This summer, I finally read Thucydides’s The Peloponnesian War after years of intending to do so, ever since I read the first line on the back cover of the translation by Benjamin Jowett: “For twenty-seven bitter and heroic years the most intellectual civilization the world has ever seen was busily destroying itself.” I thought instantly that there must be some parallels to our current self-imposed destruction of the planet, and that discovering them would be illuminating. There were indeed some, but the rich ancient text chronicling the disastrous war between Athens and Sparta goes beyond whatever point we moderns attempt to press it to make for us, and I found the book to be an immensely moving, important, and universal text that is worth reading in full regardless of one’s agenda.
For one, there are harrowing battle scenes that grip the reader as tightly as anything Hollywood produces. One scene of soldiers on the shore, their hearts in their throats as they watch a naval battle unfolding, masterfully captures the dreadful feeling of suspense that readers can recognize from their own experiences with, if not battle, then certainly sports, or drama, or those pivotal moments in our lives where we await an as-yet-undetermined outcome with bated breath: While the naval engagement hung in the balance the two armies on shore had great trial and conflict of soul. The Sicilian soldier was animated by the hope of increasing the glory which he had already won, while the invader was tormented by the fear that his fortunes might sink lower still. The last chance of the Athenians lay in their ships, and their anxiety was dreadful. The fortune of the battle varied; and it was not possible that the spectators on the shore should all receive the same impression of it. Being quite close and having different points of view, they would some of them see their own ships victorious; their courage would then revive, and they would earnestly call upon the Gods not to take from them their hope of deliverance. But others, who saw their ships worsted, cried and shrieked aloud, and were by the sight alone more utterly unnerved than the defeated combatants themselves. Others, again, who had fixed their gaze on some part of the struggle which was undecided, were in a state of excitement still more terrible; they kept swaying their bodies to and fro in an agony of hope and fear as the stubborn conflict went on and on; for at every instant they were all but saved or all but lost. And while the strife hung in the balance you might hear in the Athenian army at once lamentation, shouting, cries of victory or defeat, and all the various sounds which are wrung from a great host in extremity of danger.
Though I initially thought my sympathies would be on the side of democratic, artistic Athens, the home of the famous Greek philosophers, poets, and playwrights, especially having enjoyed the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—all Athenians—I quickly found myself rooting for Sparta instead. This was not due to any affinity for oligarchy, a military lifestyle, modern “Spartan” workout crazes, or the film The 300, but because, at least in Thucydides’s portrayal, the Athenians were high-handed imperialists espousing a “might makes right” attitude, demanding tribute from many of the other islands and cities in the Greek archipelago, and were prone to mercilessly slaughtering anyone who resisted, while the Spartans seemed, on some level, to be more merciful in their war-waging (most of the time), and to have less interest in subjugating other territories.
That being said, I could not help but be moved at Thucydides’s portrayal of the final destruction of the Athenian army in its failed invasion of Sicily. A last group of Athenian soldiers under the sympathetic general Nicias, whose offer to surrender was rejected because it was not unconditional, have been fleeing the Syracusan and Spartan forces allied against them, harassed endlessly with stones and darts and javelins, until maddened with thirst, while attempting to ford a river, they find themselves massacred: But no sooner did they reach the water than they lost all order and rushed in; every man was trying to cross first, and, the enemy pressing upon them at the same time, the passage of the river became hopeless. Being compelled to keep close together they fell one upon another, and trampled each other underfoot: some at once perished, pierced by their own spears; others got entangled in the baggage and were carried down the stream. The Syracusans stood upon the further bank of the river, which was steep, and hurled missiles from above on the Athenians, who were huddled together in the deep bed of the stream and for the most part were drinking greedily. The Peloponnesians came down the bank and slaughtered them, falling chiefly upon those who were in the river. Whereupon the water at once became foul, but was drunk all the same, although muddy and dyed with blood, and the crowd fought for it.
In the tale of clashing empires, there are heroes and villains and many figures in between; there are brilliant triumphs and torturous defeats; there are moments of sublime nobility and of remorseless cruelty; and there are lessons aplenty for the reader of any era. Military leaders and politicians have reaped the benefits of studying it for centuries, and historians will never fail to find useful ways of applying it to their own times. Having gone into the work with an environmental focus, looking for ways that the destruction of Greek civilization might parallel our own, I found much more to enjoy and to learn in the text than I was initially looking for. I have read that many writers fall into the “Thucydides trap” of treating The Peloponnesian War as having the ability to exactly predict future events in a deterministic way, and of treating contemporary geopolitical parallels as if they are exact, and while I am conscious of trying to avoid that here, I would still offer the following general lessons about human nature and political realities from The Peloponnesian War as they relate to our environmental crisis.
