Posted 2004-01-05
The early spring of 431 B.C. witnessed, at Athens, the outbreak of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the première of a great play.
The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: Athens, a direct democracy, and Sparta, a militaristic oligarchy. It was, naturally, advertised as a war of liberation (each side claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. It began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a town near Athens—but metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states, and resulted, finally, in the defeat of Athens and the abolition of its democratic institutions. Because Sparta and its allies dominated the southern peninsula known as the Peloponnese—and because the men who wrote the histories of the conflict were usually Athenians—the war came to be called the Peloponnesian. As the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in “The Peloponnesian War” (Viking; $29.95), his brisk, if tendentious, new account, the Spartans probably thought of the conflict as the Athenian War; but then there were no Spartan historians to call it that.
The great book was the work of an affluent young Athenian who began taking notes “at the very outbreak” of hostilities, on the hunch that this would be “a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past.” About the life of the historian we know relatively little, apart from the crucial fact that he himself commanded troops in the war—something you might guess anyway from the soldierly lack of sentimentality that characterizes his book, which would in time come to be prized for its insistence on letting the reader “see the past clearly.” This soldier-historian gave no official title to his work; it is usually referred to as, simply, the History. He was called Thucydides.
The great play was by an Athenian citizen in his mid-fifties who had been writing for the theatre since the age of thirty. Like the war, the play involved some small-scale violence in Corinth that eventually made its way to Athens; as with the war, it would be some time before people appreciated its magnitude. (When the play was entered in the annual springtime dramatic competition at Athens that year, it took third prize.) The playwright’s name was Euripides. The play was called “Medea.”
Thucydides’ History is the only extant eyewitness account of the first twenty years of a war that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen—“the greatest disturbance,” as he put it, “in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” The war lasted so long that the author didn’t live to finish his manuscript; it ends in midsentence during a description of the aftermath of a naval battle in 411. (We do know, from references in his text, that he lived to see Athens’ ultimate surrender, in 404.) But such was his achievement that others who wrote about the war—for instance Xenophon, whose Hellenica covers the final decade of fighting—began where Thucydides left off.
Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among the various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable affair—part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops, went away to do battle with this or that enemy, and (you hoped) were home for the harvest. The entire war, usually a matter of some disputed bit of borderland, would be decided in a single battle fought on a single day.
The war that began in the spring of 431 represented what Kagan rightly calls “a fundamental departure” from this tradition, not only in its scope, duration, and complexity but also in savagery and bitterness. After the Corinthian diplomatic crisis, ties between Athens and Sparta disintegrated. Hostilities began, one night early in 431, with a sneak attack on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea. This sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare set the tone for what was to come. As the conflict spread across many fronts, from the Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable. The result, Kagan emphasizes, was a cycle of cruelty and reprisal that ended in a “collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs, and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life”: schoolboys slaughtered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians murdered and enslaved en masse, supplicants dragged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. In the end, the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself, Athens, collapsed. Bankrupt and imploding with civil strife after nearly three decades of fighting, it was finally defeated by an alliance of Sparta and Persia, the traditional enemy of the Greeks.
It was impossible to foresee any of this in the spring of 431. Athens was at its peak. Its empire of tribute-paying “allies” stretched across the Mediterranean, disciplined by a massive and well-trained navy. Its special national character—raucously democratic yet with an aristocratic esteem for high culture—was reflected in its leader, Pericles, who had populist appeal despite being a nobleman of what Kagan calls “the bluest blood.” It was Pericles who advised his countrymen, during the first few years of the war, to follow an unusual and, to many Athenians, foolishly passive defensive strategy: to remain within the city’s walls (including the so-called Long Walls that connected Athens to its port, Piraeus, four miles away) when the Spartans came to burn their crops, and to put their faith in their supremacy at sea. This plan took realistic account of Sparta’s vast superiority on land and of the fragility of the Spartan Alliance: the Athenians would simply ship in their grain, while harrying the coastal cities of the Peloponnese until the Spartan Alliance disintegrated.
