War, reality and truth in Thucydides

4 points · University catalogue

Between 431 and 404 BCE, a world war pitted the sea empire of democratic Athens against the land-based hegemony of Sparta, the culmination of decades of cold war, uneasy coexistence and open conflict between the two powers. The first twenty years of this major event in ancient history are painstakingly recorded in a monumental work, the War of the Peloponnesians and Athenians by the Athenian Thucydides, a participant in the conflict. This remarkable and highly crafted text combines a hyperreal narrative season by season, analyses of causality, character and motivation, and competing ethical and practical interpretations. We will approach Thucydides' War in four different ways: as a piece of historiography; as set of political or social scientifically oriented demonstrations; as a philosophical meditation on justice and power in the world; and as a historical document for a richly interesting period. Are these four approaches mutually compatible and reinforcing ? The close reading of the text (for reasons of time, we will look at Books 1-5, 8 will be completed by engagement with secondary literature (four monographs and articles) and with contemporary documents (inscriptions), the latter offering a fragmentary counterpoint to Thucydidean narrative. After reading the text, we will spend time on thematic debates involving the narrative and contextual material. The aim of this close work is to produce a Thucydides beyond the clichés of contemporary punditry ("the Thucydides trap"), closely fitting within Columbia undergraduate training (where Thucydides has vanished from the Core), and bridging the gap between contextualizing and modernizing readings.