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If there is one consistent tradition in the reception of Thucydides, it is this: everyone gets him wrong, and with great confidence. From bloodthirsty realists quoting him like scripture, to Enlightenment thinkers squeezing him into a rationalist corset, to modern political scientists running regression analyses on the Melian Dialogue like it’s a NATO briefing, Thucydides has been transformed into everything except what he actually was: a brooding, ironic, tragic moralist in the garb of a historian, who seemed to hate almost everyone, including himself.
To be fair, Thucydides wanted to be misunderstood. His prose is weaponized ambiguity. His narrative method is so stripped down it’s almost violent, and he takes perverse delight in presenting political horrors with a straight face, like a war-crimes court stenographer moonlighting as a playwright. His famed objectivity is really just emotional containment. And that objectivity? It’s the deadpan irony of a man who watched civilization implode in real time and decided the best response was to invent modern history as literature, and then lace it with quiet despair.
And yet, for two thousand years, thinkers across epochs have read Thucydides as if he were their drinking buddy. Machiavelli thought he was a kindred schemer. Hobbes, in his translation, converted Thucydides into a proto-Leviathan apologist, helpfully polishing out the ironies and ambiguities into proper absolutism. Realists like Morgenthau and Kissinger turned the History of the Peloponnesian War into a kind of “Realpolitik for Dummies,” quoting Pericles as if he were Churchill on steroids. All of them missed the fact that Thucydides likely despised Pericles, whose masterstroke was getting everyone killed more efficiently, with great speeches.
Enter Paul Shorey, whose 1893 essay, On the Implicit Ethics and Psychology of Thucydides, tries valiantly to unflatten the man. Shorey’s project is almost comically uphill: reminding a world addicted to blunt “lessons of history” that Thucydides was not in the business of providing moral clarity, let alone endorsement. Rather, Shorey argues that Thucydides has an implicit ethic, a grim psychological diagnosis of humanity, and a tragic view of politics that would make even Sophocles ask him to lighten up.
According to Shorey, the brilliance of Thucydides lies in how he resists explicit judgment while still communicating profound moral horror. He does not preach; he arranges. He doesn’t editorialize; he curates nightmares. The speeches in his history aren’t reliable narrations, they’re ventriloquized performance art, designed to show how rhetoric becomes unmoored from reality. The result is a form of tragic history, one that isn’t about learning from the past but about confronting the eternal, often self-destructive patterns of human behavior.
And here is the central misunderstanding: generations of readers have treated Thucydides as a mirror that reflects their politics. In truth, he is a hall of mirrors that distorts everything, and not for fun, but because that’s how power, fear, and ambition work. The famous line from the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” has been quoted as gospel by imperialists and realists alike, ignoring the obvious: the Athenians lose. Their ruthless logic destroys them. Their empire collapses into chaos, hubris, and civil war. If this is a lesson in power, it’s a deeply suicidal one.
But never let nuance get in the way of a good war policy memo.
Modern IR theory loves Thucydides because he seems to offer a scientific law of human conflict: fear, honor, and interest. But this trilogy isn’t a model; it’s a pathology. It’s like citing Freud to justify being a narcissist. Shorey rightly points out that Thucydides offers not a celebration of these forces but a grim autopsy. His history is a report from the morgue of civilization. Every speech, every plague, every atrocity drips with a subtle but undeniable indictment: this is what happens when we mistake eloquence for wisdom, power for justice, calculation for intelligence.
And then there’s Thucydides the psychologist. His account of stasis, the breakdown of civil society during civil war, is one of the most harrowing in classical literature. People change the meaning of words. Cowardice becomes prudence; recklessness becomes bravery. It’s Orwell, 2,000 years ahead of schedule. But instead of learning from this, generations of statesmen read this and think: “Ah, how useful!”
Shorey insists that this is not accidental. Thucydides was not a neutral observer but a tragic analyst of moral collapse. His ethics are implicit because they have to be. He writes in a time when moral language has become unusable, polluted by the very forces he documents. In that context, irony is not just a style, it’s a necessity. A way to speak truth in a world where truth has been evacuated of meaning.
So why the centuries of misreadings? The short answer: because Thucydides is too smart for us. The long answer: because we need him to say what we want to hear. We need him to offer a “lesson of history” so we can justify what we already plan to do. We conscript him into the ranks of our ideology and ignore the fact that he wrote about people doing precisely that, and destroying themselves in the process.
Reading Thucydides straight is like watching Dr. Strangelove and thinking it’s a guide to nuclear policy.
In the end, the tragedy of Thucydides is not just the tragedy in Thucydides. It’s what we’ve done to him. A thinker who gave us one of the most complex portraits of human folly, written in prose so dense it practically bleeds granite, has been turned into a bullet-point list for defense contractors. And yet, maybe that’s his final, fatal joke: that even his work would be misused by the very forces he so tragically dissected. Thucydides saw it coming. He always did.
