When I was a Princeton undergrad, I took a course with sociology professor Miguel Centeno titled “The Western Way of War.” The course was a broad survey of the evolving nature of Western conflict from antiquity to the present.
Of course, we started from the beginning, reading The Iliad, the world’s first war epic about the Trojan War, and also Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian’s testament to the series of conflicts between the city-states of Athens and Sparta.
Thucydides captivated me. There was something electrifying about history teleported so far from the past, especially when so much of Athenian rhetoric, touting the singular beauty of their democratic system, mirrored our own in the United States. When Pericles, the leader of Athens, addresses the attendees of the funerary procession for the Athenian army, he says things that might as well be in the words of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, or heck, George W. Bush (albeit with fewer grammatical errors):
Let me say that our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors. It is more the case of ours being a model to others, than of ours imitating anyone else’s. Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.
It was the people who gave their lives for their city who made it great, Pericles intoned. “What I would prefer is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her,” Pericles said. “When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great was men with a spirit of adventure, men who knew their duty, men who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard… it is for you to be like them.”
