Thucydides: A Brief Introduction to His Writing and Reception

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. The 5th century Greek writer Thucydides is generally considered one of the greatest Greek historians from antiquity, and he envisioned his historiographical project primarily as a pedagogical act designed to teach future generations the fundamental laws that govern the affairs of states and individuals in both politics and war. At once the product of the intellectual developments in Athens during the latter half of the 5th century BC, as well as a unique genius who combined literary greatness and a new level of accuracy and objectivity in the nascent genre of historiography, Thucydides wrote his text on the Peloponnesian War with a single educational aim in mind, that it be, quote, a possession for all time, end quote. And this he indeed accomplished, in that it has inspired and influenced writers of history as well as political theorists and others from his own time until the present day. His philosophical insights into human nature, conduct, and language are all still applicable to contemporary concerns, both societal and international, and together they earn him a place as one of the greatest teachers within the Western intellectual tradition. As an Athenian general and historian of the Peloponnesian War, which raged from the years 431 BC to 404 BC, and which was waged against the powerful city-state of Sparta, Thucydides took direct part in the events of the war in its early years. Yet it was his educational background, particularly among the early rhetoricians and medical writers of his day, that provided him with the theoretical framework through which he would offer an analysis of these events, an analysis which, more than anything else, elevated his historiography to the level of an educational tool, whereby he distilled and transmitted to subsequent generations the timeless lessons which the particular events of his history contained. Thucydides belonged to the prominent Athenian family, the Phileiadae, who were very wealthy, well-connected, and politically conservative in an age when Athenian society had entered its period of radical democracy following the reforms of the statesman Ephialtes in 461 BC. This family lineage is important in establishing Thucydides' generally aristocratic social perspective. In the radical democracy, the demos, or people, were sovereign in the state, and potentially any adult male citizen, no matter how humble his background, could address the assembly on any issue. Effective speaking alone, therefore, could quickly make men very powerful, and this new avenue for political prominence and influence, as opposed to the older path of seeking power through election to political office, gave rise to a new type of education in the decades that followed 461, a style of education that was to have a great impact on Thucydides' own intellectual formation. The paradigm of the archaea paideia, or old education, as the comic playwright Aristophanes had termed it, was customarily traced back to the earliest piece of Greek literature, Homer's Iliad, written down somewhere around the end of the 8th century BC, wherein every major figure was characterized by two essential virtues of conduct, martial prowess in battle and the ability to address an assembly. The character of Achilles, typifying these sought-after qualities in education, is described as having been handed over by his father to the tutor Phoenix to become, a speaker of words and a doer of deeds. In a very real sense, these two aspects were the essence of the old education, not just at Athens, but throughout archaic Greece. Through another tradition, I'm sorry, though another tradition in myth held that Achilles was the student of Chiron, a centaur, this same dual quality was apparent as Chiron was said to have taught him and other Bronze Age heroes the aristocratic arts of horsemanship, hunting, swordsmanship and javelin throwing, as well as how to play the lyre. These were the essential components of aristocratic education for the next several centuries in Greece, until the great changes that took place in education during the mid-5th century and even for some time after that. The overt military focus of education began to change at some point in the mid-6th century, particularly at Athens, towards a less violent and more civilized form. Thucydides himself states that it was at Athens that men of this time first began to lay aside the practice of always walking around armed, and certainly the trend toward a more humane and sophisticated culture was gaining general momentum, such that by the time of Thucydides' youth over a century later, the traditional education had become entirely civilian. Indeed, physical competition in sport, or agon, came throughout this time largely to replace the heroic, warlike model that had been before the traditional ideal for aristocratic education. Moreover, by the mid-5th century, the process of increasingly expanding political rights, powers, and privileges to the common people brought with it new access to a similar kind of general gymnastic education, or paideia gymnasticae, that originally only the aristocrats had enjoyed, with boys and young men of all economic backgrounds coming more and more to train at the gymnasium, in much the same way that later Romans of all classes would use the public baths. Yet kalosthenia, or beautiful strength, the origin of the English kalosthenics, was only half of the traditional Athenian education. The concomitant intellectual aspect of the old aristocratic