'The difficulty of drawing lessons from an ancient war'

From: The School of Athens

... Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient history, has himself taken part in these arguments for almost a half-century. His own four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is a classic of modern scholarship. Now, with "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History," Mr. Kagan has produced what reads like the last word on the man, a nuanced and subtle account of a subject that has so often been treated in a spirit of high partisanship.

Mr. Kagan stresses that Thucydides, an Athenian naval commander who was exiled in 424 B.C. for losing an important battle in Thrace, was more than just a participant in the conflict that he described. He was also a player in the domestic politics of the war, the "spin" as well as the strategy. Thus "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History" is a book about a long-ago historian's argument with his contemporaries—the tension between facts and what one would like to be facts. "In the important cases examined here," Mr. Kagan writes, "the contemporary view was closer to the truth than [Thucydides'] own."

Of what can we be certain? Athens lost the war; Sparta won it. A turning point was Athens's ill-advised invasion of Sicily in 415 B.C. during a lull in the conflict with Sparta. The result was a catastrophic destruction of the vaunted Athenian navy and ultimately a fatal weakening of Athenian power. This, too, we know: When the Spartans finally won victory in 404 B.C., they were aided by a late alliance with Persia, the traditional enemy of all Greece. Beyond that outline, the certainties are scarce.

The origin of the war? Without doubt, tensions were rising in the mid-fifth century B.C. between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesian League, with Sparta as its leader. But was Pericles, the aristocratic leader of the Athenian democracy, a key cause of hostilities? Many of his contemporaries thought so, Mr. Kagan says. They blamed Pericles for his influential support of two actions against Spartan allies—restricting the trade of one, aiding the enemy of another—that helped to provoke war.

Thucydides strongly disagreed with Pericles' critics, insisting in his "History of the Peloponnesian War" that the conflict was caused by later demagogues and deeper underlying forces. Thucydides' interpretation would color most later scholarship. Yet Mr. Kagan notes that Thucydides' views were hardly the result of dispassionate analysis and were more likely a reaction to his family's anti-democratic past—he was simply supporting Pericles with a convert's zeal. ...

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