Our Historian Thucydides

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different, usually historical, sometimes military.

Today we have both a historical and a military topic.

We're going to look more closely at the Peloponnesian War, but first let's have a word from our sponsors.

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Welcome back, Victor.

I know I always ask you how you're doing.

How are you doing?

I always say the same thing, Sammy.

I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for a drop, drop, drop of rain.

Okay, so we'll leave the subject there since we're going so far back in history.

Although Greece does have the same rainfall as we have, generally speaking,

we're almost on the same latitude as Peloponnese, middle of the Peloponnese here in California, where I am, and it has the same weather patterns and it has the same problems with drought.

All right.

And today our topic is the Peloponnesian War.

And Victor has written a book on the Peloponnesian War called A War Like No Other.

And he's also written the introduction to the landmark edition of that.

But first, I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And I just want to ask you about that Hillsdale College.

You've done a series of lectures on Greece for Hillsdale College?

I have.

About five years ago, the distinguished classicist Paul Ray, who's writing a six-volume history of the Peloponnesian War, sort of an amplification of Donald Kagan's four-volume, he and I gave a series of paired lectures on the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides.

Very good.

I was just going to say that landmark Thucydides was really the brainchild of a guy of an ex-oil man, Robert Strassler, who contacted me.

I think it was in 1993.

He was not a classicist.

I don't know why he contacted me of all people, but he showed me this outline.

He came to my house and saw him out here on the farm and I met him at a Fresno cafe

as well.

And he showed me the maps, the headers, the footers, and it was absolutely stunning.

And yet people had not, I don't think, had been interested.

So I called my agent, Glenn Hartley.

writer's representatives, and he got in touch with my editor at Free Press, Adam Bellow.

And the next thing we knew i gave him some names of people in cambridge and he made their introductions he got some wonderful people to write in the appendices i wrote the introduction to that thucydides and it it's the best-selling edition of thucydides now best-selling translation and he's gone on to blueprint i mean there's a landmark herodotus a landmark xenophon a landmark I think there's even Arian, et cetera.

So the blueprint survives and perpetuate.

And the whole purpose of it is, for all you listening, if you need to read a complex, difficult author like Thucydides with all these strange names and places, you pick up this translation, the landmark Thucydides, and you've got footnotes at the bottom.

You've got headers at the top, at the bottom, you've got little margin comments at the side.

You've got vocabulary.

You've got an index.

You've got everything you need to make it accessible.

Oh, wonderful.

So that's a great suggestion for a book to buy for our listeners.

All right.

so I wanted to turn to Thucydides, and I thought maybe we could talk a little bit about him and his method, but I wanted to read what he says about his method in the Peloponnesian War.

And I don't have the landmark editions translation here, but nonetheless, it will help us understand a little bit about Thucydides or a big question in his method, which is how he used speeches and how he recounted them for us.

And he says this about the speeches and his method.

He says, In this history, I have made use of set speeches, some of which were delivered just before and others during the war.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches, which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty.

So my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general use of the words that were actually used to make the speaker say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.

So he says basically here that my method has been to make the speaker say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.

And be very careful.

Hold it.

Hold, hold, hold, Sammy.

Don't get ahead of yourself.

And yes, listeners, I am interrupting Sammy.

So what you just said has to be followed by the key qualifier.

So you're suggesting when he said that his habit was to make people say what, in his opinion, they ought to have said on the occasion, that he had a novelistic fictive freedom to put words in the mouth.

But remember what he said right after that?

And I'm quoting by memory, but he said,

although, or...

especially there's a comma there.

I mean, in Greek, there's a particle there, but he says that he adhered, he adhered, or he stuck to

the general meaning or the general sense of what they really did, what they really said.

So he said, I put words into the mouth of speakers,

but I kept as possible, as much as possible to what they actually said.

Now, what does that mean?

It's a contradiction, isn't it?

When I have Pericles speaking, I knew what he had to cover the topics.

So I put in words what the occasion demanded that I know that he should have or ought to have to say.

However, I stuck to clearly as possible what he actually said.

And I think what we can distill from that is take the funeral oration of 430.

I think he was an Athenian.

And so he may have heard it.

He may not have.

He talked to people.

They gave him an outline of what he said.

And he elaborated or was a little bit more ornate.

