1) His Biography and Main Works:
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 B.C.), one of the greatest Greek historians, recorded roughly 30 years of conflict and hostility between Athens and Sparta. His “History of the Peloponnesian War” is a classic text of the historical genre because it set a benchmark for scope, clarity, and accuracy. Thucydides wrote about his own time, in contrast to Herodotus, who wrote the other great work of ancient Greek history. He relied on both eyewitness accounts and his personal military career as a general. The questions he addressed, “What drives nations to go to war?” were timeless even as they were detailed. How can politics affect a society—for better or worse? What qualifies as a great democracy or a great leader?
With the exception of the few biographical references in his masterpiece, Thucydides’ life is little known. His family originated from Thrace in north-eastern Greece, where Thucydides possessed gold mines that probably provided the funding for his historical writings. His father’s name was Olorus. He was in Athens during the epidemic in about 430 B.C., a year after the war started, and he was born in the Athens suburb of Halimos.
He was appointed command of a fleet in 424 but afterwards banished for not arriving in Amphipolis in time to stop the Spartans from capturing it. “It was…my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis,” the author wrote of his exile. Being present with both parties [Athens and Sparta], and more particularly with the Peloponnesians due to my exile, I had leisure to watch matters more attentively, he further wrote.
He worked on his history during his 20 years in exile, gathering data, writing, and revising. Thucydides’ estimated birthdate (about 460) is dependent on how old he was when he joined the military. Thucydides most certainly passed away prior to Athens’ ultimate capitulation in 404 because his history makes no mention of events that occurred after 411.
2) History of the Peloponnesian War:
The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta is the subject of Thucydides’ opening lines, which state that he began writing about it from the moment it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war and more deserving of record than any that had preceded it. Athens was a powerful force at the time, a large sea power with a democratic political structure and forward-thinking leadership. Sparta was most effective as a land force and was situated on the Peloponnese, mainland Greece’s southern peninsula. Its form of government encouraged strict militarism and loyalty to custom. According to Thucydides, the Spartans’ initial, preventative attack on Athens in 430 was motivated by their fear of the city-state.
Annual Athenian naval raids matched Spartan land invasions during the first ten years of the war. The Athenians’ attempt to reclaim Amphipolis in 422 under the leadership of Cleon failed. The fight resulted in the deaths of both Cleon and the Spartan general Brasidas, forcing the war-weary parties to conclude a truce. After a tense peace, Athens mounted a seaborne campaign against Syracuse, a distant Sicilian ally of Sparta, six years later. The result was terrible, and the combined Sicilian and Spartan forces drove the Athenians off the island in 413. Their army, fleet, and everything else were destroyed, according to Thucydides, and only a small number of people made it back to their homes.
The “History of the Peloponnesian Wars” concludes with an unfinished depiction of uprisings, revolutions, and Spartan victories that ends mid-sentence. Athens rallied in the final years of the war, winning a number of engagements, only to have the Spartans under Lysander destroy the last of its fleet at Aegospotami. In 404, Athens gave up to Sparta.
3) Thucydides Trap:
One hundred years later, World War I serves as a sombre reminder of human stupidity. When we declare that war is “inconceivable,” are we referring to what is actually possible or just what our finite imaginations are able to comprehend? Few people in 1914 could have predicted the level of carnage that required a new category: world war. Four years after the war began, Europe was in ruins: the Kaiser was gone, the Austro-Hungarian empire had fallen, the Bolsheviks had ousted the Russian emperor, France had been bleeding for a generation, and England had lost its youth and riches. A millennium in which Europe had served as the global political hub came to an abrupt end.
Whether China and the United States can escape Thucydides’ trap is the main question about the world order for this generation. The analogy of the Greek historian serves to remind us of the risks involved when a rising power challenges a dominant one, as Athens did with Sparta in ancient Greece or Germany did with Britain a century ago. A team of Graham Allison’s, at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, has found after studying the historical record that the majority of such contests have ended poorly, frequently for both sides. Over the previous 500 years, war has occurred in 12 of 16 situations. When the parties avoided going to war, both the challenger and the challenged had to make significant, painful changes in their attitudes and behaviour.
The future course of events suggests that war between the United States and China is not only feasible, but also significantly more likely than is currently thought. Indeed, based on the past, conflict is more probable than not. Additionally, present misconceptions and underestimations of the risks associated with the U.S.-China relationship have a significant negative impact on those risks. Thucydides’s Trap poses the danger that regular operations, rather than just an unanticipated, rare occurrence, could result in widespread strife. Standard crises that would normally be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can start a chain reaction that leads to outcomes that none of the participants would have preferred if a rising power were to succeed a dominant power.
The Athenian historian Thucydides made a profound observation more than 2,400 years ago: “It was the emergence of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.” Others named a wide range of Peloponnesian War causes as contributory factors. But Thucydides got right to the point, emphasising the unavoidable structural tension brought on by a sudden shift in the relative strength of two adversaries. The rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of importance, and demand for more influence, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and resolve to protect the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other, are two fundamental drivers of this dynamic that Thucydides recognised.
In addition to focusing on the leaders of Athens and Sparta’s perceptions of change and how they prompted each to forge stronger alliances with other nations in an effort to balance the other, Thucydides also documented objective shifts in relative power. However, entanglement is bidirectional. George Washington famously warned America to avoid “entangling alliances” for this reason. Athens had little alternative but to support its friend when fighting broke out between the second-tier city-states of Corinth and Corcyra (now Corfu). Sparta deemed it imperative to defend Corinth. Then came the Peloponnesian War. Sparta was the nominal winner when it was over 30 years later. However, both were in ruins, leaving Greece open to invasion by the Persians.
5) His Legacy:
It took Thucydides several generations to achieve his current unchallenged status as one of history’s finest writers. He is never mentioned by Aristotle, who lived a few decades later and wrote about the same time period. He was hailed as a renowned historian by writers like Cicero by the first century B.C. The work was copied multiple times throughout the ensuing decades, ensuring its survival into the dark ages. Following the Renaissance, political thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes praised Thucydides for his realistic understanding of politics and warfare and his clear vision