Cracking the Code: Narrative and Political Mobilization in the Greek Resistance

Abstract

That narrative can be more than a mechanical recitation of events is epitomized in Thucydides’ challenge to historiographical paradigms current during the fifth century B.C. In his definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian general in effect tells a “story” with a beginning, middle, and end. Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is anything but a neutral description of events. Instead, the collection interprets the conflict for the reader. The tale contains a discussion of the role of alternative military strategies and of the war’s wider political implications. According to Thucydides, the fractionization and polarization engendered by war as a mode of resolving political conflicts is too high a price to pay for victors and losers alike. Thucydides warns of psychic as well as material costs. Thus, the ancient political scientist tells the story of the Peloponnesian War to assert that the “sequences of real events be assessed as to their significance as elements of a moral drama” (White 1987: 21).