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[by A. E. Clark]

I cannot be the only reader to have been fascinated by the career of Demosthenes, the Athenian commander.

In outline:

(3.94-98) His attack on Aetolia, undertaken as the beginning of an ambitious campaign (projected, apparently only by Demosthenes, to pass through Boeotia), ends in disaster. The narrative supplies enough details for us to ponder the flaws in the general’s decision-making.

(3.102) His move to save Naupactus with troops he wheedles from allies whom he previously snubbed is all the more impressive because at this point Demosthenes has few resources — his generalship may have ended, and he is in such disfavor that it would be personally dangerous for him to return to Athens.

(3.105) Allies ask him to lead them in the West when the Peloponnesian army that he stymied at Naupactus keeps marching.

(3.107) An ambush on the battlefield brings him victory at Olpae.

(3.109) He craftily separates the Peloponnesians from their local allies.

(3.112) He wins a massive victory at Idomene by positioning his troops stealthily during the night and launching a pre-dawn surprise attack in which the enemy’s sentries are confused by Demosthenes’ use of allied troops whose dialect resembles the enemy’s.

(4.2) Demosthenes finagles himself an unofficial berth on a fleet rounding the Peloponnesus to relieve Corcyra.

(4.3-5) He has a plan: make an unscheduled stop and create an outpost at Pylos, in the Messenian country where the Spartans fear revolt. The generals in charge of the fleet laugh at him. Grossly insubordinate, he appeals to the soldiers and the junior officers. No one will listen. Then a storm drives the fleet into shelter at Pylos.  They still won’t listen to him.  But as the weather keeps them trapped in harbor, the soldiers get bored and decide to build Demosthenes his outpost. (Did it really happen like that? One wonders.) But he has neglected to bring any tools, so they must pile rocks to create walls in the most primitive manner.  The weather improves; the fleet sails on, leaving a very small force with Demosthenes in his vulnerable outpost.

(4.6) The Spartans are so alarmed by this tiny threat to their rear that they recall the army that has been laying waste the country around Athens.

(4.8) Then they come in ships to wipe him out.

(4.9-12) Having figured out where they will attack, he repels them from the beach in an epic action where one Brasidas, who will go on to do more harm to Athens than perhaps any other Spartan, is almost killed.

(4.13-14) The Athenian navy arrives in the nick of time. The Athenians discover they have trapped hundreds of the Spartan elite on a desert island next to Pylos: a most valuable bargaining chip.

(4.17-20) Sparta offers peace.

(4.21-22) Overreaching as they often do in this Greek tragedy, the Athenians (instigated by the detestable Cleon) spurn the offer.

(4.26-38) The blockade of the island proves long and difficult.  The Athenians blame Cleon and, calling his bluff, send him to sort it out in the expectation that he will humiliate himself.  Thanks to Demosthenes, who is mindful (Thucydides explicitly says) not to repeat a mistake he made in Aetolia, the Spartiates are defeated by Demosthenes’ use of stand-off missiles and a surprise attack from the rear. They surrender.

(4.41) Again, the Athenians have a chance to end the war on favorable terms.  Thucydides says, “The Athenians, however, kept grasping at more, and dismissed envoy after envoy…”

These events, engagingly narrated by our historian, make a strongly favorable impression.  It seems that Demosthenes learned from an early failure and, with a penchant for surprise attacks that was unusual in the warfare of his time, achieved significant victories.  I’d say Demosthenes won the war twice — once at Pylos and once at Sphacteria — but the Athenians threw the victory away each time.  There is more to the story, however. Now for Part II:

(4.66-73) Demosthenes and Hippocrates undertake a complex scheme to seize control of Megara with the help of traitors within the city. Again he carries out one of his signature night-time ambushes. But the Athenians are only partly successful, and soon find themselves confronted by the decisive and resolute Brasidas. They give up on Megara without a battle.

(4.89-100) A Boeotian campaign is entrusted to the same two generals.  It fails disastrously, with Hippocrates getting killed and his division bearing the brunt of the losses.  Thucydides is unclear about the details, but it seems that Demosthenes may have made an error of timing, as a result of which two separate surprise attacks that needed to be synchronized . . . weren’t.  It also seems that the enemy caught wind of their plans.

