The War that Destroyed the Greek World

Plato is a coward before reality. Consequently he flees into the ideal. Thucydides has control of himself; consequently he also has control of things.

That's Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols talking about this guy Thucydides. We've recently had a discussion. I talked to Stephen Pimentel, who's obviously very much a reader of Plato and those guys. We were talking about the importance of that. Here's Nietzsche telling us that Plato's no good. He's telling us that he's a coward, and what we really need to read is Thucydides to understand the hard spirit of the ancient Greeks and maybe bring it to our own time. Today I have on Max Dmitrienko. Did I get your name right?

Yes, that's correct.

I'm your host, Wolf Tivy. Welcome to The Students. We are reading some of these ancients to try to recover certain philosophical instincts and practical lessons about our own time that modern students should understand as they engage in the world. Max, you've been reading this stuff a lot recently. You're a very prolific reader. I'd love for you to start off by telling us: who is this Thucydides guy that Nietzsche is talking up here? Why should we be reading him?

Thucydides is an Athenian general who was born around 460 BC, essentially at the peak of Athens in terms of its power and cultural prosperity. We don't know very much about his life, unfortunately. His father was Olorus, and he had some roots in Thrace. He was from a noble lineage, and his family was quite wealthy. They owned gold mines in the Thracian region. But Thucydides is our primary source for the greatest conflict that has ever struck the classical world of the Greeks, which is the Peloponnesian War. We have a first-hand account of this conflict from Thucydides, who himself was a participant. He was an Athenian. He was elected as a general in 424, toward the beginning of the war, and eventually he was exiled and spent some time with the Spartans, the opponents of the Athenians.

The war was Spartans versus Athenians.

Yes, exactly. The world was divided into two blocs. We can get into that a bit later. Thucydides got to see the conflict from both sides, and he sat down to write the most impartial account of the war that he could provide.

These are always great. It reminds me of Bernal Díaz's account of the conquest of New Spain, which is very much worth reading because it is this first-hand attempt at an impartial account of a great military adventure. Thucydides is a general, he's a Greek, he's in this fantastic conflict that ends up reshaping the entire Greek world. On that grounds, obviously, we love to read about ancient things: see the commonalities between different times, see the differences, learn as much as we can from those things. Often they draw a lot of lessons in unexpected ways. Why don't you give us the story of the Peloponnesian War? What is this particular conflict? What led up to it? Why did the Greeks end up in this huge two-sided conflict? Previously they'd been this confederation of city-states. Afterwards, within a few generations, they were conquered — not by Aristotle, by Aristotle's student Alexander — and then later by Rome. Is this the end of the Greek golden age, or is it a high point of it? What is the Peloponnesian War?

The high point and the end

This is probably the distinctive thing about it. It is both the high point and the end of the Greek classical world. It is where we find the expression of the most power that any of the city-states ever had, but also this is their end. This is when they decline and they no longer attain either those cultural peaks in terms of output of literature, the arts, sculpture, or in terms of the power that they can exert.

To understand the Peloponnesian War we have to go back to the Persian Wars, because this is what really sets the stage. In 490 you have the first invasion by the Persians. There's a famous battle at Marathon where Athens defeats the first wave.

This is the three hundred Spartans stood against —

That's not Marathon. That's Thermopylae.

That's right, sorry. But it's in that war.

It's in that war. Essentially they defeat the Persians. There's a second wave with Darius. The Athenians and the Spartans and the other Greek city-states team up to defeat them, and essentially in 478 they beat the Persians back completely. The most famous naval battle is at Salamis. The Persians are never really able to conquer the Greek city-states after that. First off, the Spartans attempt to create an alliance to keep pushing back the Persians, but they have a Spartan general named Pausanias who starts what the Greeks call Medizing, which was their term for acting as a Persian, and this insults a lot of the Greek city-states. The Spartans sort of retreat from their alliance because Pausanias is voted out as a general.

He's not acting enough like a Greek.

Yes, exactly. He's acting too much as a Persian.

What did that mean? Was he dressing like a Persian?

He was dressing like a Persian. He was trying to act like a Persian, eat like a Persian — just all things that were foreign to the Greeks, who had a very cohesive self-understanding of what makes a Greek a Greek, and then the barbarians.

So he's blurring those lines.

Yes, exactly. And so the Athenians take over once Pausanias is off the scene. They first form a defensive alliance against the Persians, which involves tribute or ships from other city-states. In the common pot they have a treasury on the island of Delos, and everyone contributes either ships or tribute to pay for a navy to make sure that the Persians don't invade the Ionian coast, where a lot of the Greek city-states were located, like Miletus. There's also the island of Chios, pretty famous, Lesbos as well, because they had been subjugated by the Persians during the Persian Wars.

And this is at Delos. This is why it's called the Delian League.

Yes, exactly. But as time goes on, a lot of these city-states end up sending simply tribute instead of ships. And the Athenians build the biggest navy out of all the other Greek city-states that are in the league.

Well, they've just got a bunch of ships as tribute.

Exactly, yes.

Were the ships manned by the subordinate city-states, or were they manned by Athenians?

Mostly Athenians. Some city-states, yes, but mostly Athenians. And so as time goes on this starts turning into the Athenians' own personal empire, because they start being the biggest wolf in town with the biggest navy. You have a couple of moments where certain city-states try to revolt against the league because they consider it to be unjust. Money is being extracted from them without much benefit, because the Persians are no longer really a threat anymore, but the Athenians are still extracting tribute from them. And they're using this tribute to build the Acropolis and build the Parthenon, famously. This was the money from the tribute that was used for this. So the city-states start rebelling against them, and the Athenians create economic blockades or they will besiege the cities until they submit and continue extracting tribute from them.

Tribute and honor

So it's at first a defensive alliance, but it becomes an empire.

Yes, the personal empire of the Athenians.

The Athenians started using it to continue to extract tribute from the rest of the Greeks.

I have to mention why this was significant. This is the first instance we really have of another Greek city-state paying tribute to Athens. And this was seen as an incredible slight to Greek honor, where there was a sense of equality among the Greeks. The only cities that paid tribute were, traditionally, cities subjugated by the Persians, who paid tribute to Persia. For a city-state to pay tribute to another Greek city-state was seen as incredibly humiliating and as a slight to their honor.

