Okay, let's unpack this. We are about to do a
deep dive into a figure who is somehow both ancient
history and, well, required reading for anyone
in a modern war college. That's a perfect way
to put it. We're talking about Thucydides, an
Athenian general, a historian, and you could
argue the single most important foundational
thinker of what we now call political realism.
Absolutely. And when you shared these sources
with us, detailing his life, his... really revolutionary
method and his huge philosophical impact, the
mission for us became pretty clear. Right. We
have to understand why this man, writing about
a war in the 5th century BC, the Peloponnesian
War between Athens and Sparta, created something
he was convinced would be, and this is his phrase,
a possession for all time. That phrase alone.
A possession for all time. The sheer ambition
of that is staggering. It suggests that what
he was seeing wasn't just about Athens and Sparta.
No, he believed he was mapping the permanent
features of the human condition, of power, fear,
and statecraft. And our sources all circle back
to this title he's been given, the father of
scientific history. So let's get the core takeaway
right on the table at the start. What's the big
innovation? The central innovation, the thing
that changes everything, is his relentless focus
on cause and effect, what the Greeks call the
logos. He applied these strict standards of evidence
while, well, it's about what he omitted. He completely
left out. Any reference to divine intervention.
Completely. No gods, no fate, no omens. And you
can't overstate how radical that was. Before
Thucydides, history was tangled up with morality,
with divine will. You know, Homer, Hesiod, even
Herodotus to a degree. They're all asking why
the gods let something happen. And Thucydides
just says, no, we're not looking at the heavens.
We're looking at human decisions and their consequences.
Precisely. His history of the Peloponnesian War
covers the conflict up to 411 BC. But it wasn't.
just a chronicle it was a foundational analysis
he was convinced this war was the greatest the
most consequential conflict ever waged by the
greeks so if he's trying to get at the deepest
structures of human power we have to start with
the man himself let's zoom in on thucydides the
person born around 460 bc in athens his father's
name was olorus What do we actually know for
sure about him? Well, that's what's so fascinating.
Most of the really reliable information comes
directly from his own work. He tells us he was
an Athenian, that he fought as a strategos, a
general, that he caught the plague of Athens
and survived, and most importantly, that he was
exiled by the democracy he served. And then there's
that wonderful little story, which our sources
say is probably not true, but it's too good to
ignore. Oh, the Herodotus story? Yeah, that as
a boy, maybe 10 or 12 years old, he hears Herodotus
giving... a public reading of his work. And young
Thucydides is so moved, he just bursts into tears.
And Herodotus supposedly turns to his father
and says, Oloros, your son yearns for knowledge.
It's a perfect story, right? It sets up this
intellectual lineage. It does. But scholars are
pretty sure it's a later invention to kind of
pass the torch of history from one to the other.
Even if he was about to completely reject Herodotus'
style. Exactly. But his early life was shaped
by something far more brutal than intellectual
excitement. He lived through a catastrophe. The
Plague of Athens, an event that killed a third
of the city's population, including its greatest
leader, Pericles. And this wasn't just some biographical
detail. It was a crucible that forged his mind.
The way he documented the plague is a masterclass
in his scientific approach. He details the symptoms
with this terrifying clinical precision. The
fever, the lesions. the thirst but also the psychological
collapse the breakdown of society absolutely
and you can see the influence of the hippocratic
school of medicine here they were all about empirical
evidence factual reporting and finding natural
causes for disease not blaming the gods so thucydides
is doing the same thing with history that hippocrates
was doing with medicine he is his description
of the plague is completely free of moralizing
he's just listing the facts how it spread what
it did to the body and it's right here in the
middle of all this horror that he makes an observation
that is Frankly, astounding. Acquired immunity.
Acquired immunity. He notes that those who got
sick and recovered could then care for others
without fear of catching it a second time. That's
an incredible intellectual leap for the 5th century
BC. He's basically observing natural immunization
centuries before anyone had a clue about germ
theory. It proves his mind was already wired
for this kind of objective cause and effect analysis.
But the element that really pushed him out of
the action and into the role of historian was
a military failure. A huge one. The loss of Amphipolis.
