The History of the Peloponnesian War

I really liked Thucydides as a historian. He seems to make a good effort to be accurate and he's open about where he takes artistic liberty ("reconstructing" the speeches of various leaders). It seems like quite a sophisticated approach for someone writing 2000+ years ago. "Sophisticated" seems to be a word I keep using when it comes to ancient Greek writings, so maybe that says more about my preconceptions than it does about the works themselves.

The most difficult aspect of this book is the sheer complexity of the war. It's not just a simple matter of Athens vs Sparta, it's Athens vs Sparta vs Corinth vs Macedonia vs Persia vs Siracuse vs Lesbos etc etc etc. It's tough to keep everything straight, and it reminds me of an article I saw show more on the Syrian war once, stating that there were at least 300 factions. It really exemplifies how much chaos war can bring.

One thing I can appreciate, whether it's a cultural difference or a device of Thucydides, is the "honesty" of the conquering factions. It's refreshing to hear "hey, we're hear to conquer you because we have more ships than you, and it's natural for the powerful to subjugate the weak. You'd do the same in our shoes", instead of our modern conceit of framing aggression as a service to some greater ideal.

In fact, one of the larger themes of the work seems to be the conflict between righteousness and practicality. Is it better to fight nobly and lose, or act with discretion and perhaps survive? I was really invested in the fate of the Plataeans, who defended their city in so many brave and ingenious ways, and the injustice of their eventual fate was heartbreaking.

Another great theme is the capriciousness of fortune, and the danger of mistaking good fortune for superiority. Many times the narrative emphasizes that victory should never be taken for granted, and sudden reversals can occur at any time.

Thucydides also has an art for human feeling. In his description of the retreat of the defeated Athenians from Syracuse, he paints a poignant picture of misery - of those who have to leave their wounded companions behind, of the suffering of the fleeing soldiers.

Sadly, the book ends abruptly. Mid-sentence even. How I wish the rest had been preserved! show less

Thucydides is known as the great-grandaddy of history, sharing that title with Herodotus but generally accepted as being the more objective of the two. And while Herodotus keeps us entertained with beguiling if largely unbelievable tales of lands he probably never saw, Thucydides renders a cold, calculated, intensely detailed snapshot of events in which he was a minor player. Thus 'The History of the Peloponnesian Wars' is at once, very believable and very dry. If you are interested in a good story about the fall of the Athenian empire you've come to the wrong place (albeit perhaps the only good source). If you are an archaeologist or historian trying to determine the number of Carmarinaean hoplites at the siege of Syracuse, Thucydides show more is a treasure trove.

Thucydides, covers the approximately thirty years of the Pelopponesian wars. The wars, which effectively pitted the Athenian empire, formed of Athens and its mostly Ionian 'involuntary' allies, against the Spartan's and their more voluntary, if less democratically governed allies. The war grinds on for years without major event until the Athenians try to conquer Syracuse and Sicily. They ultimately fail, and, when the Persian empire intervenes on the side of Sparta, are stripped of their empire and ultimately defeated. The resulting book is full of details - not of character or daily life but of places and people. It's not an easy read.

That's not to say there aren't a few moving tales amongst the vast welter of place names, personal names, ship lists and roll calls. The story of the Mytilenian debate, in which the conquered Mytilene population is nearly massacred by a decree rescinded at the last second is definitely worth a read. The sad fate of the Athenian army after the long siege of Syracuse is also gripping, as is the escape from the siege of Plataea of two hundred men.

If you are an academic, this book is full of a lot of useful material on the Athenian empire, Sicily, Persia and Greece in the 4th century B.C. I imagine you could spend a lifetime cross-correlating names and places with other early documents and inscriptions. This edition is not particularly well stocked with scholarly resources, coming as it does with a brief introduction, four short appendices, few footnotes, and only a brief bibliography and index. You might be better off with the four volumes of the Loeb Classical Library's Thucydides. If you are taking a course in classical Greek history this might suffice.

