Konstantine Panegyres, The University of Western Australia

If you were to visit a bookshop in the ancient world, what would it be like?

You don’t just have to imagine it. The ancient Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the 2nd century CE, gives us a number of descriptions of his adventures at bookstores. In one passage, he describes an encounter at one in Rome, which he was visiting with a poet friend:

I chanced to be sitting in a bookshop in the Sigillaria with the poet Julius Paulus […] There was on sale there the Annals of Quintus Fabius Pictor in a copy of good and undoubted age, which the dealer maintained was without errors.

Gellius then tells us that, while they are sitting there, another customer enters the shop. The new customer has a disagreement with the dealer. He complains that he “found in the book one error”. The dealer says that’s impossible. Then the customer brings out evidence to prove the dealer wrong.

In different passage, Aulus tells us about some bookstalls he came across when he arrived by ship at the port of Brundisium on the Adriatic coast. The books, he records, were “in Greek, filled with marvellous tales, things unheard of, incredible […] The writers were ancient and of no mean authority”.

The volumes themselves, however, were filthy from neglect, in bad condition and unsightly. Nevertheless, I drew near and asked their price; then, attracted by their extraordinary and unexpected cheapness, I bought a large number of them for a small sum.

Aulus goes on to describe in excited language all the weird facts he derived from these books – like how people in Africa can “work spells by voice and tongue” and through this witchcraft cause people, animals, trees and crops to die.

The origins of writing

These sorts of stories bring us close to how ordinary people in ancient Greek and Roman times obtained books and engaged with books. But if we read stories like this it might lead us to want to know more. How did books and writing come into existence? And how were books written and produced?

Many people in the ancient world thought that writing had been invented by gods or heroes. For example, the ancient Egyptians believed the god Thoth was the first to create signs to represent spoken sounds.

The origins of writing are certainly mysterious. It’s unclear when writing began and who invented it.

The earliest written text is a wooden tablet radiocarbon dated to before 5000 BCE. This is known as the Dispilio tablet, because it was discovered at a neolithic lakeside settlement at Dispilio in Greece. It is carved with strange linear markings. These have not been deciphered, but most scholars think they are a form of writing.

Evidence for writing appears early in different parts of the world. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the oldest texts, such as the Kish limestone tablet at Uruk or the Narmer Palette at Hierakonpolis, date to before 3000 BCE. In the Indus Valley, the Harappan script, which remains undeciphered, appeared around the same time. In China, the earliest characters, the Dawenkou graphs, also date to around 3000 BCE.

One of the most interesting aspects of early writing is that there is such a variety of different scripts. For example, the earliest known texts in the Greek language are written in the Linear B script, which was used from around 1500-1200 BCE, and wasn’t deciphered until 1952. Linear B is not an alphabet, but a syllabary of more than 80 different signs. A syllabary is a kind of writing system where each sign represents a syllable.

By around the 8th century BCE, most Greeks had starting using an alphabet instead of a syllabary. Unlike a syllabary, in an alphabet each letter represents a vowel or consonant. The Greeks adapted their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet, probably via interactions with Phoenician traders. The Phoenician alphabet had only 22 letters, making it much easier to learn than the 80-plus syllabary signs of Linear B.

Our English alphabet comes from the Romans, who in the 8th and 7th century BCE also got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, via the Greeks.

The origins of books

People in ancient times used many different things as writing materials.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) tells us that the earliest people in the world

used to write on palm-leaves and then on the bark of certain trees, and afterwards folding sheets of lead began to be employed for official muniments, and then also sheets of linen or tablets of wax for private documents.

However, the most popular writing material in the ancient Mediterranean was papyrus, from which we get our word “paper”.

To make papyrus, you get the pith of the papyrus plant (Cyperus papyrus), cut it into slender strips, then press it together. Once dried, it forms a thin sheet that you can write on.

Papyrus sheets were usually glued together into rolls. These rolls could be very long. Some of the most lavish Egyptian papyrus rolls were more than 10 metres long, such as the recently discovered Waziri Papyrus containing parts of the Book of the Dead.

When papyri were rolled up they were stored in shelves or boxes. Labels were attached to the handles of the papyri so you could identify their contents. In his play Linus, Greek playwright Alexis (c. 375-275 BC) has one character tell another how to look through a bunch of rolls to find what he wants:

go over and pick any papyrus roll you like out of there and then read it… examining them quietly, and at your leisure, on the basis of the labels. Orpheus is in there, Hesiod, tragedies, Choerilus, Homer, Epicharmus, prose treatises of every type…

Papyrus seems flimsy to the eye, but it is a durable writing material, stronger than modern paper. Many papyri have survived for thousands of years stored in jars or sarcophagi or buried under the sand.