(4.101)  Demosthenes undertakes a raid against a coastal city west of Corinth.  He fails to take the adversary by surprise and his troops are routed.

(5.80)  Demosthenes is sent to evacuate a fort among allies of uncertain loyalty; he employs a ruse to accomplish this safely.

But alas, there is more.  In Part III, Demosthenes loses the Peloponnesian War:

(7.42) Demosthenes arrives in Syracuse to salvage the faltering Sicilian expedition.

(7.43-44) He hastens to mount a large-scale night-time surprise attack on Epipolae. Historians judge this to be a first, indeed wholly original: a large-scale nyktomachia, a night battle.  It miscarries due to poor intelligence, poor communication, and the inherent riskiness of such an action in the absence of radios or night-vision goggles.  Athenian losses are in the thousands, and morale is shattered.

(7.47-49) Having gambled and lost, Demosthenes votes to go home or at least move camp, but Nicias, the general on the scene whom he had criticized, refuses and prevails in council.

(7.72) After a devastating naval defeat, Demosthenes recognizes that the Athenians’ best way out is still by sea, but the demoralized soldiers won’t listen to him. They choose, fatally, to make their way overland to another part of the island.

(7.81) Marching “somewhat slowly and in disorder,” his division is surrounded by the Syracusans. According to Plutarch, Demosthenes attempts suicide.  Soon the rest of the Athenian army will also be captured.

(7.86) In captivity, Demosthenes is “butchered.”

As I struggled to draw conclusions from this extraordinary tale, I realized that I needed help, and I wondered if anyone had written a book about Demosthenes.  The New York Public Library was kind enough to fetch from its offsite storage a 1993 monograph [1] by Joseph Roisman.  It is a work of marvelous scholarship, free from pedantry and full of carefully-reasoned judgments.  Roisman notes that Demosthenes seems to have been always attracted to surprise tactics without realizing how heavily such tactics depend on good intelligence.

Moreover, the surprise attack works best on a small scale.  On a large scale, the friction of big organizations is wont to spoil the surprise or to impede the necessary coordination, and operational security is also harder to maintain when large numbers of people are involved. This was especially true in the ancient world with its limited technologies of communication.

At Olpae and Idomene, Roisman argues, Demosthenes received excellent intelligence from his local allies, and his goals were realistic.  I would note also that he showed prudence in letting the Peloponnesians get away: he was limiting himself to defeating the Ambraciots.  At Sphacteria, Roisman says, “He was successful because he had adequate intelligence, time to plan, and some luck; and he used surprise tactics on a careful and limited basis.”

In the Aetolian campaign, by contrast, Demosthenes was led on by an ambitious goal (a march through hostile Boeotia) for which his resources were inadequate. He had only a superficial plan, and when some of its key conditions were violated, he kept going with it anyway, convinced that he could take the enemy by surprise and that this would ensure victory. Worst of all, he had no good local intelligence. Where other scholars see the Aetolian defeat as “his education in the art of warfare,” Roisman sees it as “a presage of future disasters.”

Roisman notes in the general “an inclination to embrace ambitious goals combined with a willingness to give up when the campaigns failed to produce their projected results immediately.”  You can see this in the backing down from Megara as well as his eagerness to stake everything on a single roll of the dice at Epipolae: a tendency, in Roisman’s words, “to approach military problems in terms of immediate and decisive success or failure.”  I will not spell out the obvious lessons; Parts II and III of Demosthenes’ career do that quite well.

The nuanced intuition in Roisman’s analysis makes me wonder whether this alumnus of Tel Aviv University may have gained a certain Fingerspitzengefühl from a stint in the IDF.  He has done other work on ancient military history, with a particular focus on Alexander the Great. I look forward to exploring that oeuvre; in the meanwhile, if you can get your hands on it, I recommend his Demosthenes monograph very highly.

