The Peloponnesian War, [Thucydides’] magisterial opus on Athens’ doomed decades-long conflict with Sparta in the fifth century BC, includes the famous line, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
That well-known line comes from an important section of the text known as the Melian Dialogue, in which representatives of Athens browbeat emissaries from the island of Melos. After the Athenians fail to persuade the Melians to accept unconditional surrender, they kill all the island’s men and enslave its women and children. Thucydides’s Melos passage has long been cited as proof that little governs the world beyond strength and its exercise—and as evidence that the brilliant Athenian general, historian, and philosopher himself believed that. Generations of students of international relations have been assigned these decontextualized snippets from his vast work and instructed that this was indeed Thucydides’s lesson. Today, a cottage industry of commentators now celebrate (or bemoan) what is described as a Thucydidean turn in American foreign policy. In “How Trump Won Davos,” an essay published in January, the historian Niall Ferguson explicitly invoked the Melian Dialogue to tout the triumph of Trump as a realist in the mode of Thucydides and asserted that, at Melos, “the realists won an emphatic victory.”
But that understanding of both the dialogue and its author gets his meaning fundamentally backward. Thucydides repeatedly refers to, but never endorses, the idea that the strong have the freedom to do what they want: to the contrary, a careful reading of The Peloponnesian War suggests a rather different view. Among the principal lessons to learn from Thucydides is that the ambition of the strong can lead to their own undoing. Right after Thucydides reports the fateful words of the Athenian envoys and the subsequent destruction of Melos, he describes at great length the disastrous campaign Athens pursued in Sicily—an effort that eventually led to Athenian defeat and Spartan victory. In this light, the Melian Dialogue is not proof of the great virtue of strength in international relations but an illustration of pride before the fall.
The political scientist Graham Allison famously coined the term “Thucydides trap” to refer to the dynamic inherent in The Peloponnesian War, of how the tensions between a rising power and an existing power will invariably bubble over into conflict. The real Thucydides trap, however, is different. The crucial lesson of the book is notto sketch how Athens and Sparta found themselves sleepwalking into a war that neither side wanted or understood. As Thucydides elaborately elucidates, both went into the conflict with eyes wide open. Moreover, in his view, the start of that war was hardly a trap. Thucydides supported the commencement of hostilities and the careful strategy of Pericles, the Athenian leader who rallied the public behind his demand for war with Sparta. The true catastrophe, and the real trap, occurred many years later, when Athens abandoned Pericles’s prudence and became recklessly ambitious, most grimly demonstrated by the misguided bid to conquer Sicily.
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The dialogue is less about the fate of Melos than it is about the condition of Athens, and the picture is not a pretty one. That becomes abundantly clear in the way the destruction of the island sets up what immediately follows, the ill-fated Athenian bid to take Sicily. Immediately after describing the annihilation of Melos, Thucydides continues: “The same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicily . . . if possible to conquer the island.” The Athens that operated at Melos is inseparable from the Athens that embarked on its fantastically and fatally misguided campaign to conquer the large and distant island of Sicily, the folly that would be a chief cause of its ultimate ruin. Thucydides thought the Sicilian campaign was the most important event in the war, and he devotes nearly a quarter of his magnum opus to a detailed depiction of it. One reason why the destruction of Melos (in contrast to, say, the extremely similar events in Scione) is an ideal place for extreme narrative deceleration is because it allows Thucydides to directly and explicitly link Athenian arrogance and hubris in Melos—well on display in the dialogue—with Athenian arrogance and hubris in Sicily, where that bill would come due: “They were beaten at all points altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily.”
It is reasonable to suggest that the Melians ought to have chosen surrender and survival, but in the debate they make the stronger (and more prescient) points. If the Athenians massacred those who were at their mercy, the Melians argued, a dangerous precedent might be set: “You are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.” On this point, and others, the Melians were spot on—and likely articulating a point that Thucydides wished to impart (and one that his initial readers would have immediately recognized). The classicist Hunter Rawlings has advanced the necessarily speculative but convincingly argued notion that the Melian Dialogue was intended to mirror what would have been elaborated as an “Athenian Dialogue” at the very end of the work, with the Athenians now in the shoes of the ill-fated Melians.
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With the structure of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shows that the Melians may have been vanquished on the battlefield, but they utterly routed the Athenians in the debate, leaving as their legacy enduring lessons about the limits of what brute force can accomplish.
Fascinating essay, and great conversation with Demetri Kofenas.