Thanks to Christopher Nolan, there is a renewed global interest in Greek mythology. At the same time, rising geopolitical conflicts around the world are driving a renewed interest in Greek history. Or more specifically, a Greek historian.
Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, has lately been summoned to every op-ed straining to explain a world of rearming great powers. He is invoked either to warn of a returning age of catastrophic conflict, or — more often — to lend ancient authority to the notion that strong states may simply do as they please. In a superb essay for Aeon, the political theorists David Polansky and Daniel Schillinger argue that nearly everyone who reaches for him this way has misread him. Thucydides’ central lesson is not about conflict between great powers; it is about the human capacity for self-deception.
Thucydides famously wrote that the Athenians at Melos said, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” and earlier this year Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney drew applause at Davos by quoting it against Donald Trump’s America.
Polansky & Schillinger says that Thucydides “writes to expose the delusions of both the strong and the weak, the unjust and the just. Self-deception is a leitmotif of his History. Because self-deception is perennial, and because it can prove disastrous to victors and vanquished alike…” Even the famous line is a mistranslation, “more ominous than the Greek verb… really warrants. A more accurate rendering of the line would be: ‘Those who are superior do what they can, and the weak yield.'”
When Athens sent its expedition in 416 BCE to force the neutral little island of Melos into its empire, asking only for tribute and ships, the island’s oligarchs refused, trusting that heaven and their Spartan kinsmen would save them. “We trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the [Spartans], who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred.”
The Athenians warn that no such rescue is coming, that “as you have staked most on, and trusted most in, the [Spartans], your fortune, and your hopes [for justice], so will you be most completely deceived.” And so they were; Athens took the island, “killing all the men and enslaving the women and children.”
The Athenians were not wrong about power — “there is nothing in Thucydides’ History that refutes the Athenians’ central claim… the strong are simply in a greater position to impose their preferences, which the weak disregard at their peril. Every city rules to the limits of its power.” The real question is subtler, “whether any city does so wisely, without illusions,” and there Athens failed too. “What, after all, did the Athenians gain – except infamy – by destroying tiny Melos?”
If the Melians deceived themselves about the rewards of virtue, the Spartans (who Melos expected to come to their defence) deceived themselves about possessing it. Sparta went to war calling “not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians.” This was a state that butchered neutral sailors, razed Plataea, wiped out Hysiae and, most chilling of all, murdered 2,000 of its own helot slaves after promising freedom to those who had fought most bravely for.
Hypocrisy, though, is too gentle a word. “At best, the Spartans are hypocrites, trumpeting the causes of justice and liberation while quietly acting out of fear and self-interest. Yet the truth is worse and more complicated. The Spartans are moved by a passion for justice, which burns hot when they mete out punishment. Those who threaten the interests of the city – including their own best slaves, whose only fault is their excellence – incur the wrath of the Spartans. They are self-deceived because they do not seem to realise that their passion for justice has grown into a monstrous taste for punishment.”
Yet the Athenians are the most deceived of all, because “if the Athenians grasp the weakness of justice among cities, they overestimate the power of reason – including their own. It was the Athenians, after all, who insisted on a dialogue with the Melian elites, trusting (mistakenly) that they would be able to persuade the Melians to accept Athenian rule.”
Winning is never quite enough for the Athenians either, since they “also want the satisfaction of seeing the other cities acknowledge the truth of their worldview.” And when they voted to invade distant Sicily, the gamble that would ruin them, “there is surprisingly little discussion of the actual strategic value of this venture,” the older men “seeing opportunities for vicarious victory, and the young seeking glory and adventure with little fear for their lives.” So much for hard-headedness, since “even when they focus their deliberations on material realities, the Athenians make bad decisions, or fail to understand their own motivations.”
What makes all this timely is that the same delusions are on display now. Thucydides called war “a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes,” and the authors hear its logic in the tough talk around America’s present conflict with Iran, a “faux-realism” that “has a way of excluding the subject from the harsh logic of their own claims about political life.”
The authors are equally wary of the opposite reflex, the confident forecasts of American decline, which they read as “a form of wish-casting for a just universe, in which the unjust inevitably receive their comeuppance.” Thucydides offered no such comfort. Nietzsche praised in him an “unconditional will not to deceive [himself]”; “he sees the world as it is, and he does not attempt to find in it confirmation of what he already believes he knows.” Which leaves a last irony worth sitting with in our own noisy moment, that “so many with greater confidence and less self-awareness apply their own purposes to a work concerned with the vast human capacity for self-deception.”
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
MORE FROM Aug WEEK 4
