At first, Athens was successful, but as the war went on its fortunes worsened. The plague of 430–429 killed many in the city, including Pericles himself, and the city was left without a great leader. Furthermore, frightened by the apparent success of Sparta, Athens began to adopt Spartan methods, not only of fighting but also of ruling.
In the end, Athens had become a worse tyranny than its enemy. It was finally defeated and humiliated, after nearly thirty years of intermittent warfare. In its frustrated bitterness and fury, it turned on what was left of its own best self and, among others, executed the philosopher Socrates because he had never ceased to tell it that its only chance to win was to remain true to its ideals.
One of the supreme creations of the Athenians during the half century before Thucydides wrote his History was dramatic tragedy. There is no question that Thucydides was influenced by the tragic dramatists of his era and conceived of himself as writing a kind of tragic history or historical tragedy. Certainly “tragic” is the right word to describe the fall of Athens. At the beginning of the war, Athens was the best and the brightest of its time and its world. At war’s end, owing to the city’s own tragic flaw, it had become a broken shadow of its former self. How this happened, how the city took each downward step without understanding where it was headed, is described by Thucydides in cool, objective, nonjudgmental prose. You wonder how he, an Athenian, could exercise such restraint; you sometimes forget that he loved his country with all of his heart.
In short, he wrote one of the great histories, an inspiration and a model for other historians ever since. It continues to be read for its facts and its insights about the Greece of Thucydides’ time. But it is not just a history of those times. Thucydides was the first historian to recognize that “war is primarily a matter of money.” This and other cold observations on the life of mankind dot a narrative that is in itself rich and powerful. Underlying all is the book’s profound understanding of the role of force in human life. Perhaps that is exemplified most memorably in the series of events that occupies the book’s final part. The citizens of a certain island, Melos, one of Athens’s allies, inform the Athenian leaders that they no longer desire to be followers of Athens; they have decided to be neutral. Impossible, says Athens; once an ally, always an ally. A dispute ensues, with Melian envoys voicing the very arguments, in favor of freedom and democracy, that the Athenians would once have used themselves. But these latter-day Athenians are unable to heed those arguments, and when they cannot win the dispute in words, they win it by force: They kill the Melian men, enslave the women and children, and, as Thucydides coolly remarks, “occupied the place themselves.”
Only a short time afterwards, a large Athenian armed force is surrounded in the harbor at Syracuse, on the eastern coast of Sicily, by a combined Sicilian-Spartan army. The Athenians are defeated and captured, the soldiers put to work in the Syracusan silver mines, sweating and dying in the Sicilian summer at the bottom of deep holes in the ground. The Athenians present the Melian arguments to their captors, but their captors treat them like Melians in return. It is a hard lesson, and all the harder for never having been learned by those who have followed after.
General George C. Marshall, the U.S. chief of staff during World War II, was wont to say that every military leader should read Thucydides, that this little war between the two different halves of a small nation at the end of the fifth century BCE somehow prefigured all subsequent wars, especially all civil wars, and that there was much to be learned from it. Those were essentially military lessons. There is also a deeper lesson to be learned, about the human condition. Is it, after all, irremediable?
chapter two
After the Fall
The fourth century before the Christian era was very different from the fifth. Gone was the artistic glory of the fifth century, together with the glow of surprising military inventiveness and discovery in the natural world. Particularly in Athens, the self-elected capital of Hellas for five or six great—indeed unforgettable—decades, the mood was somber and dark. But despite their victory in the civil war that ended just before the turn of the century, Sparta was hardly better off than Athens. The war had sapped the strength and resources of both winner and loser. There wasn’t much to look forward to for either in those sad and hopeless years.
Nevertheless, the fourth century had, because it made them, its own glories and successes. In philosophy, Plato and Aristotle achieved greatness of a different kind from that of Themistocles and Pericles. For all practical purposes democracy no longer existed. Athenian drama had fallen on hard times, religion had become secretive, and citizens looked at one another with fear and suspicion, and, despite the valiant (and ultimately self-defeating) efforts of Aristophanes and Euripides on their behalf, women were treated with the same old lack of honor and respect. In Hellas proper it was not a time to look back on with any pride or pleasure. Yet there was a new light blazing in the north, in Macedon, only recently thought of as backward and poor. And by the end of this new century the greatest and most famous of all Greeks had flamed through a world that had belonged to Persia and never would again.
His name was Alexander of Macedon. He was the third to bear a name that in after times would be borne by kings, popes, and emperors. His father, Philip, won the crown that he gave his son, and that his son wore with unexampled brilliance. Alexander was born in 356 BCE and died in 323, still a young man, but in those thirty-three short years he conquered the greatest empire ever seen until that time, defeating Persia, Egypt, and Babylon and the rest of the Near East, and threatening India, which escaped only because he died. His exploits were extraordinary in every sense of the word. If you want to know more about him, read Plutarch’s Life, in which he is compared to Julius Caesar. Even that would not have satisfied Alexander—he thought there was only one man that ever lived who could rightfully be compared to him, and that was Achilles. When he came upon the supposed tomb of that great hero on the Troad, the beach below the ruins of Troy, Alexander wept because, he said, he regretted there was no poet as great as Homer to tell his own story.
Alexander wrote nothing, nor has his story ever been told as well as it should be. However, there were small triumphs in the era, and some works that deserve their fame. I have chosen five authors to represent the time: Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Archimedes. Any century would be proud to possess five such names.
HIPPOCRATES
460?–377? BCE
Medical Treatises
Hippocrates (fl. 400 BCE), “the father of medicine,” a friend of Socrates and Plato, was the best physician of his time. He taught medicine as well as practiced it, and he may have written some of the works that were later ascribed to him by the ancients, but this is by no means certain. Instead, these treatises—“On Ancient Medicine,” “On Airs, Waters, and Places,” “On the Sacred Disease,” and so forth—may have been written by anonymous physicians and teachers of the famous fourth-century BCE medical school of Cos and published as the works of Hippocrates, who for at least a thousand years thereafter was the greatest name in medicine. Whatever the truth of the matter, the works ascribed to Hippocrates are important. There are three things to learn from them.