Guided by Jeremy Mynott's new translation, H. leads us through the Peloponnesian War as Thucydides composed it. Like Thucydides, H. exercises restraint. Beyond the obvious – the subject matter of the History is politics, and Thucydides offers a vision of its uncertainties – the book embraces few robust conclusions. Indeed, given H.'s insistence that Thucydides is neither this nor that, one might say that his reading proceeds by negation. By seeing how Thucydides is neither proto-philosopher, political scientist, historian, strategist, moralist or partisan, we discover how he embodies a far richer realism attuned to the vagaries of practical politics.
H.'s book contains fifteen chapters that take us through the war chronologically and, occasionally, thematically. Chapter 1 considers Thucydides' motivations and purposes (with particular emphasis on the meaning of Thuc. 1.22.1 and 1.22.4), what the original would have looked like, and some highlights in ancient and modern reception. Chapters 2–4 focus on the causes of the war. In Chapter 2, H. provides historical details that support Thucydides' account of the growth of Athenian power, including the transfer of the allied treasury from Delos to Athens in 454, the Peace of Callias with Persia in 449, Athens' founding of the pan-Hellenic colony of Thurii, its consolidation of its hold on Amphipolis, and its expeditions along the Black Sea coasts. Chapter 3 considers at length the two stated reasons for the war: the arguments between Corinth and Corcyra over Epidamnus in 435 and between Corinth and Athens over Potidaea in 432. In Chapter 4, H. takes us through the key speeches at Sparta in the run-up to war. He also gives an account of the three Spartan envoys to Athens and Athens' response under Pericles. The most interesting part of this chapter is H.'s provocative questions about whether the war could have been avoided and whether Sparta could have accepted a diminution of power. In Chapters 3 and 4, H. maintains that Thucydides offers no compelling reason or clear motive for war. A number of factors – including pressure from Spartan allies, Spartan identity and internal politics, and Athenian resistance under Pericles – rather than any marked intentionality nudged both parties towards conflict.
Chapters 5–10 cover the Archidamian War. Chapter 5 considers the early years of the war, highlighting Pericles' speeches and political judgements. This chapter contains H.'s most vocal disagreements with Thucydides. H. thinks Thucydides is mistaken in his judgements about Periclean and post-Periclean leadership, Athens' strategy during the Archidamian War and the reasons for Athens' defeat. Contrary to what Thucydides says in 2.65 and 6.15, his own narrative suggests that the Sicilian Expedition was a political mistake and that, despite its dysfunctional internal politics, Athens' final defeat was avoidable.
Chapters 6–8 argue that for most of the war, neither party evinced much strategic thinking. Instead, Athens and Sparta sought to capitalise on opportunities presented by smaller, often unreliable, allies. The fact that this is so has a hermeneutic upshot, namely that readers of Thucydides should not interpret the History's set pieces as exemplars of thwarted plans, but rather as revealing something about ‘the circumstance and experience of war in general and its attendant political complications’ (p. 72). Chapter 7 focuses on three major set pieces in the fourth and fifth years of the war: the revolt of Mytilene, the Corcyraean revolution and the tragic fate of Plataea. The dramatic force of these events is unparalleled, and H. could have better accentuated it by deepening his own analysis instead of hewing so closely to the History's narrative exposition and speeches.
Chapters 9 and 10 focus on the time period between the Athenian victory at Pylos and the peace concluded in the tenth year of the war. In these chapters, H. considers events through the lens of necessity and interest. He claims that in 424, there was little necessity for Athens to take Megara or Boeotia or for Hermocrates to act against the Athenians; only the Spartans faced true exigency in their need to recover after Pylos. In Chapter 10, H. maintains that although our modern understanding of interest and power is unsatisfactory, we cannot dispense with these concepts. Thucydides reveals the complexity of both terms, asking us to consider questions about the nature, clarity and formation of interest; different kinds of power (dunamis, arche, kratos); and their foundation and uses. H.'s reflections are tightly tethered to the momentary convergence of interests in 421 and their rapid divergence almost immediately thereafter.
The next three chapters, which showcase H.'s originality, reflect on Melos and Sicily. Chapter 11 makes a case for Thucydides' skill at conveying emotion in the context of deeds. The emotive act in question is hubris, which H. sees as mediated by the culture of ancient Greece, ‘a deliberate act, the direct and amoral practice of demeaning others for the sheer pleasure of doing so’ (p. 151). H. reads the Melian Dialogue backwards, against the backdrop of defeat at Mantinea, and argues convincingly that it was an act of hubris, ‘an exercise in shaming the Spartans’ (p. 174). In Chapter 12, H. speculates on the reasons why Athens went to Sicily and, in addition to Egesta's seductive demands and Alcibiades' rhetorical influence, suggests that the Athenians were also riding the tide of Melos. Still, in 415, they had no firm purpose or considered plan. Thucydides' dramatic narrative, which H. conveys in Chapter 13, takes us through the Athenian disaster as it unfolds. Chapter 14 is a whirlwind tour through Book 8, which H. defends against its many critics. He calls it ‘Thucydides’ most sustained and compelling exposition of practical politics' (p. 227). For the first time in the war, both sides seemed to have strategies, and Book 8 illustrates how each side pursued them.
The final chapter echoes H.'s most important claims about the war and about Thucydides. For most of the war, neither Athens nor Sparta had well-thought-out, long-range plans. Thucydides, who ‘sideshadows’, writing from the present perspective of his actors, captures the provisionality of politics; the impossibility of separating motives, intentions and deeds; and the pre-reflective commitments that inform thought and action. Influential interpreters who see the History as depicting either the triumph of rational intelligence (e.g. de Romilly) or a tragic world that defies reason altogether (e.g. Stahl) are wrong. For H., Thucydides captures complexity irreducible to any one term of a binary, whether reason or emotion, chance or necessity. Thucydides is not a philosophical writer with large-scale theoretical ambitions. At most he offers us a case study: ‘an account of what it is to practise politics and make war that raises questions for other times and places but can answer them only for its own’ (p. 236).
H. is admirably faithful to Thucydides' text and authorial spirit. He offers useful speculation where Thucydides remains silent. He challenges both Thucydides' judgement of events and modern judgements about Thucydides. The book is a salutary antidote to the tendency to reduce the History to this or that lesson. H. adopts what he sees as Thucydides' peculiar resistance to illusion and conclusion, though one wonders whether ultimately there is not a mismatch between H.'s modesty and Thucydides' ambitions. H. has no overarching conceptual thesis to advance, no hermeneutic commitment besides an attentiveness to the stuff of politics. So faithful to the original is H. that his book proceeds according to the unfolding of the war rather than by book divisions, a later imposition he tells us early on. Historians will undoubtedly appreciate the close exposition. Others – particularly those who see the History's enduring power as indebted to the author's theoretical and aesthetic sensibilities – will wish H. had taken more interpretative risks and offered more of a sustained argument for how such a particular account could be a possession for all time.
