CapitalistImperialistPig

 2500 years ago. The next passages quoted, written as a general reflection on the Corcyraean Revolution of 427 B.C., are interesting, first as an excellent picture of the class situation; secondly, as an illustration of the strong words Thucydides could find when he wanted to describe analogous tendencies on the side of the democrats of Corcyra. (In order to judge his lack of impartiality we must remember that in the beginning of the war Corcyra had been one of Athens’ democratic allies, and that the revolt had been started by the oligarchs.) Moreover, the passage is an excellent expression of the feeling of a general social breakdown: ‘Nearly the whole Hellenic world’, writes Thucydides, ‘was in commotion. In every city, the leaders of the democratic and of the oligarchic parties were trying hard, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Lacedaemonians … The tie of party was stronger than the tie of blood … The leaders on either side used specious names, the one party prof...

Chapter: I.5 ppg. 41-51 Maps: Maps of Bernard Suzanne. This chapter is returns to the period at the end of the events of chapter 3. It is concerned mainly with the speech of the Corinthians to the Lacadaemonian Confederacy, advocating war with Athens, and the fate of Themistocles, Athenian hero of the struggle against Persia, and Pausanias, the Spartan King previously recalled for excessive ambition. In each case these latter betrayed the trust of their fellow citizens in their ambition for power and prestige. Themistocles made out slightly better of the two, escaping to Persia and finding some success there in the service of its king. Pausanias met a more macabre fate, after falling victim to his own treachery and a Spartan "sting" operation. So how did the Corinthians argue? I think we can say that a core argument was that if we don't fight them "over there," we will have to fight them here: If wise men remain quiet, while they are not injured, brave me...

Recall that when we left Thucydides , Sparta (the Lacedaemonians) had just decided that they had to fight Athens. In this, they were motivated less by the entreaties of their Corinthian allies than by fear of Athen's growing power. Thucydides now turns to a flashback, recounting the events between the end of the war with the Medes, in which the two parties were allies, and the Congress of Lacedaemon, where the Spartans decided on war. That period began with further joint action against the Medes, with Sparta still in the lead. The Spartan general Pausanias turned out to be such a jerk that the allies revolted and Athens took the lead: Meanwhile Pausanias, son of Cleombrotus, was sent out from Lacedaemon as commander-in-chief of the Hellenes, with twenty ships from Peloponnese. With him sailed the Athenians with thirty ships, and a number of the other allies. They made an expedition against Cyprus and subdued most of the island, and afterwards against Byzantium, which was in th...

CHAPTER III Congress of the Peloponnesian Confederacy at Lacedaemon OK, the MIT version sucks. Everything is incomplete. Project Gutenberg has a better version of the same Crawley translation here . I am starting to suspect that I'm the only reader here, but I will keep posting my comments to the blog anyway, for my own convenience. This chapter is all about four speeches: the speech of the Corinthian representatives, that of Athenians who were in town on othe business, that of the king of Lacedaemon (Sparta), and that of the Spartan ephor. So what's an ephor anyway? This wikipedia article offers some insight into Sparta, but such insight is limited by the fact that: The Spartans had no historical records, literature, or written laws, which were, according to tradition, expressly prohibited by an ordinance of Lycurgus (excluding, of course, the 'Great Rhetra,' supposedly given by Lycurgus himself). By the time of this history, the Kings (there were two) had a mai...