“History” is itself a fairly recent phenomenon, historically speaking. As far as we can tell, all the preliterate civilizations, and a lot of the literate ones, lived in what amounted to an endless now. I find [Julian] Jaynes’s ideas [in his book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind] very helpful in this regard, but we don’t need him for this, because whatever the explanation, it’s an obvious fact of historiography (“the history of History”; the study of the writing of History). Herodotus and Thucydides were more or less contemporaries, but what a difference in their work! Herodotus’s “history” was a collection of anecdotes; Thucydides focused on people and their motivations; but both of them wrote in the 400s BC — that is, 2500 years ago.
We are closer in time to them than they were to the men who built the Pyramids — by a long shot — and think about that for a second. That’s the vast scope of merely literate human history. Human settlement itself goes back at least another 6,000 years before that, and probably a lot longer.
So far as we can tell, well into historical time men had no real conception of “the past”. Even those men who had recently died weren’t really gone, and again I find Jaynes useful here, but he’s not necessary; it’s obvious by funeral customs alone. They had a basic notion of change, but it was by definition cyclical — the sun rises and sets, the moon goes through its phases, the stars move, the seasons change, but always in an ordered procession. What once was will always return; what is will pass away, but always to return again.
Linear time — the sense of time as a stream, rather than a cycle; the idea that the “past” forecloses possibilities that will never return — only shows up comparatively late in literate history. Hesiod wrote somewhere between 750 and 650 BC; his was the first work to describe a Golden Age as something that might’ve actually existed (as opposed to the Flood narratives of the ancient Middle East).
Note that this is not yet History — that would have to wait another 300 years or so. Whereas a Thucydides could say, with every freshman that has ever taken a history class, that “We study the past so that we don’t make the same mistakes”, that would’ve been meaningless to Hesiod — we can’t imitate the men of the Golden Age, because they were a different species of man.
Note also that Thucydides could say “Don’t make the mistakes of the past” because “the past” he was describing was “the past” of currently living men — he was himself a participant in the events he was describing “historically”.
The notion that the Golden Age could return, or a new era begin, within the lifetime of a living man is newer still. That’s the eschaton proper, and for our purposes it’s explicitly Christian — that is, it’s at most 2000 years old. Christ explicitly promised that some of the men in the crowd at his execution would live to see the end of the world (hence the fun medieval tradition of the Wandering Jew). And since that didn’t happen, you get the old-school, capital-G Gnostics, who interpreted that failure to mean that it was up to us to bring about our own salvation via secret knowledge …
… or, in Europe starting about 1000 AD, you get the notion that it’s up to us to somehow force Jesus to return by killing off all the sinners. I can’t recommend enough Norman Cohn’s classic study The Pursuit of the Millennium if you want the gory details. Cohn served with the American forces denazifying Europe, so he has some interesting speculations along Vogelin’s lines, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter. All we need to do is note that this was in many ways The Last Idea.
Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.
February 25, 2026
QotD: The notion of “history”
January 11, 2026
QotD: The limits of foreign policy realism
Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must”,1 with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.
If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (“states aim to survive”) and offensive realism (“states aim to maximize power”), but we needn’t get into the details.
So when someone says they are a “foreign policy realist”, assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).
The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating “states generally act this way”, with “states should generally act this way”. You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (“Russia was always likely to do this”) to the normative statement (“Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this”). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.
I should note, this sort of “normative smuggling” in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.
I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments [AND] the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ “realist” ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”2 the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.
And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.
That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (“international relations are shaped by ideology and culture”) and IR liberalism (“international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates”). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.
In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most “realists”, intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find “spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful” – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it “just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited”.
One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: “I hate, this but …” “I don’t like this, but …” “I would want to do this, but …” If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.
That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday, June 27, 2025 (On the Limits of Realism)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-06-27.
- Thuc. 5.89.
- Thuc. 5.90.
July 29, 2025
QotD: Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics – he was writing a tragedy
These concerns were not limited to the fringes, they were real. So real were they that respected geopolitical analysts like George Friedman (later of Stratfor) wrote books like [The Coming War With Japan] The argument was that an upstart like Japan would crash head first into US economic and security interests, sparking another war between the two. This conflict was inevitable because challengers will always seek the crown, and the king will always fight to maintain possession of it.