Because if you look at the grammar and the syntax of that speech in Greek, I think it's analogous to say what the Federalist papers are like in English.

And I can guarantee you that if somebody got up in the middle of San Francisco or any major city and talked to 5,000 people or 10,000 people and read the Federalist Papers, no one would know what he was saying.

So there are long, what we call articular infinitives, there's long dependent clauses, and that is Thucydides.

But he can't make things up, Sammy, out of whole cloth because there's people, there's people there.

there and you know there's a hundred there's 140 141 speeches in these eight books and they vary their

direct discourse in other words there's quotation marks racid says comma and he speaks and then there's what we call indirect discourse and it was said at the time that speaker x said the following and you know there's so many range of what scholars have said.

You can pick up a book on Thucydides, Cornford or something, and they say, you know, they're fiction.

They're Thucydides, the postmodern philosopher, putting words into the mouth.

Or you can say, B, they're greatly modified.

There's a kernel of truth, or you can say they're actual verbatim accounts, or you can say, and I think this is what I tried to point out in the introduction, you know, some 30 years ago, that They vary.

The 141 speeches vary, and we have certain criteria to adjudicate adjudicate their veracity.

Was he near there?

Did he hear it himself?

Was there a reaction to people?

The crowd was stunned.

The millions answer back.

So you know that there was some level of response and general consensus of what is said.

Or are they just completely crazy and they make no sense?

They're just stuck in there.

And that's very rare.

So I think there's a lot of veracity in most of the 141 speeches.

Yeah.

And so do you think also the way that the speeches are used, because obviously he could have chosen some speeches and not others, has something to do with his last line about his methodology, where he says, my work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the tastes of the immediate public, but done to last forever.

This war went on 27 and a half years.

And the first book goes all the way back, the so-called Pentakantateia, the 50-year period after the Persian Wars.

And it doesn't finish.

He literally stops in mid-sentence in 411.

And we know the war went on another eight years to 404-403.

Okay.

But in that long 24-year, 23-year period that he wrote about, we have other sources.

Diodorus following the lost historian Ephorus, for example.

Xenophon's last years.

But we have inscriptions, we have archaeology, we have poetry, and we can build a narrative of what happened.

But so we know that Thucydides was not necessarily unbiased.

So if you're writing about World War II, do you write about Dresden?

And say, if you can write a World War II history and say, let's talk about the Japanese internment, I'm now just doing what we do in America and the atomic bomb and the bombing of Dresden and the Allies were really bad.

Or you see what I'm saying?

So he picked and choose incidents to magnify or diminish.

And one of them is a funeral oration.

And we know every year they gave a funeral oration, but he picked one the first year.

And the purpose of that speech is to remind the Athenians who they are, how singular they are.

And then he juxtaposes it.

As soon as he finishes, then the plague breaks out.

And that's the irony of Thucydides.

Same thing with the expedition to Sicily.

He's talking about the Melian dialogues and how they execute the Melians.

You turn the page and they're off to Sicily to meet their own payback.

So he is an artful, what one writer called an artful reporter.

And he arranges his material and especially the speeches.

And the speeches remember for our listeners are not like modern speeches where you have to have footnotes and they have to be verbatim, although with fake news today, that art and those standards have been relaxed.

In the ancient world, they were kind of a mixture between literature and history, which doesn't mean that they're false.

It just means that the historian takes latitude that in the modern area we would consider not a direct quote.

So, can we then turn to the funeral oration and what Pericles gives the funeral oration?

And it, you know, when I've read it, it just sounds like you could be talking about the United States in a way, what he says about the democracy, or at least an ideal of a democracy.

But what are your feelings or thoughts on the meaning behind that funeral oration?

Well, Thucydides has some Thracian blood.

He came from northern, his family came from northern Greece.

I think he was son of Aloris.

So he's an aristocrat.

And so he would, on the one hand, have admiration for the aristocrat Pericles, but also deep suspicion because he was also probably an enlightened oligarch.

And Pericles, he might consider otherwise, was a demagogue because he was a leader of the popular party.

But he did not feel that way about Pericles.

He had great admiration.

and he had great admiration because, as he says, although he was a popular leader, he was first citizen.

In other words, he got elected to be general, a board of general, every year, which they don't have an executive in the modern sense, like consuls in Rome.

But in other words, by his sheer magnetism, the Athenians turned over the affairs of state basically from 459 all the way to 431.