Lying politicians and the manipulation of public affairs for private gain
Thucydides has definitely made me more cynical about human nature (though that may seem surprising, given what may seem like misanthropy in other posts here). Not that he’s convinced me that all people are bad, but that at most times and in most places, there are likely to be some bad actors, whose greed and thirst for power at public expense may be shocking to a person who is prone to give others the benefit of the doubt and to believe that most people are generally good.
It sometimes seems hard to believe that there are fossil fuel executives still pushing to expand their operations and extend the use of fossil fuels, despite the undeniable damage they are doing to the planet, or that political candidates would allow themselves to be bought by these people to build their campaign funds for their next election. Sometimes I’m tempted to think, They can’t really care so little about future generations, they can’t really be so consumed with their own profit that they would permanently endanger us all… But Thucydides’s hand sternly bangs a gong to wake us sharply from our delusions. He shows us, in stunning detail, the shifty Athenians Cleon and Alcibiades repeatedly manipulating the course of public affairs for their own private benefit, even if it meant pushing their own state into disaster, or needlessly causing the deaths of many at home or abroad.
Their demagoguery can bring Trump to mind even if you’re not looking for parallels. The blowhard Cleon, “the most violent of the citizens” in Athens, stirs up the masses with calls for the wanton execution of their captured enemies, gaining power as he stokes a thirst for blood. He continues to promote war even when the Spartans send a peace embassy, which he dismisses; soon afterwards, when the Athenians have been told, accurately, that their forces are in a bad position against the Spartans and that their siege should be called off, Cleon perceives that he in a weak position. Now, knowing the facts are stacked against him, he tries to cast suspicion upon these reported facts and get the generals to attack anyway. He accuses the Athenian generals of incompetence and cowardice, and boasts that he would be a better commander than they are. When the generals try to put him in charge of a naval fleet to call his bluff and have him prove his words, he starts backpedaling and doing all he can to get out of this commission. He is forced into it, though, and somehow triumphs in the battle, which only furthers his period of power in Athens, and also keeps the war going, though it ultimately destroys Athens.
Alcibiades comes to prominence as a young person “lawless in his personal habits,” someone hoping that “success would repair his private fortunes, and gain him money as well as glory.” Thucydides adds, “He had a great position among the citizens and was devoted to horse racing and other pleasures which outran his means. And in the end his wild courses went far to ruin the Athenian state.” He was another who helped to continue the disastrous war out of personal motives. At one point, he pushed to sustain hostilities with Sparta because they had attempted to negotiate a peace with representatives other than him, slighting the bond his ancestors had historically had with Sparta. He later, hoping to receive a military appointment and profit by it, pushed Athens into fighting in the Sicilian Expedition against the Syracusans, which was disastrous for Athens and left it in a weakened state, ultimately allowing Sparta to triumph.
He went on to betray every empire he worked for—he gave Athenian secrets to the Syracusans when he realized the Athenians were going to exile him, and went over to the Spartan side and worked to destroy Athens, telling lies about the Athenians and spurring the Spartans to aid the Syracusans against Athens. When the Spartans came to distrust him and ordered his death, he went over to the Persians, and schemed against the Spartans. He presented himself as a close associate of the Persian king, and convinced the Athenians they would need to take him back if they wanted any assistance from the Persians. Later, he schemed to replace the Athenian democracy with an oligarchy which he thought would be friendlier to himself. At every step, he worked primarily with his own interests in mind, and was heedless of the trail of chaos and betrayal he left in his wake.
When we see Republican politicians repeatedly making bad faith arguments about environmental initiatives, their smoke screens are easily fanned away, revealing the naked personal interest that drives them. When they repeatedly make the same debunked claims about the Green New Deal, or when they suddenly show up to take a surprising interest in whale deaths in an attempt to falsely blame offshore wind and stop it in its tracks, thereby prolonging our dependence on the fossil fuels that bankroll their campaigns, we are seeing the likes of Cleon and Alcibiades at work. People like them have been with mankind since the beginning, and are not going away—the best we can do is wise up to them.
