Who is thucydides

All this attention, both serious and silly, raises the question: What can we truly learn from Thucydides, a writer who lived over two millennia ago, about power relations today? Quite a bit, in my view, but not necessarily in the way people like to.

This moment is not, of course, the first time modern policy experts have turned to Thucydides for his insights. The cognoscenti have long known of the utility of his history. To take a prominent example, during the Cold War much used to be made of the bipolar world of Thucydides. America was often cast in the role of Athens because both were democracies, while militarized, oligarchic Sparta was played by the Soviet Union.

But this analogizing got things backwards in strategic terms: Sparta much like the United States led an alliance of relatively free, vulnerable allied states who looked to it for protection against a repressive imperial power. Thucydides himself foresaw the utility of his work.

He says that he wrote it not to entertain for the moment but to be of lasting value, because people could use it to clearly understand past events and also understand future events given that, people being people, similar sorts of things will happen again. But as we have seen, one can get the analogies wrong.

Thus, the dangerous, decades-long American-Soviet standoff did not result in catastrophic war the way the Athens-Sparta confrontation did. Now, to be fair to Allison, Destined for War does not go quite this far. He is more cautious. In 12 of these, he says, war resulted and in four it did not.

Moreover, his goal is not really to make a prediction. And yet the risk of misunderstanding Thucydides remains when he is used this way, however carefully. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water.

The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. Amphipolis was of considerable strategic importance, and with news of its fall, Thucydides fell victim to the full brunt of popular Athenian indignation. Because of his failure to save Amphipolis, he was exiled.

Thus it was as an exile from Athens that Thucydides traveled freely among the Peloponnesian allies and was able to view the war from the perspective of both sides. The project team also shared their findings more widely with a number of public events and media work, not least because of the surprising contemporary relevance of the subject.

Professor Neville Morley. Thucydides — still relevant today? Reinterpretation of Thucydides' works The reception of Thucydides focuses on the question of who was reading Thucydides and what exactly they were reading.