And we had the Parthenon and the Periclean building program and the cultural renaissance.

So he's trying to encapture that.

So he calls it the pedusis hellados the school of hellas that's what he's trying to tell everybody listening this is a great war and we've lost a lot of soldiers the first year but we have to remember what it's about we are a free society we are transparent society we're not suspicious we're not envious we know we have faults because we're so open.

But the antithesis, of course, is Sparta.

We're not like other people.

And then he lists what a closed or non-transparent society is like, i.e., although he doesn't really explicitly a lot mention Sparta, he's trying to tell people that they have innate advantages.

And remember what the context is.

It's in 431, the first year in May when the Spartans came, they didn't go outside of the walls.

They withdrew everybody into the walls for three or four weeks.

It was crowded.

It was stuffy.

And right after the speech that was given after the first year, and they've lost a lot of people and they're going to have a plague.

It's going to wipe out a quarter of the population.

But he's trying, that hasn't happened yet, but that's on the eve of this.

And so what he's trying to do is enumerate the values of a democracy, of confidence in the majority of the people, the need for people to be free and open and spontaneous versus a closed society that's secretive and prone to prejudices and biases.

Now, remember, he also says in the speech, you know, he tells women, I know you've lost a husband, but your duty is to retire and produce sons and be traditional women.

He's not, even though he had this relationship with Aspasia, Cortesian, and he was sort of an envont-guard Athenian in his personal life, he represents a strict role-playing of the two sexes.

Yeah.

And, you know, I found it ironic, and I don't know if...

Pericles actually said this or Thucydides was just putting it in, that he says that the Spartans train, and I'm paraphrasing myself here.

So, Spartans train all the, all the time to get their army, but we do it in a volunteer fashion.

And, you know, our army and our military strength comes naturally to us.

But yet, outside the walls of Athens, they're being boxed in or laid siege to by the Spartan army that seems to be a lot stronger than them.

I mean, it's such a strange thing to say in there, but go ahead.

I don't know if you have any.

Well, first of all, that speech has been championed by any time of democracy or a more liberal society.

And so during the Civil War, people, and you look at the Gettysburg Address, there's elements that resonate out of this speech, even though it's a very brief speech, the Gettysburg Address.

But the argument is that Union soldiers that basically...

I don't mean the argument necessarily of the Gettysburg Address,

there are echoes, but a lot of the Union newspapers use this speech and resonated the values that so-called, I don't know, they were being made fun of by the Confederates as industrial people, city people, versus the Scots-Irish dualist, bravo, macho culture of the South would make mincemeat.

And of course, when Sherman brought in agrarians, homestead farmers from Michigan and Illinois, it wasn't true.

And so the North said, look, Free people can be more successful than people with slaves.

And

not that they didn't have slaves in the ancient world.

The same thing in World War II.

We use this idea that free, you know, we had an army the size, I think it was the size of Portugal's in 1940, 18th largest army in the world.

And yet the Nazis had been at it for years of training, and yet we beat them.

That was the idea that free soldiers, even though they're going to lack the discipline or the expertise in military affairs, they learn quickly and they are emboldened and fueled by democratic fervor.

So that's what he's trying to say.

Do you think that's true about the U.S.

military that it does have a certain freedom and therefore expertise or naturalness about their skills?

Because I know

we are a very skilled military, that is certain.

I think it's true.

I made that argument in Carnage and Culture in a chapter on Salamis and also on Vietnam.

And I made the argument again in the Savior Generals.

The argument is that what you lose through perhaps stern discipline, that you have a spontaneity.

So a private says, you know,

I was out there in Iraq and I saw this thing and an idea came to me.

Or if you're in World War II, a sergeant comes and says, I know we can't get through the hedgerows, but something came to me.

If we put these big spikes, I'll call them rhinos, we'll weld them onto a Sherman tank and you can go right through the hedgerows like it's a...

almost like a caterpillar earth mover.

And we can get the stakes from all those things the Germans put on the beach to stop us, those spikes,

or porcupines and all that stuff.

And so in a regiment in society, they'd say, who are you to talk to your commanding officer?

Get back there.

But in the American army, there was the idea that you're having a chorus of ideas and regimentation and hierarchy.

don't necessarily suppress it.

There are downsides to it.