He was serving as a general, the Stratigos, in
424 BC. He was sent to the region around Thassos.
Why there specifically? His family had connections
and money. They owned gold mines at a place called
Skeptahiel in Thrace. Yeah. Right across from
Thassos. So he had influence there. Powerful
local alliances. And that influence was supposed
to be an asset. It was. But it ended up being
part of his undoing. That winter, the brilliant
Spartan general Brasidas makes a surprise attack
on Amphipolis. Strategically vital Athenian colony.
It controlled timber, access to those gold mines.
It was a huge deal. A massive deal. So the Athenian
commander there sends an urgent message to Thucydides,
who's nearby on Thassos, and Thucydides rushes
to help. But Brasidas was not just a great general.
He was a shrewd politician. He was a step ahead.
He knew Thucydides was coming, and he knew about
his local influence. So before Thucydides could
arrive with his ships, Brasidas offers the people
of Amphipolis incredibly generous surrender terms.
And they took the deal. Instantly. Why endure
a bloody siege when you can get a good deal?
By the time Thucydides sailed into the harbor,
it was all over. Amphipolis was gone. And back
in Athens, they needed a scapegoat. And he was
it. The Athenian democracy blamed him for the
failure and sentenced him to exile for 20 years.
Which is just one of the great ironies of history,
because his personal disaster becomes his greatest
professional gift. He says it himself. His exile
gave him the freedom to travel. he could move
among the peloponnesian allies sparta and its
friends he writes that he had leisure to observe
affairs somewhat particularly because he was
there yeah with both sides he was getting perspectives
no other athenian general could have possibly
had so you have this perfect storm an insider's
knowledge from being a general a scientific mind
sharpened by the plague and now access to all
sides of the conflict because of his exile But,
I mean, that's not a cheap lifestyle, living
in exile for 20 years during a war. Right. How
did he fund all this research? This is a key
point people often miss. He wasn't some struggling
writer. His family was incredibly wealthy. Those
gold mines in Thrace provided a massive private
income stream. So he was essentially the world's
first independently funded scholar. He didn't
need a patron. He didn't have to write what someone
else wanted to hear. He was completely free.
His father's name, Oloris, connects him to Thracian
royalty. He was related to famous Athenian statesmen
like Miltiades and Simon. He was an elite insider
who was forced to become an outsider. That's
the perfect summary of his position. He says
he started writing the moment the war broke out
in 431 BC because he knew how big it would be.
And yet, for all that dedication, his book just
stops. It just cuts off mid -sentence in the
year 411 BC. It doesn't even cover the final
seven years of the war. And that abrupt ending
has been a puzzle for centuries. The traditional
assumption is that he simply died while he was
writing. That's the prevailing theory. But later
sources offer a few conflicting, more dramatic
accounts. One says he returned to Athens after
the war ended, around 404 BC, but was murdered
on the way. Another story says he was killed
at his estate in Thrace. But we don't really
know. The text just stops. He never got to finish
his... possession for all time. Right. Let's
move on to his methodology, because this is really
the heart of it all. This is why he gets that
title, father of scientific history. What did
that actually mean in his time? It seems to come
down to rigor and rationality. I mean, standards
he set for evidence were completely new, weren't
they? Entirely new. He was obsessed with impartiality,
with gathering evidence. But his core focus was
always on cause and effect. the logos. And that
meant deliberately, fundamentally excluding the
gods. Which again, in that intellectual climate,
wasn't just a minor tweak. It was a complete
rejection of the standard worldview. Oh, absolutely.
Before Thucydides, if your city was hit by a
plague, it's because you angered Apollo. If you
won a battle, it's because Athena was on your
side. He effectively secularized history. He
treated it like a phenomenon governed by predictable
human behaviors, not by the whims of deities.
Exactly. And if the gods aren't responsible,
then human beings are. And if humans are responsible,
then we can study their actions, their calculations,
their mistakes, and maybe even learn from them.
That's the foundation of political science. So
how did he go about gathering this evidence?
What does his scientific standard actually look
like? Well, he put a huge value on eyewitness
testimony, but, and this is key, he was skeptical
about it. He knew memory was unreliable. He even
says in his book that different witnesses will
give different accounts of the same event depending
on their loyalties or what they remember. So
he tried to cross -reference them? Yeah. Talk
to multiple people? Yes. He was essentially triangulating
his sources. He'd consult written documents when
he could find them, treaties, official records,
and he interviewed people from all sides extensively.
