August 11th, 2021
I finished reading The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides recently and I wanted to do a review. First off, it was pretty tough to get through. When I started, I was making some decent progress, but then that progress started to decline around Chapters 3 & 4 and it was very difficult to maintain my rate of progress. I opted to listen to an audio recording of the work found on youtube while reading the remaining chapters, which helped tremendously. The main takeaway that I reached upon concluding the work was that democracy is not always what it is cracked up to be, but I think that is partly due to Thucydides’ anti-Athenian bias, although I don’t think I disagree. Without getting into the details at the moment, I think a good indication of this was the fact that the politicians of Athens, a democratic state, decided to invade Sicily right after a peace was reached with Sparta which was a dumb move considering the hostilities with Sparta were a direct result of Athenian imperialism. The result was a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of the Syracusans, who received the aid of the Spartans, which crippled Athens and allowed her subjects to revolt. This is considered to be the turning point in the war. All of this reminds me of the theme of insolence or overwhelming pride inevitably leading to destruction from Herodotus. You can’t get too big for your britches otherwise someone else is going to come along and put you in your place.
To start off, Thucydides was an Athenian general and as soon as the war began in 431 BCE, he perceived that it would be a conflict on a scale without precedent, and resolved to become its historian. He says in the opening lines:
“Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta, beginning the account at the very outbreak of the war, in the belief that it was going to be a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.1
And that:
“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.22
How he went about this task of creating this work is unknown, but he offers some clues:
“… with regard to my factual reporting of the events of the war I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was present myself at the events which I have described or else I heard them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible. Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories”.
History of the Peloponesian War, I.22
I can’t help but think about some of the claims made by Christians about the Gospels when reading this and comparing these passages of Thucydides with what I’ve heard on both sides of the gospel debate. One side claims that they are eyewitness testimonies, the other side disagrees. I haven’t read the New Testament yet, so I don’t know what to make of the arguments, but I would figure it would be useful to keep this section of Thucydides in mind when reading The New Testament, as I think it might be a useful way of thinking about it, especially since eye-witness testimonies can so often be unreliable. I would imagine that the gospels are not written to the same level of thoroughness that the work of Thucydides is and I think that might color my view on them, but I can see there being some similarities as well. I recently heard and would like to explore this notion that the Greek writers of the New Testament would have read Thucydides and Herodotus and would have recognized the value of eye-witness testimony when writing the Gospels. Unfortunately, Thucydides doesn’t name his informants (which may be true for the Gospel writers as well), but it can be imagined that he tirelessly sought out vast numbers of witnesses from both sides and through cross-questioning of the witnesses closely, deciding on the veracity of their reports, piling up notes, sorting through the data, and then selecting, thinking, and writing, gave us his history. Everything from the debates to the behind-the-scenes-maneuvers to the battles had to be reconstructed from what he was told or had personally witnessed. He also used speeches as a way to drive the narrative and to set up the actions that took place. How he used speeches is outlined as follows:
“In this history I have made use of set speeches, some of which were delivered just before and others during the war. I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speaker say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.22
The way I take this is that the speakers and those listening to the speakers were in a particular situation and, taking into account the actions/decisions that were made following a speech or set of speeches, Thucydides crafted what he thought the words would be for the speeches based on their outcome. Another thing that Thucydides mentioned was:
“Investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one cannot rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in a non critical way – even when those stories concern their own native countries.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.20
He later goes on to say that:
“Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.20
Basically, he’s saying that people don’t often think critically about the stories they are told and simply believe whichever story came to them first and that those stories are not always the truth, which I certainly agree with (This is also a dig at Herodotus because he wrote down basically everything that was told to him in his travels). Thucydides says that his account will be accurate enough that one can be safe in believing its veracity with the following:
“…, I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poet’s, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.21
However, there are some passages in the work that are interesting with respect to this. When Thucydides is talking about Sicily and is listing the historical inhabitants: he mentions the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians which are likely taken from Homer’s Oddysey and considered to be giant monstrous humanoids:
“It is said that the earliest inhabitants of any part of the country were the Cyclopes and Laestrygonians. I cannot say what kind of people these were or where they came from or where they went in the end. On these points we must be content with what the poets have said and what anyone else may happen to know.”