It can be unruly sometimes, but more or less, in the long run, it's an advantage for society to come from consensual origins.

Anyway, what I'm trying to get at, that speech given at the first year of the war is trying to outline in Thucydides' mind for the reader or the listener, what this war will be about.

It's going to be about an oligarchy versus a democracy.

In the ancient world, that meant a little bit different.

They both had a hellots on one side, slaves on the other, but more people in Athens would participate, maybe 20,000, 30,000, and there was very little property and finally no property qualification.

In Sparta, there would be landowners of 10,000.

Sparta was Doric.

That's a tribal affiliation or ethnic Athens is ionic.

In the ancient world, that meant a little bit less severe.

Athens is a cosmopolitan city.

Sparta is an agrarian backwater.

It doesn't have a port.

And so Athens is a sea power.

Sparta is a land power.

And in Thucydides' formulation of these antitheses in book one, you can see what's going to happen, Sammy.

It's a whale versus an elephant.

There's the strengths of Athens are different than the strengths of Sparta.

So it's kind of like a Greek play.

You kind of sense after reading this and you read book one, the side that if Athens can build an army and defeat Sparta, it will win.

If Sparta can beat a navy, it will win.

But one side's got to emulate the strength of the other.

Otherwise, they're just going to invade for the, you know, the first 10 years of what we call the Arcadamian War, back and forth, and they're going to find Cold War type of third-party spots, but they won't get a decisive resolution.

So again, the funeral oration, like most of the last speeches of book one, are trying to outline the tragedy of this war, that two Greek city-states, each antithetical to one another, and each powerful because they're antithetical to one another,

have hit each other.

Thank you, Victor.

On the Pericles funeral oration, I wanted to take a moment to have a word from our sponsor, and then we'll be right back to talk about the Mitallini revolt and the war at Corsaira.

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Welcome back.

And we were right in the middle of listening to Victor on the funeral oration, but there's other important moments in the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.

And I wanted to talk a little bit about the revolt at Mytilene.

I know that the Athenians were thinking about perhaps killing all of the Mytileneans, but they don't end up doing that in this first incident, which is not repeated when they get to Milos.

So could you tell us a little bit about what Thucydides is doing with the Mytilene revolt?

Yes.

In the year 427, now that we're in the fourth year of the war, he has this theme that as the war goes on, it gets coarser and coarser, and the thin veneer of civilization gets more and more ripped off and it reveals us for what we are, which is not necessarily a nice thing.

And he chooses it.

as one of his best early examples in 427 BC, a revolt from the island of Lesbos at the capital city called Mytilene.

We know Lesbos from the word lesbian and Sappho the lesbian poet, etc., etc.

But it's a case study of what democracy does in times of panic and hysteria and mob rule without constitutional guardrails as would later come from Rome.

It was famous throughout Western civilization along with this.

We see the Melian dialogue and other examples of killing Socrates, executing him of excesses.

And very simply, when the Athenian overlords hear that one of their 150 subject states in the Aegean has revolted and may go over to Sparta or oligarchs may displace the Democrats, they get angry.

And their generals have then restored order and they've got the captives.

And the Athenian Deimos tries to see what they should do with them.

And we have this great debate.

And Diodotus is the realist.

He says, you know what,

I would like to kill them all, all of them, but that will only incur hatred of us.

And then Cleon, the famous demagogue, goes, you know, you guys aren't even up to empire.

You actually have all these nice things, your empire, but you don't know how to rule.

And they're going to interpret any magnanimity on our part as weakness to be exploited and not as gratitude to be reciprocated.

So kill them.

And he wins the day.

The next day, being Democrats, they think about it and think, oh my God, some of these people were not responsible.

But the trireme has already left with the execution orders.

And it's, you know, 150 miles.

They'll be there pretty soon.

And so then they vote, well, let's not kill all of them.

Let's just kill the people who were responsible.

But what do we do?

Well, let's send out another trireme and give them a bonus and let them eat during rowing and give them food.

And you have this wonderful scene or macabre scene where all of a sudden they're ready to slit everybody's throat that's an adult male and they say halt only the guys that were responsible and so that was it's a very moving exegesis about the dangers of radical democracy but also realism that cleon who's a very unattractive figure nevertheless makes an argument that human nature what it is no we don't like it but he says if you're naive

or you're too unrealistic or you're too idealistic and you hold an empire you're not going to hold it long

Yeah, and so if you're done with that, then Coursaira was a whole different example where there was a war.