Interesting. So this starts to develop a lot of resentment and rebellion. At some point Sparta comes in here.

Sparta comes in, yes. The main opposition in this war is between Sparta, which is a traditional land power, and Athens, which turns into a sea power. We have one of these interesting things where fundamentally two different modes of operation and modes of waging warfare collide with each other, and it'll be significant later on. The Spartans don't have an empire. They essentially have what we call now the Peloponnesian League. This was simply a series of bilateral alliances between Sparta and various city-states on the Peloponnesian landmass. They're aligned with Corinth. They're aligned with the Boeotian states. Essentially it was simply a defensive and an offensive alliance. If Sparta went to war with any city-state they could call on their allies. If their allies went to war they could call on Sparta.

Classic cause of big wars, these defensive alliances. And Corinth is sort of how this whole thing kicks off, isn't it? At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War as told by Thucydides there's some incident involving Corinthian colonies, where it's unclear who they're supposed to be reporting to.

The interesting thing is that the war is set off essentially by a proxy conflict which is on the outskirts of the Greek world, but it ends up having consequences for the whole Greek world, and the center of gravity of the conflict gradually shifts toward the main players, which is Athens and Sparta.

Let's just tell the story at a higher level. It's fun to have these more detailed remarks here and there, to add some flavor, but let's talk about just the high level, because what we're interested in here is Thucydides as a thinker: situating him and his style of analysis in the broader Greek world, and then applying that spirit to our time. So Athens and Sparta get dragged into it somehow. Classic World War I style. There's a bunch of defensive alliances, there's some peripheral incident, and it escalates up into conflict.

I just want to note: there's a peripheral conflict between Corinth, its own colony, and then the colony of that colony. Athens gets dragged into the conflict to defend Corcyra, which was Corinth's colony, and Corinth calls on Sparta to defend it against Corcyra and Athens. And this is probably the most famous claim that Thucydides makes. He talks about all of these proxy conflicts, but he says: this is not the cause of the war. The truest cause is the Spartan fear of the Athenian growth of power. He gives us a more fundamental psychological explanation for why this war happens. It doesn't have anything to do, directly, with those proxy conflicts. He's trying to point out that if it weren't for that proxy conflict it would have been another one that would have dragged these two great powers into a war. Essentially there was a sense of inevitability to that war in his view.

This is the concept of the Thucydides trap that people call these days, and the neocons are always citing this as the only part of Thucydides they read. There's a bunch of these very famous observations that he makes, and famous dialogues, that come from this particular work.

A possession for all time

This is also in the beginning of his work. He realizes that there's something distinctive about this war that upheaves all traditional understandings of what is the nature of man, what is justice, what is religion, what is piety, what role does it play in the world. And he sits down to write this work with the conviction that this is something that will be read and reread and discussed as we are right now. He says that he's not writing for the pleasure of the moment or for cheap applause — he's kind of making a dig at Herodotus, who'd go around and tell his magnificent tales of what he saw in Egypt or his discussion of the Scythians — and he sits down to say that he's writing for a possession for all time.

And here we are, almost twenty-five hundred years later, reading him.

The reason he says he believes this to be the case is that he thinks there's something distinctive about human nature that this war shows. He makes the claim that although things won't repeat exactly as they have been, if man is still man and has the nature that he has, things will be approximately the same.

There are these eternal lessons.

Yes, exactly.

That's sort of how I opened this. This is why we're reading it. There are these commonalities, these very fundamental things to the nature of man. I would even speculate it goes beyond the nature of man — that's a whole other fun discussion.

Just how much of this is the nature of conflict and organization as such. This is why we read Thucydides. He's self-consciously laying down this idea of history as this eternal possession, trying to get at the essential eternal lessons of how these things happen. He's trying to create a very rigorous view of what did happen. It's not just his opinions. He's trying to reveal reality.

He's very careful. He tells us himself. He essentially gives us his methodology in the beginning of the work, where he emphasizes that he's interested in exactness, in the weighing of facts, that he's very careful about not simply taking what the common opinion of the day is. He's really trying to investigate the nature of this war and the nature of man and the nature of conflict. And this is partly due to his intellectual influences. He grew up at the peak of cultural Athens, when there's a sense that the traditional Homeric stories and piety are no longer sufficient for the state of Greek life at that point in history. There's plenty of new and exciting intellectual movements that pop up around the sixth century and really take a peak in Thucydides' own day. It starts off with the pre-Socratics, who are interested in the nature of reality in the non-religious sense. They're trying to give rational explanations for why the world as it is is the way it is. And then later on you get a generation of sophists who have come to us, presented by Plato, as these rhetoricians who simply spin up pretty speeches. But that's a distortion. In fact they were in a sense proto-scientific. They did teach rhetoric, but they were also interested in the nature of society and the nature of man. They had this very famous opposition between nomos and physis — between religion, piety, or custom, and physis, which is hard to translate, but something like nature.

Nomos and physis

I get the sense we're going to be discussing that conceptual distinction quite a lot on this show in general. Not necessarily today, but of course to some extent today as well.

And so we find this spirit of rational inquiry in Thucydides himself, and this is partly what drives him to write the way he writes.

And so he's been described as kind of starting the discipline of history as such. Not necessarily scientific history. Scientific history I think is credited more to Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Tunisian nobleman. But let's get back a little bit to the story itself: what happened. We definitely want to get into these questions of who this guy was, where his thinking came from, what is his cure for Plato, so to speak. But to flesh out our picture a little bit more: Sparta and Athens get dragged into this conflict, but there's multiple phases of the conflict. There are elements of class war. There are elements of revolutionary war. They almost become a conflict between systems of government or systems of philosophy.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then there are famous characters and dialogues. Critias is a very important one for the development of later philosophy — Socrates and Plato and those guys in Athens after the war — Critias being the revolutionary figure within Athens on the side of philosophy. Why don't you tell us the story as you see it, the big highlights and phases of the conflict?

