Thucydides Roundtable, Book IV: “What a Man Can Do”: The Melian Dialogue and Morality Reality in War
But if the Realist line of thinking above holds, there is a much more important question: Why are the Athenians even having to defend and justify their actions? If the classical Realist view holds, the conversation need not even take place and is completely pointless! Which naturally is my point: the rhetorical move whereby the Melian’s adopt the role of questioner and the Athenians as respondents is in fact an ethical move. It moves what is happening firmly into the domain of the war as moral discourse. Returning to the Jack Sparrow example, we can see “What a Man Can Do, and What a Man Can’t Do” in a different light: even the Powerful must, in fact, defend their actions because there are limits on what they can do. (Sparrow needs help bringing the ship into port.) The Melian Dialogue makes the Athenians look morally bad and that, in my view, is the point; they lose the moral argument, even if they destroy the Melians in war.
War is a moral discourse. You can control and narrow the terms of the discussion, you can do what you want in terms of physical action and bending the adversary to your will, but a justification is still required. The fact that the Melians are able, even in limited terms, to exact a justification from Athens is a moral act. The Athenians won the battle, but in a certain way the Melians won the war. A contemplative point from Master Sun Tzu, “Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.” (Nine Grounds)
Page 2 of 2 | Previous page
Neville Morley:
November 16th, 2016 at 5:36 pm
Do the Melians really have power and control? Agreed, compared with a Platonic dialogue this feels more even and open. Each side demands that the other justifies its position, rather than one doing all the questioning and controlling the outcome. But a crucial issue is that they don’t agree on what would constitute an adequate justification – for the most part they’re arguing at cross purposes, from incommensurate world views…
zen:
November 16th, 2016 at 5:40 pm
Bravo!
.
I have used the Melian Dialogue many times with students to spur thinking in terms of moral reasoning in that given situation. But for me, I have always read it not in isolation in a larger context, which perhaps Thucydides intended and maybe he did not; which is “Look at the Athenians now. What have they become?”. The Athenians began the Delian League as Pan-Hellenic liberators and became first masters and then genocidaires. They were no longer Pericles’ democracy but Cleon’s.
.
War is transformative. WWII began with the hesitation among Allied general staff regarding the propriety of bombing private property and ended in the nuclear fire of Hiroshima. The Athenians are Spartans were transformed and the future Western world with them.