And could you let us hear about that?

In the same year, he goes, you know, he has this regular narrative of regular events, invasions, sea attacks, you know,

what's happening in the internal politics of cities, but he's got another iconic moment.

And later in the year, at modern-day Corfu, which was ancient Corsaira, there is a civil war.

And during the Peloponnesian War, if you're an oligarch, it means that you want a property qualification in order to vote, then you call in the Spartans.

If you're a radical Democrat and you want everybody to vote, no matter whether they own property or not, just free male citizens, then you bring in the Athenians.

And in this conundrum, they have a civil war, what they call in the ancient world stasis, which doesn't mean what it does in the modern world of immobility, but strife.

And he says it heightens and it extends and accelerates to such a a point that the language any language of moderation if you say he's sober then that's a sellout word if you say

he's smart that doesn't mean anything and what he's he says that they start killing each other families fathers sons and they accuse a revolutionary of being too soft so today's revolutionary is tomorrow's counter-revolutionary and today's radical, nutty, you know, way out there revolutionary is tomorrow's conservative because these spasms of human excess always extend in one direction until they implode.

And he really is interested in the language and the language always changes its meaning.

And he also says something that's very important that the blunter wits in times of strife win.

In other words, that people who are very sophisticated or educated and they go, everybody's going to listen to me, or I can figure this out.

They don't understand that a person who's just single-minded, you know, a Lenin or somebody like that or a Castro who's willing to kill people or just, they win in the end.

And when you get into an utter revolution, and civil strife, he implies, is much more bloodthirsty than national or interstate strife.

Another example, like the Periclean oration, the Middle Ean debate, of a moment where Thucydides will expand on one event in a way that's disproportionate to the history, but proportionate to his philosophical purposes of teaching us about human nature.

Yes, back to that changing of language at Corsaira and there's, it sounds mostly like a civil war that they're having.

Do you notice that today in our dialogue?

That's an interesting, I think I do, but I was wondering what you think.

Absolutely.

And in fact, you'll see the stasa Corsaira has been mentioned in a lot of columns.

I've mentioned it because

what it suggests is that when you get into a revolutionary hysteria, the words change their meaning.

So if somebody is a, say, look at the left today.

It used to be a liberal was a very, you know, touchy word.

You were leftist.

Today's liberals are sellouts.

And then we went to progressives and they were more and more supposedly left-wing and now we're at woke and woke hate liberals.

They're just, they're not there because they're not there in the Democratic Party anymore.

And you can really see the use of euphemism and how words change their meaning.

What does racist mean today?

I don't think it means anything.

I think if you were to write an Oxford English dictionary, you would say a slur or a smear designed to be unanswerable for the purpose of destroying somebody's reputation or career, because I don't think it's related to actual documented examples of somebody actually showing bias on the basis of race.

What does affirmative action mean?

You're going to affirm what action?

Why not just say racial quotas?

And this is something that Orwell, both in Animal Farm, but especially in 1984, really mastered.

But he too drew on Thucydides' description of the stasis at Corsaira and the way that words were manipulated and they had no grounding with reality.

They were constructs that serve political purposes.

Yeah, and diversity doesn't seem to mean diverse at all.

Equity doesn't seem to have anything to do with

Thucydidean terms.

So if we go to this mantra, diversity, equity, and inclusion, diversity doesn't mean intellectual diversity.

It doesn't mean that you want somebody who's Italian, you want somebody who's Jewish, you want somebody who's Irish.

It doesn't mean you want conservatives.

It just means that you want people who are not white.

That's all.

And we say that the NFL is diverse because 75% of the team is African American, but it's not diverse.

There's no Asian Americans to speak of, very few Hispanics to speak of.

And so we say, well, the coaches are not diverse.

Well, there's about 8% or 10% are African-American.

So you get into this word game.

The African-American community says there's not enough black coaches, but according to their percentage, at least until recently in the general population there was 12 percent but they don't ever say well we're 75 percent overrepresented by you know five or six or seven times our numbers in the general population so it doesn't mean anything what does equity mean does it mean everybody is going to have a stake in society that they're roughly equal no it means that we're going to manipulate the economic system so that on the back end the result is going to be all the same we don't believe in equality of opportunity We believe in equality of result, which we've renamed equity.