The oldest surviving papyrus text is the so-called Diary of Merer (which you can listen to here), the logbook of a man named Merer, who was an inspector during the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza under Pharaoh Khufu. This papyrus, which dates to around 2600 BCE, gives a day-by-day account of how Merer and his team of about 200 men spent time hauling and transporting stone and doing other work.

Papyrus was susceptible to being eaten by insects or mice. But there were ways to prevent this. Pliny the Elder, for example, advises that sheets of papyrus soaked in citrus-oil won’t be eaten by moths.

How to write a book in antiquity

If you were living in ancient Greece or Rome and wanted to write a book, how would you do it?

First, you would buy sheets or rolls of papyrus to write on. If you couldn’t afford it, you’d have to write on the back or in the margins of papyri you already owned.

If you didn’t own any papyri already, then you would have to write on other materials. According to the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE), the philosopher Cleanthes (c. 331-231 BCE) “wrote down lectures on oyster-shells and the blade-bones of oxen through lack of money to buy papyrus”.

Second, you would get your ink. In the ancient world, there were many varieties of ink. Normal black ink was made from the soot of burnt resin or pitch mixed with vegetable gum. When buying ink, it would come in powder form, and you would need to mix it with water before using it.

Third, you would get your pen. It would be made from reed, hence it was called the “calamus” by Greeks and Romans (“calamus” is the Greek word for reed). To sharpen your pen you would need a knife. If you made a mistake, you would erase it with a wet sponge.

Now you have all the materials you need. However, you don’t need to use the pen and papyrus yourself. If you want, you can get a scribe to write down your words for you.

The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c.40-110 CE) even advised writers not to use the pen themselves:

Writing I do not advise you to engage in with your own hand, or only very rarely, but rather to dictate to a secretary.

If you needed to consult other books while writing, you could get friends to send them to you or ask book dealers to make you a copy. In a papyrus from the 2nd century CE found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and written in Greek, the writer asks his friend to find the books that he needs and make copies of them. Otherwise, you would go to a library, though the best libraries at Alexandria, Rome and Athens might be far away.

When you finished drafting your book you would need to revise and correct it. You could then publish it by having many copies made by scribes and delivering these copies to friends and booksellers.

When all this was done, your book would be out in public. Perhaps someone like Aulus Gellius would stumble across it in a busy Roman bookshop. Maybe he’d even buy it.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Michael La Corte, University of Tübingen and Stephan Blum, University of Tübingen

Imagine waking up to find strangers in your home – eating your food, killing your animals, then laughing as they blind you. Later, they tell the world you were the monster.

We are describing one of the better known episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, written around the late 8th or early 7th century BC. The intruders are protagonist Odysseus’s men, and the “monster” they attack is Polyphemus, a solitary giant shepherd later remembered only as a cyclops.

For centuries, we’ve followed the hero’s journey without asking what it costs. But what if the cyclops wasn’t the monster, but just one of many lives shattered along the way?

Director Christopher Nolan’s new adaptation of The Odyssey hits cinemas in July 2026. But will it celebrate Odysseus as the clever hero – or finally confront the wreckage he leaves in his wake?

Homer’s Odyssey, composed at the turn of the 8th to the 7th century BC, follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, as he struggles to return home from the Trojan war, outwitting monsters, gods and fate. It’s a tale of resilience and cunning – and the template for countless stories since: the clever man triumphs over the monstrous other and sails home in glory.

We know the pattern by heart. But we rarely ask: who gets trampled along the way, and whose story is never told?

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This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

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In the scene of Odysseus v Polyphemus, the cyclops is cast as a brute, a savage who traps the hero and his men in a cave. Odysseus responds with legendary cunning: wine, lies, a sharpened stake – and escape.

From the outside, it’s textbook heroism, yet Homer himself hints at the cost of that victory. He has Odysseus reveal his name only after the escape: “Tell them it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, who blinded you.” It’s a moment of pride, not necessity – the spark that seals his fate. In that instant, the clever survivor becomes the arrogant aggressor, and the story’s moral axis begins to tilt.

