they are rational, not blinded by ambition; and they are restrained, not ranting out of control like a spoiled child. In their speech, defending the integrity of Athens against those trying to rouse Sparta to action, they invoke an Athens that is the champion of Greece against the Persians at Marathon. On that plain the Athenians had been disciplined, self-sacrificing, and defenders of the good of all Greeks against the Eastern conqueror. They say, in other words, that a strong Athens protected the weak Greeks. (The funeral mound of the Athenian dead, which included the brother of the playwright Aeschylus, is still plainly visible.) A few years later other Athenians repeated this claim at Platea in the fourth year of the war. These amateur diplomats make a good impression on the reader as Athenian patriots, but also as Greeks.

At the end of the first year of the war there occurs another major event in the book that provides a backdrop to the Melian dialogue. This was the famous speech of Pericles at the ritual of burying the war dead. Such rituals remain around the world as Armistice Day, ANZAC Day, or Remembrance Day. At the end of the first year of the war Pericles gave a speech reminding Athenians of the nature and value of their city. In it he praised Athenian democracy and what politician who had been elected eighteen times would not praise the wisdom of the demes to keep electing him. He also celebrates Athens as the educator of the Greeks in its arts, drama, poetry, philosophy, architecture, sculpture, and monuments, including the Elgin Marbles on display in the British Museum since 1817.

What he does not say, though it is implicit, is that Athens acquired this lustre through taxes on its allies originally accepted to prevent another war with Persia, not to beautify Athens. Leaving aside these details, that speech again shows Athens to be magnificent in its aspirations for Greece. It is a remarkable fact that the thirty-plus monuments, temples, and buildings that we associate with Athens of the Golden Age were built in about eight years, while Pericles dominated Athenian politics. Residents of Ottawa who have lived through the reconstruction of the Centre Block on Parliament Hill will marvel at how much building was done in the confined spaces of ancient Athens in so short a time. True, this speech is probably as widely cited as the sentence about the strong and weak, but it is usually not shortened to a single line, nor have I ever seen it alleged that it alone is what the book is about and that Thucydides himself meant what Pericles said.

Thucydides quotes Pericles’ rhapsody of Athens at its best in the early days of the war, and this brings forth a major theme. The History of the Peloponnesian War is a pathology of Athens. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, the book records the deterioration of Athens during the war from noble exemplar to tweeting tyrant. Thucydides’ focus was Athens, not the war itself, but what it did to Athens. The reality he saw was that the wonderful and beautiful city of Athens—light of the world—destroyed itself along with a great deal of the Greek world. The tipping point was Melos.

***

Returning to Melos, the Athenians pronounce their ultimatum: join us in our Spartan war and pay tribute or we will slay you one and all. There is nothing subtle and restrained about this message. There is nothing in this message about the greater good of Greeks. One can only imagine how breath-taking this instant ultimatum was to the auditors on the island city Melos.

The elders of Melos asked for a private discussion rather than a public debate. Why? They may have done so to give themselves time to think, to avoid panic, to stop the Athenians from playing to the audience, and also to negotiate an agreement free of a CNN-effect. The Athenians also may have preferred a private discussion. Why? Because they may have still felt some inhibitions. Or it may have been entirely Thucydides' invention to put this drama at the centre of his book, and to abstract it from the pattern of debates, the more to frame it. That is all speculation, but what is sure is that it is an astounding argument.

The dialogue at Melos needs no exegesis. The Athenians demand compliance. The Melians assert their neutrality. The Athenians admit the Melians have been neutral these many years despite their Spartan genes but say that neutrals can no longer be tolerated. ‘If you are not with us, then you are against us,’ they might as well have said. The Melians plead the justice of neutrality. The Athenians say, let us be practical and put matters of justice aside. Indeed, they go further and say ‘justice’ means nothing.

None of the Melian elders is named and neither are the Athenians, from other sources we do know that Alcibiades, Cleomedes, Philocrates, and Tisias were the leaders of the Athenian taskforce when it was dispatched. To withhold now the names of the speakers in this dialogue is unique, for in all the debates and speeches Thucydides reported the speakers are identified. Not so here. Perhaps Thucydides contrived this omission to make this exchange at the centre of his book generic, beyond the particulars and idiosyncrasies of this or that person.