And inclusion doesn't mean we're trying to include everybody into the general community.

We're not saying at Stanford University where I work, there is nobody from the white working class here.

They don't exist.

White people here are all very, very wealthy.

We want to include a guy from Oklahoma.

We want a guy from Mississippi.

We want a guy from Bakersfield.

No, that doesn't mean that at all.

It doesn't mean we, as again, we don't want to include people with different ideas.

We want to have a faculty that's inclusive of conservatives, of libertarians.

No.

So it's an Orwellian time that we're living in.

Yeah, it sure is.

And even the anti-racism, they say, well, we're going to be racist.

And it's just, it's mind-boggling.

My head reels when I hear that.

Whenever I see that word anti-racism, I just understand that.

It means that race, and Mr.

Kendi, Professor Ibram Kendi said that.

Basically, you have to be racist to be anti-racist as for reparation.

Remember that very quickly, Sammy, the assumption that we're all supposed to make that some very, very

privileged person who is not white that was born into the late 20th century, 30 to 40 years after affirmative action, and was a beneficiary of that and is in the upper, upper middle class, has complaints.

against the society at large for the undeniable racism that his grandfather and ancestors experienced.

And therefore, the present generation of white people had nothing to do with it and have not been racist in their own life, owe him something.

And I don't think that's a sustainable proposition.

I don't.

No, I don't.

It sounds like Corsair in its stasis.

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Welcome back.

And we are looking at what I was...

intending to be the last thing, but you might want to go on to the Sicilian expedition just to finish off, you know, complete the story, as it were, with the Athenians.

With the Melian dialogue, we were just talking about how Thucydides is showing these city-states breaking down into, you know, craziness, if I can put it that way, or chaos.

But the Melian dialogue shows another kind of breakdown, I think.

And I would like to listen to you on what the meaning of the Melian dialogue was for Thucydides and his.

Well, it's a brilliant...

dialogue, an exchange of ideas from the island, the leaders of the island of Melos, which was pro-Spartan but neutral, and the Athenian Athenian Empire that is growing desperate.

And it's just about at the end of the so-called peace of Nicias.

They've had a breather in this long war, and they're going to go at it again.

And the Athenians say it's time to take care of business.

And any island in our sphere of influence that says they're neutral, either for us or Guinness.

And we're going to go after those Melians.

So they go and they say, we're going to destroy your whole city unless you surrender.

They say, but you know, you're Democrats.

You believe in freedom and you didn't surrender to to the Persian.

You know what?

Hope.

That's all you guys have.

Look at the relative strength.

Hope is dangerous comforter.

You're going to delude yourself and you're not going to be realistic.

You're going to give all these pious explanations how you got our empire, that we're not true to our values.

And when it's all said and done, you're going to die.

So why do you do this?

Save us a lot of trouble by just.

you know, surrendering.

And they say, but the Spartans could come.

Oh, no, they're never gonna come they don't do anything unless it's in their interest they're worse than we are being realists and then that said but but you know you would admire other people will see that we that we we resisted you and they'll they'll be impressed now they'll think you're stupid sobs because you looked at the relative size and you made the wrong calculation and they're going to say you know what we don't want to be like the millions because they're going to wipe us out so once we wipe you out i'm paraphrasing, everybody will not.

And they'll say, No, you'll be so crude and mean that people will rebel for the spirit of freedom.

And they say, Well, we would like it that way, and we admire your thing, but we didn't make the rules.

Human nature was here.

We just inherited it.

And so, after it's all over, the poor Melians go into their walls and they hold out for a while.

Then the Athenians send a really big contingent and they cut the throat of every adult Melian.

They enslave the rest of the population, then they destroy the city, and they farm out the land to Athenian settlers.

And then, what is the purpose?

And it's very hard to determine what Thucydides is doing.

There's a huge debate for the last 400 years in Western literature and philosophy.

On the one side, the realist said he doesn't like this, he doesn't approve of it, but he was trying to tell us that we're stuck with human nature.

And if you think you're going to change human nature, you're crazy and you're going to get a lot of innocent people killed.

You You know, you DAs are letting everybody out.

You're virtue signaling.

You feel so good.