Suffice it to say that this war did not come to pass. The Japanese threat was vastly overstated, and its economy has been in stagnation-mode for decades now (even though living standards remain very high in relative terms). What may seem inevitable need not be.
The next several years will see marked increase in tension between the USA and China, as the former completes its long awaited “Pivot to East Asia”. So anxious are the Americans to pivot that they have been threatening to “walk away” from Ukraine if they cannot hammer down a peace deal in the very near future. This indicates just how serious a threat they view China’s ascent to be to its economic and security interests. If they are willing to sacrifice more in Ukraine than originally intended, the implication is that China’s rise is a grave concern, and that a clash between the two looks very likely … some would argue that it is inevitable, appealing to a relatively new IR concept called the “Thucydides Trap“.
Andrew Latham explains the concept to us, arguing that Thucydides is misunderstood, making conflict between rising powers and hegemons not necessarily inevitable:
The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.
Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book Destined for War — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”
Distortion:
At first glance, this provides a compelling and conveniently packaged analogy: Rising powers provoke anxiety in established ones, leading to conflict. In today’s context, the implication seems clear – China’s rise is bound to provoke a collision with the United States, just as Athens once did with Sparta.
But this framing risks flattening the complexity of Thucydides’ work and distorting its deeper philosophical message. Thucydides wasn’t articulating a deterministic law of geopolitics. He was writing a tragedy.
This essay might be an exercise in historical sperging, but I think it has value:
Thucydides fought in the Peloponnesian War on the Athenian side. His world was steeped in the sensibilities of Greek tragedy, and his historical narrative carries that imprint throughout. His work is not a treatise on structural inevitability but an exploration of how human frailty, political misjudgment and moral decay can combine to unleash catastrophe.
That tragic sensibility matters. Where modern analysts often search for predictive patterns and system-level explanations, Thucydides drew attention to the role of choice, perception and emotion.
His history is filled with the corrosive effects of fear, the seductions of ambition, the failures of leadership and the tragic unraveling of judgment. This is a study in hubris and nemesis, not structural determinism.
Much of this is lost when the phrase “Thucydides Trap” is elevated into a kind of quasi-law of international politics. It becomes shorthand for inevitability: power rises, fear responds, war follows.
Therefore, more of a psychological study of characters rather than structural determinism.
Giving credit to Allison:
Even Allison, to his credit, never claimed the “trap” was inescapable. His core argument was that war is likely but not inevitable when a rising power challenges a dominant one. In fact, much of Allison’s writing serves as a warning to break from the pattern, not to resign oneself to it.
Misuse:
In that sense, the “Thucydides Trap” has been misused by commentators and policymakers alike. Some treat it as confirmation that war is baked into the structure of power transitions — an excuse to raise defense budgets or to talk tough with Beijing — when in fact, it ought to provoke reflection and restraint.
To read Thucydides carefully is to see that the Peloponnesian War was not solely about a shifting balance of power. It was also about pride, misjudgment and the failure to lead wisely.
Consider his famous observation, “Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved”. This isn’t a structural insight — it’s a human one. It’s aimed squarely at those who mistake impulse for strategy and swagger for strength.
Or take his chilling formulation, “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must”. That’s not an endorsement of realpolitik. It’s a tragic lament on what happens when power becomes unaccountable and justice is cast aside.
and
In today’s context, invoking the Thucydides Trap as a justification for confrontation with China may do more harm than good. It reinforces the notion that conflict is already on the rails and cannot be stopped.
But if there is a lesson in The History of the Peloponnesian War, it is not that war is inevitable but that it becomes likely when the space for prudence and reflection collapses under the weight of fear and pride.
Thucydides offers not a theory of international politics but a warning — an admonition to leaders who, gripped by their own narratives, drive their nations over a cliff.
Latham does have a point, but events have a momentum all their own, and they are often hard to stop. Inevitabilities do exist, such as Israel and Hezbollah entering into conflict with one another in 2022 after their 2006 war saw the latter come out with a tactical victory. Barring a black swan event, the USA and China are headed for a collision. The question is: in what form?
Niccolo Soldo, “Saturday Commentary and Review #188 (Easter Monday Edition)”, Fisted by Foucault, 2025-04-21.
