New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

150 The New Imperialists
Amphitheus: [offering the third skin] Ah, but now this one – this is
the real thing. Thirty years, by land and sea.
Dicaeopolis: [drinking deep, and gradually breaking into an enormous
smile] Why, by all the feasts of Dionysus! It has the taste of
nectar and ambrosia. 36
The first wine reminds Dicaeopolis of Athenian imperial activities
such as shipbuilding, and he associates the second with the strategies
of alliance building during the interbellum, and so he rejects them both.
It is only the third one, the wine suitable for a divine repast, and one
which has matured over the span of a generation, that is acceptable to
our Athenian farmer. The underlying point stresses the possibility of a
permanent peace, but one that can be engendered only when older
generations are given an opportunity to forget about the present war and
younger generations can mature in peace.
These poetic examples express sentiments that were hardly exceptional
in ancient commentary. It can be claimed that the poets Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the historian Herodotus, and
the philosophers Plato and Aristotle shared grave concerns about war
and empire, particularly the Persian and Athenian empires. The sobering
condemnation of war in Aeschylus’ Orestian trilogy, Aristophanes’ unrelenting
reproof of the Athenian demagogues during the Archidamian
phases of the Peloponnesian War, and his rehearsal of these same
themes much later in Lysistrata, Herodotus’ tragic depiction of Persian
imperialist designs or Plato’s speculative critique of empire attest to this
general disquiet among Hellenic thinkers. When considered together
they effectively mounted a sustained critique of war and empire from
their unique intellectual standpoints.
Thucydides’ History is in step with this tradition. Most notably, his
account of the war has the feel of a poetic tragedy, especially as it moves
through the latter books. At its most fundamental level the tragic idiom is
premised upon the notion of a cosmological order with inviolable
boundaries. Within this cosmology humankind must take care not to
transgress the natural order, a violation destined to invite correcting
hands. As a literary form, tragedy presents us with a subject (individual
or nation) succumbing to hybris, that is, to an overreaching or exaggerated
optimism rooted in the inability to recognize one’s place in the
natural order of things. The deities typically function as superhuman