Damn, He’s Good

I’m reading (and loving) Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. That war, was the true-life, twenty-seven year battle between Athens and its empire, and Sparta and her allies. Fought from 431 to 401 B.C., it truly was epic, encompassing the Greek city-states and colonies — not just in Greece, but in Asia, and Italy as well.

Though Thucydides fought as a general on the Athenian side, he consciously set out to write the definitive history of what he instinctively sensed, was a ‘world war’. He states,

“My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.”

He is considered the “father of scientific history”, and invented many of the standards of modern scholarship. He used a strict chronology, writes in an unbiased fashion, and most importantly, the ‘gods’ play no role in the cause of things. Unlike with Homer or Herodotus, things happen because of the choices that human beings make.

Similarly, when volcanoes erupt, a plague strikes, or a storm blows a ship off course, it’s just nature, not divine retribution. (Remember when Pat Robertson said the Haitian earthquake occurred because the Haitians had made a “pact with the devil”?)

Thucydides writes this,

The next summer the Peloponnesians and their allies set out to invade Attica …and went as far as the Isthmus, but numerous earthquakes occurring, turned back again without the invasion taking place. About the same time that these earthquakes were so common, the sea at Oribae, in Euboea, retiring from the then line of coast, returned in a huge wave and invaded a great part of the city, and retreated leaving some of it still under water; so what once was land is now sea; such of the inhabitants perishing as could not run up to the higher ground in time. A similar inundation also occurred at Atalanta…carrying away part of the Athenian fort and wrecking one of two ships which were drawn up on the beach. At Peparetus also the sea retreated a little, without however any inundation following; and an earthquake threw down part of the wall, the city hall, and a few other buildings. The cause, in my opinion, of this phenomenon must be sought in the earthquake. At the point where its shock has been the most violent, the sea is driven back, and suddenly recoiling with redoubled force, causes the inundation. Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen. (my emphasis)

Man, I would have loved to have met him.