this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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"We are not the first who have aspired to rule; the world has ever held that the weaker must be kept down by the stronger. And we think that we are worthy of power; and there was a time when you thought so too; but now, when you mean expediency you talk about justice. Did justice ever deter any one from taking by force whatever he could? Men who engage the natural ambition of empire deserve credit if they are in any degree more careful of justice than they need be. How moderate we are would speedily appear if others took our place"
-Thucydides (emphasis mine)
Some background for anyone who doesn’t know the context here - this is from an imaginary dialogue between the Athenians and the people of Melos, and this isn’t Thucydides himself saying this from his own perspective.
The Melians have been neutrals and do not wish to pay tribute to the Athenians like many of their other island neighbors. The Athenians say fuck you, pay me, or we kill all of you. The Melians try to reason their way out of it, but they cannot offer the Athenians anything other than an appeal to their morality. The Melians refuse to surrender. The Athenians kill all of the men and sell the women and children into slavery. End of Book V.
Earlier (13 years or so), Thucydides has Pericles remind the Athenians that “the empire you hold is a tyranny,” and warns them that it may have been wrong to take it, but it would be dangerous to let it go because obviously there are going to be a lot of people out there who would have a motive to raze Athens. What the Athenians do to Melos (and Scione, and nearly did to Mytilene) is supposed to be what’s going to happen to Athens at the end of the war, and is what the Athenians feared when they finally lost.
Instead (Thucydides doesn’t get this far), Sparta merely demolishes the Long Walls, letting Athens survive as a city - because they needed Athens, however weakened, to remain as a buffer between them and the Thebans, who were in favor of giving Athens the Melian treatment.
Thucydides is so fascinating and frustrating. His writing is great, he provides some incredible perspective, but he also invents or embellishes in ways we cannot discern fully. Particularly with Pericles. Don't we have like a half dozen actual documents from Pericles himself, several of which are just his name, much like Shakespeare? Thucydides did know the man though.
Pericles had a great reputation as an orator but he died just before the Athenians started publishing speeches (or paying other dudes to write them). We have some sayings of his in Plutarch's biography, but they're just one-liners ("Aegina is the eyesore of the Piraeus"), so all we have are invented (not to say wholly fictional) representations in Thucydides and Xenophon's Memorabilia.