Kagan, the author of the standard four-volume scholarly study of the war, relates all this with crisp authority in his new, popularizing account. He is particularly shrewd about the economic and material realities behind certain kinds of political rhetoric. Where others might see in Pericles’ policy an admirable Apollonian restraint, Kagan sees the calculations of a politician who knew he had only enough drachmas in the bank “to maintain his strategy for three years . . . but not for a fourth”—let alone a twenty-seventh.
The Periclean strategy, however, died with the man himself, in 429, in a plague that, within three years, killed a quarter of the city’s population. (Thucydides, in a rare reference to his personal life, writes that he had the illness but survived.) Pericles’ successors, first Cleon and then the aptly named Hyperbolus, were hawkish demagogues and came from the ranks of the so-called “new politicians”—pragmatic men whose attitudes, like their backgrounds, were anything but patrician. (Cleon’s father made a fortune in leather, the source of great amusement for the comic playwright Aristophanes.) A crude but effective orator—Aristophanes memorably likens his rants to the squeals of a scalded pig—Cleon was principally responsible for pursuing the more aggressive policies that, many historians believe, cost Athens its empire.
Under Cleon’s brash leadership, Athens’ fortunes began to oscillate between surprise victories, like the capture of a tenth of all Sparta’s citizen soldiers on the islet of Sphacteria in 425, and unnecessary defeats, like the debacle at Delium in 424, the outcome of a rash effort to force a decisive encounter. Under Cleon, too, Athens increasingly espoused a chilling Realpolitik. In 427, when the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, revolted from the Athenian alliance known as the Delian League, Cleon proposed that all its adult men be put to death and all its women and children sold into slavery—a motion that the Athenian Assembly passed, only to revoke it, conscience-stricken, the next day.
Cleon repeatedly rejected opportunities for peace, and it was only in 421, a year after his death in battle, that a truce could be negotiated by his great political rival, the pious and cautious Nicias. This peace, however, soon fell apart because of the ambitions of another charismatic Athenian, Alcibiades, whose increasingly arrogant strategies led to ever greater disasters. These were moral as well as strategic. By the time the tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, refused to become part of Athens’ alliance, in 416, the Athenians no longer felt any compunction about punishing civilians. In Book V of the History, Thucydides tersely relates how, after the Melians refused to capitulate to the Athenians’ demands, all the Melian men were put to death and all the women and children sold into slavery.
For many historians, Melos marks a watershed in Athens’ moral decline. The next year, greedy for more empire, the Athenians invaded another island, Sicily. But the Sicilian Expedition, which occupies two full books of the History, turned out to be a watershed of another kind. It saw the complete annihilation of the Athenian armada, the death of Nicias, and the beginning of the end for Athens. Violent internal strife, economic troubles, a succession of oppressive regimes, and Sparta’s alliance with Persia all put terrible pressures on Athens and led inexorably to the final, catastrophic defeat of the Athenian navy at Aegospotami, in the Hellespont, in 405. All but ten of Athens’ ships were destroyed or captured and all the Athenian war prisoners—between three and four thousand—were put to death. In March, 404, exactly twenty-seven years after the war had begun, Athens capitulated. The Spartan allies gleefully destroyed the Long Walls, to the accompaniment of flutes.
To describe this war in all its complexity, Thucydides had to invent a new way of writing history. In his introduction, he says he will eschew “literary charm”—mythodes, a word related to “myth”—in favor of a carefully sifted accuracy. (The remark is partly a sideswipe at Herodotus, the historian whose account of the Greek victory against the Persians half a century earlier is characterized by a florid style and an inability to resist a good story.) But this desire for what we would call balanced and accurate reporting led, paradoxically, to a most distinctive literary device: the use of invented speeches and dialogues to illustrate the progress of the war and the combatants’ thinking about it. Every key moment in the war—from the debate, in 431, over whether the Athenians should involve themselves in Corinth’s altercation with its former colony to the controversies over Mytilene and Melos and the decision to invade Sicily—is cast as a dialogue that, as Thucydides admits, may not be a faithful reproduction of exactly what was said in this or that legislative session or diplomatic parley but does elucidate the ideologies at play. “My method has been,” he writes, “to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.” This, more than anything, is what gives the History its unique texture: the vivid sense of an immensely complex conflict reflected, agonizingly, in hundreds of smaller conflicts, each one presenting painful choices, all leading to the great and terrible resolution.
