It seems to many these days that the world is a jungle beholden only to one law. Since returning to office in 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump has not only made a spectacle of American power—by striking alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, bombing Iran, and even threatening the sovereignty of allies—he has also made a principle out of it. Trump described Maduro’s capture as a vindication of the “iron laws that have always determined global power.” In a similar vein, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller asserted in January that the world is “governed by force” and “governed by power” and that “these are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Observers heard in these blunt statements echoes of Thucydides, the ancient Athenian aristocrat often considered the first proponent of the cold-blooded doctrine of realism. The Peloponnesian War, his magisterial opus on Athens’ doomed decades-long conflict with Sparta in the fifth century BC, includes the famous line, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
That well-known line comes from an important section of the text known as the Melian Dialogue, in which representatives of Athens browbeat emissaries from the island of Melos. After the Athenians fail to persuade the Melians to accept unconditional surrender, they kill all the island’s men and enslave its women and children. Thucydides’s Melos passage has long been cited as proof that little governs the world beyond strength and its exercise—and as evidence that the brilliant Athenian general, historian, and philosopher himself believed that. Generations of students of international relations have been assigned these decontextualized snippets from his vast work and instructed that this was indeed Thucydides’s lesson. Today, a cottage industry of commentators now celebrate (or bemoan) what is described as a Thucydidean turn in American foreign policy. In “How Trump Won Davos,” an essay published in January, the historian Niall Ferguson explicitly invoked the Melian Dialogue to tout the triumph of Trump as a realist in the mode of Thucydides and asserted that, at Melos, “the realists won an emphatic victory.”
But that understanding of both the dialogue and its author gets his meaning fundamentally backward. Thucydides repeatedly refers to, but never endorses, the idea that the strong have the freedom to do what they want: to the contrary, a careful reading of The Peloponnesian War suggests a rather different view. Among the principal lessons to learn from Thucydides is that the ambition of the strong can lead to their own undoing. Right after Thucydides reports the fateful words of the Athenian envoys and the subsequent destruction of Melos, he describes at great length the disastrous campaign Athens pursued in Sicily—an effort that eventually led to Athenian defeat and Spartan victory. In this light, the Melian Dialogue is not proof of the great virtue of strength in international relations but an illustration of pride before the fall.
The political scientist Graham Allison famously coined the term “Thucydides trap” to refer to the dynamic inherent in The Peloponnesian War, of how the tensions between a rising power and an existing power will invariably bubble over into conflict. The real Thucydides trap, however, is different. The crucial lesson of the book is not to sketch how Athens and Sparta found themselves sleepwalking into a war that neither side wanted or understood. As Thucydides elaborately elucidates, both went into the conflict with eyes wide open. Moreover, in his view, the start of that war was hardly a trap. Thucydides supported the commencement of hostilities and the careful strategy of Pericles, the Athenian leader who rallied the public behind his demand for war with Sparta. The true catastrophe, and the real trap, occurred many years later, when Athens abandoned Pericles’s prudence and became recklessly ambitious, most grimly demonstrated by the misguided bid to conquer Sicily.
The central tragedy of The Peloponnesian War is the story of growing Athenian arrogance and hubris and its fateful consequences. Modern-day Athenians, trumpeting the virtue of strength, would do well to heed Thucydides’s warnings if they don’t want to court their own disasters.
TRUTH IN THE TALE
The Melian Dialogue indeed offers vital lessons, but only if it is understood in the context of The Peloponnesian War as the book was written. That requires familiarity not with a few selected sentences but with the content of the entire work—and with Thucydides’s brilliant, precise, and overarching method. In his estimation, the 27-year conflict (431–404 BC) between Athens and Sparta unfolded in three distinct phases: an initial ten years of direct conflict, an uneasy seven-year interregnum of constant skirmishes and jockeying for position, and then another ten years of war before Athens’s unconditional surrender. Thucydides lived long enough to see the end of the war, but not, it seems, to complete his narrative, which ends abruptly in 411.