History of the Peloponesian War, VI.2
To a certain extent we have to take Thucydides on faith, but there is room for skepticism like there is with other Greek works. A trend that I’ve seen while reading the works of Hesiod, Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides is that the accounts become less mythical and legendary the closer they get to our contemporary times. For example, Hesiod is all myth, Homer is myth and legend, Herodotus is legend, folktale, and history, and Thucydides is pretty much all history (although there are some legendary elements that we recognize today which were believed to be actual history by the Greeks, for example, an account of Theseus being the founder of Athens or the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonian section above). Thucydides thought it important to accurately relay the events that took place, but nowhere in his work does he state his thoughts on what history was about, why it was worth a lifetime of very hard effort to write a detailed and accurate history of the war, or why that history could lay claim to being a possession for all time. The Greeks were deeply attached to the past but it was a timeless past, the age of gods and heroes, that attracted them. It wasn’t important that these stories were accurate, the myths and legends performed the necessary function: they filtered the important bits of information and preserved them, gave the Greeks a feeling of continuity, strengthened the sense of nationhood, and were a source of moral and religious teaching. None of these requires a precise chronology nor did they require accurate or complete documentation. This is the same way that I think about the Old Testament. The earlier books are more mythical and legendary, but then they become closer to describing actual events with more contemporary writers, although the Old Testament never reached the amount of detail that Thucydides achieved, focusing instead on providing a theological interpretation for the history of Israel as the ancient Hebrews knew it. When a later writer mentions an earlier figure, they talk about them as if they actually existed which is actually something Thucydides did such as when he mentioned Agamemnon:
“Agamemnon, it seems to me, must have been the most powerful of the rulers of his day; and it was for this reason that he raised the force against Troy, not because the suitors of Helen were bound to follow him by the oaths which they had sworn Tyndareus.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.9
The tradition was that Helen was courted by many leading Greek kings and nobles in her day, that she was allowed to make her own choice, and that all the suitors swore an oath to her father Tyndareus to abide by her decision. This oath bound all of the suitors (basically the entire Greek world) so that when Helen was taken by Paris, all of the suitors joined in the effort to bring her back. Thucydides believed that Agamemnon was a real person, even if he was skeptical of the circumstances of the oath of Tyndareus, but if we are to look at them through our greater understanding of history due to archaeology, we have no evidence to conclude that Agamemnon even existed, let alone evidence for the events of the Trojan War described in Homer (Interesting to the discussion on the historicity of Agamemnon is the Mask of Agamemnon which was found by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876; Heinrich said that it was the mask of Agamemnon, but later archaeologists determined that it was not dated to the time of the Trojan War). Thucydides treats the characters in Homers poems as if they actually existed. To quote Classical Myth by Barry Powell on the subject:
“Most Ancient Greeks, then, did not doubt that such events as the Trojan War really did occur, and they pointed out the tombs of legendary figures and the actual sites of their exploits. But the Greeks had no way to compare their traditions with historical reality. Today, armed with the insights of archeology and techniques of historical investigation, modern scholars recognize that oral transmitters of traditional tales had little respect for historical truth, or even any concept of it. Greek myth tells us more about the circumstances and concerns of its transmitters than it does about life in the distant past”
Classical Myth (page 7)
The conclusion is that tradition cannot be used to determine if something is true which goes back to my thoughts about people who believe that certain characters in the Bible existed because a later historical person believed that they did, Moses being a good example. Referring to the laws of Moses is like referring to the exploits of Agamemnon. If Moses is historical because of tradition, does that mean Agamemnon is historical because of tradition? I’m not confident in either, which doesn’t mean that they weren’t historical persons, it just means that tradition is not a good line of evidence. All this to say that it will be interesting to read the New Testament with all of this in mind.
Similar to this discussion about tradition and historicity of particular characters is a discussion about prophecy. For Thucydides, history was strictly a human affair and was capable of being understood in terms of patterns in human behavior without the involvement of the supernatural (Herodotus is of the same opinion, although he often mentions fate in his writings). It is uncertain what Thucydides’ religious beliefs were, but if he had any piety, it didn’t extend to those who spoke prophecies and oracles, who were numerous and aggressive in times of war. As a historian, he certainly recorded incidents where actions were held up by oracles and prophecies, but he went out of his way to denigrate them as in the following example:
“At this time of distress people naturally recalled old oracles, and among them was a verse which the old men claimed had been delivered in the past and which said: War with the Dorians comes, and a death will come at the same time. There had been a controversy as to whether the word in this ancient verse was ‘dearth’ (limos) rather than ‘death’ (loimos); but in the present state of affairs the view that the word was ‘death’ naturally prevailed; it was a case of people adapting their memories to suit their suffering. Certainly I think that if there is ever another war with the Dorians after this one and if a dearth results from it, then in all probability people will quote the other version.”