In response the equally anonymous Melian elders say we have sent word of your invasion to our ancestors, the Spartans, and they will come to our defence. The Athenians dismiss this threat on political grounds—the Spartans will not risk blood for distant relatives—and military grounds—the Spartans have no navy and cannot get there. Both of these refutations remind us that Melos had no military or strategic significance. Their arguments undercut, reduced, and rebutted, the Melian elders can only say,

We trust to the gods and to the Spartans.

To which Athens personified replies, ‘the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.’ From this flat assertion flows the conclusion that this is the natural law, and the mighty Athenians are leaves on its wind and can do no more than bend to it as a palm tree does to the tempest. This claim, that it is the natural law of the jungle, is the claim upon which the house of Realism in International Relations theory is built. If that is the case, then let us look to the foundations.

Comes the time to put that line and that dialogue in context, and not just within the book and the war, but within the moral life of Thucydides and his culture. Centuries before Hesiod's well-known Works and Days includes these lines:  Thus said the hawk to the nightingale with speckled neck, while he carried her high up among the clouds, gripped fast in his talons, and she, pierced by his crooked talons, cried pitifully. To her he spoke disdainfully:

Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress as you are. And if I please I will make my meal of you, or let you go. He is a fool who tries to withstand the stronger, for he does not get the mastery and suffers pain besides his shame.

Hesiod describes the savagery of nature, not civilized people, not that pinnacle of Greek culture made into shinning stone on the Athenian acropolis proudly defended by travelling Athenians at Platea.

The Athenian everyman at Melos echoes the hawk, a feathered and taloned beast of nature, not noble Pericles; moreover, he does so boldly without a hint of embarrassment. It is likely that the educated and reflective Thucydides drew this parallel. It is also likely he realized another parallel that his Athenian readers knew when they reflected on their own history.

Generations before in 490 BCE a Persian fleet crossed from Asia to Europe. On a hot day in September, an Athenian army of as many 10,000 arrived at Marathon on the coast where shallow waters and wide shingle had served as landing site for a Persian invasion. Some ancient sources suggest the ratio was ten Persians to one Athenian, though contemporary sources put it two to one. What is sure is that the Athenians knew that they were substantially outnumbered, and they probably also assumed that however many Persians were present on that day, there were more to come.

That unreliable narrator Herodotus reported that the Persian commander offered terms to these Athenians. How did the Athenians respond to a Persian ultimatum? They said,

We trust to the gods and to the Spartans.

For they had sent news to Sparta of the Persian invasion. They trusted to the gods because their cause of Greek liberty was just, and to the Spartans who could be relied upon to rally to this Pan-Hellenic cause. We may imagine that the Persian envoy used the same words with the Athenians at Marathon that later the Athenians used with the Melians: ‘Be practical. If you don't surrender on our terms you will die. Talk not of gods for they cannot help you today. The Spartans—well, they may not come and if they do, they will be slow, as Spartans always are. Be realistic!’ Thus, the Persian satrap may have spoken. On that hot, dry day amid the dead grass of late summer the Athenians said ‘No.’  (Likewise on 28 October 1940 Greek dictator Ioannis Metaxas reacted to the invading Italian ultimatum with one word: Όχι,’ that is, ‘No,’ subsequently making the Greek national day the ‘No’ Day.)

Thucydides' mastery lies in putting the same sentiments and maybe the very same words in the mouths of the Melian elders who confronted invading Imperial Athens, only to have the officially designated representative of Athenian democracy ridicule their sentiments. This much has Athens changed!

The Athenians at Melos rely only on the strength they have today. They had flattened the man-made world into a sword. The gods, justice, morality, these are all pounded into nothingness in their dialogue. When all is flattened, what remains is force, and on that day the force was with Athens. Halfway through the book, in the dialogue at Melos, Thucydides, this born and bred proud son of Athens, sees in the city that made him a monster far worse than the plague, a monstrosity that was destroying all that he held dear. It no longer aspired to the heavens in art but instead built warships; it no longer led Greece into democracy but enslaved other Greeks; it was no longer home to philosophers but soon would kill that great philosopher Socrates (who carried a javelin in this war and whose execution may have occurred when Thucydides had returned to Athens). This was no longer the Athens of the Periclean paean of praise fourteen years before. This was no longer the Athens of sober businessmen proud of their city and ready to speak for it even before a hostile audience in Sparta. This was a second and dark Athens that dominates the rest of the book. This second, twin Athens is still a democracy, yet others call it the Tyrant City, something Pericles earlier admitted in the Funeral Oration, but which is usually ignored by readers who see what they want to see.

In this mutating Athens language itself underwent a molecular change. Thucydides put it this way:

to fit with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against the enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.

Saying it was so made it so. Evidence was but fake news. Dissent was treachery. Sobriety was weakness. Compromise was stupid. Thucydides tracks the aetiology of the leprosy eating away the civil society, but this much suffices to show the long drop from Pericles’ oration.

At Melos the Athenians were as wicked as their words and executed their threats. They sacked the city and destroyed it. According to one story, the massacre was cruel, making it an object lesson for the next neutral who would resist the Athenian Empire. The Melian men who survived the assault were chained together on pegs along a winding path up a slope, with every second one beheaded, leaving the living for the beasts. The women and children were enslaved as property and no doubt the women were raped as well as the children. How would a gifted orator like Pericles find a way to praise this lesson? Is this crime the foundation or the fruit of Realism? 

Athens had stood on the embankment of another outrage twelve years earlier in the fourth year of the war the city of Mytilene on Lesbos had ousted an imposed Athenian rule. When news of this revolt reached Athens, the democratic assembly immediately shouted its demand to destroy the island and its people. Voices of moderation were drowned out in the din, but they persisted overnight and the next day they caused the assembly to convene again and to consider anew its decision of the yesterday. On this occasion, moderation prevailed, and another means was found to deal with Mytilene that was much less drastic. Even so, the worm was now in the wood.

Thucydides makes it clear, though, that the moderates, chief among them Diodotus, had to argue their case in such a way as to convince the insatiable majority. The moderates had to speak of the interests of Athens and not the justice of treating others with restraint. A comparison makes the point. In 1998 a tsunami hit Papua New Guinea, a fragile country that Australia administered for decades. When the Australian government offered assistance to Papua New Guinea, the acting prime minister chose to argue the case publicly as Diodotus did. He appealed to Australia's self-interest to justify helping Papua New Guinea; he described it as a market for Australia goods; he did not say that Australia is rich and can afford to help a poor neighbour, nor that there was a moral responsibility to assist this particular neighbour after forty years of a neo-colonial relationship with Papua New Guinea. In this way words slowly flatten the human world.

At Melos, Athens crossed a moral Rubicon. Thucydides shows us this with the third island of distant Sicily. It, too, had no part in the war, but it offered the riches needed to continue it, but most importantly, it was a new world to conquer. A huge Athenian fleet, hugging the shore, went on the long and difficult journey west to capture Sicily. In attacking Syracuse, the Athenians went to war against not only a Greek city but a democratic city for the first time.

The final stage is tyrannical; the war was no longer about protecting Athens, the goal while Pericles lived, nor was it any longer about supporting and developing other democracies. What was it about? It was about conquest. It was about Athenians re-making the world in their own blighted image, without caring how changed and distorted that image had become.

At Melos those nameless Athenians showed they had not learned another powerful lesson that is woven through the pages of the History of the Peloponnesian War: things change.

This theme of change surfaces at least five times in pages of Thucydides' book, first in the opening debate at Corinth, then at the ensuing debate over the war at Sparta, in the third year of the war in both Athenian debates over Mytilene, and again in the failed Spartan peace offer. When change is taken into account, we see that Athens had forgotten the truth that one day it would no longer be strong, just as virile youth forgets, despite all the evidence around it, that one day it will be old and frail. In its strength Athens failed to use that power to create a world in which it is safe for the nightingale to be weak. It failed to create a world where the weak could survive and thrive, however inevitable it was that one day Athens itself would become weak and let fall the heavy sword of conquest.

