The 5th century bc Athenian historian Thucydides proposed that the driving force behind interstate relations was power and fear. But the soldier-essayist Xenophon (d. 354 bc) thought that humiliation, of the sort that the EU recently heaped on Mrs May, lay at the heart of the problem.
In his Cyropaedia, Xenophon wrote an extended essay on the achievements of the Persian King Cyrus the Great (d. 530 bc), founder of a huge empire stretching from Turkey to India. In it, Xenophon invented a conversation between the experienced Tigranes, future king of Armenia, and the young Cyrus on the subject of foreign domination. Tigranes pointed out that problems between states arose out of men’s habit of holding states in contempt (hubris) either because they were so weak or one’s own state was so strong. But in the event of conflict, responding to hubris with hubris was simply to ensure that nothing changed.
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