History of the Peloponesian War, I.22
I tend to have a similar skepticism of prophecy that I’m sure I will explore when I read the New Testament.
To get away from comment how Thucydides wrote his history, I want to discuss some of the content of the work that I found interesting. One interesting tidbit was from a speech where Corcyra, a colony of Corinth, was trying to be independent and align themselves with Athens, a rival of Corinth, because Corinth was not treating Corcyra them well. I don’t know why, but this reminded me of the American sentiment in the American Revolution. The British were not treating the American Colonies well and so they revolted and became independent. Another interesting tidbit was a description of a naval battle that sounded very similar to the naval battle mechanics in Total War: Rome II. A reasonable assumption would be that this is where the mechanics for naval battles in the game came from. Some other interesting tidbits are the following: the account of the crucifixion of a Libyan King by the Persians in Book 1, the mention Socrates being an Athenian commander in Book 2, and Thucydides speaking about his involvement in the war and how he came to the relief of Athenian forces at Amphipolis in Book 4. As an example for this last item is the following:
“…Eucles… sent to the other Athenian general in Thrace, Thucydides, the son of Olorus, the author of this history… asking him to come to their relief.”
History of the Peloponesian War, IV.104
And also:
“After this Thucydides organized the defence of Eion to keep it safe…”
History of the Peloponesian War, IV.107
There was an interesting description of a siege engine during the siege of Delium in Book 4:
“Various methods of attack were employed, and in the end they took the place by means of an engine constructed in the following manner. They took a great beam, sawed it in two parts, both of which they completely hollowed out, and then fitted the two parts closely together again, as in the joints of a pipe. A cauldron was then attached with chains to one end of the beam, and an iron tube, curving down into the cauldron, was inserted through the hollow part of the beam. Much of the surface of the beam itself was plated with iron. They brought up this machine from some distance on carts to the part of the wall that had been principally constructed of vines and other wood. When it was close to the wall, they inserted into their end of the beam large bellows and blew through them. The blast, confined inside the tube, went straight into the cauldron which was filled with lighted coals, sulfur, and pitch. A great flame was produced which set fire to the wall and made it impossible for the defenders to stay at their posts. They abandoned their positions and fled; and so the fortification was captured.”
History of the Peloponesian War, IV.100
I found this interesting simply because it sounds like a very rudimentary cannon of sorts. Another interesting bit was when Thucydides wrote about coming up with a new way to track the years of the war in Book 5. Basically, most Athenians would reference the name of the magistrates for the years, but this would have no meaning for later readers; instead, he used summers and winters and years since the beginning of the war. In Book 2 Thucydides describes the plague that ravaged Athens and how he fell victim to it. This was the most shattering and influential ‘accident’ of the war, but what is interesting is that he drew no conclusions from it, refraining from considering the causes, and made the point:
“As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately”
History of the Peloponesian War, II.53
Within this section there was a part of a speech that reminded me of the Brexit Debates:
“What has happened is this: you took my advice when you were still untouched by misfortune, and repented of your action when things went badly with you; it is because your own resolution is weak that my policy appears to you to be mistaken. It is a policy which entails suffering, and each one of you already knows what this suffering is; but it’s ultimate benefits are still far away and not yet clear for all to see. So, now that a great and sudden disaster has fallen on you, you have weakened in carrying out to the end the resolves which you made.”
History of the Peloponesian War, II.61
From what I’ve seen there are a lot of people who voted to leave the European Union that are now regretting their decision. Not an exact comparison, but reminded me of it nonetheless.
Another interesting (and important) section was Pericles Funeral Oration which is a famous speech made by pericles at the end of the first year of the war in which those who had fallen in the previous years fighting were honored. This speech has had a significant impact on the American democratic experiment. The thing that makes it noteworthy is that the speech not only honors the men that died in the previous year of the war, but also glorifies the city for which they died. I wanted to include a couple of excerpts that I found poignant:
“Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day today life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands deep respect. We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.”
