Power and the Historian

(From A.G.Woodhead's Thucydides On the Nature of Power)

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. (Thucydides, V 105, 2)

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan XI)


“The Athenian Empire is only one manifestation of power in action in Thucydides' world. What we are concerned with now, therefore, is not the historian's personal attitude to such manifestations, to political systems like democracy or oligarchy, to political personalities like Pericles or Cleon, or to political institutions like popular law-courts or representative councils. It is a concern rather with his attitude to the nature of power which those systems or those individuals or those organs of government exercised, and with his interpretation of the contexts in which they exercised it. It is indeed true that we cannot entirely divorce the concept of power from the practicalities of the situation, from the people who acquired or used power, or from the systems and institutions which were the framework or the vehicle of that exercise. It is in fact through Thucydides' treatment of the separate issues or manifestations of power that we have to elicit his attitude towards the principle and exercise of power itself. For instance, there were and are in practice inhibiting factors in the use of power, as J.R.Lucas has correctly argued and as Thucydides equally correctly depicts. Since, from the nature of our evidence, we are constrained to see all the issues and manifestations largely through Thucydides' eyes we cannot cut ourselves off entirely from Thucydides' analysis of them, appealing only to the facts as he appears to state them.

“This consideration may be taken a stage further. For example, we have to bear in mind that there may be a relationship, whether of conflict or otherwise, between Thucydides the recorder and Thucydides the analyst. We must not only watch how he describes situations in which power is discussed or exercised, as in the Melian dialogue, but we must also observe how he phrases his descriptions, what words he uses and the connotations of those words. And in so doing it emerges that we must investigate whether to Thucydides the recorder and Thucydides the analyst we must also add Thucydides the judge. To put a simple dilemma, to which I referred earlier – is Thucydides reporting what the Athenians at Melos (or Athenians in general) in fact thought about the character of power, as I stated? Or is he expressing what he believes to have been a theory of power on which they acted but which, as barker thought, they would have hesitated openly to acknowledge, or the reality of which they did not comprehend? Or is Thucydides using the situation to enunciate, by this unusual method, his own personal theory, unrelated to what anyone else in fact thought or said or did? In any choice we make among these possibilities, we are tempted to ask a further question – is Thucydides explicitly or implicitly condemning such a doctrine as he expresses in relation to Athens’ pressure on Melos? The possibilities are not mutually exclusive and may indeed be combined. Thucydides can report and, in the manner of his reporting, criticize at the same time,  as he does for example at the time of the Spartan arguments and omits the count-arguments of the Athenians. Plainly stated, it is the contention of this chapter that, in the fact of power and the rightness of its exercise, Thucydides is reporting and no more, and that his attitude to power, like power itself in its nature, is neutral.

“The trouble is – and this to some extent why so much effort is expended in diagnosing what Thucydides’ own opinions are -  that we do not want Thucydides to be neutral, and we do not want power to be neutral either. We want to model the great historian in our own image, to see him as moral in the condemnation of power and its exercise, because we ourselves prefer to regard power as intrinsically immoral, as a vehicle of corruption. The connection between power and morality, ancient as it is and examined with a clarity still unsurpassed by the Greek tragic dramatists, has emerged as one of the great issues of our time which occupies and troubles those who give thought to public affairs more perhaps than, in their concern for specific problems and remedies, they sometimes realise. Now whether the acquisition and exercise of power, in the sense to which I have referred, is indeed to be regarded by us as amoral proceeding, and whether this takes place in our own time or in the fifth century B.C., seems to be beside the point of our inquiry. We shall return to the question of the morality of power in the fifth century in the last chapter, and whether Thucydides contaminated his concept of power with a moral judgement about it we shall consider later in this one. What we must be careful to do is to keep ourselves and our own judgments out of it. It is quite irrelevant whether we think the Athenians were good men or bad men to have enunciated the doctrine to the Melians that they did; and it is the more irrelevant if, as is inescapable, any conclusion we make, one way or the other, is to be based on what we regard as moral.

“We must accept, I think, that the problem of the relationship between public and private morality preoccupies us in a way that was alien to the world of Thucydides. That there was this kind of problem under discussion we know well, but it took a different form; it was concerned with a clash of differing authoritative claims on the individual rather than with a conflict between authoritative claim on the one hand and absence of claim, connoting in the modern view freedom, on the other, which is the way in which it presents itself to us. The quotation from the Melian dialogue with which we began (Thucydides V 105 2) acknowledges them, and is not controverted. The Athenians expect that they may one day be sufferers from the law’s application, just as at the time of the conquest of Melos they were its beneficiaries; but they do not complain that there is something wrong with this. They will not use terms such as that their action is ‘right’ or ‘just’, save insofar as the priviledges of using these terms is conferred on them by the possession of power. Power itself, that is to say, is neutral in character. It may be just according to the point of view of the person so describing it, but the description does not affect its essence. The Athenians enunciated the law of nature and the gods. The existence of that law is accepted by Thucydides, and by Machiavelli, and by Hobbes. It is we who do not accept it, and who, since the time of Hobbes, have sought ways and means of circumventing its conclusions. Our attitude to the law is as a result ambivalent. It is through Hobbes that we may see how the ambivalence comes about. ‘Whether men will or not’, he says (as the Athenians at Melos more or less said), ‘they must be subject to the Divine Power’; and again, ‘it comes to pass that we are obliged to obey God in His natural kingdom’. In a world which, though largely pagan, derives its general concept of morality and its motivation from the Hebrew concept of God and the Christian concept of divine revelation, we cannot reconcile the divine law as we wish nowadays to understand it with the divine law as the Athenians expressed it or as Hobbes modified it. Thus our own accepted habits of thought, and our reactions to expressions based on those habits of thought, tend to hamper us in any appreciation of what Thucydides is telling us.”

Cleon argued against sending a reprieve to Mitylene