“I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
- Thucydides
by Thucydides
All eight books of the Peloponnesian War - origins, plague, civil war, the Melian Dialogue, the Sicilian disaster - in the Woodruff selection of the historian who invented the genre. The first scientific historian, the first realist, the first writer to take the long view of human nature in crisis.
tags: thucydides, peloponnesian-war, history, athens, sparta, melian-dialogue, pericles, plague, sicilian-expedition, realpolitik
ΘΟΥΚΥΔΙΔΗΣ
- THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR -
VIII BOOKS✦431 - 411 BCE✦UNFINISHED
“A possession for all time, not a competition piece for hearing in the moment.” - Thucydides 1.22
- DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR -
86 sentences · pulled from the speeches and the narrative · arrow keys to turn them
“I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
- Thucydides
№ 01 of 86 · METHOD · 1.22
Thucydides was born in Athens around 460 BCE. Gold-mining concessions on the Thracian coast, exile from Athens after failing to relieve Amphipolis from Brasidas (424 BCE), twenty years travelling and interviewing both sides. The book is unfinished - he died around 400 BCE while writing about the events of 411; the eighth book breaks off mid-sentence. Almost everything written about war since is either an extension of his argument or an attempt to evade it.
- DOCTRINE I · THE TWO POLEIS -
The two characters of the war. The owl and the lion; the navy and the phalanx; the assembly and the gerousia. A war between two ways of being a city.
Ἀθῆναι
“ἀνδρῶν γὰρ ἐπιφανῶν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος”
the whole earth is the tomb of famous men
Σπάρτη
switch sides →
The owl is wisdom that schemes; the lion is strength that endures. They were the same animal, in the end - both eaten, in turn, by Macedon.
The famous opening declaration: I have written this book as a possession for all time, not a competition piece for hearing in the moment. He refuses storyteller’s pleasures - suspense, drama, satisfying arcs - and refuses to give either side the finale its partisans wanted. What he wants is the structure: how alliances form, how war comes, how atrocity follows from atrocity.
The speeches are reconstructed. He says so himself - he has put into each speaker’s mouth the speech that any competent statesman would have given, given that man and that situation. This is not unreliability; it is the reverse. The speeches are stylised so that the reader can see the logic of each side without the noise of a transcript.
- DOCTRINE II · THE TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS -
Drag the year. Athens begins ascendant; the plague follows the Funeral Oration by six months; Sicily breaks the back of the empire; Aegospotami ends it.
- DOCTRINE III · A POSSESSION FOR ALL TIME -
The historian’s claim, in his own opening: not a competition piece for hearing in the moment but a possession for all time. The seal of the project.
The aegis is bronze. The motto, in the historian’s own words, has held two and a half thousand years. That, by his own criterion, is the only test that matters.
The book contains four set pieces no honest reader has ever forgotten:
After the Melian Dialogue, Athens commits to the Sicilian Expedition - an over-extension that destroys the fleet, the empire, and eventually the democracy. The book is not subtle about the connection. The strong who do what they can sometimes find that what they can do destroys them.
- DOCTRINE IV · THE THREE MOTIVES -
The Athenian envoys at Sparta, in 432 BCE, name the three passions that govern the empire and admit, on the same breath, that no other state in their position would have done less.
the empire was kept because letting it go was more dangerous than keeping it.
the empire was kept because the city wanted to be seen keeping it.
the empire was kept because dismantling it was more expensive than maintaining it.
The Athenians did not deny the empire. They explained it. That is the difference between Thucydides’ speeches and the propaganda of every empire that has imitated them.
- DOCTRINE V · FIVE BATTLES -
The five engagements that, taken together, draw the arc of the *History* - from the first humiliation of Sparta to the dinner-hour disaster at the Hellespont.