Thucydides intuited that the Peloponnesian War would be of enormous consequence, and, with time on his hands (he was relieved of his command and exiled in 424, as punishment for a military setback under his authority), set out to record its details as “a possession for all time.” He went to heroic lengths to achieve accuracy and objectivity—qualities that can of course be strived for but never fully achieved. He had to adjudicate, at times, between competing accounts of events he did not witness and explains about the book’s many speeches that “some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”
It seems safe to say that objectivity was Thucydides’s sincere aspiration. But he inescapably had a point of view—and lessons he wished to convey. He elaborated those points not by massaging the facts but by choosing to tell the story in particular ways. As his first great English translator Thomas Hobbes put it, although Thucydides never stops “to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text,” nevertheless, “the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader.” Modern students of Thucydides share this view. As the French classicist Jacqueline de Romilly explained, Thucydides “strives so impressively for perfect scholarly objectivity,” but he is “constantly making choices” and his “intervention is most profound.”
Thucydides also puts his finger on the scale by simply withholding information. Readers must attend to the places where he opts to expand or contract the narrative. One full year of fighting is sometimes compressed into a few paragraphs, yet other events, even those of little direct strategic consequence to the course of the war, are elaborated in considerable detail. Thucydides deploys the tactic of what one scholar has called “extreme narrative deceleration” to instill greater meaning into certain events, and in so doing, subtly crafts the lessons that he wants to impart.
THE MELIAN MYSTERY
The Melian Dialogue is a dramatic example of Thucydides’s extreme narrative deceleration. Although it is incessantly quoted, its most distinct—and rarely acknowledged—characteristic is that there is absolutely no obvious reason why the author dwells on this event. In the 16th year of the war (during that unstable interregnum when Athens and Sparta were technically at peace), the Athenians returned to this modest island in the Aegean and demanded that it surrender or be obliterated. Technically a Spartan ally but not much involved in the fighting, Melos wanted to be left alone, and its representatives pleaded with the Athenians to let them remain quietly neutral.
Thucydides then stops his narrative in its tracks and follows the deliberations among a handful of Athenians and Melians. That debate takes the form of a dialogue, in which each side takes a turn making or rebutting an argument. It is the only such dialogue in the entire work and goes on for several pages, during which the Melians warn that the Athenians might regret destroying them and the Athenians insist on complete submission. The Athenians are imperious and swaggering and show little concern that any act of barbarism they commit might come back to haunt them. They urge the island’s inhabitants to surrender and be spared, surviving as vassals; the Melians, at least those in the closed-door negotiations, choose resistance. After a while (Melos turned out to be less of a pushover than imagined), the Athenians conquer the island. “The Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves.”
The episode’s denouement offers a compelling and characteristically vivid parable. But it is also not obvious at all why Thucydides gives Melos the attention that he does. The Melian campaign had no bearing whatsoever on the course and outcome of the war.
Prolonged war can undermine the dignity and integrity of societies.
Nor does Melos provide a unique example of how “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Numerous classicists have observed that this notion appears frequently in the work. Sixteen years earlier, in a speech before the Spartans, the Athenians defended their behavior by invoking it: “It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.”
The Melian Dialogue is only one example of many in Thucydides’s tome of how the world is anarchic, how there are simply no guarantees that the behavior of others will be restrained in any way, and how horrifying acts—including the annihilation of peoples—are on the table. In The Peloponnesian War, such horrors are ubiquitous, and Thucydides often pauses to dwell on them. In the fifth year of the war, when Plataea surrendered to Sparta, a discussion ensued in which the Plataeans made a compelling case for mercy. Instead, the Spartans slaughtered the men, enslaved the women, razed the city, and repopulated the territory. And not because Sparta held some particular animosity toward Plataea; rather, they did it “to please the Thebans, who were thought to be useful in the war.” The following year Thucydides describes another bloodbath, and reports he was “astonished” at the losses, and that the number of those killed “seems so out of proportion to the size of the city as to be incredible.” Other examples abound throughout the text.
Two more observations only add to the mystery of Thucydides’s motivation in reporting the Melian dialogue. To begin with, “reporting” is not quite the right word. Thucydides explains that he often imagines encounters as he expects they might have occurred, and surely this is one of those instances. Generally, he provides the identities of those who give major speeches, but the Athenian participants are unnamed, and presumably the Melians who participated in the dialogue did not survive to tell the tale. Thucydides could possibly have later received secondhand accounts of the events, but the dialogue reflects the author’s capacity to invent as much as his capacity to faithfully record.
