Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds.”

And thus throwing down the gauntlet, Thucydides led humankind into modernity.

Over the last several weeks, I have been reading, with the greatest of pleasures, Thucydides’ remarkable intellectual tour de force, his History of the Peloponnesian War, a work spanning, if we believe the author, not only the twenty-one years of the war that it covers, but an equal number of years of the author’s own life.

Over the last few weeks, I have kept, as I usually do, notes on the text as I go along. Unlike what I did with Herodotus’ The Histories, I have decided to condense my thoughts and observations this time into a single post, brevity and narrower focus being perhaps justified by the narrowness of Thucydides’ own scope. To get a better appreciation for what Thucydides accomplished in his History of the Peloponnesian War, it is useful to compare him with Herodotus.

Herodotus is usually called “the Father of History.” The English word “history” is itself derived from the Greek word, historia, which meant “learning or knowing by enquiry” [New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]. Herodotus had begun his work with the following words, rather literally translated:

What follows is a display of the enquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Landmark Herodotus, citing Gould in a footnote).

The more idiomatic translation given by the Landmark volume main text is:

Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents his research [historia] so that human events do not fade with time. May the great and wonderful deeds–some brought forth by the Hellenes, others by the barbarians–not go unsung; as well as the causes that led them to make war on each other.

Now anyone who has read Herodotus knows that the key words are “inquiries” and “causes,” for Herodotus is fond of digressions relating to pretty much anything he can discover about strange and foreign peoples. Thus, Herodotus’ The Histories (literally “inquiries”) is really less “history” in our sense and more inquiry–and these inquiries span sociology, geography (including human geography), ethnography, and narrative history. There is a fair amount of the latter, of course, but the work is very wide-ranging.

With Thucydides, we have a far narrower approach. Thucydides begins his work with what is most correctly termed an anthropological overview of the development of primitive Greece, with an emphasis on how different groupings (e.g. Dorians and Ionians) came to be at the time of the writing. For example, he writes:

It is evident that the country now called Hellas [Greece] had in ancient times no settled population; on the contrary, migrations were of frequent occurrence, the several tribes readily abandoning their homes under the pressure of superior numbers. Without commerce, without freedom of communication either by land or by sea, cultivating no more of their territory than the necessities of life required, destitute of capital, never planting their land . . . they cared little about shifting their habitation, and consequently neither built large cities nor attained to any other form of greatness.

Thucydides goes on to show how as population grew due to cultivation, the small space that we now call Greece sent out colonists to distant parts of the Mediterranean. Although he attributes the first navy to the legendary figure of Minos, Thucydides quickly brings his readers into the not-so-recent past, and then goes on from there, beginning with a local matter at Corcyra (modern Corfu) in the Adriatic that quicky drew in both the Aegian Athenian and Spartan powers–and then pretty much every one else in the Greek world as each polis sought to take sides.

The scene, quite frankly, reminds me a very great deal of the system of alliances in Europe prior to the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Just as that one local event in what we now call Bosnia drew in all the great powers of Europe in a great and utterly unprecedented war that would break several empires, the conflict between local factions in Corcyra–an place not really so far from Bosnia, actually–drew in Sparta and Athens and all their allies. The real issue, of course, wasn’t the particulars of the affair at Corcyra–though Thucydides presents these in detail–but rather–and Thucydides presents this too–Athenian military and economic expansion as well as increased political influence–and Spartan nervousness about these.

For the next several hundred pages, Thucydides’ narrative exclusively deals with three inter-related themes: military matters, including both strategy and tactics, economics, and politics. Not only is Thucydides’ focus far narrower than Herodotus’ encyclopedic inquires were, but he was conscious that his methods were more precise, too. Where Herodotus wrote down pretty much any interesting yarn that he could supply–letting the reader decide its worthiness to be believed as factual–Thucydides formed his theses from personal interviews of interested parties and examination of inscriptions and written documents and presented his arguments to the reader fully-formed.

It must be stated that Thucydides had ample opportunity for accuracy in his writing, for a few reasons. He was a general (stratigos) in the Athenian army, and a prince of Thrace, where he had the right to work the gold and silver mines. Furthermore, after facing defeat early on in the war, Thucydides was banished from Athens, and he lived for many years as an exile in Sparta itself.

One possible effect of Thucydides’ life experiences is the remarkably dispassionate tone which he takes throughout his work. The greatest early historian rarely engages in anything approaching name-calling, and he is even-handed throughout in his treatment of not only each battle and local conflict, but also in terms of his evaluation of the two principle combatants: Athens and Sparta.

This is not to say that Thucydides’ prose is devoid of humanity. On the contrary, the narrative displays great psychological insight into the minds of soldiers on the edge of victory and others who can see defeat coming with despair. He gets inside the minds of conspirators plotting to overthrow democracy by examining their motives. He deplores genocide where it occurs. He praises good men as being fundamentally decent and moral, while occasionally calling others “scoundrels” (a term exceptionally rare in his work, though).

Thucydides also goes further than Herodotus in making the two principal actors into quasi-characters of their own. Thus, the Athenians are “addicted to innovation,” democratic, and given to quickness of action. They value experimentation and quick adaptation, and are masters of the sea. The Spartans, on the other hand, are slow, extremely conservative, and suffer from a surplus of caution, though their military prowess on land is formidable–but vulnerable to the quick-thinking Athenians.

Thucydides’ focus on the war, as stated above, relates primarily to the three fields I mentioned above; economics, politics, and military matters. You can’t have any proper discussion of the last, Thucydides would surely say, if you neglect the first two.

Because Thucydides’ work is above all a military history, I’m going to take the military side of things “as read,” if you don’t mind (shades of Monty Python). Suffice to say, the extended discussions of siege warfare (as exemplified above all by the Spartan and Theban attack on the brave Plataeans), naval warfare (above all, in the harbour at Syracuse), and land warfare (typified in a number of battles, including an early Athenian victory over the Spartans in which surprise and trickery were used) fascinate! Some of the tactical high points for me include the following: the observations about fire signals, the reference to divers sneaking food underwater to the stranded soldiers of Sparta on the island at Pylos, the notes about the Spartans hoisting their ships overland across two isthmuses in order to avoid Athenian fleets, and the narrative relating Plataean tunneling under a Spartan-Theban siege-mound to remove the ground below it so that the mound never grew high enough to assault the Plataean wall. I can certainly see why the History of the Peloponnesian War is required reading in military academies! The book is worth reading on that score alone.

But that is in my opinion a small part of the meaning of Thucydides’ work. After all, it is economics and politics that are really the keys to the narrative. First, the former.

In the aftermath of the Persian war with mainland Greece and the Ionian cities in on the coast of what is now Turkey, Athens was able to liberate from Persian tyranny many cities and islands whom she brought into the Delian league. As time passed, the league became an empire, with much wealth flowing into Athens from her territories, principally Chios, Lesbos, Samos, and Euboea, though there were a great many others. Sparta correctly perceived that the best way to win the war was to cut off the parts of the Athenian empire that made her great and prosperous. Then, too, Sparta also relied on Persian money to finance her fleet. (As it happened, the Persian regime is portrayed as helping the Athenians after helping the Spartans, hoping to play her two dangerous neighbours off against each other, thus keeping them in a perpetual state of weakness.) Other money was obtained by borrowing the considerable sums of money that were to be had in the local temples; in some cases, for instance, statues of deities were melted down and turned into coined money. State coffers, taxes of dependent states, and bounty taken from conquered enemies were sources of income. Paid soldiers and paid rowers were an expense. The public state at Athens paid for the orphans of soldiers killed in the war.

The English word “politics” of course, comes from the Greek word for the local city-state, the polis. And the systems that emerged throughout Greece found a number of expressions, the two most extreme of which were Sparta and Athens. Thucydides took it for granted that readers would be reasonably acquainted with the Spartan system, a system in which Dorian Greeks lived off land worked by their helots, non-Dorian Greek slaves whom it was legal to murder. (In fact, as a rite of passage, young Spartan males were told to go out by night and kill helots on occasion.) Sparta was presided over by two kings, but the real power lay with the Board of Ephors, who were elected by a larger body of older men, known as the gerousia; both of these small bodies held much more power than the fuller citizen’s Assembly (ecclesia, the Greek word that came to be translated of Christian gatherings as “church” much later.

Things were very different at Athens. Foreigners, for one thing, were welcome there. Athens was also a democracy, and she often allied herself with revolutionary movements representing “the many” as opposed to the oligarchic “few.” As Athens would ally herself with revolutionaries in the various cities of the Greek world, Sparta would ally itself with the local oligarchies.

Athenian democracy was sloppy and unpredictable, but very human. Thucydides relates the story of how the Athenians decided to exterminate an entire city of Mytilene . The next day, one of their leaders proposed that they vote on the matter again. Thucydides preserves, apparently, the speeches of those who spoke for and against the motion. On the one side, it was argued that if the Athenians let the Mytilenians go unpunished for revolting, then her other tributaries would also revolt. It might have been wrong for Athens to take her empire, one Cleon argued, but letting it go would be fatal. Against this, his opponent Diodotus argued that it was in Athens’ best interest to earn revenue off living Mytilenians, and further argued that the death penalty was not a sufficient deterrent to rebellion or crime. Cleon expressed his frustration in democracy as an institution at this point. (Thucydides explicitly says in another context that Cleon preferred war as a means of distracting his fellow Athenians from prosecuting him for various alleged offenses.) After the debate finished, it was moved to send a ship to overtake the first (charged with exterminating the town in question) with orders to belay the genocide that was to have occurred. Thucydides adds a little romance and suspense by relating how the Athenians told the rowers to take their provisions while they rowed, and to row all night, with promises of bonuses if they overtook the first ship, which did indeed happen, since the first ship sailed slowly, her sailors not at all relishing their orders to kill every male in the city.

