Thucydides: "History of the Peloponnesian War"
A timeless work relevant to todays conflicts
(Photo from the historical site of Corinth, Greece. Corinth was pivotal in convincing Sparta to declare war against Athens. This led to a ~20 year war between the Greek city states allied with Sparta and those allied with Athens, called The Peloponnesian war)
In 2020, I finally read “The History of the Peloponnesian War” by the greek historian, Thucydides.
I knew only little about the book or its author before I read it. But this was likely an advantage. Sometimes the less you known about something, or someone, a bit controversial the better to draw unbiased opinions. As this has held up for over ~2,000 years, it’s a rare and magnificent piece of writing, but it can be confusing to many potential readers.
First off, in many reviews of this book, and even in the official book introduction, there’s a cautionary warning about how hard it is to understand Thucydides. The sentences are complex with little context at times, making it hard to follow an easy narrative.
To me, the reading of this book and finding it beneficial came easy. On the whole, I found it fast moving and often exciting. The narrative is a world part from the modern New York Times easy to follow narrative style, guiding your emotions with each sentence. But that makes the journey of discovery in the reading less predictable and more rewarding. If the author has to constantly tell people where you are going to get anywhere, it is less likely for your mind to go someplace interesting.
What I enjoyed
After some thinking, and reading the book twice, I considered a few reasons why I found this book so fulfilling.
First, in the years before finally getting to Thucydides, I read several books notorious for being books that people don’t actually read, they only claim they read: (ex: Dostoevsky “The Brothers Karamazov”, Clausewitz “On War”, Wallace “Infinite Jest”). Take Clausewitz, in my opinion, he’s much harder to get through than Thucydides. They are also similar. Both are generals writing about events of their time in an attempt to draw conclusions to be applied over a long stretch of time.
Having a longview will limit short-term commercial potential for most books, or written products, or anything artistic.
What also helped was in the years before I had read Thucydides, I had read the three foundational Greek Classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. These provide a firm foundation of the mindset, philosophical assumptions, and even the phrasings used by Thucydides.
For example, what significance does the Oracle of Delphi hold? Whenever the Spartans or Athenians went to the Oracle of Delphi to seek guidance, to attack or defend, it may sound like reading a horoscope. However, with a more broad understanding of how the Greeks (and many societies) interacted with their religious temples, festivals, and pantheons of gods, the Oracle of Delphi is more close to how individuals today use therapists, mentors, or career coaches and how companies use consultants and certain experts to make critical decisions. A connection with seeking out mystical advice today and seeking out an oracle in the past seems very likely.
Staring at words for hours to imagine new people, landscapes, and ideas requires some mental endurance. A high threshold for getting bored and incessant interest in learning despite our current image saturated social media society is useful.
I worked for about ~10 years in analytical roles requiring constant learning, looking at information or data and work through explanations to problems to test out different variables where you are regularly proven wrong.
Thucydides 500+ pages is filled with situation reports, post analysis, and scenario testing, a sort of dreamscape for an analyst. Some of the speeches are long winded (taking up pages sometimes), but by and large Thucydides shows that time to analyze is limited and must be balanced with decisions and actions.
I traveled to Greece and some of the neighboring countries some years before I read the book. This helped because the geography, people, cities, and temples, referenced by Thucydides was not too distant to me.
(testing out the Greek hoplite (soldier) helmet at a gift shop in Corinth, Greece. The owner well knew Thucydides, and pronounced his name “THUKIDEEDDEES”)
So, at the outset I already had a decent preparation, which made it a much easier journey to find some value in the reading.
But another key point was the style. Thucydides wrote with sentences that don’t always flow together and avoided the romantic sounding narrative style. The work shows an appreciation for the fog of war, no easy answers, and how hard it is to be sure of almost anything.
In my opinion most people are accustomed to reading or watching content which basically guides them along in exactly how they should feel and react. Thucydides is quite the opposite. He presents the most likely explanations, but leaving the chance that much of what is unprovable could be different from the likely explanations.
The writing often comes off as someone trying to express a thought or idea for the first time. Most of the writing we see today is basically mimicking whatever the well established talking points are on a particular topic. You can often tell when journalists struggle with a new or developing story if it does not easily fit into a prior story or case study example. But over time, firm talking points are established and people act as if there was never any uncertainty before.
Thucydides attempted to describe a war that he saw as the most significant development of that time. The story changes as more information is gathered. And Thucydides often avoids assuming a side. Rather he presents the most plausible explanations and offers the support for each case.
Writing like this is far less common in what most people encounter online or commercially published material, and in especially in what AI will write for a while at least. Most people have a strong preference for easy to flow writing which assumes it has the truth. It is easier to follow and less confusing, and offers a confidence which most readers require to justify even paying attention to what was written.