Πύλος · 425 BCE
“Nothing astonished the Greeks more than that Spartans should surrender alive.”- from the History
- DRAMATIS PERSONAE -
The History of the Peloponnesian War is structured around the speeches of perhaps a dozen men. Eight of them are below - six generals, one demagogue, one historian - with notes on what they said, what they did, and how they ended.
Περικλῆς
c. 495 BCE-429 BCE · plague
Bk. 2 · Funeral Oration
The architect of imperial Athens. Strategos for fifteen consecutive years; transferred the Delian League treasury from Delos to the Acropolis in 454 and used it to build the Parthenon. His Funeral Oration is the most famous defence of democracy ever made. Six months later he was dead of the plague he had warned the Spartans could not stop the city.
Ἀλκιβιάδης
450 BCE-404 BCE · murdered in Phrygia
Bk. 6 · Sicilian debate
Pericles's ward; Socrates's student; the most beautiful and the most untrustworthy man of his age. Persuaded the Athenian assembly to launch the Sicilian Expedition; was recalled to face charges of religious sacrilege; defected to Sparta and taught the Spartans how to defeat his own city. Defected back. Defected again. Murdered in his bed by Persian assassins.
Νικίας
c. 470 BCE-413 BCE · executed at Syracuse
Bk. 6–7 · Sicilian Expedition
Wealthy, conservative, devout. Negotiated the Peace of Nicias in 421. Argued strenuously against the Sicilian Expedition; was appointed to command it anyway. Hesitated at the moment of withdrawal because of a lunar eclipse. The Athenians lost their fleet, their army, and the war. Captured and executed by the Syracusans. Thucydides judges him "of all the Greeks of my time, the least deserving of so calamitous a fate."
Κλέων
c. 470 BCE-422 BCE · k.i.a. at Amphipolis
Bk. 3 · Mytilenean Debate
A tanner's son; the first politician of the new democratic generation. Loud, vulgar, effective. Argued for the execution of every adult male in Mytilene as a warning to other rebellious allies. The motion narrowly passed and was as narrowly reversed by Diodotus. Cleon won the unexpected victory at Pylos, became insufferable, was killed leading an inexperienced army at Amphipolis.
Διόδοτος
--- (probably outlived the war)
Bk. 3 · Mytilenean Debate
Speaks once, in book three, to argue against Cleon's motion to massacre the Mytileneans. He does not appeal to mercy or to justice; he argues that mass executions don't deter - that severity invites desperation, and that the Athenians should spare Mytilene for tactical reasons. The Athenians agree. The trireme bearing the reprieve overtakes the trireme bearing the death-warrant by twelve hours. Diodotus then disappears from the narrative entirely.
Βρασίδας
--422 BCE · k.i.a. at Amphipolis
Bk. 4 · the Amphipolis campaign
The most brilliant Spartan commander of the war and almost a one-man counter-empire. Marched a small force the length of the Aegean to detach Athenian allies in Thrace; promised them autonomy under Sparta and seemed for once to mean it; took Amphipolis through speeches alone. Killed at Amphipolis in the same battle that killed Cleon. The Spartans never produced a successor of his calibre.
Ἑρμοκράτης
c. 460 BCE-407 BCE · k.i.a. in coup attempt
Bk. 4 & 6 · the Sicilian wars
The Syracusan who saw the Athenian threat earliest and persuaded the Sicilian Greeks to settle their own quarrels and unite. When Athens did invade in 415 he organised the resistance. After victory he was exiled in a democratic backlash. Returned with mercenaries to seize Syracuse by force; killed in the attempt. His daughter married Dionysius the tyrant. Plato met her grandson.
Θουκυδίδης
c. 460 BCE · Athens-c. 400 BCE · in exile
Bks. 1–8 · author
The man writing it down. Athenian. Wealthy. General in 424; failed to prevent Brasidas's capture of Amphipolis; exiled by his own city for twenty years. Used the exile to interview both sides - the only history of antiquity composed by a participant who had also been on the wrong side of his subject. Died around 400 BCE, with the last book unfinished mid-sentence.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI