Thucydides and the Lessons of Ancient History: An Interview with Donald Kagan

DONALD KAGAN IS STERLING PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS AND History at Yale University. In 2002 Kagan won the National Humanties Medal. He is the author of a number of books on ancient history, civilization, and the West, including The Fall of the Athenian Empire (Cornell University Press, 1987); On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (Anchor Books, 1995); While America Sleeps (St. Martin's, 2000) with Frederick W. Kagan The Western Heritage (Prentice Hall, 2000) with Steven Ozment and Frank M. Turner; The Heritage of World Civilizations (Prentice Hall, 2000) with Albert M. Craig, William A. Graham, Ozment, and Turner; The Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 2003).

Viking Press published Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History in 2009. Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens spoke to Kagan recently about his work on that volume.

From Adolf Furtwängler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays on the History of Art (New York, 1895).

Randall Stephens:

In an era when political history has lost some of its luster in the academy, has Thucydides, too, lost some appeal?

Donald Kagan:

I think there has been a decline. And that's too bad. Because in terms of politics in the broadest sense—war and international relations—Thucydides is more important than ever. But political history is now much less studied in universities, and intellectuals are not very interested in it. That was not the case during the Cold War.

Stephens:

Should the recent conflicts in the Middle East make military and political history more relevant?

Kagan:

They should. Yet it seems to me that today's intellectuals respond to these phenomena much more emotionally than they used to.

Stephens:

You describe Thucydides as a historical revisionist. What do you mean by that?

Kagan:

When I say revisionism, I'm thinking especially of the revisionist studies of the First World War that dominated the interwar period. I'm also thinking of the 1960s revisionist historians in America who pointed the finger at the United States and Western Europe as the aggressors and instigators of the Cold War. In both cases a revisionist consensus developed among the intellectual class. But such views about the Cold War, for instance, were miles away from what ordinary folks thought. Think of the many books and articles written to explain the use of the atomic bomb against Japan in 1945. It became common wisdom among professionals in the field that the bomb had nothing to do with attempting to win the war quickly in order to save lives, but instead was the first action of the Cold War, somehow meant to thwart the Soviet Union.

I think that Thucydides was trying to achieve a similar revisionist consensus in his own day. Most of the evidence that permits me to come to different conclusions from those of Thucydides is provided by Thucydides himself. He is a stunningly honest writer in the sense that he tries very hard to have his reader arrive at what he thinks is the correct understanding of a particular event. It's not that he fails to make his point very strongly; it's that he rarely suppresses any information that would help you go in the opposite direction. He provides a tremendous amount of information that appears to me—and not only to me—to contradict his conclusions.

But there are a few instances where other sources contain information not provided by Thucydides—striking because they are so few. Here's one famous example, though not as famous as it should be. Thucydides represents Cleon's remarkable military success at Pylos in 425 B.C. as being the product of dumb luck. Yet there is an inscription that tells us that right after Cleon's victory the Athenians were able to increase the tribute they demanded from their allies. And this was the critical problem they faced at that moment; they were running out of money. If contemporaries had judged Cleon's victory over the Spartans to be the result of nothing more than dumb luck, there is no way that the...