Athens Defeated: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Are democracy and imperialism compatible? What kind of leaders succeed in a democracy during wartime? How do states make decisions? The purpose of this class is to read Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in its entirety while asking large questions of this remarkable text. The class will include materials and discussion to make sense of the larger historical context of this ancient war.

Thucydides was an Athenian general in the 5th century BCE when the city-state of Athens declared war on its long-time rival and long-time ally, Sparta. After his failure at the battle of Amphipolis, he went into exile and wrote a history of this 28-year-long war, which ended with democratic Athens losing to oligarchic Sparta. Despite dying before he could finish his history, on the strength of his political insight, historiographic rigor and coolly operatic style, his text became, in his own words, “a possession for all time.” We will read Martin Hammond’s translation. Because Thucydides took style seriously, we will supplement Hammond’s work with some selections from other translations in order to grapple with several difficult passages in which Thucydides’ intended meaning is not obvious.

Furthermore, we will use maps and images of material culture in order to better understand Thucydides’ description of Greek life, politics, and war. Even though Thucydides is the dominant surviving voice that tells us about the Peloponnesian War, other surviving sources provide glimpses of different understandings of the war, its key leaders and the fate of the war. We will put the comedian Aristophanes, the historian Diodorus Siculus and the biographer Plutarch in conversation with Thucydides.

But while we will use Thucydides’ text to understand the history of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, we will also use close reading of the text itself to ask more universal questions concerning power, justice and the purpose and proper method of writing history. We will conclude the class by briefly surveying how Thucydides influenced modern and contemporary writers and leaders, ranging from Thomas Hobbes, author of the Leviathan, which uses a Thucydidean vision of power to understand the modern state, to Graham Allison, author of the Thucydides Trap, which explicitly draws upon The History of the Peloponnesian War to envision a war between China and the USA.