History of the Peloponesian War, II.37
Later in the speech, he says the following:
“Make up your minds that happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous. Let there be no relaxation in face of the perils of the war. The people who have most excuse for despising death are not the wretched and unfortunate, who have no hope of doing well for themselves, but those who run the risk of a complete reversal in their lives, and who would feel the difference most intensely, if things went wrong for them. Any intelligent man would find a humiliation caused by his own slackness more painful to bear than death, when death comes to him unperceived, in battle, and in the confidence of his patriotism.”
History of the Peloponesian War, II.43
This no doubt resonates with most Americans today. Abraham Lincoln struck a similar chord in his Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. I can’t help but feel a pang of patriotism and pride in the U.S. for the ideals on which it was founded. I’m sure Thucydides felt the same patriotism for his country as he fought for it, but as with the U.S. there is also the pang of disappointment for not living up to the ideals that were set forth. I will be writing about this in detail in the coming sections. Pericles was certainly the premier statesman of Athens and advised a more restrained approach to the war but his death due to the plague allowed more unscrupulous actors to take hold of the political machine of Athens. All of the leaders of Athens after Pericles died preferred to incite all the bad habits of the rabble and followed an unstable policy, endeavoring to be popular rather than useful, as recorded by Thucydides. A passage that sums this up is the following:
“Indeed, during the whole period of peace-time when Pericles was at the head of affairs the state was wisely led and firmly guarded, and it was under him that Athens was at her greatest. And when the war broke out, here, too, he appears to have accurately estimated what the power of Athens was. He survived the outbreak of War by two years and six months, and after his death his foresight with regard to the war became even more evident. For Pericles had said that Athens would be victorious if she bided her time and took care of her navy, if she avoided trying to add to the empire during the course of the war, and if she did nothing to risk the safety of the city itself. But his successors did the exact opposite, and in other matters which apparently had no connection with the war private ambition and private profit led to policies which were bad both for the Athenians themselves and for their allies. Such policies, when successful, only brought credit and advantage to the individuals, and when they failed, the whole war potential of the state was impaired. The reason for this was that Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw that they were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen. But his successors, who were more on a level with each other and of and each of whom aimed at occupying in the first place, adopted methods of demagogy which resulted in their losing control over the actual conduct of affairs. Such a policy, in a great city with an empire to govern, naturally led to a number of mistakes, amongst which was the Sicilian expedition, though in this case the mistake was not so much an error of judgment with regard to the opposition to be expected as a failure on the part of those who are at home to give proper support to their forces overseas. Because they were so busy with their own personal intrigues for securing the leadership of the people, they allowed this expedition to lose its impetus, and by quarrelling among themselves began to bring confusion into the policy of the state. And yet, after losing most of their Fleet and all the other forces in Sicily, with revolutions already breaking out in Athens, they none the less held out for eight years against their original enemies, who were now reinforced by the Sicilians, against their own allies, most of which had revolted, and against Cyrus, son of the King of Persia, who later joined the other side and provided the Peloponnesians with money for their fleet. And in the end it was only because they had destroyed themselves by their own internal strife that finally they were forced to surrender. So overwhelmingly great were the resources which Pericles had in mind at the time when he prophesied an easy victory for Athens over the Peloponnesians alone.”
History of the Peloponesian War, II.65
The keyword in this discussion is demagogue. I found an article that goes into this a bit more and offers some insights into the trend of demagoguery outside of a discussion of Thucydides alone: The Demagogues of Ancient Athens. A useful paragraph to understanding demagoguery from the article is the following:
“The popular Ekklesia resembled more and more a boisterous mob; and the sharp rise of demagoguery accentuated a range of long-festering, as well as relatively newfound, Athenian political and social conflicts: aristocrats vs working-class; rich vs poor; privileged vs less advantaged; old reputable families, networked together vs The People; the “chrestoi” (useful, well-born citizens) vs the “phauloi” (simple people, lacking in politically influential friends); oligarchs vs democrats. In the late 5th c. BC, there also appeared questions of old money vs nouveaux riches and, in particular, traditional vs “new” politicians”
The Demagogues of Ancient Athens
There are also some videos that are useful such as Democracy vs. Demagogue by the Berggruen Institute and Why Socrates Hated Democracy by The School of Life. I would also recommend reading the Wikipedia article on demagogues. It can be difficult to define demagoguery as it is ultimately dependent on the specific democratic system and the issues that the people within that system are most concerned with. Certainly, the democratic institution of ancient Athens (being a single city) is fundamentally different from the democracies of the modern world. In Athens, the people would vote directly on policies whereas specifically in American democracy, the people elect representatives who then vote on policies (Which makes America closer to a republic than a true democracy). In any democratic institution, however, the fundamentals are the same: A demagogue is a political leader who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity. Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so. Through my education growing up, I have learned about what demagoguery is in a broad sense with examples such as Adolf Hitler and the Athenian demagogues, and I’ve understood the threat that it can have on democratic institutions which is why I was very distressed when Donald Trump entered the political arena. He appealed to the fears of rural white Americans (although not exclusively rural white Americans) that radical Islamic terrorists were gathering strength, Christians were being executed en masse in the Middle East, illegal immigrants were lurking in the shadows, gangs were operating with impunity in our cities, drugs were “pouring” across the border, and that “bad people (with bad intentions)” were flooding through our airports. A good example of this demagoguery, in particular, the practice of scapegoating out-groups (much like Hitler’s scapegoating of the Jews) is the following quote:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best…they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.”