Since I am not an academic but read history for interest's sake only, I found the book slow, pedantic and over-absorbed with details. If you are very interested in this time period but not willing to slog through a lot of factual detail I would suggest you read a modern book on Greek history. If, like me, you feel the need to read the source material, I would suggest you get a really good atlas of classical history, familiarize yourself with the history of the time period fully and only then attempt Thucydides. show less

Cobbled together from musty scraps of parchment, scribbled marginalia and fragments of wax tablets, Thucydides’ account of a war among ancient Greek city-states is historical fiction of profound political insight and psychological acumen. In order to tell his story, he invents characters and scenes for which we have no corroborating sources, and fabricates dialogue and ceremonial oration that encapsulate his own biased perceptions. He provides no bibliography or notes to support his “history,” but Thucydides gets credit for formulating a conceptual scheme that has been deployed by the chroniclers of war ever since.

First things first: the whole Herodotus/Thucydides grudge match binary thing is such bunk. There's no comparison. Thucydides is the father of history. Herodotus is the father of telling cute lil stories. (Although I am well aware that said stories have had a salutary influence on the profession, influenced the Annales school and the move away from Thucydidean political history to social history and the politics that come along with it, and in short, that Herodotus is probably our favourite dude).


And yet, even at that, this is history, but not as we moderns know it. Thucydides's vaunted objectivity consists mostly in talking to people on both sides (not consulting records, because by 'n' large there werent any), and keeping Athenian show more prejudice out of it--so it's a start. And he does a good job on the prejudice thing--although some apparently disagree, and certainly he feels no such compunctions when dealing not with Greeks v. Greeks, but Greeks v. Barbarians--his treatment of the Illyrian horde in, oh, one of those battles fairly drips with scorn. On the other hand, the Illyrians seem like they deserved it. "Don't hurt women or children", as a rule of warfare, makes the Greeks not only more civilized than the barbs, but than, well, us. One of the fascinations of this book, incidentally, is seeing that ritualistic, circumscribed approach to warfare break down. When the atrocities start, at Plataea, at Melos, you're like damn it. Maybe the logic of realpolitik does irresistibly lead to total war.


And while I can't love this and clutch it to my heart completely without reservation--the actual troop movement and war-tech stuff is dry, pedantic, most likely geared to the industry insiders that Thucy and 99% of his readership would have been, with a few exceptions like the final stand of the Athenians in Sicily, and even there you're like "Lamachus died in a ditch! Did a Syracusan arrow pierce his eye? Did a Spartan hoplite claim his shield as a trophy? Inquiring minds!"; also, the maps are pretty bad, Penguin Classics--the Melian Dialogue before the Athenians kill everybody's ass for no real reason, besides being the book's centrepiece,is the prime example of the prime awesome afoot in The Peloponnesian War: the speeches. Maybe I should say "speeches", since the introduction gives me to understand that many of them are reconstructed, but hey, Thucydides can get a little Herodotean on me anytime. It's an amazing way of doing business--talk, talk, talk the issues of the day right into the ground and then some before you make your move. Talk civilized, and then when you do make that move it can be brutal and people will still talk about the Greek Golden Age. It leads to a world of demagogues instead of accountants; public engagement instead of apathy; the extreme concern for points of rhetoric that gave us alliteration and anaphora and anadiplosis and anacothulon (and anastrophe to zeugma!). It explains how we can agree with Nicias, and Thucy can praise him, and yet somehow Alcibiades foxes him and us and Athens and Sparta and the Persian satrap again and again and again.(And how cool that it's the same Alcibiades who ran with Socrates!)