That systematic approach was just unheard of.
But there's a part of his method that modern
historians would find, let's say, problematic.
His exclusion principle. He wasn't writing a
history of the era. He was only writing a history
of the war. That's a crucial distinction. He
was recording an event, not a period. And he
was ruthless about excluding anything he thought
was frivolous. You read Thucydides, you won't
find anything about the Parthenon being built
or the plays of Sophocles or the philosophy of
Socrates. He sees life only as political life
and history only as political history. It's an
incredibly narrow focus. Laser sharp. It's all
about who has power, what choices they make,
and what the military and political consequences
are. Which brings us to the most debated and
maybe the most fascinating part of his method.
The thing that seems to completely contradict
his claim to be scientific, the speeches. The
long, formal speeches, yes. This is the central
tension in his work. He puts these elaborate,
beautifully constructed speeches into the mouths
of key figures. But he couldn't have been there
taking notes, so he's essentially making them
up. He admits as much. He says that it was hard
to remember the exact words, so he wrote what
he thought the speakers ought to have said, what
was demanded of them by the situation, while
sticking as closely as possible to the general
gist of what was actually said. So how do you
square that? If you're building your reputation
on rigor and sacks, how can you justify putting
words into people's mouths? Doesn't that just
let all his own biases in? It's a fantastic question,
and I think his defense would be about purpose.
He wasn't trying to create a transcript. He was
trying to capture the essence of the political
arguments. In a culture that was so heavily oral,
like Athens, the key strategic debates and the
rhetorical maneuvering would have just vanished
into thin air. So the speeches are a literary
device to rescue the core logic. The motivations
from being lost to time. Precisely. They are
dramatic reconstructions of motive. They reveal
the political calculations, the strategic necessities,
the psychology of the leaders in a way that a
dry summary never could. And there's no better
example of that than Pericles' funeral oration.
It's still studied by political theorists everywhere.
It's the absolute high point of Athenian idealism.
It's a soaring defense of Athenian democracy,
of its openness, its culture, its freedom. He
has Pericles honor the dead, not just for being
brave, but for dying in defense of this unique
political experiment. It's just beautiful. It
has that incredible line. The whole earth is
the sepulcher of famous men. It's a celebration
of the Athenian ideal. It's rhetoric at its most
powerful. But the genius of Thucydides, the thing
that shows his true purpose, is what he does
immediately. after that glorious speech. The
whiplash. It is pure rhetorical whiplash. He
goes from that lofty, heroic ideal straight into
the most graphic, horrifying, and clinical description
of the plague of Athens. He juxtaposes the ideal
state with the absolute chaos of nature. He shows
the complete collapse of law and custom with
the Greeks called anomia. All the sacred burial
rites, the social norms. They just dissolved.
He writes that men, not knowing what was to become
of them, became equally contemptuous of the property
of and the dues to the deities. He describes
people tossing their dead relatives onto other
people's funeral pyres because they were too
sick or too exhausted or just didn't care anymore.
It's this visceral image of degradation, and
it's a deliberate choice. It strips away all
the heroic language of the oration and shows
you the brutal reality underneath. It's his way
of saying that human ideals, no matter how beautiful,
are fragile. They shatter the moment they're
confronted with true physical necessity and fear.
The plague reveals the ugly truth behind the
beautiful speech. And that unflinching, you could
even say cynical, view of how people behave under
pressure. That is exactly why Thucydides is seen
as the father of political realism. Right, political
realism. It's a term you hear all the time in
foreign policy circles. Let's really define it,
though, through his lens. What does it mean?
At its core, political realism, as Thucydides
saw it, argues that the relationships between
states are driven by three things and three things
only. Fear, self -interest, and the pursuit of
power. So it's not about shared morals or justice
or international law. Not at all. Realism assumes
that the international system is one of anarchy,
meaning there's no higher authority to enforce
rules. So states have to rely on their own strength
to survive. Morality is a luxury and often a
dangerous one. This philosophy is laid bare in
what is probably the most famous and most disturbing
section of his entire book, the Melian Dialogue.
Chilling is the only word for it. It is required
reading for a reason. It's a condensed, perfect
articulation of this worldview. So set the scene
for us. Who are the Melians? Melos is a small,
neutral island. They have stayed out of a war.
