Status Updates From Thucydides: The War of the ...

Athens warns Sparta against joining the brewing conflict:

“Consider the vast influence of accident in war, before you are engaged in it. As it continues, it generally becomes an affair of chances, chances from which neither of us is exempt and whose event we must risk in the dark. It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end; to act first, and wait for disaster to discuss the matter.”

“Men’s indignation, it seems, is more excited by legal wrong than by violent wrong; the first looks like being cheated by an equal, the second like being compelled by a superior.”

I inadvertently picked one hell of a weekend to start Thucydides…

Early chapters are about an isolated conflict spiraling out of control. The words of the Corinthian ambassador to Athens seem apropos right now:

“Abstinence from all injustice to other first-rate powers is a greater tower of strength than anything that can be gained by the sacrifice of permanent tranquility for an apparent temporary advantage.”

i like when thucydides excitedly refers to himself in the third person