ideal had always been traditionally comprised of musical education and the memorization of poetic texts, especially Homer. This paideia musicae, as it was termed, also covered basic literacy and numeracy, and in combination with physical training in the gymnasia, was supposed to produce the aristocratic ideal of kalokagathia, or beautiful goodness. However, in the years after 461, when democracy entered into its most radical and direct form, there arose a need for a new type of education which could teach young men the art of persuasion through speech, and this need was particularly acute because the traditional Athenian education lacked formal structure and systematization. Therefore, to fill that void, a group of itinerant teachers, known to modern scholars collectively as the sophists, began flocking to Athens to teach young men rhetoric, and Thucydides was numbered among their pupils. Though the sophists were not a unified school, or even a school of thought more loosely conceived, in fact, they were, at least professionally speaking, rivals of one another for prospective students. Nevertheless, certain common ideas and general tendencies are found among their number, and they can therefore be legitimately referred to collectively. For instance, one of the most famous sophists, Protagoras, who lived from roughly 490 to 420 BC, seems to have espoused a doctrine of moral relativism that appears to have been characteristic of the sophists as a whole. He stated, for example, that, quote, "...man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not." End quote. In other words, it is the subjective perspective of each individual that is the ultimate criterion of reality, and not object of reality around which man must conform his opinions. This attitude seems to have been commonly taught among the sophists, especially in terms of developing arguments for or against a person in a court of law. That is, as opposed to speaking of whether someone may in fact be innocent or guilty, the sophists trained their pupils to argue by appealing to what was merely probable. This appeal to the probable also lays at the heart of another claim of Protagoras, that he could, quote, "...make the weaker argument appear the stronger, and the stronger the weaker." End quote. Such a boast is clearly of a piece with the sophist's general emphasis on rhetorical persuasion, regardless of truth. A particularly vivid example of which is one of the few pieces written by a sophist to have come down from antiquity intact, entitled The Defense of Helen by the sophist Gorgias, which contains marvelously sophistic abuses of logic and wordplay, so as to prove Helen of Troy was in fact innocent of any wrongdoing, only in the end to inform the audience that the whole work was a mere pygmyon, an amusement for Gorgias himself. Thucydides would not have only been exposed to this type of linguistic and rhetorical training, but also to its morally relativistic theoretical underpinnings. Likewise, an anonymous treatise from this period, entitled The Dissoi Logoi, or Double Arguments, was a handbook for instructing students of the sophist on how to exploit the notion that there were two opposing arguments in any dispute, and that one can advocate persuasively for either position, regardless of the veracity of either. This particular aspect of sophistic education was apparently especially formative for the young Thucydides, because it is at the heart of a conspicuous element of his text, namely the tendency almost always to present the speeches of his historical actors in pairs, thereby using them to comment on the actions of the narrative, and to articulate opposing, often equally convincing, perspectives on the issues at hand. A vivid illustration of all these educational influences coming together can be seen in a section of Thucydides's text traditionally called the Melian Dialogue, in Book 5 of his book. Melos was a small island polis that, although originally a colony of Sparta, had nevertheless remained largely neutral in the Peloponnesian War. Athens, however, in the year 416, decided, in a move of raw imperialism, to subjugate the island and force the Melians to become a tribute-paying ally. The Athenians would ultimately lay waste to Melos, killing off all the men and enslaving the women and children. But before they did so, they sent representatives to negotiate with the Melians, and to discuss any possibility of terms. Thucydides used this debate to explore many concepts about the nature of power and politics, concepts which would prove to have a very potent afterlife in nearly all epochs of subsequent Western political thought. In its most essential form, however, the pointed issue was whether a great power should be influenced by anything beyond self-interest in dealing with a weaker power. The Melians, for their part, stated that they hoped from the gods for divine supper and victory, since they were innocent of any wrongdoing and were making their stand against unjust men. The Athenians responded with chill and cynical realpolitik, redolent of the infamous dictum of another sophist, Thrasymachus, that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. An utterance simply transferring to governmental policy the moral relativism espoused by the sophist more generally. We will not, said the Athenians, for our part, hold forth with fine words, going on at length unconvincingly, that we either have our empire justly, because we defeated the Persians, or that we attack you now because we are suffering injustice at your hands. Nor do we expect you to think