Christian Wendt

Aristos Eikastes—Ned Lebow as a ‘Themistoclean’ Classicist

For Themistocles was a man who exhibited the most indubitable signs of genius; indeed, in this particular he has a claim on our admiration quite extraordinary and unparalleled. By his own native capacity, alike unformed and unsupplemented by study, he was at once the best judge in those sudden crises which admit of little or of no deliberation, and the best prophet of the future, even to its most distant possibilities. An able theoretical expositor of all that came within the sphere of his practice, he was not without the power of passing an adequate judgment in matters in which he had no experience. He could also excellently divine the good and evil which lay hid in the unseen future. In fine, whether we consider the extent of his natural powers, or the slightness of his application, this extraordinary man must be allowed to have surpassed all others in the faculty of intuitively meeting an emergency.

Thucydides and Political Order

Today, more than ever, the History of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides some 2,400 years ago, is considered to be one of the “Great Books”1 of our time.2 Historians refer to it as the founding document of modern history-writing.3 Political scientists view the History as being the first textbook of International Relations (IR),4 if not of political science in general.5 Moreover, it is deemed to be one of the first accounts of democratic theory.6 In military academies around the world—and particularly in the United States, the self-identified “Athens of modern times”—the prospective military establishment studies the History as a textbook in military strategy.7 In 2003, the preamble of the European Union’s Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Eu rope opened with Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s Funeral Oration.8 We could list many more examples of the “use and abuse of Thucydides” today:9 Peter Handke’s literary allusion to Thucydides comes to mind, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles.10 Suffice to say that Thucydides succeeded in his attempt to compose a ktēma es aiei, a “possession for all time” (1.22.4).

Thucydides as a “Statesmen’s Manual”?

Many scholars are used to talking about the Athenian author Thucydides in terms that place him among the theoreticians of politics, whether philosophers, statesmen, academics, or others. In 2006, Josiah Ober, describing Thucydides as the inventor of political science, labelled his work as a “political systems users’ manual,”1 and in an earlier article even called him a “theoretikos.”2 This is in my opinion the most drastic interpretation of Thucydides in a line of others that have expressed a similar view, including those of scholars such as J. H. Finley, Hartmut Erbse, or Georg Schwarzenberger.3 Their views obviously feed on a pointed interpretation of Thucydides’s own dictum of having conceived his account as a ktēma es aiei, an “ever-lasting possession,” for the end of providing future readers with deeper or clearer insights into the dealings of human societies with one another (1.22.4).