The More Things Change...

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.

     Berlin, Germany in 1933? Trump's America in 2016? Nope, this was written by Thucydides on the outbreak of civil war on the island of Corcyra in 427 BC in the third book of his History of the Peloponnesian War. He mentioned the funeral oration of Pericles in which the great Greek general and orator extolled Athenian values, which included the ancient world's equivalent of law and order. We've been hearing a lot of that these days, haven't we?

     The first summer after Pericles' famous funeral speech, Athens was afflicted by a plague that partnered with the civil war that roiled ancient Greece. Thucydides wasn't a prophet but he sure sounds like one now because he was a supreme example of the prized Greek characteristic of logical, clear-headed, scientific thinking.  
     Thucydides was so good at what he did because he was a master of understanding and delineating cause and effect He understood even back in the fifth century BC what made people do what they do. He couldn't have possibly anticipated Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Trump yet circumstantially, he had by carefully cataloguing the effects that history had on the people swept up in it and predicting it would happen again and again. As Thucydides said of his own book,

It will be enough for me… if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.

     Mission accomplished.