Twenty-five years ago it was easy to teach Thucydides; all you had to do was talk about the Cold War. For most of the four decades from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, the parallels between the Peloponnesian War and the Cold War seemed self-evident. You knew, as you read about Athens, about its boisterous democratic politics and fast-talking politicians, its adventurous intellectual and artistic spirit, that these were the good guys. They were clearly our own cultural forebears. And you knew, just as surely, as you read about Sparta, about its humorless militarism, geriatric regime, and deep antipathy to democracy, that these were bad guys. They, too, looked awfully familiar.
You also knew what it was like to live in a world divided between two sides “at the very height of their power and preparedness,” as Thucydides puts it, and how blind adherence to the policies dictated by such polarization could result in fearful illogic. (As Kagan observes, the Spartans went to war to save an alliance they had created precisely to protect themselves from conflict.) In the bipartite world of the Cold War, you could choose to read Thucydides’ carefully structured presentation of Athens’ decline as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. Or you might take Thucydides’ apparent detachment to be a cautious endorsement of Machtpolitik as the grim requirement for being a superpower. (“It is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” the Athenians blandly opine during their confrontation with the Melians.)
But whichever way you read Thucydides the bipolar structure of his world was instantly recognizable. Indeed, almost as soon as the Cold War had begun, people who knew their history were using the Peloponnesian War as a lens through which to examine the geopolitical scene. In February, 1947, Truman’s Secretary of State, George Marshall, visited Princeton University on the occasion of Washington’s birthday and declared, “I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding some of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.” These words were a fulfillment of a hope that Thucydides himself sourly expresses:
It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.
That the American soldier-diplomat could so emphatically invoke the Athenian soldier-historian after nearly twenty-four hundred years bears out the latter’s declaration that his book would be “a possession for all time.”
But what kind of possession, and whose? Times have changed—not just between Thucydides and Marshall but also between Marshall and the present. What do you make of Thucydides, or, for that matter, of the Peloponnesian War itself, in an era described by some as the “end of history,” when there is only one superpower?
Kagan is alert to the opportunities presented by the new world order for rereading—or, some might say, rewriting—the Peloponnesian War. At the beginning of his account, he informs us that although the Greek conflict’s “greatest influence as an analytical tool may have come during the Cold War,” he wants his work to “meet the needs of readers in the 21st century.” Self-consciously echoing Thucydides’ famous declaration of objectivity, he writes that he will refrain from drawing parallels between the ancient event and any modern counterpart, in the hope that “an uninterrupted account will better allow readers to draw their own conclusions.” Uninterrupted, yes, but not unbiased. Kagan is famous on campus and off for his conservatism (he numbers Ronald Reagan and Otto von Bismarck among his heroes), and you tend to come away from his history with an entirely different view of the war than the one you take away from Thucydides. Unsurprisingly, Kagan’s view could be taken to support a very twenty-first-century project indeed: a unilateralist policy of preëmptive war.
The only way to do this, unfortunately, is to flatten Thucydides’ presentation of the Peloponnesian War, stripping away the many voices and points of view that he worked so hard to include. (Most scholars believe that he spent a good part of the war travelling around Greece consulting archives and interviewing veterans for his History. He was able to do so because he’d been exiled from Athens in 424, after failing to prevent the Spartans from capturing the northern city of Amphipolis.) Thucydides tends to be shy about overtly intruding his own opinions into the proceedings; not so Kagan. This is most apparent in his revisionist championing of Cleon and other Athenian hawks, whose policies he consistently presents as the only reasonable choice. “It is tempting to blame Cleon for the breaking off of the negotiations,” goes a typical bit of rhetorical strong-arming. “But what, realistically, could have been achieved?” Anyone who hasn’t read Thucydides will be inclined to agree. His explanation of the Athenians’ distaste for peace was that “they were greedy for more.”