[1] Roisman, Joseph. The General Demosthenes and His Use of Military Surprise. HISTORIA Einzelschriften 78, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 1993

[by Pauline Kaurin]

The Dean of contemporary Just War Theory, Michael Walzer begins his classic Just and Unjust Wars with a discussion of the Melian Dialogue. (pg 5ff) He is using this discussion to set up the claim that that Realists are wrong and that we, in fact, experience and discourse war in moral terms; these moral terms track an objective reality.  This is one traditional way to read the Melian Dialogue – as a contrast between the Realist position (the Athenians) and the Just War position (the Melians).   In the dialogue the Athenians seem to be arguing from a position of power, supposedly from the class fear, interest and honor paradigm in defense of their Empire. But this seems odd! The Athenians are making a Realist argument from Empire, with the Melians being seen as appealing to ideas of justice and fairness?

Another common reading is that the Melians (with their backs against the wall) have no option to appeal to morality: the strong abandon and ignore morality because they can and the weak appeal to morality because they cannot compete. This film clip from the popular film, Pirates of the Caribbean seems to have Captain Jack Sparrow espousing such a view.

However, I don’t think either of these is quite right. If we look more closely we see that this dialogue departs the “speech-ifying”model in the rest of the text. The speeches are long monologues that are uninterrupted, followed by the other side responding with a long uninterrupted speech. Here we have something much more like a Platonic dialogue, with back and forth questioning.  After the Athenians frame the discussion in terms of the survival of the Melians (and rule out discussion of any other topic, 5.87 ), the Melians take on the role of Socratic questioner, with the Athenians cast into the role of defending their position while occasionally rebutting Melian points. The Athenians try to demonstrate the Melian view as irrational and not considering the ramifications of their position, at the same time as defending their Empire interests.

What is interesting here is that relative to the Platonic model of dialogue, the Melians are the ones that are in control, in the position of power , with the Athenians being forced to defend their actions and being challenged on the grounds of what is rational. The Athenians seem to be invoking the obligation (a moral term, oops!) of the Melians to preserve themselves asking why the Melians do not surrender? From the Athenian point of view, the Melian faith in the good favor of the Gods and help from the Spartans is irrational; from the Melian point of view, Athens unfairly have limited the discussion to questions of expediency only.  In short, the Athenians are arguing for Empire and the Melians for their survival.

Given the discussion and the attendant destruction of the Melians when they refuse to give into the Athenians, how are we to read the dialogue? As the hopeless moral appeal in the face of a imperial power using Realist logic?  Are the Melians just foolish for not taking the chance at cutting a deal and living to fight another day?  Of course, we do not know what their fate would have been had they surrendered – the Athenians might have destroyed them anyway as deterrence or to ensure that they did not rebel at some later point in time.  Are we supposed to focus on how the discussion is framed by the Athenians as a choice between war and servitude? Is this dialogue about the power dynamic in international relations, that it is framed in terms of war, since it is clearly not a dialogue between equals? And does how the discussion is framed or the process of dialogue even matter since it does not impact or change the outcome?

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)

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

Like all of you, we (except Lynn Rees) were all caught off-guard by the unanticipated and dramatic results of the presidential election this week. It was obvious that most of the bandwidth on social media was consumed with the implications of the election of Mr. Trump and the inter- and intra -partisan rancor that has followed in its wake. It was unlikely that new posts at the Thucydides Roundtable were going to be able to compete for attention with that kind of event.

Now however with the realization of a very different administration coming to power in Washington next January sinking in, the appetite for lessons from Thucydides may suddenly increase 🙂  Therefore, we are rebooting the Roundtable schedule – Book Four posts will begin this Monday with the schedule consequently adjusted thereafter.

In the meantime, if you have not read any of our series or missed a few contributions, you can get started right here.

[by Lynn C. Rees]

Curious how many top tier historians of classical antiquity were quislings:

• Herodotus: an exile from Halicarnassus, a city ruled by an oligarchy of Persian puppets, who turned into an unabashed booster of Athens.
• Thucydides: an exile from Athens, a city ruled by democrats, who turned into an abashed booster of the oligarchic Peloponnesian League.
• Xenophon: an exile from Athens, a city ruled by democrats, who turned into an unabashed booster of the Peloponnesian League.
• Polybius: a hostage from the Achaean League, which superseded the Peloponnesian League, who turned into an abashed booster of the Roman Republic.
• Titus Flavius Josephus: an exile from Judea who, after being captured a Roman army led first by future princeps Titus Flavius Vespasianus and later by future princeps Titus Flavius Vespasianus, turned into an unabashed Roman booster so boosterish that he changed his name to that of his patrons, one of many Flavians to come.

