Teleutias took advantage of this fact to launch a raid on Piraeus, the harbor of Athens, where he seized a number of merchant ships and fishing vessels. The Spartans had suffered several defeats there and the Athenians had relaxed their vigilance in the area. He returned to Sparta to great acclaim, and took command of a fleet on the island of Aegina circa 389 BC. Posted by: mistah charley, ph.d.Teleutias (brother of the Spartan king Agesilaus II) was a Spartan naval commander in the Corinthian War who took command of a Spartan fleet to attack Rhodes. According to Larkin, "It is a particularly uncanny twist of fate that these three novels effectively tell the story of Burma's recent history" (p. 2004.begins with her discovery that Orwell has the reputation in Burma of being a "prophet" due to his three most famous books: Burmese Days, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Teashop. I got to a review of a book on how Orwell is highly esteemed in Burma these days -Įmma Larkin.
Speaking of books one hears of by reading Brad De Long's blog, by following a link in the comments section of that same posting about Thucydides This is the condition all we potential sentient beings must contend with. Genius is pain, as pseudoJohn Lennon put it. I guess I'm still glad I read it then, even though I continue to struggle with the necessity of the facing the fact that "this is the future - you got to live it, or live with it". Lo and behold, there was the mirror of what I saw going on around me - the past and the present are part of the same thing, and there are persistent patterns in human activities - same as it ever was. The Western Civ class I encountered as a freshperson in college in the fall of 1965 required a reading of Thucydides. (I learned about the Kagan book via a review, via Brad Delong.) Posted at Ma03:03 AM The Melians, alone of the Cycladic islanders, had refused to join the Delian League.Ī further conflict was inevitable, for the Athenians could not long allow their will and authority to be flouted by a small Cycladic island. a campaign against Melos provided the Athenians with the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration. Here's what he says about the Melian affair. Kagan wrote a book called The Peloponnesian War. You'd expect a professor of Kagan's stature would wrestle long and hard with the implications of this.īut you'd expect wrong. This is clearly a bleak, frightening tale, in which there is no morality in human affairs, and hideous cruelty goes unpunished.
The Athenians then conquer the island, put all the men to death, and sell the women and children into slavery. In the end, the Melians refuse to give in. 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. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The Athenians scoff at such ideas: ATHENIANS. you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right. The Melians reply they have no quarrel with Athens, wish only to remain neutral, and appeal to morality: MELIANS. The Athenians demand that the Melians choose between being Athen's vassals and being destroyed. The dialogue takes place between representatives of the Athenian empire and the island of Melos. It's studied in many college classes as the classic debate between moral claims and realpolitik. And one of the most famous sections in it is the Melian Dialogue. One of the world's most famous political books is the History Of The Peloponnesian War by the Greek historian Thucydides. But it turns out his weird scariness goes deeper than I'd imagined. So I already knew he's one weird scary dude. In explaining his political trajectory, Kagan has told stories about his experience at Cornell in the late sixties in which he implicitly compared black activists there to Hitler. He's also a prominent neoconservative and the father of two other prominent neoconservatives ( Fred and Robert). Donald Kagan is Yale's former dean and a well-known professor of ancient Greek history.