Download Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides comes to Western culture as one of the first people to study human events not
as a function of divine intervention or control, but as history, with human actors and
events that can be studied and from which we can learn, and not repeat mistakes.
During Thucydides youth, Athens was led by Pericles, who shaped Athens during their
Golden Age after the Persian Wars were won and the Delian League established with
Athens at the head. The great buildings we still see today were built on the Acropolis,
which had been burned down by the invading Persians, establishing a style of symmetry
and beauty that is still favored in Western culture. Athens was not a democracy in our
sense of the word, as the majority of the population could not vote, but it was a step
toward democracy in comparison with dictatorships like Sparta and oligarchies [led by a
small group of powerful people] prominent in Greece. Beginning in 431 BCE, Pericles
led Athens in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which Thucydides undertakes to
record and learn from. In this excerpt, Pericles makes a speech honoring those that died
in Athens during the first year of the war. Within a generation, Athens would lie defeated
by Sparta, her golden age finished, and a new Macedonian Greek king ready to bring
unity to much of AfroEurasia, spreading Greek culture abroad in the process known as
“Hellenization,” after the Greek name for themselves, “Helenes.”
“During the winter…the funeral of those who first fell in this war was celebrated by the
Athenians at the public charge…Over those who were first buried Pericles was chosen to
speak…he spoke as follows…
‘I will speak first of our ancestors, for it is right and becoming that now, when we are
lamenting the dead, a tribute should be paid to their memory. There has never been a
time when they did not inhabit this land, which by their valor they have handed down
from generation to generation, and we have received from them a free state…and
transmitted to us their sons this great empire…Our form of government does not enter
into rivalry with the institutions of others. We do not copy our neighbors, but are an
example to them…we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the
many, and not the few. Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country
whatever be the obscurity of his condition. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits
of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely
as our own. Then, again, or military training is in many respects superior to that of our
adversaries…This is no passing and idle word, but truth and fact. Such is the city for
whose sake these men nobly fought and died; they could not bear that thought that she
might be taken from them; and every one of us who survives should gladly toil on her
behalf.
Plato, Apologia
Socrates (469-399 BCE), Athens’ first great philosopher, did not leave any of his own
writings behind after his death. Like Confucius, his thoughts come to us from an apostle
of his teachings, Plato (427-348 BCE). Socrates was famous for shaming those in Athens
who thought they were knowledgeable, by ensnaring them in debates through which their
ideas were shown to be false or misguided. He stated that a moral person was one who
knows what is good and acts according to the good. Put on death-sentence trial for
“corrupting the youth of Athens” and “refusing to honor the gods,” we hear Socrates,
through Plato, give a justification for his life and method of inquiry, rather than a plea for
his life. Found guilty and condemned to death, the jury expected Socrates to flee the city
and spare his own life. Instead, faithful to his own moral code, Socrates drank hemlock,
a plant that caused him to die, as was dictated to be his fate by the jury. Plato, Socrates
greatest student, recorded many of Socrates’ ideas and finally opened the Academy, an
institute of philosophical learning that remained open for 900 years, pursuing the wisdom
that Socrates defended and died for. Plato’s own student, Aristotle, has had the greatest
influence on Western idea of learning through observation and experimentation, and
taught Alexander the Great, who allowed the spread of these philosophies and Greek
ideas throughout AfroEurasia.
“…the young men who have the most leisure, the sons of the richest men, accompany me
of their own accord, finding pleasure in hearing people being examined, and often imitate
me themselves, and then they undertake to examine others; and then, they find a great
plenty of people who think they know something, but know little or nothing. As a result,
therefore, those who are examined by them are angry with me, instead of being angry
with themselves, and say that, ‘Socrates is a most abominable person and is corrupting
the youth.’ And when anyone asks them ‘by doing or teaching what?’ they have nothing
to say…
“Therefore I say to you, men of Athens, either [give charges against me], or not, and
either acquit me, or not, knowing that I shall not change my conduct even if I am to die
many times over…For know that, if you kill me, I being such a man as I say I am, you
will not injure me so much as yourselves. For if you put me to death, you will not easily
find another who….attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse which…needs to be
aroused by stinging…then you would pass the rest of your lives in slumber….”