By Dominic Green

In 431 B.C., Athens and Sparta went to war. Nearly 50 years earlier, in 480 B.C., the two cities had united to lead the Hellenic alliance that repelled a Persian invasion. In the mostly peaceful decades that followed, Athens became a wealthy empire. But old rivalries resumed, dividing the Greeks between the Athenian-ruled Delian League and the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. Around 436 B.C., a "quarrel in a faraway county" of which neither Athenians nor Spartans knew much broke out into civil war in the colony of Epidamnus. Corinth, a Spartan ally, intervened. Corcyra, which had founded Epidamnus, appealed to Athens. The 27-year conflagration that followed would consume the Greek world.

A highborn Athenian named Thucydides recognized at once that a transformative conflict was beginning. As the British scholar Robin Waterfield puts it in his clear and considered translation of "The Peloponnesian War," Thucydides reports that he "started writing as soon as hostilities began, since he anticipated not just a major conflict, but one that would be more significant than any that had gone before." The third-person voice, and his analytical distance, belie Thucydides' first-person experience. He caught the plague when it ravaged Athens between 430 and 426 B.C. He was elected a general in the Athenian army. He campaigned against the Spartan alliance in northern Greece. In 424 B.C., he was exiled for 20 years after failing to block its advance -- a humiliation that obliged him to reappear in his own narrative.

Athens was a commercial democracy enriched by a maritime empire. Sparta was an agrarian oligarchy whose muscle was its hoplite horde. Athens beat Sparta at sea, Sparta ravaged Athenian land; then each was forced to fight on the other's turf. A decade of destruction passed before the truce of 421 B.C. This broke down by degrees, critically in the Sicilian Expedition of 415-413 B.C., when Athens tried and failed to annex Syracuse, a Spartan ally. This disaster invited Persia to initiate the war's third and final phase by tipping the balance on Sparta's behalf. Thucydides stops midsentence in 411 B.C. Xenophon's "Hellenica" carries the story to 404 B.C., when Athens surrendered and the Spartan general Lysander's men demolished its Long Walls "to the music of flute-girls."

The Greek historical method polarizes, like Athenian democracy and Spartan oligarchy, into the images of Herodotus (ca. 485-425 B.C.) and Thucydides (ca. 460-400 B.C.). Herodotus was an anthropological Autolycus, a spinner of yarns from Halicarnassus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor. Thucydides was a political analyst from Athens's upper crust, an insider breaking down the Greeks' drama in search of the "truest cause" of events. Their approaches, wrote the 19th-century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, differ as "a portrait differs from the representation of an imaginary scene." Yet Herodotus' portrait-rich "Histories" seek to explain the "cause of the hostilities" between the Greeks and Persians, and Thucydides' wonkish narrative includes Herodotean urges to preserve the "traces of human events" and the "fame" of the combatants.

Thucydides' mastery of perspective allows him to populate his landscapes with the dilemmas of democratic politics -- the battlefield where psychology meets strategy. For Thucydides, rhetorical "complaints and contentions" alone cannot explain the disaster. The true cause was "the growth of Athenian power." This alarmed the Spartans and "made them feel that they had to go to war." Mr. Waterfield dissents from the customary translation of the verb anagkazai ("made them feel") into the adjective "inevitable," with its double burden of ancient fate and modern determinism. The political scientist Graham Allison calls Sparta's strategic bind the "Thucydides trap": Mr. Waterfield's word choice emphasizes that the Spartans didn't have to step into it.

"I read and reread Thucydides," the British novelist and politician John Buchan recalled in his memoir of World War I, "for he also had lived among crumbling institutions." Buchan realized that "an old regime was passing away," and that the "vanishing" of one world and the arrival of another was "apt to crush those who had to meet it." Thucydides mapped how individual and group psychology shaped what Buchan called war's "apocalyptic splendor of design," and how its savage action can be set in motion by democracy's susceptibility to the power of words and charisma.

To Thucydides, Athenian democracy failed first to contain Sparta and then to contain its own weaknesses of faction and greed. While Herodotus suggests the workings of fate in the earlier Persian Wars by reporting multiple opinions, Thucydides, likely influenced by Sophist philosophy, stages Athens's inner conflict during the Peloponnesian War through imaginary dialogues. He wrote what he thought "each speaker is most likely to have needed to say" within "the overall purport of the speech as actually delivered." His speakers seem to have needed to say what he would have said, had he been in their sandals.

"I'm more afraid of our own mistakes than I am of the enemy's plans," Pericles tells the Athenian assembly as he makes the case for war. Pericles is Thucydides' hero. Tempering democratic rhetoric with aristocratic restraint, he rises above the divisions of debate to deliver the funeral oration when Athens buries its dead sons in the war's first winter. It "isn't easy to find the right balance in a speech when even people's grasp of the truth is insecure," he admits. His exhortation justifies democracy (politics "organized in the interest not of the few but of the many") by citing the republican virtues of patriotism, bravery and "true mental courage."

After Pericles' death from plague in 429 B.C., rhetorical and political authority is seized by Cleon, an upstart demagogue who is the "most violent person in Athens" and "the most persuasive." Athens is ruled by "the desire for political supremacy" and "the whims of the masses." The war comes to be defined by the Spartan general Brasidas, who goes on to wrong-foot Thucydides in 424 B.C., and Cleon, who may have engineered Thucydides' exile. The brutalities intensify. The Peace of Nicias in 421 B.C. merely allows the parties to regroup. If Pericles' funeral oration is a landmark of democratic virtue, the amoral facts of pure force become explicit in the "Melian dialogue" following the Athenian conquest of the neutral island of Melos in 415 B.C.: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

This, the near-canonical translation, is from Richard Crawley's 1874 edition. Robert Strassler's "Landmark Thucydides" of 1996, which improves on Crawley where it can, repeats these words verbatim. Mr. Waterfield goes for "the strong do what they can and the weak concede them that right." Many translators have approached Thucydides since Thomas Hobbes made the first direct translation into English in 1628. Mr. Waterfield inclines toward Hobbes's "they that have odds of power exact as much as they can, and the weak yield to such conditions as they can get." To the victor, the rights of political morality, and the wrongs.

After the Melians fail to talk themselves out of their weakness, the Athenian assembly talk themselves into the Sicilian Expedition. Nicias, the peacemaker of 421 B.C., first opposes raiding Sicily because it would leave Athens undefended. When his "political enemy," the glib and popular Alcibiades, sways the assembly, Nicias replies that this means sending both a fleet and "large numbers of land forces." But the assembly, "consumed by lust" for loot and glory, votes to give the generals everything they want. Alcibiades leads Athens to disaster. Imperial overreach comes home: financial crisis, a Spartan fleet off the coast of Attica and an oligarchic coup in Athens. A democratic restoration cannot restore Athens's squandered power or forestall its eventual surrender.

The "Landmark Thucydides" remains the best modern English version for new recruits. It has more maps and footnotes than Mr. Waterfield's edition, as well as Victor Davis Hanson's superb introduction. But Mr. Waterfield advances a sound and coherent interpretation of Thucydides' complex style and ideas. In particular, he sharpens our image of the Hobbesian Thucydides, who founded the realist theory of international relations. If you find yourself in Thucydidean exile, start with the "Landmark." Frame it with Donald Kagan's history of the war in its original four volumes or, if you must dash to Sicily, its one-volume condensation. Then compare major scenes in the "Landmark" with this edition. The wise read what they can.

--Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 21, 2025 11:55 ET (16:55 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.