The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

Thucydides suggests, I think, that the legacy of the Peloponnesian War would not be the victory of Spartan authoritarianism and the repudiation of the imperial democratic culture of Athens. No, it would be the irrevocable exhaustion and bankruptcy of the Greek city-state itself. The polis was, after all, an egalitarian but closed and static institution that could not adapt well to the military, economic, and political challenges of the wider Mediterranean world, changes initiated by the Persian invasion at the beginning of the fifth century, but dramatically and tragically elaborated by the virulent war between its most distinctive representatives, Athens and Sparta. And even if the Athenians are right about the universal relativity of justice and the amorality of power, we sense that such belief is nevertheless explicatory of their own destruction—and the demise of the polis itself. Our historian, it seems, does not necessarily like what he knows may be true.

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