In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides includes a small but revealing note on methodology (1.21–22),¹ which concludes as follows:

“It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear: but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those who will want to have a clear understanding of what happened — and, such is the human condition, will happen again at some time in the same or a similar pattern. It was composed as a permanent legacy, not a showpiece for a single hearing.” (1.22)

Thucydides’ insistence on removing the emotion, the romance, from history, and thereby turning the study of the pasts away from the rhapsodes, who owe more fealty to the muses than to the battlefield, is understandable and appreciable, particularly because it gives us the beginning of the end for Ancient Greece. However, I have written about that in the past, and consequently will not attend to it here.² Thucydides here seems to be stating the obvious, but there is much to commend: it is the statement of a method that we use today, as students of political philosophy, of the arts, and of the humanities in general.

Why do we study the human condition? Is it because we aim to get historical insights into how our ancestors lived? Or is it because we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes they committed, but on a much larger scale? The magnitude and scale of tragic events has kept pace with the burgeoning population of this planet, and much of the vaunted progress in the natural sciences is reoriented toward wasting more lives, instead of saving them, when it is required. Thucydides seems to proffer to his readers the observation commonly attributed to the premier despot of the nineteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte, or by any number of individuals from Thucydides onwards; it is now such a trite commonplace that it is shown to be true, a priori, requiring no further investigation but merely uttered as a statement of fact. Such sentiments can be observed even in those who claim that human nature is fungible, flexible, and ultimately fabricated, a garden variety of modern day sophistry, and that the studia humanitatis is possible even though the object of its study is not fixed, defined, and articulated at length and with rigour.

Thucydides’ insight — the main one, in any case, of his very many — is that the events of the Peloponnesian War, where:

“The phenomena in the old stories, more often told than attested, now became credible fact: earthquakes, which affected large areas with particular intensity; eclipses of the sun, occurring more frequently than in previous memory; major droughts in some parts, followed by famine; and, one of the most destructive causes of widespread death, the infectious plague. All these had their impact along with this war.” (1.23)

While nothing of the sort had happened before — Thucydides explains that even the Trojan War, much less the Persian Wars earlier in the century — had not come close, the Peloponnesian Wars were unique. Yet, there was an inescapable sense of rupture, a discontinuity that could be articulated and remembered. Thucydides knew that the value of his history lay not in the accuracy and detachment with which he recounted the events of the Peloponnesian War — though that was of central importance, too — but in his ability to discern the intricacies of human nature. Lurking in the background was the notion that the human condition is pushed to the extremes in times of crises, and a war at such a catastrophic scale — a Pyrrhic victory, one may say, for any victor — would be revelatory of the best and the worst of man, the extremes of what man can and cannot do, and consequently what may be considered virtuous and just.

Take, for example, the Melian Dialogue, where the Athenians famously argue that the Malians should submit themselves voluntarily to Athenian slavery and slaughter, for “in terms of practicality, the dominant exact what they can and the weak concede what they must” (5.89). Is this Thucydides advocating for a world where justice is only the rule of the strong over the weak? Most certainly not. It is Thucydides’ exploration of the downfall of the Athenians. The same Athenians who led the Greek world to victory against the Persians earlier in the century were reduced to their own brand of petty despotism and tyranny. Moral principles had lost their force; the world had fallen so far that justice seemed to be perverted and equated with the worst form of injustice. The Athenians had lost sight of men like Pericles, who, in the midst of a plague, had rallied the Athenians before succumbing to it himself. The Athenians who feature in the Melian dialogue are nameless, for they have lost their culture, their civilisation, and now resort to barbaric proclamations of tinpot dictatorships. There is no saving grace, no redemption, except total destruction and recreation; on this front the Spartans seem to have done a favour to the Athenians by pushing them to disgrace and defeat, thereby forcing them to discover their lost sense of identity.

Why does this matter? The rupture seemed so great, unlike anything before, that everything seemed to be either scorched earth or new ground, with nothing in the middle. This is a sentiment that I hear expressed often nowadays: that the rupture caused by COVID19 is unprecedented, that we must alter our approach, and that we must change or face eventual extinction. However, such positions are remarkably untenable: they assume that we behave differently than the characters of Thucydides’ historic text, or the interlocutors of Socrates’ dialogues, or the subjects and Individuals which Cicero addresses. The lessons we learn come from a certain time and place, but they belong to all time and every place.

Perhaps the plague, the pandemic that we now face is the most important reminder of this. It is our tendency to reduce history to a record of events of a time that we no longer inhabit, but that diminishes the value of our education and our shared membership of the human race. More importantly, it diminishes human nature to the position of being determined more or less by the ages of our existence and not to one immutable standard, which has the effect of consigning the virtues — justice, most importantly, and, courage, temperance, wisdom, being the four cardinal ones — to the garbage dump. A world in which the nature of man is not fixed is a world where there can be no immutable standard of justice, where awful things such as genocide and ethnic cleansing can find justification in the particular laws of a nation that run contrary to what is just by nature. What is just in one corner of the globe can be unjust in the other — and we run the risk of sliding into a pit of meaninglessness and despair, and ultimately empty existence, for virtue and consequently eudaimonia has been thrown out of the window. The present is meaningless without the past, in the same way that our present existences will be rendered meaningless and under the jurisdiction of the tyranny of ‘might makes right’.