Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, thinks that there is no ‘better book than Thucydides as training for politics’. But what does he ‘teach’? His ‘lessons’ are legion. Herewith some possibilities.
In his history of the war between Athens and Sparta (430-404 bc), in which he briefly participated, smart one-liners leap off the page: ‘Humans are dominated by three motives: honour, fear and advantage’; ‘Identity of interests is the surest bond between states and individuals’; ‘Men consider what is pleasant to be honourable and what is advantageous, just’; and so on.
Typically of a Greek, Thucydides distinguished sharply between thought and action. Describing a ferocious civil war, he reflected that in peacetime it was normal for sound judgment to prevail, but war, being a ‘violent teacher’, brought out the uncontrollable passions in men: those of sound judgment got nowhere. His hero Pericles advised balance: ‘We have the ability to judge or plan rightly in our affairs, because we do not consider thought an obstacle to action; no, the obstacle is rather the failure to think things through first, in order to foresee outcomes, before action has to be taken.
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