Thucydides and Us

Joseph M. Knippenberg, Oglethorpe University

     One of the many joys of teaching is the opportunity to revisit the same text, with different groups of students, at different times in the nation’s life.  Our classroom conversations, inevitably informed by the big events taking place off our tiny stage, dwell on, illuminate, clarify, exaggerate, and distort the texts we examine. 

     In recent years, the author whose work has sparked the most spirited classroom discussion is Thucydides, whose history of the Peloponnesian War has long been a staple of international relations theorizing.  When I first encountered him in the 1970s, his account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta—the one a democracy at the head of an empire, the other an oligarchy leading an alliance of similar regimes—was regarded as the paradigm for understanding conflict in our bipolar Cold War world.

     But the end of the Cold War meant neither the end of history nor the end of Thucydides, who claimed that his work was “a possession for all time,” to be consulted “by any who wish to look at the plain truth about both past events and those that at some future time, in accordance with human nature, will recur in similar or comparable ways.”

     After September 11^th, we read Thucydides with an eye to the deliberations a democracy undertakes when it prepares to go to war, focusing on the interplay of hot anger and cool reason, of self-concern and self-forgetting, and on the role of visionary leadership in balancing these forces.  We asked whether and what George W. Bush could learn from the example of Pericles, who calmly led Athens into a war that he did not expect would end anytime soon.

     But since March, 2003, it has been hard to avoid thinking about the Sicilian Expedition, a bold or foolhardy—and disastrous—Athenian effort to open a new front before the conflict with Sparta had been decisively resolved.  Of course, we haven’t been alone in thinking about the alleged parallel between the invasion of Sicily and the war in Iraq.  In a column earlier this year, Arianna Huffington wrote about “the disastrous Sicilian Expedition,” marked by “Athenian warmongers” who “were convinced,” on the basis of “scant knowledge,” that “conquering Sicily would be a cakewalk.”  Last year, playwright and journalist Barbara Garson wrote about the Expedition as a “sideshow that involved lying exiles, hopeful contractors, politicized intelligence, [and] a doctrine of preemption.”

     And then there was Penn political scientist Anne Norton’s dark warning about the allegedly baleful influence of the neo-conservative students of Leo Strauss:

            The story of the Peloponnesian War, as Straussians once told it, was the story of a

lovely arrogant city, gone down to ruin in the pursuit of empire.  Athens, the free city, in love with novelty, is led astray by an errant student of Socrates.  He offers Athens the temptations of imperial power.  Athens falls, and the shame of the Melian dialogues, the suffering of its prisoners in the quarry, plague, and ruin fall upon it in return.  This was the story as Straussians told it in my time.  They tell it differently now.

We are on the Sicilian Expedition.

     I like my history a little more complicated and a little less simply edifying. 

     Huffington and Garson are surely right that Alcibiades, “the errant student of Socrates” and “warmonger,” seriously underestimated the challenge posed by the conquest of Sicily.   And Norton is right that Athenians were carried away by the prospect of conquest: “a passion for the expedition afflicted everyone alike…[a]nd so, because of the extremes of eagerness among the majority, if anyone felt at all unhappy he was afraid of seeming unpatriotic by an opposing vote, and he kept quiet.”

     But Thucydides is far from presenting the expedition as a foredoomed failure, an act in some tragic morality play, a just punishment for Athenian ignorance and hubris.  Athens, he argues, could have succeeded in Sicily, but domestic political rivalries, driven in some measure by petty personal jealousies, deprived the expedition of the leadership it needed.  Alcibiades “as a public person managed the war with the utmost skill,” but his opponents “as private individuals detested him for his behavior, and by entrusting the city to others, they ruined it in short order.”

     If I were to leave it here, I would be no better than the moralizing critics of the war in Iraq, simply counterposing my preferred prooftexts to theirs. 

     Fortunately, Thucydides offers us much richer materials for reflection about the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy.  When the war begins, Pericles, the preeminent Athenian statesman, counsels restraint.  If we tend to the empire and undertake no new adventures, he says, we can prevail in a long war of attrition, as we can impose greater costs on the Peloponnesians than they can impose on us.  This looks like sound advice, until you consider that it takes someone of Pericles’ stature to sustain such a policy, remaining calm, unruffled, in control, and influential as public opinion varies with the vicissitudes of war.  Not surprisingly, Pericles’ policy requires a Pericles at the helm. 

     But since he was already an old man at the outset of the war, it was imprudent of him to expect to see it through to its conclusion.  As it happened, he died relatively early in the war, when a plague ravaged Athens.  His successors quite predictably lacked his stature and hence his capacity to pursue a consistently restrained policy. 

     For all his judgment, foresight, and clarity, Pericles didn’t consider what would happen after his death.  Had he done so, he might have been willing to undertake a risk—like the Sicilian Expedition—that would have so changed the constellation of forces as to bring the war to a successful conclusion.  Unlike the frankly ambitious and flamboyant Alcibiades, Pericles could likely have fended off the domestic challengers who undermined the Expedition’s prospects of success.  The Athenian Empire would have weathered this challenge, falling not to the Spartans and their allies, but later to the Macedonians or the Romans.

     What can we take away from this aspect of Thucydides’ story?  In the first place, we can be reminded how hard it is for a democracy to conduct a consistent long-term policy.  Public opinion varies with the fortunes of war, unreasonably inflated when things appear to be going well and unreasonably deflated when things appear to be going badly.  Almost always ill-informed and concerned above all with their own affairs, people can also be flattered and misled by politicians, who can gain influence and power by promoting a change that only they can bring about.  In the ordinary course of things, as one leader supplants another, policies will change, for good reasons and ill.

     The appropriate response to this feature of democratic political life is neither to surrender to the game nor to envy the tyrants who can hold power for the long term without paying attention to what people think, but to seize the opportunities for bold action when they present themselves.  By acting boldly, a leader can change the constellation of forces to which his or her successors must respond, either forcing upon them a consistency to which they otherwise wouldn’t be inclined or forthrightly addressing challenges with respect to which they would be tempted to temporize.

     In all of this, Thucydides cautions, we should not expect perfection, either in the information leaders have or in the motives that animate them.  Even good and admirable statesmen have their limitations.  Every decent leader who marches across Thucydides’ stage is ambitious for honor, defining the public good in ways that he is (or considers himself) uniquely suited to promote.  If I have a hammer, then our most pressing problem must require a nail.  This is not to say that it’s impossible to distinguish between public service and naked, narrow ambition, just that we shouldn’t, in Thucydides’ view, expect the public servant to be a paragon of utterly selfless virtue.

     In the end, then Iraq may well be our Sicilian Expedition, but not in the ways the war’s most vehement critics suggest.  We are in the midst of what we have been told is a long-term war on terrorism with no guarantee that we can or will pursue a consistent and coherent policy to its conclusion.  Why not boldly open a new theater of conflict if it can either hasten the resolution of the war on terror or limit the opportunity of successors lightly to change policies?

     Of course, Thucydides also reminds us of another important domestic element in the conduct of foreign policy.  People are much more likely to support vigorous action if they are genuinely convinced of the justice of their cause.  Naked ambition and aggression will not do.  This does not mean that right and wrong are easy to discern or that anyone’s motives are pure and simple.  But Thucydidean realism demands that we make the effort at discernment and that our leaders take the task of justification seriously.

     The debate over Iraq can be waged over the justice and prudence of the war.  Thucydides is a source of uncomfortable questions and hard lessons for both sides.  If we take our responsibility seriously, we won’t dodge them.