Thucydides, triumphalist historiography, and strategic performance

Abstract

Thucydides successfully wrote a history for all time. Yet the way in which we read and receive his text is generally to decontextualize it and seek narrowly-defined eternal lessons. An increasingly identified lesson of his is the dangers of hubris, but it is unclear from Thucydides what the origins of hubris actually are. The assumption that timeless truths are inherently decontextualized is problematic and prevents us from identifying other insights, perhaps equally timeless, which result from properly contextualized treatments of Thucydides’ work—notably on the sources of hubris, which Thucydides indirectly identified in triumphalist and otherwise poor historiography and historical memory. Such flaws afflicted Athens, which forgot its defeats and remembered only its military successes, and so helped lead to its poor policy and strategic choices and behavior and, ultimately, its defeat. Demonstrating the timelessness of this Thucydidean lesson, such flaws also afflict the waging of modern wars.