In Washington, a decade of rancorous polarization just gave us the longest ever government shutdown. But one belief has ...

The Athenian patrician Thucydides began writing the history of his city’s conflict with Sparta even as the war was beginning.

The Peloponnesian War shows how fear, ambition, and mistrust can escalate into full-scale conflict. Thucydides’ trap helps us ...

Robin Waterfield’s new translation of Thucydides’ “The History of the Peloponnesian War” offers clarity but little ...

Given recent interest in the work of the ancient Athenian soldier-turned-historian Thucydides in the foreign policy community—primarily due to Harvard academic Graham Allison’s popularization of the ...

Last month at War on the Rocks, Marine War College professor Jim Lacey held forth on how to teach Thucydides. Read the whole thing and hurry back! Let’s congratulate Professor Lacey for raising ...

President Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Fla., on April 6. (Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images) The April 2 Outlook essay "How Trump ...

In the conflict between Athens and Sparta, the Melians tried in vain to maintain their neutrality. As Thucydides apprises us, the Athenians were rather blunt about the issue: “Right, as the world goes ...

In the aftermath of the 2016 elections, an intense and widening divide resurfaced among Americans. While initial fissures in U.S. society revealed themselves over twenty years ago, the split increased ...

The Athenian historian Thucydides (c.460-c.395 BCE) claimed that his account of the Peloponnesian War would be ‘a possession for ever’, valued by posterity more than by his contemporaries. The history ...