But Athens, in the later stages of the conflict,
decides they need to conquer it. So they sent
envoys to negotiate a surrender. And the millions
try to appeal to reason, to justice. They say,
we've done nothing wrong. We're neutral. Surely
the gods will be on our side because our cause
is just. And the Athenian response is just brutal.
They basically tell the Melians to stop talking
about high -sounding phrases like justice. It's
irrelevant. They say that justice is only a concept
that matters between equals and power. Exactly.
When there's an imbalance of power, reality takes
over. And then they deliver the line, the one
that defines real politic. The strong do what
they can and the weak suffer what they must.
It is the ultimate dismissal of any kind of ethical
consideration in foreign policy. It's pure naked
power. It is. And the Athenians don't even pretend
they're on a righteous crusade. Their justification
is purely strategic. They argue that if they
let Melos remain free, their other subjects will
see it as a sign of weakness and might be tempted
to rebel. So their actions are dictated by fear.
The fear of losing their empire. The necessity
of maintaining power overrides any claim to morality.
And the dialogue ends, of course, with the Athenians
conquering Melos, killing all the men of military
age, and selling the women and children into
slavery. It's a grim lesson in what happens when
self -interest is the only guide. This dark outlook,
it really seems to come from his deep observation
of human nature under extreme stress. He saw
it with the plague, and he also analyzed it in
the context of civil war. Yes, his analysis of
the civil war on the island of Corsera is maybe
his most profound psychological passage. This
is where he gives us that famous line, war is
a violent teacher. Didaskalos. And what does
war teach us, according to him? It teaches us
the extremes humans are capable of when social
order breaks down. He shows how in Coursera,
the conflict between the Democrats and the oligarchs
became so savage that it inverted the very meaning
of words. What do you mean it inverted words?
Language itself became a weapon. For example,
reckless, brutal violence was suddenly praised
as courageous loyalty to your side. Caution and
prudence were relabeled as cowardice in disguise.
The entire moral vocabulary was turned on its
head to justify atrocities. So in a crisis, morality
isn't just forgotten, it's actively corrupted.
Language is twisted to serve the conflict. Precisely.
And this ties back to the intellectual climate
of his time, specifically the influence of the
sophists. We mentioned them briefly, but they're
key to understanding his framework. Remind us
about the sophists. What was their core idea?
The Sophists were philosophers and rhetoricians
who questioned traditional values. Their famous
line was, man is the measure of all things. They
argued that concepts like justice weren't universal
God -given truths, but were simply conventions
rules made by people to serve their own interests.
Which is exactly what the Athenians argue in
the Melian Dialogue. Justice is a convention
that only applies when power is balanced. You
can see the direct line. Thucydides took that
sophist skepticism and applied it to international
relations. He used their tools to show how leaders
use words like justice and honor when they're
weak, that throw them away when they're strong.
He also had this amazing psychological insight
during the plague, something about how suffering
affects memory. You called it... The learner's
fallacy. It's a brilliant little passage that
shows how critical his mind was. During the plague,
some people recalled an old prophecy that said
a Dorian war would one day bring a loimos plague.
Okay. But a debate started because other people
insisted the prophecy actually said limos famine.
Loimos versus limos. Plague versus famine. The
difference of a single vowel. And what does Thucydides
conclude? He says people just adapt their memory
to fit what they're currently suffering. He writes
that if another war came and it brought a famine,
people would conveniently remember the verses
saying limos. So we basically rewrite the past.
even prophecy, to match our present paint. It's
a stunning observation about confirmation bias,
centuries ahead of its time. It shows his deep
skepticism, not just about the gods, but about
the reliability of human perception itself. Okay,
so let's bring this back to his own politics.
He was an Athenian general, an elite, but he
was exiled by the democracy. Did that personal
history bias his view of that system of government?
I think it has to have. He walks a very fine
line. On the one hand, he deeply admired Pericles.
He saw him as a leader of incredible wisdom and
foresight, the perfect first citizen. He approved
of Pericles' power over the people. He basically
thought democracy worked, but only when it was
guided by one exceptionally good leader. Right.
