Thucydides on the Outbreak of War

This project illuminates Thucydides’ political thought through a novel interpretation of the first book of the History of the Peloponnesian War. It explores how Thucydides reveals the human causes of war through the outbreak of a particular war, the Peloponnesian war. The primary claim is that Thucydides intends the breakdown of the Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and the Peloponnesians, which inaugurates the great Peloponnesian war, to be understood by grasping how the characters of the Athenian and Spartan regimes contribute to the outbreak of the war and, crucially, how Athens and Sparta differently express human nature. In broad outline, the History’s first book reveals how the regime characters of Athens and Sparta inform their respective foreign policies, but also how the interaction between the two cities—informed by the distinctive necessities pressing upon them—causes the Hellenic status quo to tremble and fall. Throughout the first book, while never obscuring the specific events triggering war, Thucydides progressively develops and expands his original statement that it was Spartan fear of Athenian power that compelled the fighting. The study argues that necessity (or compulsion) is the bright thread that Thucydides uses to guide his reader through the episodes of the first book, from the immediate causes of the Peloponnesian war to the human causes of war, from the particular events to the History’s universal themes.Ph