Pericles and the plague

This conflict starts off with Athens and Sparta being dragged into the war by their proxy states. The first phase is really characterized by Pericles, who's probably one of the most famous Athenian generals. He was elected as a general for thirty years, so he dominated Athenian politics for three decades.

Pericles?

Pericles.

That's how I've heard that pronounced usually.

Oh, they don't say that?

That's all right. Carry on.

He develops a distinctive strategy, because he is aware that in a land battle Sparta will probably defeat Athens. Athens is a naval power and Sparta is a land power, so they're much more trained in traditional hoplite warfare. The strategy he devises is for the Athenians to stay behind their walls that they had built after the Persian Wars, and simply to rely on their fleet to make sure that tribute keeps flowing into their empire to maintain their fleet, and to raid the Peloponnesian coast occasionally. They'd go out of Athens, disembark on the Peloponnesian coast, raid a couple of cities, then go back home. The Spartans would do something similar. They would invade Attica during the summer, after the harvest, and they would attack the farms, they would try to burn them. But essentially all the Athenians were sent behind the walls, and nothing really happens during this period of warfare. It is incredibly psychologically difficult for the Athenians, because there's this traditional conception of honor and an honorable way of waging warfare, where one must not evade conflict. One must go into battle with glory and honor.

Not just hide in the walls.

Exactly. So this is psychologically devastating for the Athenians, because they're seeing their farms being burned a couple of years in a row while they're supposed to just sit and wait behind the walls. This strategy works the first two years, but — and this is part of the tragic irony of the war — because the Athenians are sent behind these walls, they're very susceptible to illnesses. There is the famous plague of Athens that strikes them during the second year of the war. This is probably one of the first interesting descriptions we have, medically, of a plague and its social effects, if you want me to get into that.

Yeah, sure. Let's hear a bit about it.

Thucydides describes the symptoms of the plague very well. It causes a fever which eventually descends into the body, causes pus, and people are experiencing intense heat, to the point where they throw themselves into wells and into rivers, and they try to drink up their thirst, but they can't. The most interesting part is the social effect that it has. The Athenians are looking around. People are dying left and right. The plague is killing people indiscriminately, and no methods of medicine really work. For some people some are saved, some people aren't. There's no discernible pattern of what works, what doesn't. And so they just throw out all of their traditional religious customs. They don't take care of their dead. They no longer worship the gods. They live as if tomorrow was not guaranteed. Here we see the first breakdown of nomos, of custom. Everyone vies for himself and doesn't take care of his next citizen.

Does this have an effect on the course of the war? You'd think this would radically weaken them against external powers.

It doesn't have a direct effect on the war, because their fleet is not in the city itself. The fleet is still very much in power. But it does kill Pericles, and so it changes the course of the war, because you have a different generation of generals which are elected, which have a different psychology and approach to how Athens should wage their war.

Expansion and tragedy

Okay. And so what's this next phase of the war?

It's dominated by Cleon and Demosthenes. Thucydides describes Cleon as the cruelest of the Athenian citizens, and one who is most power-seeking, but he's also not very experienced in warfare. He likes to talk a lot and to be boastful. He gets elected kind of unwillingly, because he's like, oh well, I can take care of things — but he's boasting. He's not very serious. And the Athenian assembly just elects them because they like these sort of rowdy characters. This is Thucydides' comment on Athenian democracy as well.

There's also a lot of consequences that come along with that. If he can't deliver, he's going to have a hard time.

Yes. But the irony is that he does in fact deliver. By a stroke of fate they're supposed to go to Sicily at first. By a stroke of fate, a storm sends them off to Pylos, which was a Spartan stronghold on the west coast of the Peloponnesian landmass. They battle the Spartans with Demosthenes and Cleon, and they use a bunch of interesting tactical innovations that I won't get into in depth. Eventually they manage to defeat the Spartans and to take them prisoner, which was unheard of, because the Spartans were known for their warfare and for their ferocity and for never losing. And here they manage to take them prisoners and they manage to capture this stronghold in Spartan lands. This is probably one of the lowest points for Sparta during the war. It's a terrible psychological affliction.

What were the consequences of that? Where did that end up going?

Athens now has leverage over Sparta, because they have Spartan prisoners and they're holding this stronghold. The Spartans actually want to pursue peace. They could have ended the war there. But the Athenians are constantly striving. They're very expansionist, and Thucydides seems to link this to an inherent trait of democracy, where the citizens want more and more and more. The Athenians refuse the peace, and so they continue the war.

This is kind of Thucydides' tragic element to his analysis. He's identifying these character flaws, or elements of character, that are driving events, that are causing things to go a certain way.

Tragic is the correct word, because it's quite clear that in Thucydides' reading, the same sort of traits which drove Athens to its imperial glory also caused its downfall. It's that incessant expansionism.

And this is one of the schools of thought that Thucydides is drawing on in his analysis. Was there a school of thought of the tragic, or was that more just something in Greek culture that they thought of things that way? How much of this was just him? Where was that coming from?

He was definitely influenced by the tragedians, probably by Sophocles, who was actually his contemporary and was a general during the war.

Interesting.

Sophocles had multiple characters in his tragedies who are also driven by a very singular kind of psychological motivation which causes their downfall eventually.

This reminds me: we're used to thinking in our time of people having much more specialization. If you're a playwright, you're a playwright. Whereas Sophocles, he's a playwright and a general. Meanwhile Socrates — later on he's some bum, he's some philosopher — but he's also some kind of war hero in this conflict. These guys were very big characters.

Yeah, probably the biggest characters in history, probably.

So the Athenians keep going against Sparta. Where does that lead them?

Eventually the Spartans counterattack in the north, in Thrace. This is a very important place strategically for the Athenians, because this is where they get their wood to build their ships. If they can't build their ships, they can't maintain their empire, and if they can't maintain their empire they collapse and they lose all significance. This is distinctive. They know that they've gotten themselves kind of in a trap. Pericles in one of his speeches actually outright calls the Athenian empire a tyranny. But he says that you must keep it, because if you don't hold it, you will be attacked by the other city-states as revenge for this empire. So they're stuck with it now. They've gained it and they can't just simply let go of it.

All these lessons for foreign policy.

It's not easy to get rid of an empire, yes. I think that is very relevant.

