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To: pierrem15
By the way, Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War is very, very readable (perhaps on of the most readable texts of the ancients), and reads like it was written yesterday. It is timeless. Self destructive civil war due to a failure of the public square and failed diplomacy, hubris, courage, ideolism, alliances, the failure of alliances, the momentum of war such that it becomes an end in itself, such that all perspective is lost, it is all there. Pick it up.
32 posted on 08/14/2003 10:53:26 PM PDT by Torie
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To: Torie
His descriptions of how family members murdered one another and how citizens sealed one another in temples in the civil war in Corcyra is blood curdling. The "Melian Dialogue" and the descriptions of the plight of the Athenian prisoners in Syracuse are also quite moving.

I always found his phenomenon of stasis to be an interesting one, since the word means the state of standing still, but he uses it to describe the state of a city in civil war: i.e., when all the normal "movement" of a city's political life has come to a stop because of the implacable opposition of factions within.

35 posted on 08/14/2003 11:00:50 PM PDT by pierrem15
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