![]() ![]() ![]() Thucydides later says states battle out of “honor, fear, and self-interest.” How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those whom they deemed inferior and weak to serve them. ![]() And if they can get away with things, they most surely will. States, like people, the historian Thucydides tells us, can be envious-and even rude and pushy. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks’ naval victory at Salamis, but not with the slaughter at the battle of Gaugamela-Alexander the Great’s destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III’s empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats. The Greek defense against Persian attack in 480 B.C., in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epitaph mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his dramas), was “glorious.” Yet the theme of Thucydides’ history of the internecine Peloponnesian wars was folly and sometimes senseless butchery. While all tragic, wars could be good or evil depending on their cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. Warfare could be terrifying-”a thing of fear,” the poet Pindar summed up-but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil. Even the utopian Plato agreed: “War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state.” How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace, not war, the real “parenthesis” in human affairs. War is “the father, the king of us all,” the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out-and very frequently so-because we are human and thus not always rational. So war, the poet Hesiod concluded, was “a curse from Zeus.” In others words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. As Classics teaches us, war in classical antiquity-and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization-was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition-a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. If more in our universities really understood the Greeks and Romans and their legacy in the West, then they would not see this present conflict through either therapeutic or apologetic lenses. In our present crisis after September 11, it also offers practical guidance-and the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the disturbing reactions to the war that we have seen on American campuses. The study of Classics-of Greece and Rome-can offer us moral lessons as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. ![]()
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