Brasidas and a false peace

The Spartans are led by this fantastic general Brasidas. I want to get a little bit into the Spartan character and the Athenian character, and then to explain why that matters. One of the distinctive features of this war is that the Athenians and the Spartans couldn't be more radically different. Athens is the closest thing we've had to a radical democracy. They're incredibly innovative. They're, as I've mentioned previously, expansionist, always seeking to innovate in warfare, in the arts, in culture. While the Spartans are very conservative, and it seems that Thucydides links this to their own social system, where they're essentially an oligarchy of equal citizens that control a mass of slaves, the helots. They're always fearful of the helots revolting, and they actually declare war on them every year and kind of round them up and make sure that they're not planning any rebellions. This gives the Spartans a very conservative kind of foreign policy, where they're not seeking to expand because they're afraid of any kind of destabilization on the international scene causing revolts among the helots — or of some of the city-states trying to incite the helots to revolt by promising them freedom if they help them defeat the Spartans.

Brasidas is one of the generals that's elected by the Spartans to wage war, and he is fundamentally different from all the Spartans. In contrast to the Spartans who are characterized by their laconic speech — very terse, no-bullshit speeches — he is able to persuade cities that are subjugated by Athens in Thrace to revolt against Athens and to join the Spartans. He frames this as the Spartans are liberating the Greeks, bringing them freedom. And he's also very energetic in the way he wages war. He goes from one city-state to another, he conquers it, he persuades them to join them. Eventually he manages to capture one of the main city-states in Thrace, Amphipolis, but he dies in battle along with Cleon, who was sent there. So the two main drivers of the war die, and the Athenians and Spartans establish a sort of peace.

The contemporaries of Thucydides thought this was peace. But Thucydides makes the interpretive claim that this was not a real peace, despite any kind of treaty. The interesting thing is that the Spartans and the Athenians actually make an alliance with each other, despite having previously gone to war with each other. The important thing here is that Thucydides points out that if the structural and psychological drivers of what provoked the conflict in the first place are not resolved, no matter what treaties are made, real peace cannot be established and cannot be maintained.

Is this why he says that it's not a real peace — because it didn't resolve the fundamental conflict?

Yes, pretty much. There are other ongoing hostilities as well. The Athenians were supposed to give back Pylos to the Spartans, and the Spartans promised that the various cities that they had liberated in Thrace would go back to the Athenians, but the cities don't want to do that. And the Athenians are also reluctant to give back Pylos. So a lot of the formal clauses of the treaty are just not completed, and it's a false kind of peace.

And so where does it go after that? I assume the war restarts at some point.

Yes. There's a momentary interlude with some diplomatic machinations in the Peloponnesus, because essentially the other city-states which were allied with Sparta previously in the Peloponnesian League are like: wait, you guys just sued for peace with Athens? It just changes the balance of power completely, and they're afraid of being ganged up on by the Athenians and the Spartans. So they start trying to establish their own peace between them. And then we have one of the most flowery characters of Athens, Alcibiades, who enters the scene. He goes into the Peloponnesus and he starts trying to make different diplomatic maneuvers to get the city-states to fight each other and to make sure this benefits Athens. Eventually there's a big battle at Mantinea that the Spartans don't formally join, but they still send some soldiers there, and it's mainly fought by the Corinthians against Argos, which was another city-state which was a democracy in the Peloponnesus, and they lose. And this ends up closing the peace and restarting the war again.

Sicily and the end

And so where does it go from there?

The Athenians make their biggest decision, which leads to, as Thucydides calls it, the biggest kind of military operation and also the biggest defeat for Athens, where they attempt to invade Sicily because they were afraid of Sicily joining the Spartans. The Sicilians had navies, and they were afraid of them also messing with their naval empire. They're invited by one of the city-states in Sicily to join them against Syracuse, because that city-state was afraid of Syracuse taking over them. Here we have an interesting dynamic which you see often in foreign relations, where a state will ask for the backing of a larger state in their own conflict to help them win it. We saw plenty of those examples in the Cold War between the US and the USSR.

Yes, of course. It's an enduring feature of international relations.

And how does the war end up concluding? Where does it all go?

The Athenians face terrible disaster in Sicily. They send Nicias, who's a very pious and cautious general, when they needed someone who was more energetic and willing to commit to a battle. So he delays too much. The Syracusans receive help from the Spartans, and the Athenians end up totally devastated. Their soldiers are sent to quarries to work in the mines, because they're essentially reduced to slavery, and that fleet is destroyed. Despite this, they still manage to raise more money to create a new fleet, and they continue on the war. The balance of the war shifts from Sicily and from the Peloponnesus to the Ionian coast. And here the Persians start getting involved again, because the Spartans realize that if they don't have a fleet, they won't be able to defeat Athens. So they start making deals with Persia to fund a fleet for them so that they can fight the Athenians in naval battles. We have another interesting dynamic here, where the Spartans are inviting the Persians while still initially claiming to be fighting for the freedom of the Greeks. One of the arrangements that the Persians make is that if they help the Spartans, they retain their hegemony or control over the Greek city-states of the Ionian coast, which was the first cause of the Persian Wars. And the Spartans, for their own self-interest, end up betraying the Greek city-states.

It reminds me of the case of Poland in World War II. We get into this nominally to save Poland's sovereignty. The actual result of the war is Poland is basically under the USSR. Wars often don't get you what you want. It's not that simple. Sparta ends up effectively defeating Athens, right? What happens to the second fleet here?

Athens holds their ground for a long time. They defeat Sparta in various naval battles, but they end up beaching their ships in the Hellespont.

That's the Bosporus now, isn't it?

Yes. And they beach their ships for some military maneuver, and the Spartans surprise them and just completely destroy their naval fleet. At that point it's over for Athens. They're forced to dismantle their walls, and Sparta installs an oligarchy, the Thirty Tyrants.

Yeah, this is Critias.

Yes, this is Critias.

And somehow Athens recovered from that. I don't know if that's even relevant here.

They do recover, but essentially the circuit which gave them their outsized power — because they're just a city-state — the circuit of tribute, navy, walls is no longer there. They never regain the power they had, and eventually they're conquered by Macedon and then the Roman Empire.