The desire to rehabilitate Cleon inevitably results in a corresponding denigration of the peace party (with its “apparently limitless forbearance”) and of the cautious policies recommended first by Pericles and then by Nicias, a figure for whom Kagan has particular disdain. Here Kagan’s revisionism borders on being misleading. Nicias had tried to bluff the Athenian Assembly into abandoning the invasion of Sicily, declaring that it would require far greater expense than people realized; but they simply approved the additional ships and troops. This leads Kagan, bizarrely, to characterize the Sicilian Expedition as “the failed stratagem of Nicias.” As for the Athenians’ massacre of the Melians, Kagan dismisses it as “the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration.”
Kagan’s perspective on events and personalities at first suggests an admirable desire to see the war with fresh and unsentimental eyes. But after a while it becomes hard not to ascribe his revisionism to plain hawkishness, a distaste for compromise and negotiation when armed conflict is possible. His book represents the Ollie North take on the Peloponnesian War: “If we’d only gone in there with more triremes,” he seems to be saying, “we would have won that sucker.”
Kagan isn’t the only one offering a newly political reading of the Greeks and their wars. Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, is extremely prolific on the subject of ancient war; his most recent book, “Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think” (Doubleday; $27.50), is his fourteenth in twenty years. He is also a tireless opponent of what he sees as the ascendancy of feminists, post-structuralists, and the like, in the current academic study of the classics.
When Hanson writes about ancient infantry battles, he is absorbing and informative. Lately, he’s been writing about more recent wars. In November, 2001, during the war in Afghanistan, he wrote an article for the National Review Online entitled “A Voice from the Past: General Thucydides Speaks About the War,” in which he poses questions about the situation and has Thucydides “answer” them, by means of citations from the History. To the question, for instance, of why Osama bin Laden and his terrorists “believed they could repeatedly get away with killing Americans, win prestige, and gain concessions—without eventually incurring the destructive wrath of the United States,” he has Thucydides give the following “answer,” from Book III:
Their own prosperity could not dissuade them from affronting danger; but blindly confident in the future, and full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition, they declared war and made their decision to prefer might to right. Their attacks were determined not by provocation but by the moment which seemed propitious.
Hanson neglects to mention that this implicit endorsement of “destructive wrath” comes not from Thucydides but from Cleon. This speech is, in fact, the one in which the demagogue so admired by Kagan urged his fellow-Athenians to slaughter all the adult males and enslave the women and children of Mytilene, a punishment from which the Athenians themselves shrank. Cleon’s apparent horror at the notion that might makes right is, in any case, a disingenuous piece of rhetoric; he was its most outspoken advocate.
Hanson’s article is featured in a collection called “An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism,” which Vice-President Dick Cheney recommended to his entire staff, declaring that it captured his philosophy. Hanson has also met the President and addressed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a certain military swagger tends to color his reading of Thucydides. In his introduction to “The Landmark Thucydides,” an amply annotated reprint of a Victorian translation of the History, he sneers at the “veneer of culture” that war inevitably strips away, showing us up “for what we really are.” In “Carnage and Culture,” his 2001 study arguing that Western warfare is superior to that of all other cultures, he says:
There is an inherent truth of battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory. . . . To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality.
And yet the Greeks themselves—not least Thucydides—did speak of war in these other ways. In fact, it is Hanson and Kagan who strip away the moral meaning that underpins Thucydides’ account of the war. To get a better sense of what that meaning is, you have to turn from the book that was started in 431 to the play that premièred that spring—which is to say, from history to tragedy.