These men probably didn’t see themselves following in Vidkun’s bloody footsteps. They remained loyal to a political community of their birth, just not the flesh and blood political community of their birth. They pledged allegiance to a nation in being that remained moored just over the horizon in the Scapa Flow of their imaginations, waiting for Der Tag of political change.

Donald Kagan has pointed out that the Athenian quisling Thucydides’ terrifying silences and omissions are as important to an informed reading of The History of the Peloponnesian War as what he directly writes about. Though much of Kagan’s most recent distillation of his argument in Thucydides: The Reinvention of History is an indirect refighting of that war in Iraq his boys and daughter-in-law got mixed up in, it makes some valid arguments.

Thucydides went out of his way to frame such subjects like how a series of separate contests were one single war (since Thucydides was in exile for most of its length), how deranged the war policy of the Athenian democracy was (since it had exiled Thucydides), how enlightened the war policy of his fellow aristocrat Pericles had been (since Thucydides admired him), and how clever the Spartan Brasidas was (since he’d been responsible for the defeat that led to Thucydides’ exile). Kagan gathers enough information from other sources about the time and Thucydides himself to plausibly argue Thucydides’ narrative was somewhat skewed to fit his personal agenda.

How human.

There may have been no single “Peloponnesian War”. You could plausibly treat each of the conflicts that Thucydides lumps together as distinct wars that should be studied individually rather than as a group. Or you veer all the way to the other extreme and portray every Athenian-Spartan war between 460 B.C. and 387 B.C. as a single “Hundred Years War”-type conflict. The “Second Peloponnesian War” is a narrative convenience invented by Thucydides for his polemical needs.

Similarly, the military strategy pursued by Cleon and other demagogues that Thucydides despises for their policies, social class, and (oh yes) his exile was far more successful than the military strategy pursued by the sainted Pericles that Thucydides so strongly support. Conceptually, the Sicilian expedition was not doomed to inevitable ultimate failure. A twist of fate here, a twist of fate there, and it might have succeeded. Its eventual defeat was a near run thing in any case. Much more risky military expeditions have been attempted and succeeded against much greater odds.

Thucydides is lauded for his realism. Indeed, his history is a cold shower of corrections to many contemporary delusions. Thucydides shows us democracies fighting each other in spite of MacDonalds in both Athens and Syracuse. He shows us Athens intervening in the affairs of other Greek poleis to overthrow oligarchies and install democracies. He shows us Sparta intervening in the affairs of other Greek poleis to overthrow democracies and install oligarchies. He shows us civilization reduced to primal savagery, the foolishness of men, and a cynical game of political musical chairs.

But, like many avowed realists, Thucydides is a closet romantic. Like the leadership of his Spartan, Corinthian, or Theban hosts or any clique of fellow Athenian nobles at home, Thucydides believed in rule by “the best” (aristoi) as the cure to all problems. This recurring theme, passed down to us by Thucydides, Socrates, and younger Athenian contemporaries like Xenophon or Plato, holds that, given enough educated, well-bred, well-intentioned, and well-groomed men, no political problem is insurmountable. Handing rule over to the mob only condemns society to insurmountable foolishness.

However, history testifies that moving from rule by demagogues to aristocrats doesn’t guarantee either a gain in wisdom or a loss of foolishness. It only rearranges the chairs on the deck, moving the source of foolishness from one group to another. The same human stupidity behind the foolishness of the crowd haunts the human stupidity of the elite. The best laid plans of the “best and brightest” will be as thwarted by the stupidity of the “best and brightest” as the passions of the mob are thwarted by the mindlessness of the crowd. Rule by the “best” is as prone, if not more prone, to epidemics of destructive foolishness as rule by anonymous peons in a mobocracy.