And so where does Thucydides end the story?

He finishes it before the war actually ends, and it breaks off essentially mid-sentence. So we don't really know what happened. There are textual indications that he lived to the end of the war, which would be in 404 BC.

Oh, so this is sort of an ongoing account of the war that at some point he just stops writing. Or we lost the rest.

He didn't finish it, for whatever reason.

Interesting. Okay, so that's a pretty good overview of the conflict and where it all went. And of course it's after Athens recovers from the Critias incident, the Thirty Tyrants, that you get the development of Socratic philosophy.

Fear, honor, and interest

Now I'd like to explore a little more of what Nietzsche is talking about with Thucydides as a philosopher. What analytic lenses does he bring on this? I remember reading the Peloponnesian War from Thucydides. He's got these wonderful dialogues where the various city-states, represented by characters in speech, give these long expositions of their interests and what their position is and how they're trying to persuade the other guy. You get so much color on how they think and what's going on through those things. A lot of that, his whole narrative approach, is coming from who he is as a thinker.

His speeches are wonderful. They really allow you to get inside the heads of the characters. The distinctive thing about his speeches, especially in this war, is that toward the beginning of the war there are still appeals to justice. For example, in the speech between Corcyra and Corinth, when they're appealing to Athens for who Athens should support, they both mention justice and that the other had committed some kind of injustice to them. But as the war goes on, the characters no longer really talk about justice. They justify themselves simply in terms of self-interest. It's like: we are striving for our self-interest, and this is why you must join us, or this is why we must wage war against Athens.

One of the more interesting perspectives Thucydides gives us is the Athenian one, where they justify their empire. This is toward the beginning of the war, when the Spartans are deciding if they should go to war or not. Athens is one of the city-states that are represented there. Thucydides tells us that an Athenian happened to be there. Probably they unofficially sent someone to Sparta, because they didn't want to cause any domestic problems. So it was probably secretive. Anyway, the Athenian essentially claims that in Athens' shoes anyone would have done the same thing. This is sort of the psychological lens he gives us for understanding human motivations. He says that all men are driven by three things: fear, honor, and self-interest. Out of this constellation of psychological factors, Athens was driven to gain their empire, and they cannot be judged, or they cannot be said to have committed an injustice, because they've done something which is common to all men.

Interesting. So between the war wreaking havoc on all these moral concepts and on all their previous forms of honor, and the plague, and all these things, what we're looking at is almost total destruction of the previous nomos of Greek society.

Yes. To go back to Nietzsche: he has probably one of the best descriptions of what the traditional conception of Greek justice before Socratic philosophy was. And it's something that Thucydides himself talks about. Essentially it's this idea that justice is only possible between equals in power who can inflict as much damage upon each other. There's a sense that justice is only possible between two actors who can mutually assure each other's destruction. The sphere of justice is the sort of understanding that we could both destroy each other, but we won't.

Justice as a kind of equilibrium of force between powers.

Yes. And I think one of the reasons this is distinctive, and why Socratic philosophy is a reaction to this, is that there's a complete breakdown of the balance of powers. Athens becomes completely — it outweighs, in terms of how much military power it has and how much economic power it has, because it ends up economically blockading some city-states — compared to the traditional balance of powers of the Greek city-states. There's a sense that the traditional understanding of justice between city-states is just not something that's possible anymore.

It reminds me a lot of the world wars again. There are a bunch of ways in which our own time is shaped by this big war that kind of destroyed all of our concepts of justice, all of the previous nomos of our civilization. We're in this kind of new era where things have to be rebuilt. Going back to their time, you have obviously the Republic from Plato opening with this discourse about justice: what is justice? This puts it in some context. Justice had just been destroyed. The whole basis of their previous concept of justice has been destroyed. So what could justice even be is this very live question at the time. I'd love to hear a little bit more about Thucydides, the traditions that he's operating in. We've mentioned the sophists, we've mentioned the tragedians. Tell us more about him as a thinker and his influences. What does he represent philosophically?

Thucydidean realism

That's a tough question, because he doesn't — I mean, he's not a philosopher, even if he has a kind of philosophical outlook on life. It's hard to put a label on him. I think there's probably something such as Thucydidean realism, and that's probably how I would try to characterize him. To go back to the previous Nietzsche quote: it's this kind of outlook on life which doesn't shy away from its atrocity and its tragedy, but that is also interested in it. It's not something that seeks to get away into metaphysical speculations about a very abstract understanding of the nature of reality, of the forms — if you want to dig a little at Plato.

Well, this is what Nietzsche is doing in that quote. He's saying Plato is retreating into these ideals out of cowardice, not willing to face the tragedy and atrocity of hard reality.

Yes. There's a way in which, faced with extreme atrocity — which I didn't even get into that much, but we have various city-states which are just completely leveled, their whole male populations are murdered and the women and children are enslaved or sent to work in the mines — one reaction could be a complete turning into oneself and closing the eyes and being like: this is punishment sent by the gods to us, or this is divine wrath, we have sinned in some way.

You can moralize it.

And Thucydides just does not do this. He's not interested in moralizing and saying that this is a punishment for being bad in some way, or for failing to achieve some kind of moral ideal of what man should be.

He doesn't make it about moral qualities or good versus evil, or any of the things like the way we've parsed our recent big conflicts. The world wars are very much in moralistic terms: the good guys won, those guys were the bad guys. This comic-book kind of morality.

Yeah. And here he's giving a very secular account, which is very distinctive for the ancient world. If we compare him to someone like Herodotus, in Herodotus the gods still intervene. He gives some kind of causal explanation to the gods meddling in human affairs. We find the same thing in traditional Homeric poetry. But with Thucydides, his level of explanation is individuals and states and institutions, and how the various psychological factors driving individuals interact with institutions, and how those cause conflict and destruction and atrocities.

So it's a very naturalistic account of how things happen.

Yes. And it's unclear if he thinks that something can be done better, because he himself says that he's giving this as a lesson or as a teaching, but it's not exactly clear what that is, because he also emphasizes that if humans remain the way they are, things like these will happen again. I think this is where the lens of tragedy enters again. Tragic characters: there's a sense in which we, the audience, when we're watching the play, we know what will happen to these characters, and often the characters are even warned by prophecy that if they continue down this path they will end up in doom, and yet they still choose to do so.