There are some phenomenal speeches--the initial petitions from Corinth and Corcyra to Athens, before the world catches fire; Pericles's Funeral Oration. Most of all, though, you come back to that Melian Debate, where the Melians throw everything they can at the Athenians, dead men walking and tonguing desperate word magic. I would love to have a rhetoric-annotated edition, or speak Ancient Greek. And . . . nothing. The Athenians don't even blink. "It is true that it is more in keeping with the dignity of a great nation to show mercy, but we're still gonna kill everybody's ass. And yes, it is true that to extend the hand of peace to a defeated rival makes a foe an ally and adds to one's own strength, but sorry, you're still fucked. Can't you die with dignity?"


This is Warsaw Ghetto shit. And that's probably the biggest adjustment to be made as a result of the book to one's (my) classic picture of Ancient Greece: Athens is fucking awful. It's like, okay, their democracy is vigorous or whatever, and the Spartans are a racial slave theocracy--but then you see the way Athenians treat their colonies, their ostensible allies, the places whose power and wealth they usurped and even those, like Melos, they didn't--and of course they were all slave states, and Athens just exports the contradictions of their class structure with the superficial democracy they market. Classic imperialist neocons.


And okay, Sparta uses not entirely dissimilar rhetoric, but . . . they really seem to mean it. We keep getting told how artless they are, and if Thucydides does have a bias, it's certainly not in their direction, so I see no reason to believe that Brasidas, say, is not exactly what he seems--and what he seems is like Optimus Prime or some shit, liberating all the townz, and if there is a little bit of "we're gonna liberate you whether you like it or not!", well, look at the way Sparta's allies--your Corinth, your Thebes, your Syracuse--get treated versus what happens to the Athenian subaltern.
After Brasidas, consider "The state of feeling among the people of Camarina was as follows. They were well disposed to the Athenians, except insofar as they thought they might enslave Sicily . . . ." Athens as charismatic asshole/Sparta as misunderstood weirdo?

But then, what did I just say? Racial slave state. So Sparta rules unless you're a helot or a weakling child, and Athens rules unless you're from the colonies, and who's to say whether power games trumps eugenics in the worst historical powers stakes, and none of them had refrigeration, and Thucydides rules. This deserves five stars for being the first and one of the best of its kind, dry patches and all. show less

Thucydides predicted that the lessons in his History of the Peloponnesian War would be valid “for ever” (I, 22, p. 48), and sure enough, scholars still apply his concepts. Graham Allison, for example, in Destined for War (2017), examines several wars between established powers and rising ones, and whether the United States and China “can escape Thucydides’s trap.”

Now that the world is in the midst of a pandemic, Thucydides’s account of the Plague of Athens (II, 47-55. Pp. 151-6) takes on additional interest. Thucydides contracted the disease but survived. Pericles, Athens’s greatest leader, died of it. A medical symposium in 1999 judged that the Plague of Athens was typhus, but in light of the significance of show more coronaviruses, that judgment may need reexamination. Thucydides concluded that “Nothing did the Athenians so much harm . . . or so reduced their strength for war” (III, 87: p. 246).

Thucydides was an Athenian strategos (a general and also an admiral) until relieved of his command and exiled. Exile enabled him to write about the war with relative impartiality, because he had access to information from Sparta and other city states. He appears to have been inured to the suffering and death in ordinary battles, and he takes for granted that his readers are familiar with the weapons and tactics of the combatants. He mentions repeatedly that advancing armies (especially the Spartans) "laid waste to the countryside," implying that destruction of the civilian economy, especially agriculture, was the Greeks' version of strategic warfare--their forerunner of Sherman's March and strategic bombing. He skips over whether rape and plunder were implicit forms of soldiers' pay. He does not address why the Greek city states so often chose war over peace, but he was appalled by the bitterness of civil conflict, when political and personal enmities intermingled, moderation was denounced as cowardice and “words, too, had to change their usual meanings” (III, 82, p. 242).