Pericles’ finest hour was made possible by luck, a fortuitous swing in the politics of Megara in a pro-Athenian direction. Control over the Megarid during the “First Peloponnesian War” let Pericles keep Peloponnesian armies from reaching Attica to ravage Athenian territory. His worst hours were made possible by a less fortunate swing in the politics of Megara, this time back in a pro-Spartan direction. Loss of control over the Megarid reopened Attica to Peloponnesian ravaging in Peloponnesian War I and II. Pericles defended the Athenian people against this ravaging by gathering them inside Athens’ Long Walls. This protected them from the Peloponnesians but, crowded in as they were, they were now vulnerable to the plague that eventually killed Pericles himself, along with many of his fellow citizens.

In the end, Pericles’ luck in war was no better than that of Cleon, Alciabides, or his other successors. But, through Thucydides’ “possession for all time”, Pericles’ luck in history has far transcended the usual fate of small regional conflicts 2,500 years ago.

[by A. E. Clark]

The reflections of Thucydides on the murderous polarization at Corcyra (III.82-84) are justly celebrated. He himself claims a timeless insight into human nature:

…sufferings … such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same

and

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition . . .

Yet he also makes it clear that these horrors could not occur in the absence of certain conditions:

In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war . . .

This is the context for his memorable epigram that war is a violent teacher. The hasty reader might conclude that Thucydides is saying merely that war is hell and it brings out the worst in people. This would be a mistake.

***

The passage is a difficult one.  An early critic — Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing from Rome in the reign of Augustus —  singled out these chapters for censure as “affected, artificial, and crowded with all kinds of ornamental additions.” And he was Greek!  While the translator has smoothed out some difficulties for us, he may have introduced a new one. The subject of this passage is stasis, which Crawley renders as “revolution.”  Stasis is related to the word for “stand” and can mean ‘the place in which one stands or should stand.’ It came to be applied to political faction and the strife arising from the mutual antagonism of factions. This etymology brings to mind the language of the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards would often exhort a person “to take a stand,” which often meant “drawing a line between” oneself and some friend or relative who carried a political taint. But I wonder if the most natural translation for Americans today might be ‘polarization,’ except that when we talk of polarization, we are usually just talking about strong differences of opinion. The stasis of which Thucydides writes is something that leads rapidly to the breakdown of all morality in a fight to the death.  Where does that come from?

***

Our author drops a strong clue in Chapter 84:

In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion . . .

This is pretty clear.  It must have made an impression on the seventeenth-century British scholar who produced the first English translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War.  Decades later, after surviving England’s own Civil War, he developed a social philosophy on the following premise:

. . . during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

Thomas Hobbes usually translates stasis as ‘sedition,’ which doesn’t seem quite right to me. Rather than overthrowing a civilizing top-down power, the stasis of Thucydides arises in the absence of that power.

And the horror with which Thucydides describes stasis suggests that for him it is not the natural state of man, held at bay by a central power. He seems to be describing extraordinary conditions in which human nature is unable to express its true qualities in the social sphere.  One thinks of W. B. Yeats (“the centre cannot hold”) when reading

. . . the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two [extremes] . . .

Yeats understood this unnatural state of society, at least symbolically, in eschatological terms. As we work out what Thucydides’ understanding may have been, we may learn from his description of another phenomenon that, like stasis, dissolved all morality: the plague at Athens.

***

As the plague spread and subjected the Athenians to unbearable stress, funeral customs (which there, as in many other pre-modern societies, were endowed with a sense of propriety verging on taboo) were violated in shocking ways. (2.52-53) In Thucydides’ view, such behavior was not an uncomfortable adaptation to necessity but rather a symptom of a complete loss of moral standards: Men now did just what they pleased . . . Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none . . . [‘Honor’ translates to kalon, primarily meaning ‘the beautiful’; and its identification as a profound moral value is characteristically Greek.]

As he tells of the plague’s impact, Thucydides does more than shake his head in horror. He posits two reasons for the collapse of morality.  The first is an acute scarcity of vital resources: from want of the proper appliances through so many of their friends having died already.  The second is a contraction of the time horizon: regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. This second factor is readily understandable to us: a modern economist would say that during the plague, the Athenians applied an extremely high discount rate.  This is always demoralizing. Students of poverty have long observed that the poor are driven to do whatever they can to survive in the present, making little provision for the future; but this very style of behavior, as much as anything else, ensures that they will remain poor. And as I will observe in a moment, the time horizon is even more important socially than economically.