Donald Trump, June 2015
I would label this rhetoric as demagogic and damaging for civil society. I didn’t vote in the 2016 Presidential election, mostly because I was busy with school and wasn’t able to Stay up to date with the politics at the time, but my assessment was that Donald Trump didn’t win, but rather Hillary Clinton lost. Hillary Clinton was the definition of an establishment politician and Donald Trump tapped into the distrust that the common people had for the establishment. There is a discussion to be had about the rise of Donald Trump as a political figure as I believe it has some very interesting implications for modern politics. Within that discussion lies an exploration of the role of populism as it relates to demagoguery as well as the role of personality cults. This is a complex discussion that I hope to dive into one day, but at present, I feel that there is definitely a reason to be anti-elitist in America today, but with the way Trump went about his presidency, he did not meet the needs of the people. That is all I will say about that
The last major thing I want to discuss is The Melian Dialogue which is a famous set of passages that appears at the end of Book 5. The Melians were a colony of Sparta on the island of Melos, but had remained neutral throughout much of the war. The Athenians, wanting to further solidify their naval empire, demanded that the Melians surrender and pay tribute or be destroyed. The Melians, wanting to remain neutral, refused to capitulate and were subsequently slaughtered. What makes this dialogue interesting is a couple of things: On the one hand, it is unique in that it is a dialogue set up like a play and on the other, it provides some interesting political philosophy for domestic and international politics. There are no other instances of this style of dialogue in Thucydides’ work and it can be safely assumed that it was an invention of Thucydides. Certainly, the reasons for the action and the action itself are accurate, but the likelihood that the dialogues happened as they have been recorded is slim at best. One of the most famous lines from this dialogue is the following by the Athenians:
“The standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”
History of the Peloponesian War, V.89
Or in other words, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”. This is a significant thing in the realm of political realism in that it is not so much the ideals of a nation-state that determine actions, but rather the amount of power they have. Several resources that are worth exploring are the Wikipedia article for Might makes Right, the military wikia for the Melian Dialogue, and the video On the Melian Dialogue by the Vlogbrothers on Youtube. I’m sure that as I read more about political philosophy, I will dive into this in detail. What I will say here is that this is another example of democracy not living up to the beacon of freedom that it is so often portrayed as. I think relevant to this discussion is the following video: America’s History of Meddling in Foreign Elections. America has a history of meddling in foreign affairs to overturn leaders who the U.S. saw as threatening to her national security even if they were democratically elected. I’m not sure how relevant to the discussion of might makes right this is, but it is relevant to discussions about U.S. foreign policy which seems to sometimes find itself in the might makes right realm.
The last thing that I want to discuss is the oligarchic coup of 411 BCE. Basically, near the end of the war, the aristocratic class was tired of having their resources diminished and blamed it primarily on the democratic institution that had existed for 100 years prior and thus organized a coup whereby they took control of the government. I believe there to be some significant lessons to be learned from this, but I am afraid that I am not in a position to dive into what I think those are at the present moment. What I can glean from the events surrounding this coup is that democracy is fragile and can be manipulated in a way to be detrimental to the populace and I think it is telling that the Athenians ended up losing the Peloponnesian War to the Spartans. There may be a discussion here about populism as well, but I will save that for a later date. Thus concludes my review of The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.