It was democracy in name, but rule by the first
man, in fact. He did not have that same admiration
for the common people, the demos, or for the
more radical form of democracy that took hold
after Pericles died. And you can feel his distaste
for the leaders who came after Pericles, the
demagogues like Cleon. His descriptions of them
are just scathing. Absolutely scathing. He paints
them as self -interested populists who manipulate
the emotions of the mob. And there's probably
a personal element there, too. Some historians
connect Cleon directly to the political maneuvering
that led to Thucydides' exile. So his personal
grievance might be coloring his supposedly objective
analysis? It almost certainly is. But that entanglement
also fed into one of his bigger philosophical
interests, the role of fortune or chance in history.
For all his scientific analysis of cause and
effect, He was obsessed with how unpredictable
events can derail even the most rational plans.
The plague is the ultimate example. It was just
sheer bad luck, a random catastrophe that destroyed
Pericles' entire war strategy. So even in his
rational world, there's still room for the incalculable.
A huge amount of room. He ultimately seems to
believe that history is too irrational and unpredictable
to forecast because human judgment is flawed
and fortune is always waiting to intervene. To
really get a sense of how revolutionary Thucydides
was, you have to place him side by side with
his predecessor, Herodotus. Herodotus was called
the father of history. Then Thucydides comes
along and basically invents political science.
It's the original rivalry in how we write about
the past. It really is. And Thucydides, you know,
he never mentions Herodotus' nine name, but his
introduction is one big subtle swipe at him.
When he says his own work will contain no fables
and is meant to be an everlasting possession.
rather than something recited for a prize. That's
a direct shot. Herodotus' work was often performed
at public festivals. It was a form of entertainment.
Thucydides is drawing a line in the sand. He's
saying this isn't for entertainment. This is
a tool for understanding power. So let's break
down Herodotus' approach. You can call him the
moralist or the ethnographer. Definitely. His
histories are this sprawling, amazing work. They
cover the Persian Wars, yes, but they also include
geography, stories about different cultures,
fables, legends, personal anecdotes from his
travels. And his view of history is fundamentally
moral. He sees conflict as arising from acts
of injustice. There's this cycle of hubris human
arrogance, which invites punishment from the
gods. History is a series of moral lessons. Right.
And he'll often present two or three different
versions of a story and kind of say, you decide
which one you think is true. It's a very different
style. Then you have Thucydides, the political
scientist. He just throws all of that out. He
limits himself strictly to contemporary political
and military events. He cuts out all the geography,
the ethnography, the fables, and most importantly,
conventional morality. plays no part in his analysis.
He's not interested in who was right or wrong
in a moral sense. He's just giving a clear -eyed,
non -judgmental report of what happened and why.
He's dissecting the mechanics of power, not judging
the souls of the participants. Exactly. And the
effect of that shift on later Greek historians
was immense. It was a paradigm shift. So they
followed his model? For the most part, yes. Historians
who came after him, like Xenophon or Polybius,
largely accepted his premise. They agreed that
history should be about politics, that it should
be based on facts, and that contemporary history,
what you could actually investigate, was the
most important kind. The Fusidian tradition of
hard -nosed political history became the gold
standard. It's just amazing how a book about
a war from nearly two and a half millennia ago
can still be shaping policy today. Let's trace
how this work became that everlasting possession.
How did Thucydides become the cornerstone of
modern real politics? well it wasn't a straight
line after his initial influence in the ancient
world he was largely forgotten in western europe
during the middle ages very few people could
read greek so his text was basically lost to
the west it had to be rediscovered during the
renaissance right the first translation back
into latin was done by a scholar named lorenzo
vaila around 1450 but even then he didn't immediately
catch on as a political thinker Another historian,
Polybius, was more popular at first. So when
did people start to see the connection, the modern
relevance? It started when thinkers began drawing
parallels between Thucydides and another icon
of ruthless political analysis, Niccolo Machiavelli.
The author of The Prince. The similarities are
pretty obvious. Machiavelli, just like Thucydides,
stripped morality and sentiment. out of his analysis
of power. Completely. Machiavelli's whole idea
was that a ruler's primary job is to maintain
the state, the reason of state, and that might
require actions that are, you know, conventionally
immoral. There's a great quote from the historian
J .B. Burry. He said Thucydides could have forestalled
Machiavelli, that the whole attitude of Thucydides'
history agrees with Machiavelli's basic idea,
the supremacy of the state's interest. They're
both stripping politics down to its brutal essentials.