To an Athenian, at least, Thucydides’ History may well have looked more like a tragedy than it does at first to us. The best contemporary evidence for what the ancient Greeks thought of Greek tragedy is Aristotle’s Poetics, and it’s striking how much of what Thucydides does in his history resembles what Aristotle thought tragedians were supposed to do in their plays. Thucydides’ dialogues and speeches, with their emphasis less on factual accuracy than on a kind of psychological truth, conform to Aristotle’s view that the best tragic dialogue expresses what a character is most likely to say in a given situation. At one point, Thucydides goes to great lengths to underscore the similarities between his dialogues and those written by dramatists. In the Melian dialogue of Book V—where the Athenians assert that might makes right and that resistance is futile, while the hopelessly outnumbered Melians are forced to put their trust in fate—the author gives his text a remarkable physical resemblance to the script of a play, with the names of the “characters” abbreviated before their respective speeches. It is a chilling dramatic exchange:
Mel.: And how could it be just as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?
Ath.: You, by giving in, would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would be able to profit from you.
Mel.: So you would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?
Ath.: No, because it is not so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.
Still, Aristotle goes on to say, good dialogue alone doesn’t make a tragedy. What makes tragedies feel “tragic” are two plot devices: peripeteia, reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis, a climactic “recognition” of what one hadn’t realized before. Thucydides, naturally, couldn’t determine his characters’ actions—his “plot”—as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides so artfully did. But he did arrange and juxtapose speeches and descriptions of events in such a way as to bring out his story’s tragic force.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Thucydides’ masterly portrayal of Athens’ disastrous Sicilian Expedition as a tragic peripeteia. In tragedy, reversals are usually punishment for hubris, and there are clues, in the History, that Sicily is to be seen as a grand retribution for the policies of which the Melian slaughter stands as the great symbol. The Melian affair closes Book V, and the Sicilian Expedition opens Book VI—a pointed juxtaposition. In Sicily the Athenians are forced, in a typically tragic reversal, to “play” the Melians whom they themselves had destroyed. In their moment of total defeat, Nicias urges his troops to place their trust in “hope,” “fortune,” and the gods—the very things that the Melians, facing obliteration at the hands of a vastly more powerful enemy, had trusted in, to the derisive amusement of the Athenians during the Melian debate. What befalls the Athenians in Sicily therefore fulfills the desperate prediction of the Melians: “We know that in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected.”
This is surely why Thucydides takes special care to present the climactic defeat of the Sicilian campaign, at the Assinarus River in 413, as a theatrical spectacle, with what can only be described as an audience of Syracusans watching the battle, “prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions.” How better to behold what the author describes as “the greatest reverse that ever befell an Hellenic army”? The notion of reversal colors the entire passage: the Athenians, who had come across the water to this island greedy to fatten their empire, finish by crawling around in the river mud, desperate to slake their horrendous thirst. “They now suffered very nearly what they had inflicted,” Thucydides writes. “They had come to enslave others, and were departing in fear of being enslaved themselves.”
But no reversal in Thucydides is more shocking than one that would have been obvious to his contemporaries. In Herodotus’ history of the glorious conflict in which Athens and Sparta joined forces to confront the Persian invaders, he relates how the Great King of Persia, confident of his military superiority, tried to persuade the Greeks that resistance was futile; and yet they trusted to hope, and fortune, and the gods, and were richly rewarded in their stunning victories at Marathon, in 490, and Salamis, ten years later. It is an irony as bitter as any you find in Sophocles that the protagonist of Thucydides’ History should have come to resemble the villain of Herodotus’ Histories. Ancient readers readily grasped this. “Words like these,” the first-century B.C. historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote of the Melian Dialogue, “were appropriate to oriental monarchs addressing Greeks, but unfit to be spoken by Athenians to Greeks.”
So the lessons to be learned from Thucydides are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world.