of convincing us by saying that, although being colonists of the Spartans, you have not taken part in their military operations, nor have you done us any injustice. But each of us should say what we truly think, so as to accomplish what is possible, knowing that in human considerations justice only arises between parties equal in power to enforce it, and that the strong do as they will, while the weak suffer what they must. Nor do we think we will be left without divine favor ourselves, for we are neither judging or acting in any way outside either human opinion regarding the divine, or human desires regarding their own interests. For the gods in our opinion, and men in our experience, by a necessity of their nature, rule wherever they have the power to. Being neither the ones who laid down this law, nor the ones who made use of it first, we did but take it up, and will leave it behind for perpetuity, knowing that even you, like everyone else, if you were as strong as we are, would do the same thing. We do not fear then to be at a disadvantage as far as the gods are concerned. This reference at the end here to the gods brings up another broad tendency of the sophists, and was also very influential on Thucydides, namely skepticism regarding the gods, and the supernatural in general. For instance, the same sophist Protagoras, quoted earlier, stated famously, concerning the gods I am not in a position to know either that they exist, or that they do not exist, for there are many obstacles in the way of such knowledge, notably the intrinsic obscurity of the subject, and the shortness of human life. Additionally, the sophist Prodicus of Chios, whose dates are roughly 465 to 395 BC, articulated a belief in what would later become known as euhemerism, named after the fourth century BC mythographer Euhemerus, that taught the belief that the gods had been originally human beings, or even natural forces which became mythologized over time. Such rationalizing tendencies vis-a-vis the gods, however, were not just found within sophistic education, but also within the teachings of the fifth century pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, under whom Thucydides also studied. This educational background no doubt lies at the heart of why Thucydides not only strips his historical narrative of any supernatural causation, even metaphorically speaking, but also often portrays traditional Greek belief in omens, signs, and oracles very negatively, and with great cynicism. In fact, this quality of his was so striking for contemporaries, as was his tutelage under Anaxagoras, that he was considered to be rather atheistic, tells us the sixth century biographer Marcellinus. One of the many places in Thucydides's text that reflects this cynical attitude, particularly in respect to oracles, comes after a terrible plague has swept through Athens in the second year of the war, and the Athenian elders recall an oracle that predicted, quote, a Dorian, that is, a Spartan war will come, and with it plague. However, because of the linguistic phenomenon known as ioticism, wherein multiple vowels and diphthongs within the Greek language all came over time to be pronounced identically, with the vowel iota, or i, all these vowels and diphthongs all sounding identical to the vowel iota, e. The word for plague, therefore, loimos, sounded apparently even at this early time indistinguishable from the word for famine, limos. Accordingly, Thucydides relates that there arose a dispute among the Athenians as to the meaning of the original oracle, equips. Of course, it prevailed that plague had been said originally, for men made their memory to harmonize with the things they had suffered. But I think that if another Doric war breaks out later, and it happens that a famine occurs then, they will recite the oracle in such a way as to conform with their circumstances. His cynicism here is, strictly speaking, limited merely to the human interpretation of the oracle, and not to the oracle itself. But many scholars have seen that this and other similar treatments in his histories suggest that Thucydides looked upon the traditional religion of his society in much the same way the sophists had taught, that is, as mere human contrivance. The dominating conception for the sophists in their educational theory was that of phusis, or nature, specifically human nature, with the understanding that human nature must lie at the foundation of the whole educational process. In fact, it was this general conception of universal human nature, phusis tu anthropu, that laid the theoretical groundwork for their novel approach to education, replacing, as it did the old aristocratic model, and its axiom that character, learning, and excellence, arete, could only be inherited by blood, replacing this with the momentous and radical claim that such things could be acquired, at least to some degree, by most people through instruction and practice. Thucydides essentially gave the same idea of universal human nature historical application, in that his whole theoretical approach to the writing of history as a pedagogical tool was grounded in the assumption that there is such a thing as human nature, always and everywhere the same, and therefore the lessons of history can have timeless and universal application. In this, however, as in so much else, both the sophists and Thucydides were influenced by contemporary medical theory, which had originally discovered the idea of human nature and had based all its work upon it. Traditional medicine in the Mediterranean had been based largely on an uncritical