Free Republic

The history of Western man is the history of war, and no war looms larger in the West than the Peloponnesian War. Fought in the fifth-century BC between the Delian League, led by Athens, and the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, the war has come to define the two natures of the West. One side is the austere, efficient men of war and the other is the creative men of culture and philosophy.

While listening to The Peloponnesian War translated by Benjamin Jowett and narrated by Charlton Griffin, I was puzzled by the way dates descended as time advanced. The dates were recalculated to reference a marking event more familiar to modern listeners (Anno Domini). My question: What was the marking event Thucydides used in his original?

Is the United States headed for a civil war? Every new partisan battle feels like the battle to end all battles. But contemplating apocalyptic violence and massive upheaval brings doubt: even with all the current acrimony, could it really be the case that the most successful nation on earth is spiraling towards internal war? Isn’t intense partisanship a hallmark of American democracy? At what point does intense partisanship threaten to devolve into civil war? And how would we know—especially when so many of our intuitions are bolstered by unfounded hopes and the assumption that things can’t change? Let’s step away...

As those who follow the gyrations of the stock market are well aware, human beings have a propensity for short-term thinking. They react on impulse to that which is recent; they magnify its significance; and they forget what previous generations learned through bitter experience.To this propensity, the study of history can be an antidote. But all too often historians ransack the past in support of current prejudice.For one who wishes to escape the prison of presentmindedness and gain perspective, there is no substitute for works written regarding circumstances similar to our own at a time our prejudices and predilections...

In the winter of 479 B.C., a tsunami was the savior of Potidaea, drowning hundreds of Persian invaders as they lay siege to the ancient Greek village. New geological evidence suggests that the region may still be vulnerable to tsunami events, according to Klaus Reicherter of Aachen University in Germany and his colleagues. The Greek historian Herodotus described the strange retreat of the tide and massive waves at Potidaea, making his account the first description of a historical tsunami. Reicherter and colleagues have added to the story by sampling sediments on the Possidi peninsula in northern Greece where Potidaea (and...

Trump administration officials are seeking insight into U.S.-China relations from an unlikely source – the ancient Greek historian Thucydides who chronicled the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Michael Crowley reports in Politico Magazine that Professor Graham Allison of the Harvard Kennedy School met with Trump’s National Security Council staffers last month to discuss the “Thucydides Trap” – a term he coined to explain how the fear of an emerging power can spark conflict with an established power. In Thucydides’ telling, “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” According...

Scientists used the degraded strands to reconstruct the entire genetic code of the deadly bacterium. It is the first time experts have succeeded in drafting the genome of an ancient pathogen, or disease-causing agent. The researchers found that a specific strain of the plague bug Yersinia pestis caused the pandemic that killed 100 million Europeans - between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of the total population - in just five years between 1347 and 1351. They also learned that the strain is the "mother" of all modern bubonic plague bacteria. "Every outbreak across the globe today stems from...

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job. So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when...

“Americans view the Founding Fathers in vacuo, isolated from the soil that nurtured them,” says Traci Lee Simmons in his book, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. For the Founders, says Simmons, these virtues came principally from two places: “the pulpit and the schoolroom.” We are already fairly familiar with the explicitly Biblical influences on America’s founding, but we are far less familiar with the classical influences on the Founders—and how these two influences worked in concert to mold their education and their thinking. It is a well-known fact that literacy was prevalent in colonial times. “A...

In the last three months, we've been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already angry public. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes once described how screaming politicians — posing as men of the people — would sway Athenian citizens by offering them all sort of perks and goodies that the government had no idea how to pay for. The historian Thucydides offers even more frightening accounts of bloodthirsty voters after they were aroused by demagogues ("leaders or drivers of the people"). One day in a bloodthirsty rage, voters demanded...

Achaemenid inscription names uncle of Darius in Old Persian for first time Tehran Times Culture Desk TEHRAN -- The name of Farnaka, who was the uncle of Darius I, has been identified in a newly discovered Old Persian Achaemenid inscription for the first time. Written in cuneiform, the stone inscription bears the names of Darius the Great and his uncle, Farnaka, the Persian service of CHN reported on Friday. His name had previously only been found in historical texts written in other languages. Greek texts refer to him as Pharnaces and Elamite texts call him Parnaka. “Sometime ago, I discovered...

