In his important discussion of the interest exhibited by Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in territorial expansion (“Trump, Putin, Xi and the new age of empire”, Opinion, February 11), Gideon Rachman adduces a famous line from Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue in which the Athenian speaker tells the people of Melos, a small island off the southern coast of the Peloponnese, that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
It is a powerful line, but one I fear Rachman has misunderstood. For Thucydides, the Athenian’s statement is pure folly.
His arguments prefigure those offered by Alcibiades, a self-interested liar, to convince the Athenians to invade Sicily, the operation which Thucydides sees as leading to their ruin. The wise politician, like Thucydides’ Pericles, understood the limits of power.
Rachman goes on to draw attention to Elon Musk’s admiration for the homicidal Roman dictator, Sulla. Sulla’s political system was overthrown by Julius Caesar, whose own understanding of the Melian Dialogue comes through in the first book of his account of the Gallic War where he has the German chieftain, Ariovistus echo the Athenian’s speech to justify his own aggression.
What Ariovistus is doing by speaking this way is justifying Caesar’s annihilation of his enterprise in Gaul. For Caesar, as for Thucydides, genuine power was achieved by those who understood the limits of force.
It remains to be seen if this lesson can be relearned in the present.
David Potter
Francis W Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History
The University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI, US