Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is in fact among the greatest books written, but not for the reasons many think it is. Here is a brief thread about why I love it, and how it's so uniquely distorted and misused in today's literature. tl;dr, The book is about democratic backsliding!! /1 - ThreadSky

areidross.bsky.social • 2 days ago

Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War is in fact among the greatest books written, but not for the reasons many think it is. Here is a brief thread about why I love it, and how it's so uniquely distorted and misused in today's literature. tl;dr, The book is about democratic backsliding!! /1

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areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

First let's give vent to the widely used historic reference. Everyone cites the famous Melian Dialogue, where the Athenians try to convince the small island people to surrender using a blunt rationale distilled as "might makes right"—surrender or else. /2

areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

There's something called context here though, people. If you read Thucydides as supporting this position, you haven't read Thucydides. The entire book is about Athens losing the war in epic fashion. In this quote alone we get inflections of how Athens is losing. /3

areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

So the war begins not with Athens against Sparta, but with Athens refusing to support a tributary who is trying to stand up for a tertiary tributary that expelled its incompetent nobles. There was a democratic revolution, and instead of supporting the dems, Athenians did the opposite. /4

areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

Why'd they do this? They figured siding with the stronger power would be smarter than siding with their values. As a result, Sparta became involved, and the war became partly about military confrontation and partly about political struggle between "moderate oligarchy" and democracy. /5

areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

Sparta flipped lots of Athenian allies based on promises of freedom under oligarchy under their protection. Athens would claim that they had fought the Persians, valued culture and liberty, and that democracy was far superior. And then they started backsliding. /6

areidross.bsky.social•2 days ago

Along with losing major battles, Athens committed terrible atrocities against rebellious allies like Scione, which reinforced the rationale for entering the conflict—it was never about democracy, it was about power. It's further proved by the rationale for the disastrous invasion of Sicily. /7

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