Wise counsel and foresight ignored (and often slandered)
In Thucydides’s presentation, the reader often encounters juxtaposed monologues, sometimes with one from a benevolent orator side-by-side with a slanted speech from Creon, Alcibiades, or other pro-war demagogues. Men like King Archidamus of the Spartans counsel the people not to get involved in a war with a powerful enemy that will not be concluded quickly and will likely be passed on to their own children. The Athenian general Nicias, who wants to retire from warfare while he has a good name and avoid ever bringing disgrace upon himself and his country, advises his fellow citizens not to get involved in matters in Sicily and to avoid the temptation to try to subjugate the island, which he says would be nearly impossible and would require vast sacrifices of blood, ships, and treasure. Hermocrates in Sicily warns his people that the Athenians are coming in force, and must be resisted mightily from the start.
The remarkable foresight of all of these wise leaders is in vain. The leaders and masses appealed to rely instead on their own prejudices, greed, or bellicosity, or allow themselves to be swayed by deceptive speakers who steer them in precisely the wrong direction. Time and again the advice that would avert catastrophe is ignored, and these civilizations commit themselves to paths that bring them pain and destruction. Thucydides remarks that people would rather believe what they want to be true than to confront inconvenient truths.
The cries of scientists and activists and scrupulous politicians for decades, which have yet to fully and effectively turn the tide against business interests and business as usual, are echoes of Archidamus, Nicias, and Hermocrates trying to turn their people away from the doom they seek. Thucydides’s chronicle should spur us to ask ourselves how we can bring people to listen to the voices of the farseeing and the just, so that we do not regret ignoring their counsel until it is too late.
Big conflicts stemming from small issues
Throughout Thucydides’s history, small conflicts involving one city against another, or the independence or subjugation of a single island, or internal conflicts within one region, end up drawing in disproportionate outside forces and leading empires to war with one another. The chronicle begins with internal problems in a colony called Epidamnus, which ends up drawing in the island of Corcyra, which was its mother-city, and then the distant city of Corinth, which was the mother-city of Corcyra. Ultimately the dispute comes to involve Athens and Sparta, and, with similar instances in other cities, helps to spark the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that rages for twenty-seven years, claims thousands of lives, and sees the complete destruction of many cities.
Throughout the war, there are many times where peace is proposed, but the sides refuse to give ground on small points that have become matters of pride—“We can’t be asked to give up that city we just liberated!” “We can’t agree to destroy the wall we erected!”—and so the war drags on needlessly, for decades. The sides involved end up committing to massive conflicts instead of accepting a small loss.
In Russia’s ill-conceived and criminal invasion of Ukraine, we have seen a dictator refusing to deviate from his course despite the unexpected obstacles he has faced, as he continues to sacrifice tens of thousands of men and ravage an innocent country rather than wound his pride by making peace without achieving his objectives. On the other side of the conflict, the Ukrainians have now affirmed their intention of driving Russia out of not just the area they invaded in 2022, but the area they seized in 2014, which makes the prolongation of the war seem much more likely. Back at home, we see the two political parties taking hardline stances on a host of small issues that become cultural flashpoints and that neither side is willing to give ground on, while we suffer from a lack of a combined effort to combat climate change and other environmental issues, and lose the sense of being a united country with a working democracy.
Volatile, unreliable public opinion
Throughout the Peloponnesian War, several speakers in Athens and other democratic cities remark upon the flightiness of the masses, who are rarely seen to commit to any one person or course of action for very long. Very often, the masses will elect a leader only to turn on him shortly afterwards, sometimes for not being successful enough, and sometimes for being too successful. Alcibiades himself, the flightiest of them all, says to the Spartans, “Of course, like all sensible men, we knew only too well what democracy is, and I better than any one, who have so good a reason for abusing it. The follies of democracy are universally admitted, and there is nothing new to be said about them.” Several times in the chronicle, the people of Athens will be stirred up by a speaker and will vote (against the better advice of others) to pursue war, and then will be outraged when the tides of war turn against them, and will be “furious with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition—as if they had not voted it themselves.” The voting masses take no responsibility for their bad decisions and routinely rail against those they put in power.
