Ancient Greek
Thucydides
c. 460–400 BC
“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
Thucydides, an Athenian general who wrote after his exile, composed the . He confines himself to one conflict, examines causes and motives with severe care, and sets aside the marvelous. Human nature, he assumes, is constant. An exact record of the past therefore instructs the future. Power, fear, honor, and rhetoric govern states as they govern men. Later political realists, from Machiavelli to Hobbes, take him as their model of a history that can teach politics.
In the Conversation
6 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Politics
War and Peace
War is inevitable because power, fear, and self-interest govern relations between states.
Constitution
Constitutional government is a fragile achievement, sustained not by written forms alone but by the civic spirit of the people living under it.
Aristocracy
History tests what theory promises; Thucydides' account of the oligarchic coups at Athens shows aristocratic claims repeatedly dissolving into factional seizure of power.