mixture of medicinal herbs and magic. But beginning in the early 5th century, there began a more scientific and theoretical approach to medicine, which accelerated greatly under Hippocrates, whose dates are roughly 460 to 370 BC. Hippocrates, the so-called father of medicine, who was indeed a contemporary of Thucydides, and who was reputed to have spent time in Athens while Thucydides would have been there too. This new type of approach to medicine privileged empirical observation, as well as systematic investigation of a patient's diet, environment, and other contributing factors to disease. Above all, it developed an idea of human nature in respect to physiology that, if properly understood, could provide clues to future likeliness of illness, symptomatology, and recovery. It is precisely this sort of clinical and systematic approach to one's subject that Thucydides employs not just when describing explicitly medical subjects, such as the plague which ravages Athens in the second year of the war, in which he himself both caught and survived, but also the very war itself, treating the war itself as a disease with predictable causes and effects that would likely repeat in the future, human nature being what it is, kataton of anthropinon. As analogues to the principles of health and disease, which operate on predictable trajectories, Thucydides transferred this sense of scientific causation from the world of organisms to the realm of politics, attempting to write his history as a systematic and scientific dissection of the pathology of war. While elaborating on the actual events of the time, he nevertheless always sought to pull out the underlying permanent laws of history, and to structure his entire work around them for the explicit purpose of being able to educate future readers on what could be expected under similar circumstances. For instance, that weakness always invites the domination of the stronger, that power always seeks to increase, that mutual fear is a firmer basis for trust and loyalty, that leaders must impose their will upon those whom they seek to lead, and that the engine of history is a higher necessity that supersedes individual actors in its long, continuous, and ineluctable processes. Thucydides's contribution to the theory and practice of education lies in his fundamental transformation of the entire nature of historiography, away from a mere memorialization of past deeds, towards its use as a pedagogical tool. This is particularly visible when contrasting him with the only significant Greek writer of history immediately before him, Herodotus, whose dates are roughly 484 to 425 BC. Herodotus has been since antiquity referred to as the father of history, and his work on the Persian Wars, which stretch from 490 to 479 BC, are held up as a first emblem of this nascent genre of historiography, and Thucydides, his younger contemporary, was profoundly influenced by Herodotus, a relationship universally recognized in antiquity, as double portrait busts from Greece and Rome often combine the two of them. Their relationship, however, is complicated, with Thucydides often implicitly challenging his predecessor, albeit on terms which Herodotus had already laid down. Nevertheless, it is in these challenges that one can more fully appreciate Thucydides's key contributions. Thucydides inaugurated the historiographical tradition of setting the highest of standards for research and accuracy, all the while presenting a narrative that is an objective, meticulously scientific account of events, together with an analysis of the causes of those events. What distinguishes Thucydides's historiography from the primitive annals of, say, the Egyptians or Babylonians before him, or the simple medieval chronicles that would come much later, is the pedagogical purpose of his work, that is, the notion that the historian's job is to explain and interpret the past for future generations to learn from. The direction for a more rigorous and scientific approach had been indicated, if not an outcome, at least an intention, by Herodotus himself, who confined his histories to contemporary or near contemporary events, that is, to knowledge that he could legitimately hope to validate personally, and who based his information on his own inquiries, travels, and observations. In this, Thucydides was clearly indebted to Herodotus, and yet the revolution which he affected, and for which he is sometimes dubbed the father of scientific history, lies both in the fact that he went much further in the execution of these goals than his forebear did, especially in terms of being self-consciously skeptical of his sources, of attempting to apply strict standards of impartiality, of checking facts through rigorous evidence gathering, and in using those historical inquiries as a means for communicating the lessons of events to his readers. His strictness in accuracy is directed toward this educative end, since only when the facts of history are clearly established can their true lessons be gleaned. As he outlines, for instance, in the opening of his work, I deemed it my responsibility, he says, to record the actions committed in the war, neither as I learned about them by inquiring from a chance informant, nor trusting my own impressions, but with the greatest possible accuracy in each case after appraising what I witnessed myself and what I gathered from others. Finding out what actually happened, however, was very arduous, because those present at the events often did not report the same things, but did so rather according to the bias or memory they