If you will permit me some freedom of interpretation, the first factor (acute scarcity) also resonates with modern analysis. For the life we are used to is one of ‘moderate scarcity’ and that circumstance profoundly shapes our sense of values.  Recall the thought experiments David Hume offered in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: in scenarios of effortless unlimited abundance or desperate deprivation, “the strict laws of justice are suspended.” While Hume was exploring the conditions for morality, his thought experiment is more broadly suggestive. Homo economicus chooses a combination of goods to maximize utility under an income constraint. What is popularly called the law of diminishing returns makes itself felt all the time: a person of normal income will not consume ‘too much’ of one good — even if there is no risk of satiety — because to exceed some level of consumption of that good he would need to reduce his consumption of other goods to the point that he felt a pressing need for them, a need that would outweigh the additional benefit of consuming more of the first good.  Increased consumption of one good thus incurs, at some point, negative feedback, and that ensures both stability and the choice of a variegated basket of goods. 

But what if there isn’t enough food and water?  For the starving, the whole self-equilibrating system of rates of exchange becomes irrelevant. “All that a man hath will he give for his life.” In a famine, the one who gets a morsel to eat will still want more food and he will sacrifice other things, if he has them, to get more food.  Negative feedback does not come into play, and if an equilibrium is attained it will be a “corner solution.”

***

How do these two factors of demoralization apply to civil strife?  First, consider the discount rate or time horizon.

Relationships persist, and the future constrains the present.  A. will think twice about doing an injury to B. because B. is going to be around for a while.  If the contemplated injury is serious enough, perhaps B. won’t be around: but his family, or his friends, or people who identify with him in some way, will be around; and A. will have to deal with their enmity and distrust.  If the society in which both A. and B. find themselves also has a functioning system of justice, then even people who have no personal tie to B. are going to come after A., unless he can neutralize the whole system. These considerations tend, under normal conditions, to restrain domestic political competitors from the commission of atrocities. 

The second factor mentioned above — a self-adjusting system of tradeoffs that supplies negative feedback — also seems applicable to domestic political tensions. If A. gains power at the expense of B., B. is going to start trying harder.  There will now be a greater number of people that A. needs to keep satisfied, or cowed. A. is more likely than before to be blamed when things go wrong.  This is why aggrandizement tends under normal conditions to be self-limiting.

During the Peloponnesian War, domestic conditions at Corcyra (and then other city-states) were not normal.  The crucial abnormality was the availability of external power without responsibility for it. By inviting either Athens or Sparta to enter into its domestic struggles, a party contending within a city-state nullified the two self-limiting mechanisms sketched above.  Getting one of the behemoths to fight your domestic battles for you gave you a power which your adversaries could not resist, and which had a good chance of eliminating them root and branch.  You would not have to face them tomorrow. And since the armed forces of the hegemon had no relationship with your adversaries, there was nothing but their sense of humanity to moderate their intervention.  At times, we see such humane intentions (Nicostratus in 3.75: He at once endeavored to bring about a settlement), but such efforts always fail, probably because the hegemon’s commitment is limited (he was about to sail away) and because as an outsider he doesn’t realize when he is being manipulated (the leaders of The People induced him to leave them five of his ships).

A. thus savors the realistic prospect of exterminating B.

But at the same time, because there are two hegemons out there who are nervously watching their dominoes, A. knows that B. may have a realistic prospect of exterminating A.  As much as the extreme potential gains, it is the extreme potential losses which take this conflict out of the “normal” realm of self-regulating equilibria and also contract the time horizon.  Behavior that would normally bring future punishment (formal or informal) now has the greatest survival value:

. . . the superior readiness of those united by [party spirit] to dare everything without reserve

The horrors of Corcyra flow from particular circumstances. Pace Hobbes, it is not merely the absence of a unitary power that leads to such a graphic breakdown of civilized norms.  Nor is it the fact of armed conflict — although, if an armed conflict were sufficiently destructive, we would anticipate the same demoralization that followed the plague at Athens.  It is the combination of domestic divisions with the willingness of external hegemons to intervene. This combination dismantles the feedback loops that normally keep competitive behavior “within bounds.”  Only a corner solution remains, and most of what we call civilization gets discarded on the way to it.