On Justice, Power, and Human Nature

A short Hackett teaching volume that pulls out of Thucydides’ History the passages carrying his political thought and drops the campaign narrative: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the Mytilene debate over whether to massacre a rebel city, the account of civil war at Corcyra and what factional killing does to language, the Melian Dialogue, and the Sicilian expedition’s unravelling. Woodruff translates and supplies the introduction and notes, so a reader with no Greek and no background in the war can follow the argument.

Thucydides is on a list like this for a particular reason, and it is not a flattering one. He is the canonical source for the claim that human nature does not change, that democracies talk themselves into overreach, and that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must — the Melian line, which he puts in the mouths of Athenians and lets stand without comment. The Funeral Oration in the same volume is the most famous praise of democratic Athens ever written, and the two sit thirty pages apart on purpose.

Context: Listed under Political Philosophy in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1460 — the highest in the shard, and the highest Lexile anywhere in the adult band’s Political Philosophy list.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Thucydides — the author.
• History of the Peloponnesian War — the complete work these passages are drawn from, already carded three times over from other recommendations.
• The Landmark Thucydides — the annotated complete edition, the other way into the same text.
• Power — the Melian Dialogue is the corpus’s sharpest statement of power without justification.
• Justice — the word the Melians use and the Athenians decline to argue about.
• Human Nature — Thucydides’ explicit premise: that he wrote for readers in a future that would resemble his own.
• Democracy — the Funeral Oration and the Sicilian disaster, in one volume.
• Founding Fathers — the American framers read Thucydides as a warning about democratic overextension.
• Classics — the wider corpus.