For example, one side effect of our current saturation of information and apps battling for our full attention is increased exposure writing and thoughts that don’t aim to challenge our thinking. To paraphrase Nietzche in “Beyond Good and Evil”, many people with exceptional thinking or ideas are compelled by other people to fit in and make these ideas more mediocre, and thus more palatable to a broader audience of people. Most of the challenging thoughts or ideas will have difficulty getting through the editorial process as there is a unconscious effort to sound similar to or write like the content we most often encounter in the world.
Perhaps Thucydides could be viewed as a kind of hero for self-published and independent authors of today. And also for many people trying to accurately assess what is happening despite pressures to oversimplify or water down what they find, and how to best express those ideas. An engineer once told me people at his work “don’t want truth, they want something easy to accept, but that’s not truth.”
(A sword and helmet at a museum in Corinth, Greece)
My expectations were modest and dramatically exceeded
But, all this is to say that despite all this prior preparation to read a long and complex book about war, politics, and strategy, and historical lessons, my expectations for Thucydides were modest.
I had seen YouTube clips and articles popular with the DC foreign affairs types, about the “Thucydides Trap” which piqued my interest a bit. But the actual work of Thucydides, his book and ideas, were not really explored or articulated in those articles or videos.
Who will benefit from reading Thucydides
After reading this book twice, I think this book is useful for:
people interested in a brilliant mind dedicated to find the root causes of events.
This is hard to do, and quite rare in any time period. But finding true causes and tracing their cascading effects will certainly be of value in the future; even if it seems this is now little valued by most people, organizations, or society at large.
people interested in how conflicts develop, especially military and political conflicts.
people interested in the historic influence Greek culture and civilizations has on Europe and later other western influence societies.
This is something so obvious that it’s often skipped over. But, exactly what beliefs, values, and ideas got us (the United States, and other influenced societies) to this point.
people not interested in immediately accepting anything an arbitrarily chosen “expert” says.
Things are often complicated and people who simplify the story too quickly are often serving an agenda. Of course, it’s not inherently wrong to advance an agenda or perspective, but many people fail to distinguish between opinion and objective analysis (which is also rare now).
(Tile design from museum collection in Corinth, Greece)
My critique of “Thucydides Trap”
The phrase “Thucydides Trap” has been thrown around in media, think tanks, or academic settings since at least 2017, when it was coined by academic Graham Allison. The phrase may have taken hold of the zeitgeist of the foreign policy establishment and Intel community in Washington DC and beyond.
But there are a few big flawed assumptions in what Graham Allison and adherents say:
When people refer to the “Thucydides Trap” they typically do this: insert the United States is the established power (Sparta) and China is the rising power (Athens).
Thucydides outlines his key theme in the opening pages of the book, “what made the war inevitable was the growth of the Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta”.
Thucydides asserts that this underlying fear destabilized the whole relationship amongst Sparta and Athens. This led to the truce being broken and to direct war.
Allison, and many others, loosely apply these character positions to our present day, inserting the United States (Sparta) as fearing the rising of China (Athens) and hence susceptible to the same emotional disorientating effects, potentially leading to the breaking of accords, contracts, and deals, and even war.
From my reading, I found this logic to fall quite short. Firstly, the United States is not comparable to Sparta. It is more similar to Athens, as it is described by Thucydides. On page 83 of the Penguin Classics version, Athens is described as:
Heavy use of financial tools and debt to function.
The strongest naval power.
Strong dependence on imports for its economy.
Relying more on innovation than tradition to get ahead.
Often more idealistic than pragmatic in it’s relationships.
What about that does not sound like the United States when compared with China?
Chinese relationships are generally more pragmatic, long-term, and focused on acquired certain gains and mutual benefits. This is more similar to Sparta.
China is also more similar to the description of Sparta provided by Thucydides. More inward looking, reliant upon traditional methods, and less often the first to try a new idea or practice but rather to continue the ideas and practices from the past which function properly.
Lastly, this is a key point about the rising power. The U.S has existed for about 250 years, and in the past 100 years it has been a world power. China has a long history during which is was economically dominant. So, from the perspective of many Chinese, they take a more long view, seeing the last 200 years in the broader context of history as an exception to the rule. This outlook is a bit closer to Spartan in its outlook than Athenian.
This is a key distinction that is often overlooked when the “Thucydides Trap” comes up. The Peloponnesian War was about two prominent Greek city states. While different, Athens was more naval, Sparta was more land based, they had many shared linguistic, religious, and economic values. For a modern day comparison with the United States and ancient Greek city states it is better to compare the Greek states conflicts with their more distant competitors, like the Persian empire.
(ruins of Corinth, Greece)