It is no secret that midterm elections in the US often result in losses for the party in power, as the people who voted them in grow frustrated and decide to vote for the opposition (whom they may have previously voted for eight years prior, before turning against them in an election in between). We vacillate between two political parties, neither of whom show signs of improving, and we watch environmental laws passed by one administration stripped away by the next. There is little consistency and little responsibility taken, and we let the most urgent crises go unchecked.
Many of the worst actions in the Peloponnesian War are taken by leaders either trying to steer public opinion in a nefarious direction, or leaders bound to ride the waves of public opinion that they are afraid to challenge. An exception is Pericles, the greatest orator and statesman of Athens, whom Thucydides marks out as different from the politicians driven by self-interest: The reason of the difference was that he, deriving authority from his capacity and acknowledged worth, being also a man of transparent integrity, was able to control the multitude in a free spirit; he led them rather than was led by them; for, not seeking power by dishonest arts, he had no need to say pleasant things, but, on the strength of his own high character, could venture to oppose and even to anger them. When he saw them unseasonably elated and arrogant, his words humbled and awed them; and, when they were depressed by groundless fears, he sought to reanimate their confidence. Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people.
And how did the Athenians treat Pericles? When the tides of war were not going well, the people of Athens felt the need to fine him, but then, “with the usual fickleness of a multitude,” committed the charge of the war back to him anyway. In a polarized democracy like ours, how well would we be able to recognize a leader with good intentions whose plans were actually producing good results? We have become so jaded, so contentious, and so dissatisfied with government in general that it seems unlikely that even a good leader would retain public favor for long.
The lack of great oratory
The many speeches Thucydides presents in the form of monologues are among the highlights of his narrative. Thucydides tells the reader early on that the speeches are not verbatim transcripts of what was said, since neither he nor the others who may have been present can recall the speeches in their entirety, but instead are his constructions of what ought to have been said in that moment for that argument, as the speaker would have been likely to have expressed it, along the general idea of what was reported to have been said. They are masterpieces of rhetoric, and frequently I would find myself completely swayed by the arguments of the first speaker, believing no counterargument would be possible, but then a second speaker would present a perfectly convincing, seemingly airtight argument that contradicted the first, and it would be extremely hard to choose who was “right.”
Where are the orators like Pericles today? Do we still have leaders with his alleged purity of intention and his willingness and ability to oppose and win over a crowd? If we do, where would we even hear them? Gone are the public squares where rival parties would come to discuss the issues of the day. Granted, it was easier when the city was the basis of government, and the Athenians could conceivably converge on a single location to have these public discussions; on a national level in the United States, it is impossible. We are left with televised debates every four years, and the last two rounds of them have been travesties. In addition, when television is the only option, people have plenty of other things to watch.
Donald Trump is the most successful orator in America today, which is a sorry state of affairs. I don’t say the best orator or the most skillful orator—just the most successful. He speaks with a child’s vocabulary, lies several times a minute, and is prone to digressive rants and tangents, but he is able to work his crowd and to command large audiences. Acting with a good sense of what will connect with his audience’s sense of righteous anger (probably the easiest emotion to connect with), he taps into their fears and frustrations and paints himself as someone on their side, someone just as victimized and disgusted but who will ultimately lead them to a brighter America where the injustices that outrage them all will be overcome. He is completely unable to win over his opposition through this oratory, but to be fair, the odds are deeply stacked against any speaker attempting to reach their opposition today.
Imagine a leader whose words could dazzle us and uplift us with courage and decency and intelligence, someone who could point a way forward and get us on board and help us help ourselves to get there. In some ways, it feels the time is ripe for the return of such a leader, but in other ways, it feels our fragmentation makes it impossible—but this, too, is something Thucydides was familiar with.
The dangers of factionalism
One of the most persistent issues plaguing Greece throughout The Peloponnesian War is the division of the Greek people into factions. On the one hand, the Greeks thought of themselves as “Hellenes” and of everyone else as “barbarians”—these are the two terms used throughout the chronicle. This belief that there was something unique and enlightened about their civilization that set them apart from the rest of the world was not enough to unite Athens and Sparta and prevent them from tearing their shared civilization to shreds. There are a few moments where the Spartans show mercy to their captives as fellow Greeks, and sometimes refuse to enslave them, but for the most part, there is little recognition of a shared identity, and the two sides commit staggering atrocities against one another.