They are, indeed, the lessons of “Medea,” that other product of the spring of 431 B.C. To our post-Freudian eyes, “Medea” looks like an over-the-top domestic and psychological drama; to the Athenians, that fraught March, it may well have looked like a political fable. The play’s setting is Corinth—a highly unusual locale for a Greek tragedy—and its heroine is obsessed with violated oaths. These two facts suggest an underlying commentary on the Corinthian diplomatic crisis of a few years earlier—an event characterized by broken covenants and explosive confrontations between “kindred” states—which led to the outbreak of the war. Then there’s the heroine’s philandering husband, Jason the Argonaut. With his aggressive bearing and fancy rhetorical footwork (at one point he tells Medea that he’s abandoning her and their children in a strange land for their own good), he begins to look like a parody of a certain kind of Athenian politician—the kind, say, who might for the sake of winning an argument denounce in an enemy the crass ethics that he himself is known to hold dear.
Nearly all Euripides’ extant works were written during the war, and, more than any other tragedian, he kept returning to the tragic lessons of history. His “Trojan Women” covers the horrific massacres that followed the Greeks’ sack of Troy; it was, not coincidentally, produced a few months after the Melian massacre. The play asks the very question that Victor Davis Hanson considers “immoral”: whether abject defeat can yet somehow be a victory.
Euripides’ answer is clear. The first great speech of the play is given to the mad Trojan princess Cassandra, and her monologue, recited among the smoking ruins of Troy, is a bizarre paean to the Trojans, for whom she claims a great “victory”:
They died for their own country. So the bodies of all who took the spears were carried home in loving hands,
Brought, in the land of their fathers, to the embrace of earth
And buried becomingly as the rite fell due. The rest . . .
Came home to happiness the Achaeans could not know;
Their wives, their children. . . .
Though surely the wise man will forever shrink from war,
Yet if war come, the hero’s death will lay a wreath
Not lustreless on the city. The coward alone brings shame.
The Greek invaders have, by contrast, lost crucial accoutrements of civilized life—family life, burial at the hands of loved ones. Their exercise of absolute power has come at a terrible price.
One definition of “coward,” as the play makes clear, is an armed adult male who murders small children. In the play, Cassandra’s nephew Astyanax is murdered by the Greeks for the seemingly pragmatic reason that, if allowed to reach adulthood, the young prince might yet avenge his city’s downfall. As the child’s mother, Andromache, screams in anguish, the Greek envoy addresses her with words that uncannily recall those of the Athenians to the Melians:
Let it happen this way. It will be wiser in the end.
Do not fight it. Take your grief as you were born to take it,
Give up the struggle where your strength is feebleness
With no force anywhere to help. Listen to me!
Your city is gone . . . you are in our power.
Physical power, perhaps, but it’s clear that there are other powers that need to be appeased. The emotional climax of the play is the pathetic funeral ceremony for Astyanax; it is significant that the same Greek whose arrogance might have reminded the audience of its own emissaries to Melos a few months before is moved to perform the rites himself. This is another kind of reversal, but it comes too late. The Greeks will soon go to their punishments: Agamemnon to be murdered, Odysseus to his terrible wanderings.
Who, then, are the real victors here? Cassandra’s speech suggests that Thucydides’ tragic vision, rather than the glib pose of pragmatism, should guide us in examining the moral questions raised by the war about which Kagan and Hanson have written. Like Greek tragic drama, the History is an artful object, a careful manipulation of words and actions that can indeed lead you, if you pay attention, to a clear vision of the truth. (As, for instance, the truth about the real motives behind “wars of liberation.”) If you fail to see the connections between tragedy and history, between poetry and politics, you’ll miss the point.
Certainly the Athenians thought so. Kagan tells the story of how, when Cleon scored his stunning success at Sphacteria, the rewards granted to him by a grateful city included front-row seats at the theatre of Dionysus—the site of the annual tragic performances, nestled at the base of the Acropolis, that gleaming monument of Athenian civilization at its best. Whether Cleon actually made use of that gift, and, if so, what he thought of the plays he might have seen, Thucydides doesn’t say. 