Some readers will find the History an uncongenial work of a hard-bitten and humorless author who grinds through obscure battles, amphibious expeditions and local revolts. To make more sense of the narrative, readers can skip the inadequate maps in the Penguin Classic in favor of The Ohio State University’s computerized geographic information: https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/peloponnesian. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1674785.html

This is a classic work of history, about the war between Athens and Sparta in the 430s and 420s BC. I'm not terribly interested in the war itself, or the geographical details (though I would have liked it if my Penguin edition had put useful maps in the text closer to the descriptions of events taking place on obscure islands); I hoped to find out from reading it the extent to which Thucydides' reputation as the first proper historian is justifiable.

What I found was rather different to what I expected. This is not an academic history as we know such things, but a commentary on contemporary international relations, propagandistically crafted for a particular domestic interpretation in Athens, show more rather like most of the books you can find in shops on the War on Terror or the Cold War. Thucydides' use of rhetoric, his visibly partial citation of evidence and his dramatic reconstruction of conversations at which he was not present are all familiar tactics from today's literature. He would have been very much in his intellectual element as a crafter of drama-documentaries. I rate it as fascinating artistically - particularly the complex character of Alcibiades - but barely history.

I blame Thucydides directly for the useless mess that is most academic research into international relations. In Thucydides' account (the Melian dialogue is the most obviously fictional passage, but there are many others) decisions about war and peace (and, later in the text, internal revolution) are made on the basis of perfect or near-perfect knowledge of the international and local situation, after mature reflection and rational debate of the alternatives. It's a lovely fairy-tale and it's not surprising that many people choose to believe it; I had not appreciated, however, that it went back so far. Irrational decisions are only made by the deranged, who are normally anonymous (eg the people of Corcyra in 3.84, or the Syracusans who mistreat the Athenian captives in 7.86-87).

I know I'm not being fair; Thucydides is at the very beginning of recorded history, and it is amazing that a book written 2430 years ago is still lucidly intelligible (and interrogable) on its own terms. Pericles' funeral oration (2.34-46), in particular, whether by Pericles or Thucydides, is a brilliantly eloquent appeal to the emotions of those who have lost their loved ones in the service of their country, and is far ahead of anything else I have read on that subject in terms of literary quality. But I think his inability, for whatever reason, to examine the cultural context of his time, and to be honest about his own political situation, weakens the truth of the book.

Apart from the general issue of the book's ideological purpose, there are a lot of interesting points of detail here. As a lapsed astronomer, my eye was caught by the three eclipses mentioned, especially the first, where we are told that "the sun took on the appearance of a crescent and some of the stars became visible before it returned to its normal shape" (1.28). I was a bit surprised about the stars becoming visible even though this was not a total eclipse. A little research, however, got me to Mercury being close to maximum elongation 25 degrees from the Sun, and Venus approaching superior conjunction and 15 degrees from the sun, and I suppose both would have been visible if the Sun was sufficiently dimmed.

In 5.16 we read of accusations that "Pleistoanax... and his brother Aristocles had bribed the priestess at Delphi to give oracles to the Spartan delegations, commanding them to bring home from abroad the seed of the demigod son of Zeus". The what??? of who??? I checked the original: Διὸς υἱοῦ ἡμιθέου τὸ σπέρμα - what on earth can it be?

Snerk in 4.84 about Brasidas, who "was not at all a bad speaker, for a Spartan."

Anyway, very glad to have finally ploughed through this. show less

This is my favourite book without a doubt. Its focus on the political and military situation is exceptional. What really got me into the book was the realisation that this was not just a war between Sparta and Athens but a massive war between the Greeks (and by extension the Persians who sought to reinstate their old empire). Futhermore the generals on each side were immensely competent and showed how close this war was, even with the Sicilian blunder Athens was still not out of the war entirely. I love the use of speeches as a way to break up the text. So many good case studies from the Melian Dialogue, to the oligarchic coup of Athens and the democratic resistance at Samos. Such a good book and one I will plan to reread over and over show more to really understood the extent of the war and the various details between the issues of various Greek polities. show less