On the other hand, Athenian democracy was responsible for the over-reaching expedition to Sicily that ended in total disaster, an event that turned the tide of war in Sparta’s favour. Then, too, good Athenian generals like Nicias feared to make prudent decisions knowing that the Athenians were very unforgiving of their wartime leaders.

When I was younger, I always imagined that the Spartans were the “bad guys,” and the Athenians were the “good guys.” Reading Thucydides disabused me of this notion. The History of the Poloponnesian War clearly shows that the Athenians not only were given to bouts of anger and pique, but actually carried out cold-blooded genocide on occasion. This happened to the Melians, and Thucydides preserves, in the famous “Melian dialogue,” the negotiations between Athens and Melos before the latter suffered the same fate. The Athenians informed the Melians that they, being a strong city, had power to make demands from the weaker one, in this case Melos, since

Right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak do what they must.

After the Melians argued that they did not want subservience to Athens, but preferred neutrality in the war, the Athenians attacked them, and taking the city by treachery, slaughtered every male in it.

The History of the Peloponnesian War is often characterized as being associated with those who advocate “realpolitik” in foreign policy. American “paleocons” and the likes of Henry Kissinger are still associated with it. The amorality of state decisions not on the basis of right but of might and self-interest are also routinely traced to Thucydides in Western political thought.

I think this is an extremely serious misreading of Thucydides’ work. When I read the History of the Pelopponesian War, what strikes me is Thucydides’ humanity, his preference for mercy over vengeance, and certainly mercy over proactive neutralization of enemies when genocide is involved. I do not at all think that we should identify the Athenian heralds’ words to the Melians as even remotely indicative of Thucydides’ own opinions–particularly after Thucydides’ obvious preference for Diodotus over Cleon in Book 3.

Thucydides offers sober reflections on war, too. When the Spartans first decide to go to war with Athens, one of their older speakers (I believe it was one of their two kings), argued that the young, who do not know the horrors of war, should listen to their elders before launching too quickly into another one. Then, too, our historian describes many occasions when the war between Athens and Sparta could have terminated in peace treaties that were reasonable and humane–but were scuttled by either warmongers or by mutual distrust and misunderstandings.

Unfortunately, Thucydides’ work is unfinished–the text breaks off more or less in mid-sentence, apparently, and the speculation is that the author did not live to finish his narrative. Despite this disappointment, the refined “inquiry” that constitutes the tightly-focused narrative History of the Pelopponesian War is quite clearly, like the author had hoped, a “possession for all time.”* ** ***

–
*As I read Thucydides’ work, I couldn’t help thinking about the geopolitical situation in the South China Sea. I actually tend to see China in terms similar to Sparta. China, like Sparta, has been in the last few decades very slow to war–unlike the quick Americans (paralleling the Athenians). It is also a great land power–again, like Sparta. It has a tendency to be inward looking, unlike America, where foreigners are welcome to study and do business, something that perhaps contributes to America’s own happy “addiction to innovation.” Finally, American naval and air power also back up an empire of sorts, the chief difference being that Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Alaska, and Guam are not itching for independence. But China, like Sparta, is moving slowly, if decisively and methodically, to reduce American influence on her south and eastern fronts while America, like Athens before her–wearies herself in conflicts all around the globe (the morality of which is beside the question for the moment, since the question is how America can sustain its economy like this). Furthermore, China, like Sparta, has been slowly building up her navy. And of course, China is an oligarchy while America is a democracy. It would not be prudent to stretch the similarities too far, but I believe, like Niall Ferguson, that the twenty-first century belongs to a determined China. Better start learning your Mandarin!

**There was one more thing I really want to say. The Athens that lost the war to Sparta was allowed by Sparta to rebuild itself. That Athens, a chastened one, is the city that produced the full flowering of philosophy in the Academy headed by Plato. I wonder if a victorious Athens could have produced the same Plato. Perhaps defeat was good for the moral bearings of the city.

***What makes Thucydides’ work a triumph of the human spirit for me is the fact that myth, legend, and divinity are, for the most part, thrown completely out the window. One looks in vain for signs that Thucydides’ was a believer in any kind of god. For one raised on the “historiography” that produced the likes of Kings, Chronicles, and Matthew, reading Thucydides was both romantic, heroic, and joyful. Here is a work that–while biblical writers were busy condemning gays, women, and people who didn’t believe in Yahway or his King in Jerusalem–discusses what makes economies tick, what makes for good government, and what makes for good behavior in war. Thus, Thucydides is remarkable not only for his formidable focus on military, political, and economic matters, but also just as much for the human-centric focus on it which excludes so much religious bile and nonsense.

–
Up next: the rest of the story, as told by Xenophon.