Yet if we shift perspective, the story changes. Polyphemus is a solitary shepherd, living in peace. Strangers break into his home, steal his food, kill his livestock, and leave him blinded and broken. His cave isn’t a prison but a home under siege. His violence, while brutal, emerges from desperation. You could easily argue that Polyphemus isn’t the villain. He’s the victim.

This reversal reveals a troubling pattern: our cultural instinct to root for the protagonist, no matter what they do – as long as the cause feels noble. From ancient epics to Hollywood blockbusters, we excuse deception, destruction, even murder, if it serves the “greater good”.

We cheer when the hero escapes – but rarely look back at what’s left behind. A burned city. A grieving family. A blinded shepherd. If it fits the story, we accept the collateral damage as necessary. That’s the seductive logic of heroism: clean endings, messy consequences.

In Homer’s writing, Polyphemus gets a single moment of anguish – a prayer to Poseidon, his father – and then vanishes from the story. His voice, his pain, his version of events do not fit the heroic arc.

And this pattern continues. Empires and conquerors have long branded enemies as “barbarians”, “savages” or “monsters” to justify violence. From Roman propaganda to colonial domination in the Americas and Africa – and, more recently, to claims of “denazification” in Ukraine – this tactic dehumanises the “other side” and erases their stories. Strip the enemy of humanity, and their suffering becomes legitimised.

If history is so often written by the victors, we must ask: what remains of heroism when we finally listen to the so-called monsters? As global conflicts polarise public discourse around heroes and villains, the stories we choose, and those we silence, matter more than ever.

What if we shift the spotlight? Polyphemus becomes more than a monster – he’s a mirror, showing how unchecked heroism can slip into cruelty. Cleverness isn’t virtue. And survival at others’ expense isn’t always justified.

Odysseus, the “man of many turns” is brilliant but ambiguous. His actions bring destruction alongside triumph. For every hero who returns, many suffer or are lost. True heroism lies not just in daring escapes, but in owning the cost left behind.

The cyclops’ tale warns us how easily we dehumanise those in the hero’s way. How we flatten complexity to fit a script. How we justify harm if the story feels right. Rethinking Polyphemus complicates Odysseus and challenges us as storytellers and audiences.

The real challenge for Nolan’s The Odyssey won’t be spectacle or scale, but perspective. Will it dare to look beyond the hero? Will it give voice to those left in his shadow? Clint Eastwood did just that with Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), telling the story of the battle of Iwo Jima from opposing sides. By letting the “enemy” speak, he shattered the illusion of a single, righteous story.

If Nolan embraces that sort of complexity, The Odyssey won’t just retell a myth but will challenge us to rethink who we name as heroes and to listen more closely to those we once dismissed as monsters.

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Michael La Corte, Research Associate, Curation and Communication, University of Tübingen and Stephan Blum, Research associate, Institute for Prehistory and Early History and Medieval Archaeology, University of Tübingen

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Peter Edwell, Macquarie University

Ancient Roman political leaders could be violent and cruel. Some had odd tastes and were out of touch. Others had wildly eccentric habits that might seem amusing today.

But eccentric behaviour combined with almost unlimited power, made some Roman leaders dangerous and unpredictable.

Hortensius

One oddball was the orator and politician Hortensius (114–50 BCE) of the late Roman republic.

He loved the plane trees on his estate so much he watered them with wine. Receiving news that one of them was dying, Hortensius hastily adjourned a legal case to be by its side.

Crassus

Marcus Licinius Crassus, a contemporary of Hortensius, was a powerful Roman general and politician who kept pet eels in an expensive fishpond.

He adorned his favourite eel with jewellery. When the eel died, Crassus held a funeral and mourned it for three days.

Ancient accounts of eccentric behaviour weren’t just for entertainment. Crassus’ intense devotion to his favourite eel satirised his aristocratic vanity.

Crassus later died in Mesopotamia (southern Turkey) in a disastrous battle against the Parthians (rulers of ancient Iran) in 53 BCE. The Parthian generals lured Crassus into a hot and waterless plain where they destroyed his army. Due to Crassus’ impetuosity, 20,000 men died along with him and his son.

The orator and statesman, Cicero, lampooned the piscanarii (fishpond lovers), of whom Hortensius was also one, for their obscure indulgences. They should have focused more on affairs of state, he believed.

Caligula

The eccentricities of Roman leaders continued under the emperors, after the era of the republic ended. Now, however, almost unlimited power meant eccentricities could easily devolve into violence and cruelty.