But there's going to be a lot of innocent people because when you let a criminal out of jail, he's not going to say, oh, thank you, federal attorney or LA County attorney, Mr.

Gascon.

Just because I murdered somebody or I raped somebody doesn't mean I'm a bad person.

And you believe me, now I'm going to go out and be follow the straight and arrow.

No, he's going to think, what an idiot.

I'm going to go out and do even more because there's no consequence.

That's one view.

And then the other is the humanitarian view that, well, Thucydides has the Sicilian expedition right after the Melian dialogue.

And that is deliberately compressing those two events to show you how the Athenians got their comeuppance.

They all of a sudden find themselves in the Melian position on Sicily.

They're wiped out.

40,000 of them are killed.

And nobody's going to listen to them because for their pleas for mercy because they never gave any to the Melians.

They gave very little to the Mytileneans.

They wiped out Tyrone and Scioni and other places.

So it's kind of a test case on realism.

And if there is a humanity in the realist position, that the Athenians are saying, you have responsibilities for your women and children in your community.

And your principles are very admirable, but they're not going to work with us and you're going to be exterminated.

And the other argument is, but if we don't have principles, we don't have anything.

Do we just always follow the rule of the jungle?

We can't live that way.

We're human.

And so that's that philosophical debate that's never quite resolvable.

Although myself, being a human pessimist, I feel that Thucydides was trying to show how awful the Athenians were and how corrupt they had become.

But he was also trying to tell us that when you're a million and you have no power to resist, idealistic verbiage is going to get a lot of innocent people killed because the Athenians probably would have let them live as subjects and taxpayers.

And that would have been better than being annihilated.

Yeah.

And, you know, I know that the Greeks had highly developed rhetorical techniques.

And if you go in and look at the speeches given in Thucydides' history, they mimic that.

But when you get to the Emelian dialogues, and it's a formal place where, you know, if Thucydides is going to write formal debate, he would do these beautiful speeches.

But he doesn't quite do that in that Melian dialogue.

He turns it to these really short back and forths between the Melians and the Athenians.

And could you comment on that for us?

Well, the style is absolutely brilliant because it's almost as if they're interrupting each other.

And we don't know.

And what I like about it, it says Athenians, Melians in the Greek text.

So we don't know who they are.

And a lot of people have argued anytime Thucydides uses these generalizations without identifying people, then there's a greater likelihood that he is using his imagination more than recording an actual event.

Some people have suggested Alcibiades was one of the Athenian members of the embassy, but you get this idea of Melians versus Athenians, and the Athenians are trying to tell them that they can no longer allow them to be neutral because their neutrality is an insult and will be very subversive to their empire.

And people will say, well, if the Melians are neutral, we want to be.

And the Melians are saying, but we don't want to hurt anybody.

And when people see that you allowed us to be neutral, they'll think, I want to be a member of the Athenian Empire.

And the Athenians shake their heads and say, no, I wish that were true.

It just is not true.

And you know it.

And you're going to bring the, and the implication is that they're, as soon as the Athenians leave, they're going to call in those SOB Spartans and they're going to be back at war with an asset that went over to Sparta rather than to be neutral.

But it's very hard to, I mean, when you look at what Hitler did and Stalin did, and you think of all the people who resisted them, you have to fight tyranny.

And the Athenians were tyrannical, but their cast is tragic figures.

And of course, this is during the period of the greatest of my favorite of the three tragedians, Euripides.

And there's a very Euripidean flavor that's on the stage at this time.

These are the later plays of Euripides.

Bacchae is coming up, for example, in 406.

And you get the impression that Thucydides, like Euripides, is very interested in the psychological components and what are people thinking and their insecurities and their naiveties.

And that's all part of that fifth century Enlightenment where they started to look into what humans were actually really like.

They were a huge curiosity into this question of what is man.

Yeah, absolutely.

And Thucydides has got to remember one thing about him.

He was a man of action.

He was an aristocrat.

He was probably around 35 years old.

He was a stalwart Athenian.

He had a great admiration for Antiphon, the conservative.

He was apparently a familiar of Pericles.

And then he came late, three days.

He was in charge of a fleet of Athenian ships that were supposed to keep Amphipolis from the Spartan genius, Brassydas, who's probably the most gifted man that Sparta produced.

And he lost.

He lost the city, and they exiled him for 20 years.

