Athens School

Kagan, Donald. (2009).
Thucydides: The Reinvention of History
Viking, 257 pages, $26.95





Only because of Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War"—with his radical claims of exercising a new rationality and, most grandiloquently, of writing a "thing for all time"—did a typically messy military contest based on money, influence, bloody-mindedness and happenstance become interpreted and reinterpreted as though it were a religious revelation. Communists and anticommunists, leftists and neocons, anti-imperialists and empire builders have all fought to recruit the great Athenian as their ally.

Donald Kagan, a veteran Yale professor of classics and ancient history, has himself taken part in these arguments for almost a half-century. His own four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War is a classic of modern scholarship. Now, with "Thucydides: The Reinvention of History," Mr. Kagan has produced what reads like the last word on the man, a nuanced and subtle account of a subject that has so often been treated in a spirit of high partisanship.

Mr. Kagan has no time for worshiping Thucydides' eternal rational purity, as students were once so rigorously taught to do. But he is not the first skeptic on this front: Scholars have insisted for the past quarter-century—most recently in Simon Hornblower's magisterial three-volume "A Commentary on Thucydides," completed earlier this year—that Thucydides was a master of drama as much as of science, a master of stadium rhetoric as much as of empirical reporting. It is dangerous to see him, as Mr. Kagan puts it, as "a disembodied mind." He was "a passionate individual" writing about "the greatness of his city and its destruction."

Mr. Kagan finishes up with an observation that foreign-policy debaters would do well to keep in mind: "A hegemonic state may gain power by having allies useful in war, but reliance on those states may compel the hegemonic power to go to war against its own interests." The disastrous misadventure of the Athenians in Sicily began, Mr. Kagan writes, with "the entreaties of their small, far-off allies." As he notes, it was Bismarck who once said that in a world of competing alliances it is essential "to be the rider, not the horse."

Thucydides' "History," says Mr. Kagan, shows "how difficult an assignment" the rider faces. His own book is a valuable guide to the ways in which the Peloponnesian War can—and cannot—be used to guide modern thinking.