might have for either of the two sides. This heightened standard of veracity and impartiality can be highlighted further by examining another marked contrast between Thucydides's text and that of Herodotus, in that Herodotus, especially in the earlier parts of his history, that is, books one through four, tended to include material that was often rather fairytale-like. In book one, for instance, the childhood of the Persian king Cyrus the Great is shot through with legendary elements familiar to anyone knowing the myths of Oedipus Rex or Romulus and Remus, that the baby Cyrus was saved from murder because the wife of a shepherd pitied him and substituted her own dead infant for him, but as he grew he revealed his own royal bearing. Likewise, the reader of Herodotus is treated to a delightful story of one Arion who escapes from pirates by riding on the back of a dolphin, and such tales continue for the next several books, although, as bears repetition, they do tend to disappear later in the work. It was no doubt precisely such folklore elements that Thucydides had in mind when he stated programmatically at the beginning of his first book that, quote, my own work may perhaps be less pleasurable because of the absence of any element of mythology, end quote. Yet it is only in the absence of such legendary elements when the unvarnished facts of history are presented and analyzed that their predictable causes and effects can be learned. Only in this way can historiography be subordinated to a pedagogical end. Combined with the mythological, Herodotus also included much material that is only tangentially related to his main subject matter, the Persian wars, while lavishing whole sections, sometimes even an entire book, on geographic and ethnographic digressions, discussions of customs and manners of non-Greek peoples, and really anything else that seemed to interest him. Combined with this, he also included many female personages in his historical narrative. Thucydides, on the other hand, is radically focused on his subject, eschewing virtually all ethnographical and cultural history, and as has been often noted, almost any mention of women at all, in sole preference for military events and politics. This much narrower focus, and with it a more rigidly linear narrative structure, has the specific pedagogical purpose of conveying without distraction the lessons of war and politics which are the sole focus of his text. Another key contribution of Thucydides is his replacement of any kind of supernatural causation, such as one may find in Herodotus, with strictly logical and highly insightful interpretations of the human causes at work within the narrative. In Herodotus, for instance, one finds the recurring motif of the tonos tontheon, or jealousy of the gods, which is his idea that too much human prosperity will trigger the gods to jealousy, and they in turn will bring misfortune upon individuals and states to exceed the boundaries of good fortune. Herodotus actually sees this as a causative force operative in the world, and he uses it to explain the cycle of empires rising and falling. Likewise, there is also a more nebulous concept in his text about the supernatural workings of hubris, which dooms certain historical actors like the Persian king Xerxes to their fate. But the pedagogical project of Thucydides consciously rejects anything like this, and he states forcefully in that same programmatic passage near the beginning of his work quoted just a moment ago, and no doubt with Herodotus firmly in mind, that his book will deliberately lack such fabulous and crowd-pleasing qualities, since it is, quote, rather, a possession for all time, not a declamation composed to be heard for a moment, unquote. And since Herodotus famously toured Greece giving public readings of his histories, Thucydides' comment here is not without a polemical barb. The true power of all great educational thinkers can be gauged in their ability to continue to spur new developments and to lead readers, even at great distance from themselves, into new and surprising directions. To underscore how Thucydides' ideas and insights typify this power, it is helpful to provide a graphic illustration of a particular insight of his regarding political instability and its effect on language, an insight which has immediate contemporary relevance for us and which, because of its timelessness and timeliness, can help facilitate classroom discussion among students. In his narrative on the brutal stasis, or civil unrest, on the island of Corsaira in the year 427 BC, Thucydides makes several general statements about the nature of societal breakdown during times of revolution, and in particular about the effect this breakdown has on political discourse. He says, The conditions of the cities were therefore one of civil war, and such discord as came later greatly pushed on the extravagance of revolutionary thinking by news of what had been done previously, both in the extraordinary cunning of people's attempts to seize power and in the perverseness of their retaliations. People altered the customary meaning of words in relation to things for their own self-interest. Mad recklessness was reckoned now to be loyal courage. Sensible hesitation became cowardice veiled under a fine name. Self-control was a disguise for unmanliness, and circumspection sloth. Intense vehemence was put forward as the true quality of a man, whereas to take thought for one's own safety was the specious pretext of a deserter of the faction. While a violent man was always trusted, one who offered a contrary perspective