Reading Thucydides in America Today

Forty years ago I taught Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War at the very beginning of my career, and it has remained a touchstone of my thinking ever since. Famous in its own time, Thucydides’s work was rediscovered in the fifteenth century and has been part of modern Western culture continuously—particularly in matters political and military. To give a few examples: Alfonso v of Aragon, among other kingdoms, often copied the text in his own handwriting during the fifteenth century; Holy Roman Emperor Charles v carried it with him wherever he went in the sixteenth; the philosopher Thomas Hobbes translated it into English for the first time in the seventeenth; President John Adams prescribed reading it to his son John Quincy in the eighteenth and told his wife, Abigail, that he thought of writing a history of the American Revolution because of its parallels to the Peloponnesian War. Such comparisons continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After the Civil War, Basil Gilder-sleeve, who founded classics study in American universities, wrote an article called “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War.” Similarly, after World War ii the former General and then Secretary of State George C. Marshall publicly doubted whether anyone could understand the basic international issues of the twentieth century without reading Thucydides: “I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.” The ancient Greek historian has been invoked in all our wars since, including by Congressman Wyche Fowler of Georgia, who read from Thucydides’s account of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition during debate in Congress over action in the Persian Gulf in 1990. Likewise Thucydides’s book is still required reading at the military academies at West Point and Annapolis.

So what is all the fuss about? We know little of Thucydides himself but a great deal about his book. Thucydides was born around 460 b.c. into an upper-class Athenian family, wealthy through its metal mines in Thrace, and died around 400. In between he served as a general in the Athenian army, was exiled after losing a campaign, caught and recovered from the plague, wrote the history, and returned to the city in his final years. To begin with, Thucydides’s book was the first history in the modern sense. Herodotus had come earlier, of course, but gods and spirits took a leading role in his accounts. In contrast Thucydides was the first to write a wholly secular history, assigning causation to psychology and social factors rather than to divine interventions. Then, too, Thucydides was extraordinarily perceptive, both in general insights and in particular details, and he was the first to interview witnesses. “It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. … my work was done to last for ever.”

The war itself broke out in 431 b.c. and lasted until the defeat of Athens in 405. Each side expected to win quickly, Athens through its navy and Sparta through its army, but as in so many later wars, expectations of a speedy triumph were misplaced and the war dragged on for almost thirty years and sputtered on even longer after that. Thucydides labelled it “the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes” and had no doubt about its cause: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” Against undue confidence, Thucydides during the conference that led to the declaration of war had an Athenian speaker urge, “Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents.”

Throughout the volume, one of Thucydides’s...