Thucydides: An Introduction for the Common Reader

Introduction
OF ALL THE HISTORIANS of war past or present, the ancient Greek Thucydides, author of the History of The Peloponnesian War, is the most celebrated and admired. His book, written in the fifth century BCE, is one of the supreme classic works of Greek and Western civilization that continues to speak to us from across the vast gulf of the past. Over the centuries a universal judgment has come to esteem it as one of the greatest of all histories. The famous nineteenth-century English historian Lord Macaulay, whose History of England itself became a classic, declared, "I have no hesitation in pronouncing Thucydides the greatest historian who ever lived."1 The account Thucydides wrote of the twenty-seven-year war of 431-404 between Athens and Sparta is taken up with the details and actions of warfare on land and sea, but also with much, much more. It is equally a story of diplomacy and relations among the Greek city-states, of political values, ideas, and argument, of the success and failure of military plans and strategy, of renowned and striking personalities, and most fundamentally, of the human and communal experience of war and its effects. Its time is the later fifth century, an era in which Sparta, one of the two great powers of Greece, was a formidable militaristic society organized for war, and Athens an intensely vital democracy that ruled over a large empire of subject city-states and stood at the height of its unequalled achievements as a creative center of culture, intellect, literature, and art.
In many ways Thucydides is one of our contemporaries. Despite the twenty-five hundred years that separate him from the present, and notwithstanding the vast differences in the beliefs, values, and general conditions of life between his society and ours in the twenty-first century, numerous aspects of his thinking and of the world he depicts in his book will seem recognizable and familiar to us today. Those who possess any knowledge or memory of the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century--its terrible international conflicts and the huge slaughter of human life caused by its two world wars, the revolutions that brought communism and fascism to power and the horrors of persecution and terror that followed, and the violence and catastrophic collapse of moral standards manifest in the bombing and destruction of cities and killing of civilian populations by all the combatants in their conduct of war--will see resemblances in some of the scenes Thucydides describes. And they will likewise see nothing strange in the historian's observations on the aspirations of men and states to power and domination as permanent and recurrent elements of human nature in politics and international relations.
Because of the Peloponnesian War's wide extent and the large number of states involved, which included not only the Greek city-states but also the mighty Persian empire, Thucydides considered it to be a world war and the greatest conflict that had so far taken place in history. It is not surprising that in later times scholars and others have often looked at the Peloponnesian War as a paradigm of later wars and to Thucydides' work for its lessons and parallels. In 1918, at the conclusion of the First World War, the Briton Gilbert Murray, one the most famous Hellenists in Europe and renowned as a translator of some of the masterworks of Greek literature, published a lecture, Our Great War and the Great War of the Ancient Greeks, which was based on Thucydides. Crediting the Greek historian with the faculty of seeing "both present and past . . . with the same unclouded eye," it noted a number of similarities between the war of 1914-1918 and the Peloponnesian War. It closed with the fervent hope that after the vast suffering and destruction of the war just ended, mankind would take the opportunity of building out of the ruins a better, more cooperative life between nations.2 This hope, of course, was destined to be unfulfilled, as Thucydides himself would have guessed, and two decades later the Second World War began.
Likewise in 1947, following this second great war, General George C. Marshall, U.S. Secretary of State and author of the Marshall Plan, which led to the reconstruction and revival of a severely war-damaged Western Europe, spoke of the Peloponnesian War's importance for understanding the contemporary world. Addressing an audience at Princeton University, he suggested that no one could think with full wisdom and conviction about some of the basic international issues of the present "who has not reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens."