"Right, as the world goes, is only
between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer
what they must."
If Herodotus was the historian of Greece's
finest hour, his contemporary, Thucydides (c. 460 - 400 BC), was the historian of
its darkest. After the Persian war, the Greeks realized that their disunity had
made them vulnerable, and established a confederation for common defense called
the Delian League. Since a renewed invasion, if it ever came, would have to
come by sea, and since the Greeks were a maritime people, most of the League’s
resources were spent building up a navy. Athens was a natural leader, for it
was rich, powerful, and had played a critical role in both wars. Sparta, by
comparison, was insular, suspicious of foreigners, and had no navy to speak of.
Originally all cities were supposed to
contribute men and ships, but it soon became the custom to simply pay a tax to
the Athenians. Under this system the confederated navy quickly became, for all
practical purposes, the Athenian navy, the tax a tribute, and the league a
rapidly-coalescing empire. All eyes turned suspiciously toward Athens. Unlike
the Persians, however, the new imperial power was fiercely committed to
democracy – democracies friendly to Athens, to be sure, but democracies
nonetheless. Many other cities, by comparison, were ruled by tyrants or closed
oligarchies, who feared the spread of dangerous ideas from Athens. They looked
to Sparta – the other champion of the Persian wars, and itself ruled by a closed
military oligarchy – for defense. In the coming conflict both sides could
plausibly represent themselves as the defenders of Greek liberty.
The triggering incident was a revolt in
the minor town of Epidamnus, in which the democratic party appealed to Athens,
and the oligarchic to Sparta. But the real reason, Thucydides said, "was
the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in
Sparta." During the first part of the war (431 - 421), the Athenians very
sensibly refused to meet the Spartans in the field. Their city was heavily
fortified, and was impervious to siege as long as it controlled the sea lanes.
The Spartans could not challenge the Athenians at sea, but because of their
powerful army they had little to fear from Athenian attack. The war quickly
bogged down into stalemate.
After a decade of this, Athens and Sparta
agreed to a fifty-year truce (421.) But minor hostilities continued throughout,
and in 415 the Athenians, spurred on by the demagogue Alcibiades, invaded
previously-neutral Syracuse. The city, they reasoned, was rich and vulnerable –
if they could take it, perhaps the plunder in gold and slaves would give them
the edge they needed against the Spartans. The expeditionary force was ambushed
and wiped out before it reached Syracuse, however, and Alcibiades fled to the
Spartans (and later to the Persians, who executed him.) The Athenians built a
second fleet, but it was also destroyed in a battle against the Spartans, who
had decided to take up sailing after all. (405)
Facing starvation, the Athenians
surrendered the next year. The Spartans imposed a ruinous peace and set up an
oligarchic regime in Athens (the so-called “Thirty Tyrants,” who executed
Socrates.) Although the Athenians eventually rallied and expelled the Thirty
Tyrants, its power was broken. Like the Persians, Thucydides seemed to say, the
Athians had been ruined by pride.
…
If Herodotus was the youth of Greek
history, Thucydides was, at almost the same time, its maturity. Where Herodotus
was endlessly curious, and discussed everything from Phoenician journeys around
the tip of Africa to the strange customs of the Scythians and the antiquity of
the Babylonians, Thucydides chose a single theme and stuck to it. His history
is an account of the war between Athens and Sparta, and an analysis of its
underlying causes – power politics – and nothing else. In terms of both space
and time, then, his account of the past is very restricted: if somebody is not
threatening to kill or enslave someone else, or actually doing it, he is not
interested – a regrettable precedent in a genre which is too often a record of
crimes and massacres held up for our admiration.
In his own defense he protested that he
had not written his work “as an essay which is to win the applause of the
moment, but as a possession for all time.” There was, he felt, a lesson to be
learned from the past, beyond the moral that Athens, as the new Persia,
deserved what it got. Unlike Herodotus, who portrayed every event as the result
of the uncoerced decision of individuals, Thucydides saw a logic of the
situation which influenced, if it did not exactly compel, people to behave as
they did. Athenian power had tempted them to set themselves up as the new
hegemon, this had made the other cities suspicious, and they had naturally
turned to the Spartans for defense, who recognized, in their turn, that if they
wanted to preserve their liberty they would have to resist Athens sooner or
later. What Homer would have explained as “the will of Jove,” and Herodotus as
“the will of Xerxes” or “the Athenians,” Thucydides saw as a kind of mechanism.
And as a mechanism, it could be profitably studied. For this reason he is often
regarded as the founder of political science, which sets itself the same task
of deciphering the algebra of power.
Thucydides is also famous for his
speeches. The funeral oration of Pericles is a classic statement of patriotism
and civic pride, and was offered as an explicit contrast between the wisdom of
Pericles and the foolishness of Alcibiades and other demagogues. He guided the
passions of the people with his oratory, while his successors were guided by
those passions. If Pericles had lived through the plague that swept Athens in
the middle of the war, one suspects, things might have turned out differently.
The Melean dialogue is another famous speech, in which the cynical, powerful
Athenians explain to the idealistic but weak Meleans that they are either with
them or against them. The Meleans appeal to justice, to reason, to the gods,
and to everything else they can think of, but the Athenians will have none of
it – they take the city by siege and enslave the inhabitants. Whether
Thucydides meant this episode as a frank explanation of the nature of power
politics, or as an indictment of the Athenians, who would shortly be humbled
themselves, is hard to say. Perhaps he intended both.
In Thucydides the final elements of
history as we understand it come together – that is, the study of continuity
and change in terms of time and space, and as a result of both human actions
and an underlying logic of the situation, which perhaps help us make sense of
the present. The gods have fallen silent, fate decrees nothing, and the age of
heroes has passed. What remains is human beings, who are caught in situations
they do not fully understand, but nevertheless decide their own fate.
The Peloponnesian War: Full Text:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm
Part of a Series on Philosophy of History
(V of XXXV)
Questions: Thucydides has been criticized
for portraying the Athenian democracy in a negative light, as a way of
retaliating against it for expelling him after he lost a battle. Do you find
Thucydides account of a people driven to folly by demagogues credible? Or is he
missing something? What about his contention that power politics is the
ultimate arbiter of conflicts? Does justice have a role to play in practical affairs?
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