to him was suspect. Anyone who happened to hatch a plot was deemed intelligent, while he who suspected one was more formidable still. But the man who contrived ahead of time might have nothing to do with either of these, was subverting his party and intimidated by the opposition. Simply put, the man who was first to commit some evil was praised, as was also him who encouraged to crime one who had never contemplated it before. Kinship paled in comparison with party affiliation, because the latter was more conducive to committing acts of audacity without hesitation. This profound insight into the nature of political speech in times of social revolution, wherein words take on the opposite meaning of what they actually signify, has resounded, as Thucydides correctly predicted it would, throughout history and fiction, as can be seen from the fall of the Roman Republic to George Orwell's 1984. Yet it is to be seen in especially stark relief in our own contemporary times across America, often particularly in education. Seemingly everywhere now, ideologically driven terminology is used and enforced to cloak realities with diametrically opposing semantics, thereby controlling political discourse and delegitimizing opposition. In discussions about this phenomenon in the light of Thucydides, students of mine routinely respond with surprising examples from their own observations, such as that now unrestrained corporate greed is labeled free market economics. The blatant lies and distortions told by politicians are mere alternative facts. The exercise of one's freedom of speech in a public forum, the bulwark of any democracy, is routinely denounced as a great threat to our democracy, when correctly identifying a person's gender with pronouns is actually called misgendering a person, or when the killing of an unborn child in the womb, and thereby the cessation of reproduction, that is called reproductive health care. Students thus perceive that like the factional fighting on Corsaira 2,500 years ago, the lines of this current civil strife are being drawn with strong emotions on both sides, yet without any intention of compromise. A Thucydidean analysis of such manipulation of language in the service of political ideology is accordingly not only extremely beneficial for students now, but extremely necessary if contemporary society is to escape from the inevitable consequences which Thucydides foretold, if there is to be, that is, any retreat from the barricades. The clear definition of words grounds us in reality. It is the sine qua non of all rational reflection and discussion, and in brief is one of the things contemporary society is so sorely lacking. A return to the educational precepts of the Greco-Roman classics, and Thucydides' chief among them, is precisely what can help provide the galvanizing force necessary to challenge the tides of anti-intellectualism and cultural authoritarianism sweeping over modern-day society, and his lessons and perspectives can only be ignored at great peril. Thucydides' reception covers the entire span of Western history, from ancient times to Byzantium, and the Renaissance to the early modern period, and it continues most definitely into contemporary times, an afterlife entirely in keeping with Thucydides' own educational objective for his work to be a ktema es aia, a possession for all time, and from which future generations could learn. While many works have been and continue to be written detailing each epoch of this dynamic inheritance, one particular intellectual legacy will here serve as an emblem, a tessera from the vast mosaic of the way in which Thucydides' ideas remain a matter of debate, disagreement, trouble, and inspiration for modern thinkers, and also as an indication of why he is often described, in addition to his other accolades, as being the founder of political science. The political philosophy known as realism, though including within its ranks such colossal figures as Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, has since its inception looked to Thucydides as its founder and intellectual patron. Indeed, Hobbes was the first to publish a translation of Thucydides into English in 1629. In brief, realism teaches that within any system of interstate relations, but particularly anarchic ones, or those devoid of enforceable international law, states will act according to certain predictable patterns of behavior, three of which Thucydides taught in great detail, especially in the speeches of his work. The first is that states act out of ruthless self-interest, without reference to the self-inhibiting calculus of morality and justice. The second is that fear dominates the decision-making process of most states. And the third is that the political workings of states function as a system, compelling them to act in certain ways under particular circumstances, and pushing them towards acting in other ways under other conditions. Realism was incontrovertibly the dominant international relations model for policymakers and academics alike in the United States after World War II, when it provided the theoretical framework for influential figures like Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago to analyze and to explain state behavior in terms of individuals acting, as it were, in a Hobbesian state of nature, engaged in constant struggles for power and security. The Korean War of 1950 to 1953, by these lights, was presented to the public in a series of articles in Life magazine as a conflict with the potential for disaster if America did not learn the lessons of Thucydides. One particular article in the series, entitled How a Democracy Died, artfully and provocatively overlapped the dire events occurring on the 38th parallel with those of Greece at the end of the 5th century in a manner that can only be described as thoroughly in accordance with the educational aims explicitly stated in Thucydides's work. Later in the Cold War, the University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss dubbed this realist reading of Thucydides the, quote, Athenian thesis, which provided the essential paradigm through which nearly all political scientists came to analyze and interpret U.S.