06 November 20XX+1
My Dear Lucilius,
This morning, at our now regular breakfast consisting of ½ a cup of
grains, a handful of dried berries, and some kind of herbal tea which
I cannot identify by taste, Pompeia Paulina asked me about civil
wars.
It was an unexpected and odd question coming from my wife. Yes, she
is well read and we share some (but not all) subjects of reading
together, but she has never before asked about that specific subject
or genre.
I knew a bit, I replied. Followed by “But most of my knowledge is
about civil wars long ago”.
---
Modern civil wars never interested me, even back in the day when we
could see them on our screens nightly if we so desired. Part of it
was the fact that it was not just an entertaining five minute action
sequence in a movie; it was reality. The other was the fact that
depending on one’s opinions, even a not-so-recent event such as the
American Civil War could result in a re-fighting of the entire
campaign by people whose great grandparents were not alive at the
time.
And so my interests and knowledge lay safely in the past, insulated
by centuries and lack of passions by the modern world.
---
Of the books here, she asked, did I have any worth reading on the
subject? I know you will be surprised to hear that I had one or two.
The best, I told her, was The Peloponnesian War
by Thucydides the son of Olorus.
I have others of course – the
works of Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon’s Hellenica
which
cover the same period, and Appian’s The
Civil Wars
and Caesar’s The
Civil Wars
and half a dozen Roman authors that covered the same ground. But
Thucydides’ work remains the best.
Why,
she asked.
Thucydides
was not precisely “The Father of History”; that title falls to
Herodotus but perhaps only because he wrote a bit sooner – in my
opinion Thucydides was the better writer. And it was because of that
better writing – that actual attempt to gather facts and get the
gist of speeches correct, let alone his personal experience in the
War itself that made him more engaging.
It
is a simple story I told her, as old as time: two entities that once
were close but over time drifted apart to the point that they began
encroaching on one another’s perceived strategic interests; in some
ways no different than human relationships. One argument leads to
another, which leads to action, which leads to a point (it is quite
clear in the text) where the fork in the road for peace or war is
clearly seen, and war is chosen.
Like
most wars, I said, both sides assumed that it would be over after a
season or even a few years, as most wars of the age were. No-one
predicted it would go on for 27 years and result in the effective
destruction of the Classical Greek world: the Athenian Empire would
find itself shorn of its greatness and its empire and became one
among many Greek City-States, the Spartan state (now the Spartan
Hegemony) essentially becoming everything the Spartan state never
intended to be and collapsing a mere 30 years later into a backwater
rump state with a proud history but denuded of territory and manpower
and everything
that had made Sparta Spartan.
It
was, I said, a very clear discussion of the folly of humans and
ability to destroy everything they valued in pursuit of a goal they
thought they wanted. Over 27 years, the old Classical Greek polity
was destroyed as war went from the traditional short struggles of
hoplite warfare to total war, where cities were destroyed,
populations slain or enslaved, and horrors perpetuated.
All
in pursuit of a power which would, a little over 60 years later, slip
forever from their grasp with the rise of their neighbor Macedon to
the North.
My
favorite quote, I told her, was from early in the work, Book I, where
Archidamas, Eurypontid King of the Spartans, tells the Spartan
assembly “If you take something on before you are ready for it,
hurry at the beginning will mean delay at the end….’Slow’ and
‘cautious’ can equally well be ‘wise’ and ‘sensible’”.
She
laughed at that. It sounds a lot like you, she said.
Maybe
it does sound like me, Lucilius. But it troubles me that even in
thinking about that work, the parallels lay everywhere around me.
Your
Obedient Servant, Seneca
