And the Athenians said to the men of Melos: ”Your friendship would be proof of our weakness while your hatred is proof of our strength.”
A series of seminars on the classical world, which have been going on for some time now at the University of Bologna, where I teach, has attracted hundreds of students, who listen to lectures and readings from texts with curiosity and enthusiasm.
Maybe this is because the classics have always had something to tell us. And this is why I would like to discuss a little piece from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.
In the course of their conflict with Sparta, the Athenians wanted to destroy the island of Melos, which was allied with their enemies, even though it had remained neutral. The Athenians had this to say to the folk of Melos: ”We’re not going to make you a long speech, maintaining that we have the right to do what we are doing because we defeated the Persians or by trying to demonstrate that you have done us some wrong. None of that stuff. What we’re telling you is, simply, either you submit or we will destroy you.”
The people of Melos refuse, out of pride and a sense of justice (today we would say of international law), but the Athenians reiterate that the principles of justice hold only between opposing parties of equal strength and that ”the powerful do what is possible and the weak must comply”.
Since the islanders cannot appeal to justice, they make a reply that follows their adversaries’ own logic. Falling back on criteria of utility, they try to persuade the invaders that, if the Athenians met defeat in the war against Sparta then they would risk enduring the merciless revenge of cities unjustly attacked, like Melos.
The Athenians reply: ”We’ll run that risk. We intend to show you that we are here to maintain our dominion. Now we are going to make our proposals for saving your city, because we want to dominate you without effort. Keeping you safe is in your interest as much as it is ours.”
The folk of Melos say: ”It is useful for you to dominate, but how can it be useful for us to be slaves?” And the Athenians reply: ”Because instead of suffering the extreme consequences you would become subjects, and we would gain by not destroying you …”
The islanders are dignified and stubborn, and in seeking a way out they ask: ”What if we committed ourselves to stay out of the conflict, allying ourselves with no one?”
The Athenians retort: ”No, because your hostility does not damage us as much as your friendship. Your friendship would be proof of our weakness, while your hatred is proof of our strength.”
In other words: we’re real sorry, but it’s more convenient for us to subjugate you than to let you live. That way everyone will fear us.
The men of Melos say they don’t think they can resist Athenian power but that, despite everything, they are confident they won’t succumb because, being devoted to the gods, they are opposed to injustice.
”The gods?” reply the Athenians. ”There is absolutely nothing about our requests or our actions that clashes with people’s beliefs in divinity. We are convinced that, wherever they hold power, men and gods alike will use it, thanks to an irrepressible natural drive. And we are not the ones who have imposed this law, nor are we the first to enforce it, as it already existed. It existed when we inherited it and it will exist forever. You too, like others, would do exactly as we are doing, if you had our power.”
The islanders refuse to give in, the Athenians undertake a long siege, overcome their resistance, invade the city and, as Thucydides writes, ”they killed all the adult males who fell into their hands and made slaves of the youths and women”.
To sum up, there are many ways of practicing a ”rhetoric of prevarication”, that is to say, justifying an abuse of power by presenting reasons for it, good or bad as they may be. It’s a story that begins with the wolf and the lamb, even though the wolf is no genius of persuasion and, in order to eat the lamb, pulls out lame pretexts such as maintaining that the lamb, who is standing downstream of him, is muddying the water upstream.
In the course of history, more persuasive arguments have been attempted. But what is fascinating about the passage from Thucydides is that the rhetorical skills of the Athenians are brought to bear for the sole purpose of demonstrating that might has no need to be underpinned by persuasion, and is self-justifying.
That’s why this passage is still worth pondering, and it will always be of a sad and distressing modernity. What disturbs us about reading the classics is not so much that the ancients were able to identify, in an essential fashion, something that is true and terrible, but that, more than 2 000 years later, we continue to err in our ways without having understood their lesson. — Â