January 13, 2025
The “Thucydides Trap”
At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock provides a handy explanation of the term “the Thucydides Trap”:
In the world of international relations, few concepts have captured as much attention — and sparked as much debate — as the “Thucydides Trap”. Brought to prominence by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, the term suggests that conflict is almost inevitable when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, a dynamic often invoked to frame the strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Lauded as a National Bestseller and praised by figures like Henry Kissinger and Joe Biden, Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? has become a staple of policy discussions and academic syllabi. Yet beneath the widespread acclaim lies a deeply flawed analysis, one that risks oversimplifying history and perpetuating a fatalistic narrative that could shape policy in dangerous ways. Far from an inescapable destiny, the lessons of history and the nuances of modern geopolitics suggest that the so-called “trap” may be more myth than inevitability.
The term “Thucydides Trap” is derived from a passage in the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ work History of the Peloponnesian War, where he explained the causes of the conflict between Athens (the rising power) and Sparta (the ruling power) in the 4th century BC. Thucydides famously wrote
It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.
Allison defines the “Thucydides Trap” as “the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one”.1 More articles by Allison using this term previously appeared in Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. The book, published in 2017, was a huge hit, being named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and Financial Times while also receiving widespread bipartisan acclaim from current and past policymakers. Historian Niall Ferguson described it as a “must-read in Washington and Beijing”.2 Senator Sam Nunn wrote, “If any book can stop a World War, it is this one”.3 A brief search on Google Scholar reveals the term “Thucydides Trap” has been cited or used nearly 19,000 times. In 2015, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull even publicly urged President Xi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to avoid “falling into the Thucydides Trap”.4 One analyst observed that the term had become the “new cachet as a sage of U.S.-China relations”.5 The term has become so prominent that it is almost guaranteed to appear in any introductory international politics course when discussing U.S.-China relations.
Allison wrote in his essay “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” in The Atlantic published in 2015, “On the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment” forewarning, “judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not”.6 A straightforward analysis of the 16 cases in the book and previous essays might indicate that, based on historical precedent, there is approximately a 75 percent likelihood of the United States and China engaging in war within the next several decades. Adding the additional cases from the Thucydides Trap Website would still leave a 66 percent chance, more likely than not, that two nuclear-armed superpowers will go to war with one another, a horrifying and unprecedented proposition.7
With such alarm, it’s no surprise that the concept gained such widespread attention. The term is simple to understand and in under 300 pages, Allison delivers a sweeping historical narrative, drawing striking parallels between events from ancient Greece to the present day.8 International Relations as a field often struggles to break through in the public discourse, but Destined for War broke through, making a broad impact on academic and popular discourse.
1. Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 29.
2. Ibid., iii.
3. Ibid., vi.
4. Quoted by Alan Greeley Misenheimer, Thucydides’ Other “Traps”: The United States, China, and the Prospect of “Inevitable” War (Washington: National Defense University, 2019), 8.
5. Misenheiemer, 1.
6. “Thucydides’s Trap Case File” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, accessed December 31, 2024
7. Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015.
8. Misenheimer details what Thucydides actually said about the origins of the Peloponnesian War, 10-17.
October 23, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s military reputation in the Peloponnesian War
That reputation was already deeply held even by the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, such that Thucydides notes that “Nothing that happened in the war so shocked the Greeks so much as” the surrender of 120 Spartiates at Pylos/Sphacteria, instead of dying with their weapons in their hands (Thuc. 4.40.1). The Athenians had, in the event, managed to trap a force of Spartans – Spartiates and other Laconians – on an island and harassed them with arrow fire from a distance, never closing with them, until the Spartans surrendered. This is, I must stress, in the context of a war that obliterated entire poleis, shredded the diplomatic fabric of Greece and was by far the largest war between Greeks that any of them knew of. But this, the shattering – if just for a moment – of the Spartan reputation, that was what shocked people. The image of Sparta – whatever the reality – was that deeply set.