And most vexing of all, the Athenians had done what they did on Melos before, but in that instance Thucydides barely mustered a sentence about it. Five years prior to the destruction of Melos, the Athenians had brutally suppressed Scione, a city in revolt against their rule. Thucydides notes that “Athens succeeded in reducing Scione, put the adult males to death and, making slaves of the women and children, gave the land to the Plataeans to live in.” But there was no debate in this earlier instance. The Melian dialogue was obviously very important to Thucydides, but casual readers of The Peloponnesian War may fail to understand why.
THE CORRUPTION OF ATHENS
For one, the episode reveals the persistent Thucydidean anxiety about the fragility of civilization, and how prolonged war can undermine the dignity and integrity of societies. Thucydides dwells on events such as the descent into barbarism that occurred during a civil war in 427 BC on what is now the island of Corfu, the “lawless extravagance” that took place during a plague in Athens, and details of an otherwise inconsequential frenzied rampage by the Thracians at Mycalessus: they “sacked the houses and the temples and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither youth nor age, but killing all they fell in with, one after the other, children and women, and even beasts of burden, and whatever living creatures they saw,” he wrote. “Everywhere confusion reigned and death in all its shapes; and in particular they attacked a boys’ school, the largest that there was in the place, into which the children had just gone, and massacred them all.”
The case of Melos illustrates how war had disfigured Athenian society when compared with the Mytilene affair more than a decade earlier. In that instance, Mytilene, a privileged and important ally of the Athenians, attempted a profound betrayal, reaching out to Sparta in the hope of switching sides in the war. After Athens suppressed the plot, a debate was held about how to punish the rebels. In “the fury of the moment,” the public was persuaded by the demagogue Cleon not only to execute those responsible for the uprising but also to “put to death . . . the whole adult male population of Mytilene, and to make slaves of the women and children.”
Once again, Thucydides does not offer an opinion on this decision in his own voice. Nevertheless, The Peloponnesian War makes clear that he had a visceral distaste for the exercise of indiscriminate and gratuitous violence, even though he was a general who led men into many bloody battles and all evidence suggests that he was comfortable with the use of force to advance the national interest. He tips his hand with the way he describes what happens next. The following morning, the Athenians reflected “on the horrid cruelty of a decree which condemned a whole city to the fate merited only by the guilty.” A second debate was held, and this time the majority sided with Cleon’s opponent and sent another ship to overtake the first, rescinding the order of the comprehensive massacre. With cinematic virtuosity, Thucydides describes the urgency of the crew of the second ship, who ate while they rowed and slept only in shifts.
In this context, the sack of Melos shows how Athenian society had coarsened after a dozen additional years of war. Melos had not done anything that should have incited Athens’s cataclysmic wrath. Yet because of the Melians’ desire to be left alone in neutral obscurity, they were visited with a cruel and pitiless punishment deemed too harsh to impose on Mytilene, which had attempted a much more significant betrayal. It may well be that Athens had some modest wartime quarrels with Melos, but Thucydides, again deploying the hidden hand of his narrative technique, carefully withholds those details, leaving no other explanation for Athenian conduct. Years of war had turned a once shining city on a hill into a machine of carnage.
The dialogue is less about the fate of Melos than it is about the condition of Athens, and the picture is not a pretty one. That becomes abundantly clear in the way the destruction of the island sets up what immediately follows, the ill-fated Athenian bid to take Sicily. Immediately after describing the annihilation of Melos, Thucydides continues: “The same winter the Athenians resolved to sail again to Sicily . . . if possible to conquer the island.” The Athens that operated at Melos is inseparable from the Athens that embarked on its fantastically and fatally misguided campaign to conquer the large and distant island of Sicily, the folly that would be a chief cause of its ultimate ruin. Thucydides thought the Sicilian campaign was the most important event in the war, and he devotes nearly a quarter of his magnum opus to a detailed depiction of it. One reason why the destruction of Melos (in contrast to, say, the extremely similar events in Scione) is an ideal place for extreme narrative deceleration is because it allows Thucydides to directly and explicitly link Athenian arrogance and hubris in Melos—well on display in the dialogue—with Athenian arrogance and hubris in Sicily, where that bill would come due: “They were beaten at all points altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying is, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army—everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily.”
