Thucydides Roundtable, Concluding Analysis: What have we learned?

[by A. E. Clark]

In this parting post, my theme is learning. What have we learned from what we’ve read? What did the Greeks of the late fifth century learn from what they experienced? What did Thucydides learn from his research and writing? I’ll take these questions in reverse order.

I. Learning by Thucydides

As a book-in-progress, the History was Thucydides’ close companion for perhaps thirty years. A growing collection of papyrus scrolls — whose completion may have been the goal that sustained him through an illness typically fatal, as well as undeserved military disgrace — was somehow preserved and updated and polished through an exile’s years of wandering. Scholars have tried to identify in the text such corrections and interpolations as the author may have added in the light of subsequent events or later-obtained testimony. Some have then drawn conclusions about how the historian’s views changed over time. Eduard Schwartz (1858-1940) thought that the book was revised very late in the war to be a defense of Pericles. I think this must be considered highly speculative, but it is reasonable to ask, “What did Thucydides learn by writing his book?”

On general principles, I’d guess the answer is “A lot.” But it is hard to pick out from among the wealth of his insights any that could only have come to him as he worked; in almost every case, they could have been part of his outlook from the beginning. His cold realism, for example: when Pericles says that the wise place their trust “not in hope, which is the prop of the desperate, but in a judgment grounded upon existing resources (2.62.5),” he is sounding a theme that will echo at Melos and many other scenes in the war: but a mine-owner born to wealth and power, yet responsible for maintaining both, might have learned that lesson young.

Another theme, however, likely reflects a hard-won insight. The writer often expounds the law of unintended consequences and the almost inevitable disappointment of human hopes. No one is born with this knowledge. And nothing teaches it as surely as warfare and the study of warfare. In 1.78.1, the Athenian ambassadors note “the vast influence of accident in war.” After their setback at Pylos, the Spartans say, “Sensible men are prudent enough to treat their gains as precarious.” (4.18.4) People often bring about the opposite of what they seek, as when Nicias’ speech on the exorbitant requirements of a Sicilian expedition has the effect of heightening his audience’s enthusiasm (6.24.2) or when the efforts of the oligarchy undermine its own cause:

Things at Thasos thus turned out just the contrary to what the oligarchic conspirators at Athens expected; and the same in my opinion was the case in many of the other dependencies … (8.64.5)

The hapless invaders of Sicily “contrasted the splendor and glory of their setting out with the humiliation in which it had ended.” (7.75.6) There is a karmic quality to this arc of disappointment:

They had come to enslave others, and were departing in fear of being enslaved themselves: they had sailed out with prayer and paeans, and now started to go back with omens directly contrary. (7.75.7)

In his emphasis on how easily the plans of men go astray, especially when the planners are in the grip of hubris, Thucydides reminded this reader of the wisdom literature of the Ancient Near East, but whereas wisdom literature was typically deductive or simply apothegmatic, Thucydides is inductive, drawing lessons from his painstaking observation of events.

There is another insight which — though I can’t prove it — Thucydides likely reached only as a result of his experience and investigation. It comes near the end, when Athens is fighting for internal coherence as well as survival in a hostile world. After the Euboean disaster, the people assemble to depose the oligarchy of the Four Hundred and vote to restore the Five Thousand whose uncertain identity and role had inspired the remarkable passage:

Indeed this was why the Four Hundred neither wished the Five Thousand to exist, nor to have it known that they did not exist; being of the opinion that to give themselves so many partners in empire would be downright democracy, while the mystery in question would make the people afraid of each other. (8.92.11)

It is tempting to gloss: One morning,Thucydides awoke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a Prague insurance clerk. In his description of the convulsions at Athens, our author is astoundingly modern, one might almost say post-modern. And of this moment of supreme danger he writes,

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