Thucydides, amusingly, relates that some Greeks were so shocked that they couldn’t believe it, and one ally of Athens inquired to the Spartiates – then held as captives in Athens – if perhaps what had happened was that all of the brave men (you know, the real Spartiates) had been felled by the arrows, to which the Spartans responded, “an arrow would be worth a great deal if it could pick out noble and good men from the rest, in allusion to the fact that the killed were those whom the stones and the arrows happened to hit” (Thuc. 4.40.2).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
August 11, 2022
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
August 22, 2020
History-Makers: Thucydides
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 21 Aug 2020Start your free trial at http://squarespace.com/overlysarcastic and use code
OVERLYSARCASTICto get 10% off your first purchase.Ahh ancient Greece, it has been entirely too long. Today we’ll take a look at the foundational work of my entire career path — Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, a book that almost single-handedly set the standard for how we engage in historical inquiry. Also it has the added benefit of being about Ancient Greece so win-win!
SOURCES & Further Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Histories by Herodotus, Hellenica by Xenophon, and the 4 straight years I spent studying this in university — Boy do I love doing a video about a topic I’m specifically trained in.
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August 20, 2017
Thucydides again
David Warren found a dip into Thucydides was at least as informative on political issues today as any current “reporting”:
What a week it has been, at least in the yellow world of journalism and politics. I have had nothing new to say on anything — at least I hope to have said nothing new, for my intention in commenting on passing events is simply to repeat the old gnomes which they freshly illustrate. Thucydides, into whose works I privately dipped last Tuesday, was as up-to-date as anything I found “breaking” on the Internet.
Consider, for instance, the career of the Athenian general (then Spartan, then Persian, then Athenian again), Alcibiades — more sinned against than sinning, and more sinning than sinned against, by turns. A large man, persistently underridden by the mean and small; a hero and no saint. Loved to the point of worship by the crowds; hated by the umbrous, to the point of madness; and always “in the news.”
A polarizing figure, as we’d say today; who, for his impieties, was finally run down by a mob. They set fire to the cottage where he’d retired with his mistress. (The Spartans commissioned the mob by one account; the young lady’s parents by another.) Boldly emerging from the flames to confront the whole tribe of his adversaries, he died in a hail of arrows. The gods let only Stalin die in his sleep. (Or so we thought until we got more information.)
November 22, 2014
What Thucydides can teach us about fighting ebola
In The Diplomat, James R. Holmes says that we can learn a lot about fighting infectious diseases like ebola by reading what Thucidides wrote about the plague that struck Athens during the opening stages of the Peloponnesian War:
Two panelists from our new partner institution, a pair of Africa hands, offered some striking reflections on the fight against Ebola.
Their presentations put in me in the mind of … classical Greece. Why? Mainly because of Thucydides. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War isn’t just a (partly) eyewitness account of a bloodletting from antiquity; it’s the Good Book of politics and strategy. Undergraduates at Georgia used to look skeptical when I told them they could learn ninety percent of what they needed to know about bareknuckles competition from Thucydides. The remainder? Technology, tactics, and other ephemera. Thucydides remains a go-to source on the human factor in diplomacy and warfare.
But I digress. Ancient Greece suffered its own Ebola outbreak, a mysterious plague that struck Athens oversea during the early stages of the conflict. And the malady struck, perchance, at precisely the worst moment for Athens, after “first citizen” Pericles had arranged for the entire populace of Attica, the Athenian hinterland, to withdraw within the city walls. The idea was to hold the fearsome Spartan infantry at bay with fixed fortifications while the Athenian navy raided around the perimeter of the Spartan alliance.
[…]
That’s where the parallel between then and now becomes poignant. Thucydides notes, for example, that doctors died “most thickly” from the plague. The Brown presenters noted that, likewise, public-health workers in Africa — doctors, nurses, stretcher-bearers — are among the few to deliberately make close contact with the stricken. Relief teams, consequently, take extravagant precautions to quarantine the disease within makeshift facilities while shielding themselves from contagion. Sometimes these measures fail.
Now as in ancient Greece, furthermore, the prospect of disease and death deters some would-be healers altogether from succoring the afflicted. Selflessness has limits. Some understandably remain aloof — today as in Athens of yesteryear.
Teams assigned to bury the slain also find themselves in dire peril. Perversely, the dead from Ebola are more contagious than living hosts. That makes disposing of bodies in sanitary fashion a top priority. As the plague ravaged Athens, similarly, corpses piled up in the streets. No one would perform funeral rites — even in this deeply religious society. Classicist Victor Davis Hanson ascribes some of Athens’ barbarous practices late in the war — such as cutting off the hands of captured enemy seamen to keep them from returning to war — in part to the plague’s debasing impact on morals, ethics, and religion.
