The War that Destroyed the Greek World

Wolf Tivy starts with Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. Plato is a coward before reality, so he flees into the ideal. Thucydides has control of himself, and therefore of things. Tivy has lately been talking with readers of Plato. Here is Nietzsche saying the hard spirit is in the other book. “I’m your host Wolf Tivy. Welcome to The Students.” He has Max Dmitrienko on, a prolific reader of the ancients, to recover instincts modern students will need.

A possession for all time

Who is this man Nietzsche is talking up? An Athenian general, Dmitrienko says, born around 460 BC, at the peak of Athens. His father was Olorus; the family had Thracian roots and gold mines. He was elected general in 424, toward the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, then exiled, and he saw the Spartan side as well. He sat down to write the most impartial account he could. He was not writing, he says, for the pleasure of the moment — a dig at Herodotus and the magnificent tales. He was writing a possession for all time. Human nature is roughly the same. Things will not repeat exactly; if man is still man, they will be approximately the same. He tells you his method at the start: exactness, the weighing of facts, not the common opinion of the day.

Fear of Athenian growth

The war is both the high point and the end of classical Greece. The city-states never again have that power, or that cultural output. To see why they destroy themselves you go back to the Persian Wars. Marathon in 490; a second wave; Salamis; the Persians beaten back by 478. Sparta first tries to keep a pushing alliance and then withdraws after Pausanias is caught “Medizing” — dressing, eating, acting Persian. Athens takes over and founds a defensive league, treasury on Delos: ships or tribute against a return of Persia to the Ionian coast. Over time the members send money instead of ships. Athens builds the navy. Tribute builds the Acropolis and the Parthenon. Cities that try to leave are besieged. Greeks paying tribute to Greeks is an honor-slight. Tribute had been what you paid Persia. Sparta is land; Athens is sea.

There are proxy fights — Corinth, Corcyra, the colony of a colony. That is not the cause. The truest cause, Thucydides says, is Spartan fear of the growth of Athenian power. If it had not been this spark it would have been another.

He grew up in the Athens of the pre-Socratics and then of the sophists. Plato’s sophists are rhetoricians with pretty speeches. That is a distortion, Dmitrienko says. They were proto-scientific. They taught rhetoric and they were interested in society and man. Their opposition is nomos and physis: custom, piety, law, against nature. The spirit of rational inquiry is in the book.

Pericles to Sicily

The first phase is Pericles. Elected general for decades, he puts Athens behind the walls built after the Persian Wars, lives off the navy and the tribute, and raids the Peloponnesian coast. Honor is devastated as the countryside is burned and the people crowd inside. In the second year the plague comes. Thucydides describes the symptoms and the social effect: customs die. Pericles dies.

Then Cleon and Demosthenes. Cleon, in Thucydides, is the cruelest of the citizens, power-seeking, inexperienced, boastful. A storm sends them to Pylos. They defeat Spartans and take them prisoner, which was unheard of. Athens refuses the peace that the captives might have bought. Democratic expansionism: the same traits that made the empire destroy it. Sophocles is a contemporary, a general in the war; his people are ruined by a singular motive. The tragic reading, Dmitrienko says, is Thucydides’ own. Empire is a tyranny they cannot drop. Pericles already knew the trap. Thrace matters because that is where the wood for the ships is. No wood, no navy, no empire. Brasidas, the Spartan general, comes as a liberator of the subject cities. Brasidas and Cleon both die. There is a false peace.

Alcibiades enters, flowery, maneuvering in the Peloponnesus. Mantinea is fought mostly by others; it closes the peace and restarts the war. Then Sicily. They send Nicias, pious and too cautious, when they needed someone who would commit. He delays. The Syracusans get Spartan help. The fleet is destroyed; the men go to the quarries. Athens still raises another fleet. The war shifts to the Ionian coast. Sparta, still claiming to fight for Greek freedom, takes Persian money for a navy. The price is Persian control of the Ionian Greeks. At the Hellespont the Athenians beach their ships and the Spartans destroy them — Aegospotami. The walls come down. Sparta installs the Thirty Tyrants. Critias is among them. Athens recovers a city; it never recovers the circuit of tribute, navy, and walls. Macedon will come, then Rome.

Thucydides’ history breaks off mid-sentence, before the end. There are signs he lived to 404. He did not finish, or we lost the rest.

Speeches and deeds

The speeches are the other half of the education. Early in the war men still talk about justice. Later they talk about self-interest. All men, Thucydides says, are driven by fear, honor, and interest. Athens cannot be called unjust for taking an empire; it has done what is common. Justice is only possible between equals in power, who can hurt each other as much as they are hurt — an equilibrium of force, mutual restraint because mutual destruction is available.

The Melian Dialogue is the famous reduction. Melos is a Spartan colony, unaligned. Athens says join or we massacre the island. The Melians appeal to justice and to the hope that Sparta will come. The Athenians do not make those appeals. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.

This is Thucydidean realism against Platonic idealism. War is a harsh teacher. It strips the layers of convention that restrain more animal instincts. There is no moralizing in the modern sense: no flight into a metaphysical elsewhere. Nature is what it is. Man is what he is. You can still prepare yourself, and you can still do well by it.

Nomos and physis

Tivy and Dmitrienko spend a long stretch on whether you can ground social order in that realism. Is justice only an equilibrium of force, or is there a mythological universal justice that survives the stripping? In Corcyra, toward the beginning of the war, revolution between oligarchs and demos turns into murder, sons against fathers. Words remain; what they refer to is inverted. Immoderation is renamed courage. Moderation is renamed cowardice. The wish to deliberate is branded as something else. Tivy draws a parallel to later international law: the post-Westphalian settlement among states roughly equal in power, formalized conventions that reflected the balance on the board, and then the world wars that smashed the facade the way this war smashed the Greek one.

Tivy keeps returning to the question of whether a social order can be built on nature alone, or whether some story of universal justice has to sit on top of the equilibrium. Dmitrienko will not tidy it into a system. The book shows the inversion; it does not replace the lost nomos with a new metaphysics. That is the difference Nietzsche was pointing at.

The habit the book teaches is simple and easy to lose. Remember the speeches. Then check the deeds. Most of the speeches precede an action. The action confirms or denies what was claimed about reality. In a feed that forgets last month, that is the discipline. What did they say? What happened? That is how you judge competence to rule.

They should come back, Tivy says, to nomos and physis. It sits near the heart of things. For now the assignment is the book itself. We should all be reading Thucydides more than once.

Dmitrienko thanks him for having him on. Tivy thanks him for coming.