So he is going all around the Greek world as a disillusioned Athenian, trying to talk to Thebans and Spartans and writing this history.

Now, we don't know.

He died sometimes in the 390s.

And we have a history from 431 when he was a general still, or he was being elected and re-elected or not elected.

But for the first period, he was an Athenian military mind, man, general.

And then after 424 to the end of the war, he was the reporter and he survived the war.

But we don't know why he quit at 411.

Was it because he thought, well, the theme of this is the destruction of an arrogant democratic empire and they lost the war.

And I'm, and then all of a sudden, as he was writing this, he gets, you know, 415, it's not easy to write in Greek, remember, in on papyrus.

without books and you know computers and then he looks around in the 390s when he's an old man he said wait a minute athens is back again

and they're friends with the theban and so my whole theory didn't work so he quit in frustration or it was so tedious he just died in his you know in the 390s sometime probably he was somewhere in his 60s or 70s and he just never finished it.

And so we don't know, but it's important to remember a couple of things that he was a man of action.

He was a conservative, but he was not a biased conservative.

He was very impressed with athens because of its resiliency and he doesn't like it but he does say a couple places he goes and when they lost everything at sicily basically i'm paraphrasing they immediately took actions and went in to you know overdrive and build another fleet as is typical of democracies so what he's saying is that when you get the so-called auk loss, the mob, and you get everybody on the same page, America's a good example, then you have enormous potential to marshal capital and labor in a way that an oligarchy can't do.

It reminds me of the contemporary Republican Party.

The problem with it was when it was oligarchical, it was easily caricatured and it didn't mobilize people as easily.

But now that it's sort of a workers' populist party, when you're getting the middle class, it's very strange how the Democrats are...

terrified of it because it has an ability to bring in Hispanics, working class whites, the upper suburbans.

It's a very radical idea.

And that's what Thucydides was saying, that he had some admiration if, if you had a man like Pericles who ruled the democracy as a first citizen, i.e.

democratic in theory, but they listened to the sober, judicious, well-born, wealthy Pericles.

All right, Victor, we're going to have to call it quits there, but I just want one small question.

Do you have any advice to anybody who picks up the book to try to read it?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I don't get royalties, so I'm not in a position of conflict of interest, but I do think if you want to read Thucydides, you should pick up the landmark Thucydides edition.

It's the easiest and the most accessible to you.

I wrote a book, I am prejudiced here, called A War Like No Other that tries to explain the Peloponnesian War by Jean-Ahort cavalry, army, siegecraft, etc.

Donald Kagan's four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is brilliant.

Paul Ray's six-volume, that's R-A-H-E, is brilliant.

There was a brilliant Marxist scholar, the origins of the Peloponnesian War, Jeffrey Days and Croix, had enormous influence.

It's still worth reading.

There is a commentary of the entire history.

It was one of the great masterpieces of classical scholarship by A.

W.

Gom.

Gom's commentary on Thucydides.

It was completed by Dover and Andrews and others.

And then we had an update or a different approach by Simon Hornblower, commentary on Thucydides.

So there's a lot of

can read it.

I specialized in it in graduate school.

I've written some articles, classical, nobody would want to read them.

They're in classical journals, but I used to teach Thucydides as well, especially independent studies, because the Greek is very difficult.

At least the speeches are.

Those 141 speeches, as I said, they're like reading the Federalist Papers.

And it really begs the question, when he brings these long articular infinitives or this convoluted syntax or these abstractions, there's one of two things going on, Sammy.

Either the language has not evolved, and he's one of the first writers of the old oligarch, so-called, pseudo-xenophon was probably earlier, but there's not very many, Antiphon might have been earlier.

There's not very many people who wrote in Attic prose.

So it's a new language that's non-poetic, and it's not capable of expressing the sophistication and thought this Thucydides wants to transmit.

So he's using different types of grammatical constructions in lieu of a time-tried syntax, grammar, and vocabulary.

So it's very difficult in the speeches.

The prose is not too bad.

So it's very hard to read.

But it's one of the most brilliant things ever written.

And it's my favorite author.

I read it all the time.

I quote it to myself when things are good or bad.

I remember what Thucydides said about something.

It's very tragic, his own life,

and I urge everybody at some point to come into contact with it.

All right.

Well, thank you very much, Victor.

I'd like to thank the listeners as well.

Thank everybody for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

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