The notorious emperor Caligula (ruled 37–41 CE) toyed with appointing his horse as consul. The horse, named Incitatus, was lavished with splendidly appointed stables and its own slaves.

Caligula was known for other unique tastes. He often dressed in the garb of four different divinities, including Venus. Sometimes he wore a beard of gold and held a thunderbolt in his hand to emulate Jupiter.

Increasingly paranoid, perhaps after a breakdown, Caligula held treason trials. Senators and at least one potential imperial rival were executed on trumped up charges. Some claimed he even sexually abused his sisters.

But reports of Caligula’s personal excesses were probably exaggerated. His strong disagreements with the senate got him offside with the class that often wrote the histories.

Caligula’s reputation for eccentric leadership and paranoia saw his assassination in 41 CE.

Nero

Nero is perhaps the most (in)famous Roman politician of all. The nephew of Caligula, Nero’s reign (54–68 CE) was known for brutality, excess and indulgence.

The legend of Nero singing and playing the fiddle (probably a stringed instrument called a cithara) while Rome burned in 64 CE remains strong.

Many doubt this actually happened but what we do know is that after the fire Nero built a 300-room palace – the Golden House (Domus Aurea) – on land cleared of buildings by the fire.

Nero’s penchant for singing and playing the cithara on stage was mocked during and after his reign. He even established a festival called the Neronia and competed on stage as a singer.

In 59 CE, Nero hatched a plan to murder his mother, Agrippina. At first he sent her to sea on a pleasure cruise in a collapsible boat. She survived and swam ashore but was killed soon after by one of Nero’s agents.

For these reasons, and many more, Nero was declared a public enemy in 68 CE and took his own life. He discovered there was a limit to what political elites and the public would accept.

Commodus

Over a century later, emperor Commodus expressed some wildly eccentric behaviour. Known to many of us from the Gladiator movies, Commodus actually did appear in the Colosseum. One (likely exaggerated) ancient source claimed he appeared in the arena 735 times.

Commodus liked to dress up as Hercules, his favourite mythological hero. A famous sculpture in Rome depicts him as such.

Commodus’ reputation for cruelty and erratic behaviour was widespread. The murder of his sister Lucilla in 182 CE on suspicion of involvement in a coup struck fear into many. Commodus was eventually strangled in the bath after all his allies abandoned him.

Elagabalus

Perhaps the most eccentric of all Roman emperors came to power a few decades later. Elagabalus, only 14 on becoming emperor in 218 CE, scandalised Rome with his religious and personal life.

Elagabalus broke time-honoured Roman customs. He married one of the Vestal Virgins, traditionally sacred in Roman religious traditions.

He built a temple in Rome to the god Elagabal whom he was named after. A black stone (probably a meteorite) was central to the god’s worship. Elagabalus brought the stone to Rome from Emesa (modern Homs), his family’s home town in Syria.

The historian Cassius Dio claimed Elagabalus’ fifth spouse was a man named Hierocles – an ex-slave and charioteer – and that Elagabalus liked to be called “wife, mistress, and queen.”

The emperor reportedly played some of the traditional roles of women in this marriage, including spinning wool. It is possible that Elagabalus was transgender but the bias of ancient sources makes this difficult to judge.

Ultimate power

Depictions of the eccentricities of Roman leaders were (and remain) interesting. But such leaders were often also dangerous, unpredictable and out of touch.

With the power of life and death often in their hands, a reign of terror was possible. In some cases, it was a frightening reality.

Peter Edwell, Associate Professor in Ancient History, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Timothy Joseph, College of the Holy Cross

In a week filled with news about President Donald Trump’s aggressive moves to take control of Greenland, the world got a window into his thinking about the concept of “peace.”

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump said in the message to Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre.

Trump has long coveted the Nobel Peace Prize. In his second term as president, he has styled himself as a peacemaker, as his message to Støre demonstrates. But as I have learned from my work as a scholar of Roman history and rhetoric, the word “peace” can mean something entirely different when used by those wielding power.

In the year 98 CE, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “With lying names they call theft, slaughter, and plunder ‘control,’ and when they make a wasteland, they call it ‘peace.’”

This line, said of the Romans by an enemy of Rome in Tacitus’ work “Agricola,” has had a long and varied afterlife among those commenting on imperialism.