-Soviet relations for a generation to come. Even when the classicist H.F. Harding in 1973 published a translation of the speeches within Thucydides's text, each discussed by brief introductions, he made no attempt to conceal his deep and abiding sense that, quote, the downfall of Athens had acquired portentous relevance in the era of the Vietnam War. As the 20th century wore on and the Soviet Union ultimately collapsed, the realist school morphed into neoconservatism, and Thucydides, the prototypical Cold War policy analyst, now became the ancient voice of authority for the American mission to spread, however aggressively, benevolent global hegemony. With Irving Kristol, a student of Leo Strauss and the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, making so bold as to claim in an article published just months after the United States' invasion of Iraq that Thucydides's text was, quote, the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, end quote. Throughout the early 2000s, Thucydides's precepts on the predictability of state actors and the laws of historical contingency were regularly invoked to justify both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, though often on such dubious grounds as, for instance, that the Athenians themselves had imposed democracy on their allies whom they had liberated. Most recently, Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has coined the Thucydides trap to describe the putative principle in international relations that war is inevitable when an up-and-coming power, such as ancient Athens or China, threatens an incumbent one like Sparta or the United States. In 2017, after he published his book on the subject, Allison gave a briefing at the White House to the National Security Council on his and Thucydides's ideas on the subject. Now, there is no doubt that realist ideas hold central importance in Thucydides's text. The words, for instance, of the Athenian embassy to Sparta just before the outbreak of the war are in many ways a classic example of the tragic vision of realism. The Athenians state, we have therefore done nothing out of the ordinary nor outside of human nature if we accepted the empire given to us, and do not give it up, conquered as we are by the three greatest motivating forces, status, fear, and self-interest. Nor, moreover, are we the first originators of such behavior, since it has always been firmly established that the weaker is oppressed by the stronger. But it must also be conceded that Thucydides, as a theorist of state power, is challenged in his own work and even confuted by Thucydides, the historiographer. That is, his text is so complex, weaving together with his views on international relations, literary, psychological, and philosophical layers, that any facile strong realist account of it is inadequate and thus overly reductive. To give but one illustration of this, it has been widely recognized in recent decades that Thucydides appears to have had strong moral qualms about the ruthlessness preached by the Athenians in their many speeches throughout his work, and that part of his educational project was a subtle critique of their hawkishness and imperialism, through what Edith Foster has dubbed contrasting narrative illustrations, most famously the juxtaposition of Pericles's idealization of Athens in his famous funeral oration of Book II, with the grim horror of the plague in Athens that immediately followed it. Likewise, the Melian dialogue of Book V, in which the Athenians seem to revel in unabashed imperialism, is immediately followed by their tragic defeat in the Sicilian expedition of Books VI and VII. An instantiation of this complex and multifaceted quality of Thucydides's book, and one that nicely counterbalances its reception within realist political science, is the 1991 television movie The War That Never Ends, which is an anti-war dramatization of Thucydides's text, linked explicitly to the Gulf War in Iraq and Kuwait begun by the United States in the previous year. In conclusion, the magnitude of Thucydides's achievement ultimately cannot be fully measured by merely examining discreetly any of the various contributions that I have outlined here, pursuing one to the detriment of the others, but rather it is in the totality of his work as a whole, comprised of artistry and historical accuracy, of literary and philosophical qualities, all interwoven toward a single pedagogical purpose that his greatness must be Thucydides resists any simplistic classification as a thinker, whether one wishes to call him a literary writer, a proto-psychologist, a political philosopher, or a military historian, since his work partakes of all these qualities, yet it is greater than the sum of these disparate parts, finding as it does its essential unity in his one ultimate goal, which was educated, to give a paradigm of events that would continually repeat themselves, and from which future generations could therefore learn. Thank you.