Colloquium: Thucydides
Lecturer: Victor Davis Hanson
Thucydides's chronicles of the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 B.C.) is generally considered one of the most analytical works that survive from the classical Greek world. In the historian's hands, the war is more than a referendum on athenian liberality versus Spartan conservatism, or of democracy pitted against oligarchy, or maritme empire set against a parochial rural state.
Instead, Thucydides believed his narrative would be a guide "for the ages," since he thought that human nature changes little. If so, his own keen perceptions about the role of primordial emotions such as fear and love of honor would transcend the war between Athens and Sparta and serve as a guide for generations not born.
In addition, Thucydides was a cultural pessimist who thought that the veneer of civilization is thin indeed, and once scraped off by war, revolution or plague would reveal man's raw and often frightening nature. So his ostensible history of a distant war between two small states in the southeastern Mediterranean proves instead to be a philosophical tract on human nature itself, as diverse later thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to George Marshall have pointed out. In an age where technological brilliance dazzles, it is forgotten how often a sense of pride or false grievance begins wars, and how even more frequently a hurricane or radical Islamic terrorists can reduce the human condition to savagery and refer us once again to Thucydides.
Victor Davis Hanson is the author of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War, as well as many other books and articles examining the science of war. He is the director emeritus of the classics program at California State University at Fresno and a military historian and classics scholar at the Hoover Institution.