Nearly 2,000 years after Tacitus’ time, U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy used the phrase in a 1968 speech questioning the U.S. war in Vietnam; the Irish poet Seamus Heaney echoed it in a 1974 poem figuring his homeland’s centuries of desolation; more recently still, the HBO series “Succession” reworked the words into a critique of the show’s despotic central character.

The quotation has had staying power because it cuts to the core of how talk of peace can be used as a tool of war and power acquisition.

At the one-year mark of the second Trump administration, these words from two millennia ago speak as presciently as ever.

Time and again over the last year, Trump has branded acts of war with the language of peace. More broadly, his administration’s persistent styling of Trump as a “President of Peace” and his continuous claims of entitlement to the Nobel Peace Prize have moved in tandem with a growing agenda of military aggression, both foreign and domestic.

‘War is peace’

Tacitus, who lived from c. 55 to c. 120 CE, places his critique of Roman imperial rhetoric into the mouth of Calgacus, the possibly fictionalized chief of the Caledonians in northern Britain. The words, delivered in a speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius in 83 CE, anticipated what was to come: a crushing Roman victory and the devastation of the Caledonian people.

Calgacus’ aphorism gets at something fundamental about Roman imperial propaganda, which presented the cessation of war – on their terms – as “peace.” A physical representation of this is the Altar of Augustan Peace, from 9 BCE, which was built after the warlord Augustus’ victories in foreign and civil wars. A reconstruction of one of the monument’s friezes includes the personified goddess Roma sitting atop war spoils. Peace for Rome was tantamount to victory for Rome – or, as in this case, for one of Rome’s strongmen.

And while Tacitus, an accomplished Roman politician and provincial governor, was himself no opponent of Roman imperialism, it is significant that he crafts a speech for an enemy of Rome that gives the lie to the Roman rhetoric of peace. The non-Roman’s perspective on Romans’ “lying names” cuts through the posturing of the imperialist.

Calgacus’ critique thus puts into relief the jarring juxtapositions the world has seen and heard from Trump over the last year.

On Dec. 31, 2025, Trump declared that his New Year’s resolution for 2026 was “peace on Earth.” Three days later, he invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, a military action that left 100 dead and a humanitarian crisis looming. Apart from claiming control of some $2.5 billion of Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump has provided few details about how he will personally “run the country.”

A similarly striking disconnect between rhetoric and reality came earlier in 2025 with the U.S.’s June 21 bombing of Iran, which the White House X account celebrated with the declaration “CONGRATULATIONS WORLD, IT’S TIME FOR PEACE!” Some seven months later, as the Iranian regime violently suppresses broad protests, Trump is weighing additional acts of war, saying that “the military is looking at it and we’re looking at some strong options.”

In Gaza, Trump is chairing a “Board of Peace” to oversee the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and to implement a new government. The Israel/Hamas War is one of eight wars Trump claims credit for ending.

As with the seven other cases, the claim to have brought peace in Gaza lacks substantiation.

From the announcement of the ceasefire on Oct. 10, 2025, through Dec. 30, 2025, 414 Palestinians have been killed and 1,145 injured by Israeli attacks. That is, the war rages on.

Now Trump, apparently out of resentment at not being award the Nobel, declares that he will seize Greenland “one way or the other” and that Cuba must accept his terms on Venezuelan oil shipments “before it is too late.”

At home, Trump ramps up the presence of ICE, whose violent approach to enforcement has had deadly consequences for 32 people in custody and one woman protester.

All this as FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, awards Trump its first-ever Peace Prize; and as he stamps his name on – after defunding – the U.S Institute of Peace.

Spread of ‘peace’ rhetoric

Today’s dizzying clashes in word and deed are illuminated by Calgacus’ searing words, which show how easily the rhetoric of peace can be used to cover for or distract from acts of war.

At the same time, Tacitus points readers to the prevalence and thus the normalization and commonness of this rhetoric, which can become an inseparable corollary of a program of making war.

Indeed, Tacitus presents similar indictments of Roman imperial rhetoric twice elsewhere in his writing, again from the perspectives of those threatened by Rome.

For both the Batavians, of modern-day Netherlands, in the “Histories” and another group of Britons in the “Annals,” the great menace to their peoples is Roman “peace.”

Timothy Joseph, Professor of Classics and the Director of Peace and Conflict Studies, College of the Holy Cross

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Neville Morley, University of Exeter

In his speech to this year’s World Economic Forum at Davos, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney mourned the demise of international cooperation by evoking an authority from ancient Greece.

“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.”