Once noble Athens had ignobly flattened the world to one dimension, and in its turn, it paid the price for it. Not only were the institutions of Athenian democracy despoiled by the Spartans who stabled horses in gold-inlaid temples, but the Persians who had financed much of the Spartan effort recouped their investment by denuding Athens of its wealth so that within a few years of the end of the war Athens was no longer the gleaming moral and material city on the hill that Pericles had descried but a wreck and a ruin. It became a city where a wealthy and educated citizen, one Thrasymachus by name, could declare that justice was but the interest of the stronger in Plato's Republic.

In our own world steps have been taken toward a world safe for the nightingale. One example is President John F. Kennedy's decision in 1963 unilaterally to cease nuclear weapons testing. It was a call to disarm rather than a call to arms. Generals protested; Hesiod’s hawks called him weak; Republicans opposed; Realists called him an idealist (the worst epithet in their vocabulary). Knowing all of that still Kennedy praised the adversary, the Soviet Union, for its great contributions to and suffering in World War II, a message meant for Soviet ears, and he also addressed his countrymen by arguing that we are strong and secure, and it is because we are strong and secure we can take this step toward a safer world. That old solider Thucydides would have nodded approval, having written that ‘Of all the manifestations of power, restraint is the most important.’ The Athenians lacked the strength not to fight.

In the moral tale of the History of the Peloponnesian War Athens made itself into a cancer that devoured its own cells, and this became obvious at Melos, but it did not end there. Even as the gigantic expedition sailed to Sicily, some in Athens were looking ever further west to legendary Carthage or even fabled Iberia as future targets. The war was no longer about Sparta or democracy but about the imperial overreach of the Athenian Empire. This conclusion is hidden in plain sight and missed by those who walk a flattened earth. 

***

There is a great deal more starlight in the History of the Peloponnesian War, but enough has been said to make the case that Thucydides did not speak for himself through one character and also to make the case that Thucydides would reject the title Realist—one who pounds the world flat and then says, ‘The world is flat and I must act accordingly.’

Quite the opposite, his book records the change in Athens from the political, moral, and cultural benefactor and military protector of the Greek world to its destroyer. Driving Sparta into an alliance with Persia, the Athenians made it possible for its nemesis finally to conquer Athens, something it had been unable to do at Marathon when the Athenians had unrealistically trusted to the gods and to Sparta.

It takes no mysterious X-File to see that the realism Thucydides sought was to make the world safe for the weak because the reality is that we will each be weak one day.

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Michael Jackson is an Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the University of Sydney.

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Note:  Thanks to Kathlyn Blake and Damian Grace for assistance.  I visited the island of Melos and stood on its highest point from which a lookout would have seen the black triremes of Athens approaching.  A stone from the fatal shore where they might have landed lies on my desk.

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References

Any unabridged edition the History of the Peloponnesian War will do. For those who want immersion there is The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert Strassler (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) which is replete with scholarly explanations, maps, and appendices. Highly recommended is Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (1963).

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Further Exploration

Graham Allison, Destined for War (2019).

BBC, The War that Never Ends (1991), an abstraction of Thucydides’ History.

Gary Corby, The Pericles Commission (2013), a novel that brings to life the aspiring Pericles.

Leon Festinger, When Prophecy Fails (1946), a study of believers.

Hesiod, Works and Days (700 BCE), a farmer’s almanac in dactylic hexameter.

Herodotus, History of Greek and Persian War, (425 BCE), any unabridged edition.

Thomas Hobbes’s translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War (1629), see his preface.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), Book I, Chapter 13.

Homer, The Iliad, Book 9.

Donald Kagan, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (1991), one book of a consummate four-volume study of the war.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses (1517), Introduction to Book I.

Jon Edward Martin, Nemesis (2018), a novel about the Athenian downfall on Sicily.

Nicholas Nicastro, Antigone’s Wake (2007), a novel that ends with a twist on Pericles’ funeral oration. 

Ted Sorenson, Counselor (2009), on Kennedy’s test ban speech.   

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), a novel.

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