The Landmark Thucydides

The Landmark Thucydides

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This is my second read of The Peloponnesian War the “PW”) by Thucydides. The PW is a book that bears fruit on each re-reading. Thucydides lays down a fire hose of information. Names of characters, locations, dates, background information come pouring out of the text. The first time around you may not be able to pick out the chaff from the wheat. This time around I started noticing foreshadowing, such as the mention of Brasidas as a trireme commander a book or so before he explodes on the scene to turn things around for Sparta. Likewise, I particularly noted the spot where Pericles is shuffled off stage with a casual mention.

One of the big epiphanies I had this time involved the Sicilian Expedition. It has always seemed so strange that Athens would try to defeat Sparta by getting “bogged down in a land war” on Sicily (to paraphrase Gen. MacArthur.) This read I picked up on the fact that Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition during year seven of its thirty-year (but actually nine-year) truce with Sparta. Athens had, apparently, gotten hooked on foreign adventures and figured if it wasn't fighting Sparta, it might as well expand the empire, despite Pericles' strict instruction to focus on Sparta alone.

In addition, I read this book during the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When Biden said he was going to send 8,000 American troops to Ukraine - too few to deter, just right to start a broader war - I identified it as a blunder modeled on the Athenian decision to send twenty triremes to aid Corcyra (Corfu), again, not enough to deter the Corinthians but more than enough to trigger Corinth into demanding that Sparta declare war. In 2022, Biden's decision was clearly not a deterrent; it is still too early to tell if the second half of the model will be triggered. (Perhaps not because Sparta was the dominant power fearful of Athenian ambition; in this case America/NATO are dominant and Russia is ambitious.)

Time will tell.

This is the value of reading history. I suspect that Biden has not read Thucydides, and I question whether his military advisors have.

I recommend the Landmark Thucydides for its footnotes and maps. There are maps every third page. I can't imagine how someone not educated in Hellenic geography could keep track of the world-spanning narrative in Thucydides' book without them. (And the narrative does span the ancient Greek world as Thucydides skips from Ionia to Sicily to Hellespont and places in between.)