Journalists and academics from Denmark, Greece and the United States have quoted the same line from the ancient Greek historian when discussing Donald Trump’s demand for Greenland. It is cited as inspiration for his adviser Stephen Miller’s aggressive foreign policy approach, not least towards Venezuela.

In blogs and social media, the fate of Gaza and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have been interpreted through the same frame. It’s clearly difficult to contemplate today’s world and not react as W.H. Auden did to the collapse of the old order in 1939: “Exiled Thucydides knew.”

The paradox of the “strong do what they can” line is that it’s understood in radically different ways. On the one hand, it’s presented as a description of the true nature of the world (against naive liberals) and as a normative statement (the weak should submit).

On the other hand, it’s seen as an image of the dark authoritarian past we hoped was behind us, and as a condemnation of unfettered power. All these interpretations claim the authority of Thucydides.

That is a powerful imprimatur.

Thucydides’ insistence on the importance of seeking out the truth about the past, rather than accepting any old story, grounded his claim that such inquiry would help readers understand present and future events.

As a result, in the modern era he has been praised both as the forerunner of critical scientific historiography and as a pioneering political theorist. The absence of anything much resembling theoretical rules in his text has not stopped people from claiming to identify them.

The strong/weak quote is a key example. It comes from the Melian dialogue from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In 416BC, an Athenian force arrived at the neutral island of Melos and demanded its surrender. The Melian leaders asked to negotiate, and Thucydides presents a fictional reconstruction of the subsequent exchange.

The quote comes from the beginning, when the Athenians stipulated that they would not claim any right to seize Melos, other than the power to do so, and conversely would not listen to any arguments from principle. “Questions of justice apply only to those equal in power,” they stated bluntly. “Otherwise, such things as are possible, the superior exact and the weak give up.”

Within modern international relations theory, this is sometimes interpreted as the first statement of the realist school of thought.

Scholars like John Mearsheimer claim that Thucydides identified the basic principle of realist theory that, in an “anarchic” world, international law applies only if it’s in powerful states’ strategic interest, and otherwise might makes right. The fate of the Melians, utterly destroyed after they foolishly decided to resist, reinforces the lesson.

But these are the words of characters in Thucydides’ narrative, not of Thucydides himself. We cannot simply assume that Thucydides believed that “might makes right” is the true nature of the world, or that he intended his readers to draw that conclusion.

The Athenians themselves may not have believed it, since their goal was to intimidate the Melians into surrendering without a fight. More importantly, Thucydides and his readers knew all about the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily the following year, which showed the serious practical limits to the “want, take, have” mentality.

So, we shouldn’t take this as a realist theoretical proposition. But if Thucydides intended instead simply to depict imperialist arrogance, teach “pride comes before a fall”, or explore how Athenian attitudes led to catastrophic miscalculation, he could have composed a single speech.

His choice of dialogue shows that things are more complicated, and not just about Athens. He is equally interested in the psychology of the “weak”, the Melians’ combination of pleading, bargaining, wishful thinking and defiance, and their ultimate refusal to accept the Athenian argument.

This doesn’t mean that the Melian arguments are correct, even if we sympathise with them more. Their thinking can be equally problematic. Perhaps they have a point in suggesting that if they give in immediately, they lose all hope, “but if we resist you then there is still hope we may not be destroyed”.

Their belief that the gods will help them “because we are righteous men defending ourselves against aggression”, however, is naive at best. The willingness of the ruling clique to sacrifice the whole city to preserve their own position must be questioned.

The back and forth of dialogue highlights conflicting world views and values, and should prompt us to consider our own position. What is the place of justice in an anarchic world? Is it right to put sovereignty above people’s lives? How does it feel to be strong or weak?

It’s worthwhile engaging with the whole episode, not just isolated lines – or even trying to find your own way through the debate to a less bad outcome.

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, introducing his classic 1629 translation, noted that Thucydides never offered rules or lessons but was nevertheless “the most politic historiographer that ever writ”. Modern readers have too often taken isolated quotes out of context, assumed that they represent the author’s own views and claimed them as timeless laws. Hobbes saw Thucydides as presenting complex situations that we need to puzzle out.

It’s remarkable that an author famed for his depth and complexity gets reduced to soundbites. But the contradictions in how those soundbites are interpreted – the way that Thucydides presents us with a powerful and controversial idea but doesn’t tell us what to think about it – should send us back to the original.

Neville Morley, Professor in Classics, Ancient History, Religion, and Theology, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.