Not only were the two major Greek cities, heads of their respective “leagues,” divided from one another, but they were often faced with internal divisions. In the opening conflict of the chronicle, the Epidamnians are attacked by former members of an unpopular oligarchy that they’ve ousted from the city, who come back with barbarians on their side. The Epidamnians’ cries for help are ignored by the Corcyraeans, the people of their mother colony, until the Corinthians, their grandmother colony, decide to take part. The Corcyraeans have drifted apart from the Corinthians they descended from, and have their own interests (much like the United States drifted apart from Great Britain), and they end up fighting one another, with the Corcyraeans drawing Athens to their side and the Corinthians drawing Sparta to theirs.
The Corcyraeans later descend into a lawless civil war within their city, with a bloody revolution that unfolds like the French Revolution, with waves of slaughter and desperate struggles for power. Father was pitted against son, and personal vendettas were acted upon under the guise of political cleansing: “The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood, because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. (For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good; they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest.) The seal of good faith was not divine law, but fellowship in crime.”
Power struggles also arise within the major strongholds of Athens and Sparta, sometimes out of legitimate disagreements about the course their empires should take, but often out of jealousy, as well, as successful generals find themselves acquiring enemies who work against them out of fear they will become too successful. The bitter ones with less power are prone to factionalize, a lesson for all times.
In the end, and much of this is actually chronicled in Xenophon’s Hellenica, which completes the story of The Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides never finished, Athens plunges into a fatal civil war. After prolonging the war with Sparta for years, Athens is finally defeated, and has transitioned from a democracy to an oligarchy, and even then, without an external enemy in the Spartans anymore, the Athenians cannot stop fighting, as they turn their weapons on one another. As with the Corcyraean violence, the contenders for power in Athens struggle treacherously against one another, with a group called the Thirty rising to the top, breaking laws and customs and slaying all who oppose them or might theoretically one day oppose them, and even those whose death might enrich them: “And now it was no longer a question of the so-called ‘criminals’ or of people whom one has never heard of. Those arrested now were the people who, in the view of the Thirty, were the least likely to submit to being pushed out of politics and who could count on the greatest support if they chose to take action.”
In the midst of the madness, a brave citizen named Cleocritus raises his voice in an attempt to bring his countrymen to their senses: In the name of the gods of our fathers and mothers, of the bonds of kinship and marriage and friendship, which are shared by so many of us on both sides, I beg you to feel some shame in front of gods and men and to give up this sin against your fatherland. Do not give your obedience to those wicked men, the Thirty, who, just for their own private profit, have in eight months come close to killing more Athenians than all the Peloponnesians did in ten years of war. These men, when there is nothing to prevent our living peaceably together in our city, have brought on us war among ourselves, and there can be nothing more shameful than this, nothing more unbearable, more unholy and more hateful to gods and men alike.
The tide of public opinions turns swiftly against the Thirty after this, and they give up their authority, and after another final skirmish, the Spartans help to bring peace to the city, and the Athenians affirm their bonds with one another.
Let it not come to this for us. At the moment when we, as a nation, should be united in the face of the catastrophe of climate change that this summer has made clear to us, with wildfire smoke yellowing the northern states all the way to New York City, and Texas and other southern states facing weeks of unbroken 100-degree heat. We cannot afford to be cutting one another’s throats while the world burns. We are divided by political party, by animosity between rural and urban areas, by racial and gender identity politics, and this division is fatal. We are divided as a nation, and the nations are divided from one another. In lamenting the failure to unite in common action, Pericles himself says, in a speech that could be addressed to Congress or to the UN today, The confederacy is made up of many races; all their representatives have equal votes, and press their several interests. There follows the usual result, that nothing is ever done properly. For some are all anxiety to be revenged on an enemy, while others only want to get off with as little loss as possible. The members of such a confederacy are slow to meet, and when they do meet, they give little time to the consideration of any common interest, and a great deal to schemes which further the interest of their particular state. Every one fancies that his own neglect will do no harm, but that it is somebody else’s business to keep a lookout for him, and this idea, cherished alike by each, is the secret ruin of all.
Let us pull together at last, so that one among us is not left writing the chronicle of a civilization “busily destroying itself,” but the story of a people who learned from the past and confronted their present with clear eyes and a united vision, and who achieved, together, a sane future.