It's sort of their nature to be that particular way.

Yes.

This realist thing doesn't come out of nowhere. You've remarked previously that this is related to the sophists, that the sophists were kind of developing this. Obviously this is a big trend in Greek philosophy over time. They start out with this very pious, almost superstitious apprehension of the gods, and over time it's becoming more and more abstracted, more focused on nature, on realism. Nietzsche has obviously commented on this. Maybe it culminates in this Thucydidean realism, and then you get this kind of return of a new idealism or new moralism with the Socratics. I'd love to hear more about the sophists as one of his influences.

They've been presented as rhetoricians by the Platonic tradition. They're interested in the nature of man. It's unfortunate we don't have many writings from them, but they're interested in: if we strip away conventions and morality, what is it that remains? What is man? And I think this is something that comes out in Thucydides' work, where he calls war a harsh teacher, which seems to strip away the layers of convention and custom which restrain maybe the more animalistic instincts of humans.

To speculate on what he means by future people being able to be taught by this, or to learn something from it: of course within this worldview, within a realist natural worldview, you're not going to get some apocalyptic end to war. There's no end to war, there's no end to death, there's no end to conflict and politics. These are eternal features of reality, eternal features of man. Nothing's going to overcome them. Nonetheless, the lesson, the sense in which it's a lesson, is that you can do better or worse at that. You can be the one who averts the disaster in that moment. You can be the one who comes out on top in the conflict if you understand the game that you're playing better. As life and as man becomes more skilled in navigating these realities, we get better outcomes. Nonetheless the fundamental nature is still there. That's a very different worldview from the Abrahamic apocalyptic view, where there's going to be some judgment day — prepare yourself for the judgment day — after which everyone will study war no more, beat our swords into plowshares and all this. This Thucydidean realism is very much: no. Nature is what it is. Reality is what it is. Man is what he is. But we can nonetheless prepare ourselves for that. We can do well by it.

Can you base a social order on realism?

They don't get into this here, and the Platonics don't really do it either, but one of the things that was kind of under development in philosophy — maybe the holy grail of this kind of philosophy — is: can you reconstruct a whole social order, the kind of order of a state, from this kind of thinking? On the one hand, it's very skeptical toward the claims of the nomos: these superstitions, these moral constructs, ideas of the gods and so on. On the other hand, is there nonetheless — not necessarily one answer, but — a fully rational nomos? Is there such a thing as a fully rational nomos that makes no distortions on nature whatsoever, but maybe makes certain bets, or has certain leaps of faith that it's making self-consciously on top of that? That's the thing that fascinates me. It feels like Greek philosophy is kind of aborted in the Peloponnesian War and got diverted into the Socratic direction that became, or was absorbed into, Christianity, and has been our moralistic, apocalyptic basis of our metaphysics for the last two thousand years. But with Nietzsche you kind of see again — and then with other hints at it, like Machiavelli — attempts to go back to this realism as the essence of philosophy. Can you recover, within realism, social order? That's a fascinating problem.

Can you base a social order on realism, essentially?

I doubt you can base it entirely on realism. But I think you can have a social order that grounds itself in natural law and says: what we're doing is the application of natural law to our particular circumstances and to the particular things that look like that to us. Because the ideal is the philosopher does not have to take a criminal stance toward the city. Philosophy does tend to have this kind of dissolving effect on the nomos. I don't know how much — maybe you have an opinion on this — how much of the dissolution of the nomos is coming out of the kinds of philosophy that they had. With the shock of this war they get this kind of almost nihilistic outlook as a result of the kinds of philosophies they were working with, that were very skeptical toward any sort of sacred aspect of justice or the gods. Thucydides is analyzing it very much in naturalistic terms. By the end of the war they're all justifying themselves in these naturalistic terms. Nonetheless it's this total breakdown of order. So does philosophy naturally have that effect? Does it always dissolve social order? Or is it possible that there's some through-line, that you can have a fully rational philosophy that also provides some basis for the state and for social hierarchy, for honor, for nomos?

That's not an easy question.

I don't know. It's something I'm interested in. I'll try to bring it back to the Thucydidean perspective. I think that he would not be a partisan of the idea that we can base nomos on physis, because he seems to link nomos to justice and a certain kind of irrational piety which is not true in any fundamental sense, but it's still sociologically necessary.

Yeah, well, this is what I was getting at. It's not going to be uniquely identified by physis. Your social order cannot be uniquely identified by physis. But can it at least not contradict physis? Because I think this is where the mystery is coming in. With Socratic philosophy and the ways that became various kinds of moralism, often it becomes these very metaphysical speculations that aren't really about reality. They're making claims that aren't really about reality. Or before that you have claims about the gods, the gods driving things in ways that are not a very naturalistic understanding of what's happening there. I think that there is some possibility of a fully rational worldview that has a fully rational account of nature and what nature is, that also nonetheless is able to take those so-called irrational leaps of faith to say: and we're doing this particular kind of justice, this is our particular constitution. I don't think those necessarily conflict in that way. But I think he's right that justice and nomos are based on some departure from nature as such. There's some additional thing. But does it have to be a contradiction? And this is the interesting question, because it often very much is a contradiction.

What is unnatural

In these questions I've always wondered: to what extent is this opposition a real one between nomos and physis? What does it mean for something to be unnatural?

Yeah, let's dig into that. That's an interesting question. What you're getting at is: any given nomos is produced by certain people, but it also exists in nature as a natural phenomenon.

Yes, exactly. You can look at it as a natural phenomenon. So in what sense can you call it unnatural? Because you have to have some kind of normative conception of nature.

Right. So what do we mean by nature as we contrast it with particular laws, nomos-type laws? It has to do with how thinking works within that nomos. Does thinking have a limit where you do not go beyond, or you have some taboo or some axiom that is not actually descriptive of reality? It's not that it's unnatural in the sense that it doesn't exist. It's unnatural in the sense that it falsifies the logic of nature.

