What Would Thucydides Say?

Maybe better: What did he say?  Mary Beard’s review of Simon Hornblower’s final volume of commentary on Thucydides, and Robert Kagan’s recent book on the same, complicates matters.  Thucydides wrote in sometimes incomprehensible Greek, and some of the most memorable and historically important lines come not from Thucydides himself but from the 19th-century translation by Richard Crawley, who tended to transform Thucydides Finnegans Wake -ish prose into Jane Austen.

One example: Beard writes: “Take, for example, perhaps the most favorite of all Thucydidean catchphrases, repeated in international relations courses the world over, and a founding text of “realist” political analysis: ‘The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.’ It is taken from the famous debate that Thucydides evokes between the Athenians and the people of the island of Melos. The Athenians had demanded that the neutral state of Melos come over to the Athenian side in the war between Athens and Sparta; when the Melians resisted, the two sides debated the issue. The representatives of imperial Athens put forward a terrifying version of “might is right”: justice only existed between equals, they asserted—otherwise, the strong rule the weak and so the power of Athens could always ride roughshod over the aspirations of a small island . . . . The famous slogan about the strong and the weak comes, obviously, from the Athenian side of the argument, and its current popularity owes much to the nice balance between the powerful doing ‘what they can’ and the weak suffering ‘what they must’—as well as that iron law of inevitability (or realism, depending on your point of view) that is introduced by the phrase “what they must.” But that is not what Thucydides wrote. As Simon Hornblower (a classicist and historian who has taught at Oxford and London) correctly acknowledges in the third and final volume of his monumental, line-by-line commentary on the whole of Thucydides’  History , a more accurate translation is: ‘The powerful exact what they can, and the weak have to comply.’ Even that exaggerates the idea of compulsion on the weak: to be precise, what Thucydides claimed was only that ‘the weak comply’—no necessity was introduced at all. And Hornblower’s commentary also raises the question of exactly what the action of the strong was supposed to be; it could equally well be translated from the original Greek as ‘do’ or ‘exact’ or even (as one Renaissance scholar thought) ‘extort.’ ‘Do what they can’ and ‘extort what they can’ conjure up very different pictures of the operation of power.”