27 pages • 54 minutes read
ThucydidesThe Melian Dialogue
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Thucydides
Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) was an Athenian historian and general. One of the earliest historians, he is responsible for a contemporary account of the Peloponnesian War. Born an Athenian citizen in the Attic countryside—the rural area surrounding the city of Athens—he was expected to serve in the military. As such, he participated in the opening phase of the war. After contracting and recovering from the plague that gripped Athens at the outset of the conflict, he was made a general, or strategos, and sent to the island of Thasos, opposite the strategic city of Amphipolis in Thrace. After the Spartans captured the city, Thucydides was blamed for the loss and exiled. He had considerable wealth through his ownership of gold mines in Thrace, and thus his exile was paradoxically beneficial to him as a historian, since it allowed him to travel and learn of the events of the unfolding conflict from both sides.
Thucydides is regarded as the founder of “scientific history,” or history as supported by evidence and analysis, characterized by impartiality, and without reference to supernatural intervention. This tone sets him apart from the “father of history” who preceded him a generation before, Herodotus, who referenced the supernatural in his landmark work, The Histories. “The Melian Dialogue” is viewed as a formative work in classical political realism, a doctrine that assumes political actors behave according to self-interest, not according to moral values like justice, honor, or democracy. His History of the Peloponnesian War is still frequently cited in studies of war crimes, civil unrest, behavioral norms, and epidemiology.
Athenians
Athens was one of the preeminent city-states of ancient Greece. Continuously inhabited since at least 3000 BCE, Athens became an imperial power in the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars—a series of conflicts between the Persian Achaemenid Empire and Greek city-states that ran through the entire first half of the fifth century BCE. Along with Sparta, Athens played a pivotal role in repelling the invading Persians, and as a result, the city-state gained enormous military and economic power in the Greek world. In “The Melian Dialogue,” the Athenian delegation cites Athens’s role in the Greco-Persian wars as justification for its conquest of Melos. Though the Athenian delegation advances a purely pragmatic argument for Athens’s aggression, the dialogue as a whole shows a young empire grappling with the implications of its power. Athens must contend with a rival power in Sparta, while at the same time warding off possible rebellions among the populations it has already subjugated. Given these conditions, and the asymmetry of its relations with smaller city-states like Melos, Thucydides stages this dialogue to explore the ethical, political, and practical considerations that guide an empire at war.
Athens has left a lasting impact on world culture. The leader Cleisthenes introduced a form of democracy to the city-state in 508 BCE, less than a decade before the onset of the Greco-Persian wars. The beginning of Athenian democracy paved the way for a cultural golden age that included the dramatists Aeschylus (Eumenides, Agamemnon), Euripides (Medea, The Bacchae), and Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone), the historians Herodotus (Histories) and Thucydides, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato (The Last Days of Socrates, The Republic), among many other influential artists and thinkers.
After losing its conflict with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, Athens never recovered its former position and power in the Greek world. The legacy of Athens continues to play an outsized influence in Western civilization in the fields of government, military theory, oratory, rhetoric, logic, literature, and the theatrical arts.
Melians
Melos, or Milos, is a volcanic island in the southwestern Aegean Sea, not far from the Peloponnesian peninsula. It was initially settled by Dorians, a Greek ethnic group to which the Spartans also belonged. For several hundred years (from sometime in the first millennium until 416 BCE), the Melians remained an independent city, minting their own coinage and using their own variant of the ancient Greek script. A tiny island community perennially caught between warring powers, Melos maintained a policy of strict neutrality and isolationism, though it did supplement its local economy by exporting decorative terra cotta reliefs depicting scenes from Greek mythology. During the Greco-Persian Wars, in 480 BCE, the Melians refused to submit to the Persian invaders. This prior, successful act of resistance can be read as a precursor to their doomed resistance against the Athenians. After the conclusion of the Greco-Persian wars, a power rivalry between Athens and Sparta became the defining conflict of the Greek world. In 416 BCE, Athens demanded the Melians submit and join the alliance against Sparta, which they refused to do. Following a siege, the Athenians massacred the men of Melos, sold the women and children into slavery, and resettled the land with their own people, effectively ending Dorian civilization on the island.
Related Titles
By Thucydides