It is reasonable to suggest that the Melians ought to have chosen surrender and survival, but in the debate they make the stronger (and more prescient) points. If the Athenians massacred those who were at their mercy, the Melians argued, a dangerous precedent might be set: “You are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.” On this point, and others, the Melians were spot on—and likely articulating a point that Thucydides wished to impart (and one that his initial readers would have immediately recognized). The classicist Hunter Rawlings has advanced the necessarily speculative but convincingly argued notion that the Melian Dialogue was intended to mirror what would have been elaborated as an “Athenian Dialogue” at the very end of the work, with the Athenians now in the shoes of the ill-fated Melians.
As Xenophon, a contemporary who picked up Thucydides’s narrative where it broke off, notes, Sparta did have a discussion with its allies at the end of the war, and many of them argued forcefully for Athens’s utter annihilation. As for the Athenians, they “feared that there was nothing that could save them from suffering the same evils that they themselves had inflicted against the citizens of smaller states,” Xenophon writes. “They had not done these things for the sake of avenging wrongs but simply to display their arrogance.” One lesson of the Melian Dialogue, then, is that the strong must think through with care how they wield their irresistible power.
In that dialogue, the Athenians, by contrast, come across as obtuse. And shocking, in historical context, is their cavalier attitude toward the divine. When the Melians suggest that the gods might look unfavorably on acts of naked barbarism, the Athenians mock those who “turn to the invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes.” Soon enough, however, in Sicily, the Athenians sing a different tune, pleading: “If any of the gods was offended at our expedition, we have already been amply punished.” The worm had surely turned.
FEET OF CLAY
It is certainly the case that in The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides illustrates how very often the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. But the Athenian general did not think that the best way for a strong state to advance its interests in world politics was to behave with unrestrained violence and ruthlessness, and, in contemporary parlance, “untie” the hands of its “warriors” and pay no heed to norms, laws, or “stupid” rules of engagement, as U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has urged.
In his famous dialogue, Thucydides quotes the Melians as warning that such unchecked brutality will backfire, leading the Athenians to incur grievous long-run political costs, even if they achieve their modest, short-term battlefield gains: “How can you avoid making enemies of all existing neutrals who shall look at our case and conclude from it that one day or another you will attack them? And what is this but to make greater the enemies that you have already, and to force others to become so who would otherwise have never thought of it?” With the structure of The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides shows that the Melians may have been vanquished on the battlefield, but they utterly routed the Athenians in the debate, leaving as their legacy enduring lessons about the limits of what brute force can accomplish.
Thucydides had a visceral distaste for indiscriminate and gratuitous violence.
The notion that unrestrained violence is in fact counterproductive is a common theme throughout the book. In reviewing the decades leading up to the war, Thucydides explains that the blood-soaked rampages of the Spartan general Pausanias were one reason that the Athenian alliance grew stronger, as “the hatred which he inspired had induced the allies to desert him . . . and to range themselves by the side of the Athenians.” A few decades later the shoe was on the other foot, as Athens, once the leader of an alliance, morphed into the ruler of an empire. Thucydides writes that at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, “men’s feelings inclined much more to the Spartans,” because of the widespread “indignation felt against Athens.” This is a point Thucydides drives home again and again, such as when he reports how Sparta sent envoys into the field to rein in one naval commander known for butchering prisoners and unleashing massacres. Such behavior, they admonished, “would turn more friends into enemies than enemies into friends.”
The Peloponnesian War should be read and reread with great care today, and not just to quote a decontextualized passage about the rise of Athenian power. Cunningly and cogently written, it remains rich with numerous insights that can help readers better understand contemporary international relations. Among its many teachings, its most important lesson is that self-defeating arrogance and hubris are perils that menace great powers.
Looking back on the first year of his second term in office, Trump stated, “I think God is very proud of the job I’ve done.” Over the long course of The Peloponnesian War, its author does not emphasize any reverence for the divine. But it seems obvious that, far from endorsing such sentiments and the reckless policies attendant to them, Thucydides would have taken the measure of such boundless self-regard and shaken his head.
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