And that brings us to the third figure in the
founding trinity of Western political realism.
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Thomas
Hobbes. In 1628, Hobbes published the first English
translation of Thucydides directly from the Greek.
He was a huge admirer. For Hobbes, Thucydides'
description of the chaos in Corsera, the breakdown
of society during the plague, it was a perfect
real -world example of his own theory. His theory
of the state of nature. Where without a strong
ruler, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short. Exactly. Hobbes sought Thucydides
as providing the historical evidence for his
philosophical claim that human beings are fundamentally
self -interested creatures who need an all -powerful
sovereign to keep them from destroying each other.
So there you have it. The three founding fathers
of realism. Thucydides provides this historical
case study. Machiavelli provides the practical
handbook for rulers. And Hobbes provides the
philosophical foundation. And from there, his
influence just grows. In the 19th century, the
new scientific historians loved him. They sought
his seriousness and his handling of evidence
as a model for their own work. Philosophers,
too. Nietzsche was a huge fan. Oh, a massive
fan. He called Thucydides a cure for Platonism,
for idealism. He saw him as a thinker who dared
to look at the world without flinching. And in
the 20th century, especially after World War
II and during the Cold War, He becomes essential.
He becomes the key text for the new field of
international relations. Thinkers like Hans Morgenthau
used his work to analyze the bipolar conflict
between the U .S. and the Soviet Union. The dynamic
between a rising power, Athens, and an established
power, Sparta, seemed to perfectly mirror the
modern world. The Thucydides trap. The idea that
when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling
one, war is almost inevitable. It's the ultimate
framework for pessimistic great power politics.
And it's why his book is still standard reading
at West Point and the Naval War College and why
policymakers like Henry Kissinger have cited
him as essential. But for all this reverence
for his objectivity, he's not without his critics.
We have to mention the dissenting view, especially
from the philosopher Karl Popper. It's a really
important critique. Popper starts by calling
Thucydides the greatest historian perhaps who
ever lived, so he's not dismissing him. But he
argues that Thucydides, for all his attempts
at impartiality, had an involuntary bias. Popper
suggests that Thucydides' heart was never really
with Athens, his native city. Because the democracy
exiled him? Because the democracy exiled him.
Popper argues that his scorn for the demagogues
who followed Pericles, his admiration for the
aristocratic Pericles himself, it all points
to the fact that he was, at heart, a member of
the oligarchic party. He was an anti -democrat
writing the history of democracy's failure. So
the very event that gave him his unique perspective,
his exile, might have also embedded a deep political
bias in his work. It's a powerful argument, and
it highlights the tension that still exists today.
You have the Thucydian tradition of hard -headed
military and political history. And then you
have the Herodotiner tradition, which has seen
a huge comeback with its focus on culture, society,
and ethnography. The debate over what history
should be about really started with these two.
This has been a fascinating deep dive into a
mind that truly shaped the world. So to recap
the key insights for you, the listener, Thucydides
didn't just write a history. He invented scientific
history. He did it by kicking the gods out of
the story and focusing relentlessly on evidence
and human cause and effect, the logos. His work
has lasted because it's built on a deep and frankly
dark understanding of human nature. The idea
that fear, self -interest and necessity are the
real unchanging engines of history. And that
worldview, later picked up by Machiavellian Hobbes,
became the foundation for political realism,
a philosophy that is very much still with us
today. But let's leave you with one final thought
to consider. Thucydides suffered this immense
personal and professional failure at Amphipolis,
which led to his 20 -year exile. He masterfully
turned that punishment into an opportunity, using
it to gain a uniquely balanced perspective on
the war, aiming for a new standard of non -biased
reporting. And yet, as a critic like Karl Popper
points out, maybe he never fully escaped the
bitterness of that exile. Maybe he always carried
an involuntary bias against the very democracy
that had made him an outcast. So here's the question.
If the man who invented the ideal of scientific
history couldn't fully separate his own political
story from the one he was telling, what does
that suggest about the possibility of true objectivity
for any historian writing about their own time
and their own political failures? Is total objectivity
even a real goal we can achieve? Or is it just
a noble method we strive for? Something for you
to mull over.