It’s All Greek and yet Frighteningly Comprehensible.

Robert Zaretsky and Michael Barnes consider Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War.”

By Robert Zaretsky, Michael BarnesMarch 23, 2025

• History

• Philosophy & Religion

THE TOURISTS WHO FLOCK to Melos, a speck in the dusting of Greek islands known as the Cyclades, come mostly for the sun and sand. They visit so often these days that the Greek minister of environment and energy has issued a halt to the construction of new hotels in parts of the island, fearful of the damage that may be done to some of its more spectacular, Instagrammable landscapes and beaches. Few among the waves of visitors know that one of those beaches was likely the stage for an event that, though it unfolded 2,400 years ago and is marked by neither a monument nor a memorial, retains harrowing significance for our own era. While you need not take our word for this, you might consider the words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who lived through the events he recorded in his History of the Peloponnesian War.

At the start of his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, which stretched from 431 to 404 BCE, divided much of the Greek-speaking world into two camps, and ended in the defeat of democratic Athens, Thucydides introduces his work as “a possession for all time” (“ktēma es aiei”), in Richard Crawley’s translation. It turns out that this was not an empty boast. For the past two millennia, scholars and strategists have raked over this text, the former finding the material to construct theories of international relations and power dynamics, the latter a manual for winning (and losing) wars. The commentary inspired by Thucydides’s history seems nearly infinite.

Yet is it possible that much of this commentary is also limited? It is true that Thucydides, in his own words, claimed that it would be enough for him if his work were profitable to those who wished to study the past in order to better understand the future—for in the course of human affairs, he argued, the future will at least resemble the past, and so what surer guide do we have? But any serious reader of Thucydides cannot help but feel that his history is “a possession for all time” not merely because it furnished the factual and intellectual ore to be mined by future generations of historians, theorists, and strategists, but moreover because, quite simply, it was also the stuff of human tragedy.

Perhaps no passage in history better illustrates this dimension than the fate of Melos. In 425 BCE, Athens had been at war with Sparta for six years, and the former’s population had been decimated by a plague that took the life of its farsighted leader, Pericles. The city, coarsened by these experiences, decided to invade Melos, which had striven to remain neutral in an existential conflict between two powerful city-states, each commanding significant allies.

The invasion faltered when the Melians refused to be cowed by the destruction of parts of the island, but around a decade later, in 416 BCE, the Athenians again appeared off the coast of Melos, this time with more men. What follows in Thucydides’s text is a back-and-forth exchange between the Athenian and Melian delegations, a crescendo in what Victor Davis Hanson has called Athens’s “reign of terror.”

Crucially, the exchange was not so much Thucydides’s recreation as, quite simply, his creation. As he remarks at the start of his account, his historical characters will, at times, say what he believes was “demanded of them by the [particular] occasio[n].” We are thus warned that Thucydides will at times be less interested in historical accuracy than in moral truths.

The dialogue between the Athenians and Melians is terse and terrifying. Against the backdrop of warships rising and falling with the waves, the Athenians deliver an ultimatum: cede your sovereignty or cede your lives. The Melians try to buy time, insisting that it is “natural an excusable for men in [their] position to turn more ways than one both in thought and utterance.” One by one, they propose reasons for opposition: the fact of their neutrality, the protection of the gods in their just resistance, or, failing that, the possibility of Spartan intervention. One by one, the Athenians dispose of these reasons and impose the one and only fact the Melians must consider: we are strong and you are not. The Athenians provide the corollary: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Refusing to surrender their liberty, the Melians return to their city, and the Athenians to their ships. What follows is predictable and dreadful. The Athenians quickly take the city and, as Thucydides concludes, “put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children [into slavery].” He does not offer any reflection on the event, much less any regrets for the fate of the Melians. Just as there is no epitaph marking the event on Melos, there is no epitaph marking the end of the account in Thucydides’s history.

Unless, that is, one looks a bit harder.

As the classicist W. Robert Connor has suggested, the Melians write their own epitaph in the history: “Their speech becomes their destiny.” This speech, moreover, is not spoken by the Melians and Athenians but instead written by Thucydides. And what he has both sides say stirs our awe for the courage of the Melians, but also for the moral blindness of the Athenians. The dialogue, we learn, is an epitaph not just for the Melians but also for the Athenians, next in line to suffer what they must at the hands of the strong who do what they can.

Barely a year after the events at Melos, an Athens full of swagger launched an invasion of the Greek city-states on Sicily. While on its face this expedition makes more strategic sense—unlike tiny Melos, the great and wealthy island of Sicily played a key role in Mediterranean commerce—it is also fueled, writes Thucydides, by “report[s] as attractive as [they were] untrue,” seeding Athenian fantasies of easy victory and great riches. And so, while Sparta watched, Athens invested heavily in its overseas assault, laying out unprecedented sums for ships, crews, hoplites (citizen-soldiers), and provisions for its most ambitious attack to date.

But instead of the bloody walkover they found at Melos, the phalanxes and triremes of Athens met their annihilation. The Sicilian city-states, led by Syracuse and bolstered by the Spartans, joined forces and staggered Athens in a series of land and sea battles that eventually cost around 200 Athenian triremes and their experienced crews, and tens of thousands of hoplites. It is not lost on careful readers that Thucydides writes a speech for the Athenian general Nicias in which, attempting to rally his men from a catastrophic naval defeat, he invokes the same notions as the Melians did three years earlier when they were staring down oblivion: hope and the protection of the gods. Neither saved the Melians from the Athenians, and neither saves the Athenians on Sicily. The shock and awe of the Sicilian disaster climaxed with the fate of the last 7,000 or so hoplites, whom the Syracusans deposited in a rock quarry and left to starve in the sun. Thucydides concludes this episode as simply as he did the one on Melos:

This was the greatest [Greek] achievement of any in this war, or, in my opinion, in [Greek] history; at once most glorious to the victors, and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and 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.

What is the proper response to this history, one that pretends to be “a possession for all time”? One might be to analyze the tactics employed by the Athenians and Syracusans with an eye to avoiding the former’s mistakes and adopting the latter’s maneuvers in future battles. Another is to drill into the dynamics of international relations and find the sweet spot between bullying and cowering. Yet another is to study the social and commercial factors, as well as the flawed intelligence, that led Athens to make this catastrophic mistake.

Library shelves and computer clouds sag under such works, but they mostly miss the most important thing Thucydides wished his readers to take from his history. George Santayana notwithstanding, Thucydides seems to be telling us that even if we do recall the past, we will still—human beings being what they are—make similar, if not the same, mistakes. On a larger stage than his contemporary and fellow Athenian Sophocles—both were active in Athenian politics and served their city-state as generals—Thucydides confronts us with our tragic condition: because of our fixed and unchanging nature, we will almost always, given the opportunity, lurch from arrogance and blindness toward a “katastrophē,” literally an “overturning” that is also a subjugation and, in the dramatic vocabulary of Athenian tragedy, an ending.

Of course, none of this offers much consolation, at least in the short term, for peoples threatened by the vast powers employed by those who believe such powers make them right. But that is perhaps the very purpose of this marvelous work. Great literature—and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is surely that—has greater aims than consolation. Instead, as Iris Murdoch insisted, such works arm us “against consolation and fantasy” providing us with “a new vocabulary of experience, and a truer picture of freedom.” This is no mean achievement in any age, but it is especially welcome in so mean and low an age as ours.

¤

Featured image: Title page of Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus, 1620, is in the public domain.