So if I rephrase it, you're saying that what we call unnatural is simply a certain perspective of law which falsifies a feature of reality and tells you reality works in this way, but this is not how reality actually works.

It falsifies nature. And so the question is: are all social orders — and you can extend this to the whole phenomenon of life in general. You can think about organisms, a particular cell. It has a certain nomos to it, a certain logic of internal operation. With a single-celled organism there isn't really that conscious reflection to it. It's not intelligently thinking about what its nature is and what its reality is. This is really a problem that arises with the problem of reflection, with the problem of turning the mind onto the question of itself. Then you get this whole opening up of a new set of problems, and one of them is this physis–nomos problem. In comprehending myself, in comprehending my own constitution or our own constitution, the way our society works, we may find that it is made out of lies. There's something that's true from a more distant perspective that cannot be admitted to be true within the reflexive logic of the system. And that's the opening for philosophy. The dream of philosophy — this is how I construct it; I'm curious how you would rate how these ancient schools of thought would have thought of it — but how I understand it is that philosophy has as its telos, as its end, the development of that kind of worldview that is fully naturalistic and capable of social order. Because philosophy is thought unleashed from constraint.

A question or perspective popped into my mind as you were talking. I think there are two parts to this problem. There's a question of certain conventions or nomos propagating false beliefs which simply do not reflect a naturalistic view of reality. There's a second aspect to convention which is simply social arrangement or social order. And in the second sense it's hard to say that it falsifies reality, or that a social order can falsify reality, because there's simply just — not an infinite, but an incredible variety of ways that one can arrange.

There is a wide variety of different possible ways to arrange the problems of life.

And so does the question "is a social arrangement aligned with nature" make sense in this case, given this variety?

And again this has to do with how it thinks of itself. Any organism is more or less aligned with nature. The external process of natural selection is going to make it aligned with nature. If it's not — to be not aligned with nature is to have some contradiction within yourself that's going to kill you, in that external sense. In the internal sense, you have alignment with nature in your own self-reflective self-understanding. For example, a given social order in which this class of people is obligated to do a bunch of work for this other class of people: the question is, how is that maintained? Especially as the people involved are self-interested agents to some extent. It's based on some set of understanding, some shared understanding of justice, ultimately. There's also obviously all the force relations within it. I think you can't build a society entirely out of force relations. You need some kind of shared concept of justice. And the question is: does that justice make claims like, you are bad, or you are guilty of some metaphysical sin, therefore you owe us something? Or there is this abstract concept of human rights that has some natural existence that we assert that you must believe in, that obligates you to work for this collective? You could come up with a variety of ways of justifying a social order, many things about reality or about some kind of meta-reality that are not actually real. And then skeptical philosophy of the sophistic type, or the ancient Greek type before what Nietzsche might call the Socratic disaster, would be to subject those to criticism and say: no, actually that's not real. You'll apply, somewhat of an anachronism, Occam's razor. You just say: no, you're postulating all these additional entities that are not necessary to explain the facts. Looking at it through a Thucydidean lens, there's nothing in there about, oh yes, human rights came in at this point and forced us to do this. Or justice came in and had this operative effect on history as a real natural entity. There isn't that, in a naturalistic account like what Thucydides makes. And so by Occam's razor, by some skeptical process, you might remove those things from your worldview. But then that dissolves a social order that's based on assertions of that kind. And so in that way you could say that social order is against nature, because its internal logic makes claims that do not stand up to unleashed scrutiny.

But there's a second aspect, where you said that if something survives and continues surviving, in one way it's not against nature, because if it were it would have been selected out.

So let's say there's these two different ways of being against nature. One is in bare physical terms you can be against nature. The other is in logical, reflexive terms you can be against nature. And these are often confused. A lot of the rhetoric of regimes that are against nature uses this confusion as one of their things. In book one of the Republic — I think it's book one — where they're talking about the basic arguments for justice, one of them is they get into this dispute about how can anything ever be — someone says that justice is the will of the stronger, which is a very much a realist claim. And then someone says: oh, well then how can it be that a democracy could be against nature? Or how can the group of the weaker overpower the stronger?

I believe that's in the Gorgias.

Something like that. How can they be weaker if they've overpowered the stronger? And this is where I think what's going on there is a confusion between the internal logic and the external logic. In the external logic, sure, that arrangement of forces works. But that's different from it not being based on a distortion. The lion can be put in the cage. That doesn't mean that a cage made out of words is true. And that's in the Gorgias. In the Gorgias they have the discussion in terms of the lion: the lion that's been raised among men and at some point realizes his true nature and tears everyone up. A cage made out of words. And this is what they're getting at when they're getting at the distinction between nomos and physis and how they can be out of sync: the nomos can be made out of words.

This is a bit of a digression from Thucydides, but I think this is a very Nietzschean kind of perspective. Maybe I'm taking it in my own direction here. But it's definitely related to Thucydides as this example of the Greek realism, and to dwell on: where does the Greek realism lead? How does it analyze the world? What is its sophisticated form? Sophisticated in quite literal terms.

The Melian Dialogue

Maybe one perspective that links this discussion to Thucydides: the distinctive thing is that the strong don't make appeals to justice in Thucydides, or in his account of the war. In the Melian Dialogue, which is very famous — Melos was a Spartan colony, but that was unaligned — Athens comes to Melos and is like: you must join our empire or we will massacre everyone on your island. The Melians, obviously, they make appeals to justice, and they're appealing to hopes that Sparta will save them. And the Athenians make probably the most famous line from the account of the war. Maybe I'll just read it.

What is it? The strong do what they can —

Yeah, but I think the first part of it is more interesting, in my opinion.

Okay. You can find that.

The Athenians are the strong in this position, and they say that we both know that — since you know as well as we do that right, or justice, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

There's a sense in which justice is real in the city-states, at least sociologically, but it's just not relevant when there are overwhelming differentials in power.

Yeah. This is the justice as equilibrium of force between relatively equal powers. That's a different sort of claim from what Callicles and then Thrasymachus, I believe, make, which is they ground justice in the power of the strong.

And that's sort of after the whole war, right? It's all been blown up. It's all in question. I think the way we would understand it now — what is justice — there are various ways of doing it. I think we have a similar problem now, which is the total breakdown of any kind of equal arrangement of power. And so we have instead these mythological kind of foundations for what we would call justice now, whether it's some kind of mythological equality or mythological morality. But at some point in society you do have that more primitive and naturalistic form of justice, which is the equilibrium of the use of force among a multi-party game. I don't steal from you because onlookers can look at that and conclude from that that I am acting dishonorably, I'm acting against justice, and then you can all gang up on me. Or you don't steal from me, similar logic. So it's this nice equilibrium that only really actually applies among multiple players. Even among two, it actually breaks down. There's that version of justice, which is what they're referring to here. But then there's always this temptation to abstract justice into a mythos that applies even with massively unequal powers. And this is the kind of slave morality in its embryonic form: that there's something for the weak to appeal to against the strong. And that's also what Callicles is calling the cage, basically, made out of words. I forget if he uses that exact arrangement, but it's something like that for the lion.

I think another perspective to bring here is that in Thucydides, and maybe in this tradition and lineage of thought that goes from the sophists to Thucydides to Nietzsche, there's a perspective of more particularistic justice, in the sense that within a community, within a certain balance of powers, you can have a kind of justice. But once you start speaking of an abstract and universal justice, it will inevitably have to falsify the actual relations of power that exist in whatever sphere we're talking about, if this is international relations or within an international community. And it will have to inevitably falsify some feature of reality, because it does not account for the actual equilibrium of forces, which are the only ones that can guarantee the true kind of justice.

Yeah. This is sort of the modern mess they've made of the concept of international law. International law is this thing that the Europeans like to think everyone is operating on this equal law and it somehow has this magical enforcement force. And then other people make fun of it. They say international law is just the B-2 bomber. You've seen this image. But of course classical international law is just about this equilibrium of force.

It developed within the post-Westphalian settlement between states which were roughly equal in power, and they realized that none of them can dominate the other, and so they set up a series of formalized conventions and norms which simply reflected the actual balance of forces which existed on the chessboard.

Words after the breakdown

Right. And this is another one of these interesting commonalities. We had this classical international law under the Westphalian system, and then with the rise of modernity, especially the world wars, you kind of have the total destruction of that.

I think the Napoleonic Wars is the first one where there's something that completely changes, and modernity, at least in terms of the equilibrium of forces, is caged during the Vienna Conference, the Concert of Vienna. The various powers decide to sort of keep things as they are, but some Pandora's box has been opened, and I think World War I and World War II are simply the continuation of what had started in the nineteenth century.

It started with the fall. It's just been put on pause for like eighty years.

Yeah, and you can't actually put that totally on pause. You have at some point a transition to a new equilibrium of what international law could possibly mean. And even now, it's sort of still on pause with this postwar falsification, with the UN and the kind of concept of the nation-state as it's understood after the war, international law as it's understood after the war as this falsification. It's all mixed up in these mythological concepts like human rights and democracy and all this. So it's very interesting, actually, the parallel between the Peloponnesian War as accounted by Thucydides and what happened after that and what was happening before that, and our own times. We have this takeoff of modernity as this underlying shift in the balance of power that has blown up all previous moral and customary concepts, and now we live in a new world. Even down to the fear of Critias and the stigma of Critias, and the breakdown of justice there leading to the kind of falsification — or as Nietzsche would claim, a falsification — of justice and morality in Socrates. And then in our own times, the fear of the wars kind of leading to this falsification of our whole international moral order. There's tons of these kind of parallels and lessons and interesting dimensions that you can pull on here.

To draw another parallel — maybe it's not a strict parallel, but I do still find it interesting that we find this in Thucydides, and then we can think about social order and words and the meaning of words today. Toward the beginning of the war, Corcyra has a revolution between the oligarchs and the demos, and everyone is murdering each other. Sons are murdering fathers because they've joined some kind of political party. And the interesting thing is that there's a complete breakdown of the meaning of words. The words remain, but what they refer to is inverted. Something like immoderation or brash decision-making will be reinterpreted as courage, or moderation will be reinterpreted as cowardice, or the desire to deliberate and to think about something will be branded as indecisiveness and the incapacity to act. There's this reinterpretation of words amid social breakdown, and I think something similar happened in the West with essentially World War I and World War II, where a lot of our understanding of things were essentially built and reinterpreted around this time.

If you look at the use of the sort of moral power words that are thrown around these days, or that had been thrown around for the last eighty years, they all come out of that time. They're all these distortions of things that people had previously understood very differently. I wonder if there's more to say, before we wrap it up, about Thucydides. I've been referring to him as a thinker because I think he's representing a worldview, a way of seeing things, that may have developed through his previous intellectual heritage in the Greeks. Obviously the story itself is very interesting and has many parallels to our own situation. But I wonder if we should say anything more about what we should learn from Thucydides, or anything additional you would add.

If I were to add one last thing: his use of speeches. I think it's still relevant today, because politicians still give speeches. They still come out to present justifications for actions, sometimes. One of the fundamental things in Thucydides is rereading and paying careful attention to the actual deeds of men, and then the speeches that explain the motivations or the justifications of the actions. It's probably just a good teaching of a habit: to remember what people said, because the speeches precede action. You have a speech and you have some kind of action, and the deeds either confirm or deny whatever it was claimed about reality. I think this is a key thing to keep in mind and to do and to train yourself to do: constantly refer to realities. What is it that actually happened? Remember what it is that people claimed, and then compare it to what actually happened. It seems banal to say it right now, but with the way social media works now, the algorithms, it's all just so fast. People don't remember what happened three weeks ago or what was said three weeks ago. But I think you have to keep in mind what it is that people claim, and then is it confirmed or not by the events, and that should inform you on their decision-making and their right to rule or competency to rule.

Yeah, totally. Well, this has been really interesting. I think we should, some next time, or just in our general discussions, get more into this question of the physis and nomos and the matter there, because that really strikes me as close to the heart of things. That's one of my favorite kind of topics, so obviously I was going off on that.

No, it was a good tangent.

But yeah, this was really interesting. Obviously we should all be reading Thucydides multiple times. Thanks for doing the most recent reading and walking us through that.

Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. Well, with that, until next time.