Thucydides’s Law of Peace and War
In times of peace and prosperity, cities and individuals alike follow higher standards because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their wants it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.
Exiled from Athens in 424 B.C. for his failure as a general to save a colony from Spartan attacks, Thucydides used most of the last twenty years of his life to compose his History of the Peloponnesian War. No mere chronicler of events, he attempted as evidenced by this passage from his account of civil war in Corcyra (modern Corfu) to understand causes and effects. He well fulfilled the goal that he set himself: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public but was done to last for ever.”
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