be devoted to an examination of the problem of political morality and justice as presented in Thucydides' history, and to an evaluation and critique of Strauss's interpretations of Thucydides. The argument presented here will differ sharply from that presented by Strauss, yet the ultimate conclusion reached is strikingly in accord with Strauss's. Strauss (1964, pp. 154-54) finds Thucydides to be essentially sympathetic to the values of the Spartans, which Strauss characterizes as "moderation and divine law." This essay will offer an argument which rejects that interpretation of Thucydides.
Yet Strauss finds in the end that Thucydides presented the Pelopponesian War as uniquely an Athenian tragedy, not a vindication of Sparta. Athens is presented as a tragic hero, reaching high and in the end overreaching, while Sparta is ultimately a passive actor, which has no genuine alternative to offer, and succeeds only due to Athens' failures (Strauss, 1964, p. 226). With that conclusion, this essay will find entire agreement.
The Pelopponesian War lasted a generation, and was from the Greek perspective a "world war," involving almost all Greeks and substantial numbers of barbarians (i.e., non-Greeks). It thus offers a vast number and variety of instances in which the issues of political morality and justice are raised. Of these, this essay will confine its argument to two episodes that would now be called war crimes, the Athenian mass execution of the Melians and the Spartan mass execution of the Plataeans; a third incident, that of Mytiline, in which the Athenians drew back from a similar mass execution; and the chief political and military disaster of the war, the Athenian invasion of Sicily.
The questions to be asked are twofold. First, what light do the mass slaughters at Melos and Plataea, and the avoided mass slaughter at Mytiline, shed on the moral issues faced by states at war? Second, what light does Thucydides' ce...