Typhoid May Have Caused Fall of Athens, Study Finds Nicholas Bakalar for National Geographic News February 27, 2006 An ancient medical mystery—the cause of a plague that wracked Athens from 426 to 430 B.C. and eventually led to the city's fall—has been solved by DNA analysis, researchers say. The ancient Athenians died from typhoid fever, according to a new study. Scientists from the University of Athens drew this conclusion after studying dental pulp extracted from the teeth of three people found in a mass grave in Athens' Kerameikos cemetery. The mass grave was first discovered in 1994 and was dated...

An ancient colony of Andros uncoveredThe remains of buildings found in excellent condition at Argilos, an important commercial town, on the estuary of the Strymonas River Houses in the foothills of Argilos dating from the sixth and fifth centuries BC. The surviving walls are up to 4 meters high. They form part of Argilos’s residential quarter, which spreads out on either side of a paved road leading from the port to the acropolis. The shape of the houses, the roads to either side and the organization of the city reflect island architecture and planning notions that the colonists brought with...

Secret of ancient Athens plague is being unraveled Kerameikos, Athens’s ancient cemetery, has yielded conclusive evidence as to the nature of the plague that decimated a third of the population of the ancient city and influenced the outcome of the Peloponnesian Wars. Scientists at Athens University’s School of Dentistry have used molecular biology to help solve the riddle of one of history’s biggest mysteries.Greek scientists find typhoid after excavating graves By Dr Manolis Papagrigorakis (1) Recent findings from a mass grave in the Ancient Cemetery of Kerameikos in central Athens show typhoid fever may have caused the plague of Athens,...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version November 11, 2005, 8:27 a.m. Why Did Athens Lose? The misery of war. EDITOR'S NOTE: Victor Davis Hanson's latest book, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War has recently been released by Random House. This week National Review Online has been excerpting Chapter 10 of the book. Below is the final installment; the first can be read here and the second here; the third here; the fourth here. Check back tomorrow for the final installment and click on Amazon to purchase A War...

One of the many joys of teaching is the opportunity to revisit the same text, with different groups of students, at different times in the nation’s life. Our classroom conversations—inevitably informed by the big events taking place off our tiny stage—dwell on, illuminate, clarify, exaggerate, and distort the texts we examine. In recent years, the author whose work has sparked the most spirited classroom discussion is Thucydides, whose history of the Peloponnesian War has long been a staple of international relations theorizing. When I first encountered him in the 1970s, his account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta—one a...

What the First World War was for Europe, the Peloponnesian War was for the ancient Greeks. It was also their Napoleonic Wars and their American Civil War. The protracted, ruinous conflict between Athens and Sparta, which dragged on for nearly 30 years (431 B.C. to 404 B.C.), prefigured, in one way or another, nearly every major conflict to come, right up the present war on terror. The "war like no other," as Thucydides called it, continues to fascinate because it always seems pertinent, and never more so than in Victor Davis Hanson's highly original, strikingly contemporary retelling of the superpower...

So, the next time someone quotes philosopher George Santayana for the umpteenth time that "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," just assume that what follows will probably be wrong. Having a Rolodex of cocktail party quotes to beef-up an argument is not the same as the hard work of learning about the past. Thus, we are now warned that the war against terror is failing because it has lasted as long as World War II — as if the length of war, not the cost, determines success. Yet the nearly 2,000 U.S. combat fatalities in...

<p>In a recent review of Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War, and my Autumn of War, ("Theatres of War:  Why the battles over ancient Athens still rage”  New Yorker Magazine, [January 12, 2004]), the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn  says that I believe that it is immoral to suggest defeat can be seen as victory: "The play asks the very question that Victor Davis Hanson considers "immoral": whether abject defeat can yet somehow be a victory."</p>

E-Notes Robert Kaplan onApplying the Wisdom of the Ages to the Twenty-First Century The Fifth Annual Robert Strausz-Hupé Lecture April 4, 2002 Summary by Trudy J. Kuehner Robert Kaplan delivered the Fifth Annual Strausz-Hupé Lecture on January 17, 2002, drawing on his new book, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos (Random House, 2002). Author of such books as Balkan Ghosts and The Coming Anarchy, Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic, a fellow of the New America Foudation, and a former senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Warrior Politics is available to FPRI members at...