[The New Criterion] An overriding theme of the historian Thucydides’ monumental history of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) is the fragility of civilization. In extremis, when both the elites and masses lose their thin veneer of culture, society can turn feral quickly. During a horrific war, plague, or revolution, even a wealthy and sophisticated civilization such as that of the classical Greek city-states regresses in a second to its innate state. And what follows from these natural and man-made disasters is not pretty. Still, these calamities can be tragically instructional. Hypocrisies arise. Pretexts vanish. Fundamental but forgotten truths, easily masked in times of calm, reemerge. From Thucydides’ warnings, we can glean that even suburban elites in Range Rovers can in a day be reduced to tugging over toilet paper rolls at Whole Foods.
During the twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War, Athens, the most liberal and confident of some 1,500 Greek city-states, proved the readiest to butcher prisoners and civilians. And it did so en masse at Mytilene, Scione, and Melos. Thucydides noted that during the plague of 430–29, the most virtuous of Athenians (“especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness”) perished along with the selfish. Indeed, their courage in abandoning social distancing to aid the infectious sealed their doom (“honor made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends’ houses”).
Throughout the savage revolution on the island of Corcyra (Corfu), honesty of language and moderation in politics were among the first casualties. And once the violence and body count mounted, extremism in thought and action followed:
Highly recommended reading: A War Like No Other |