New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

WORKMAN: When Might is Right 151
custodians of the natural order of things, especially the goddess Nemesis.
The tragic personage or nation, in the face of this transgression, then
suffers a reversal of fortune understood as divine vengeance on overweening
mortals.
In the History the Athenian massacre at Melos is immediately followed
by the account of the Sicilian expedition. The Athenian massacre at
Melos had shaken Athens to its core, and any reader of the History would
have known that the formidable Athenian forces were routed in Sicily.
Thucydides immediately establishes that when the Athenians launched
the Sicilian expedition they “were for the most part ignorant of the size
of the island and of the number of its inhabitants, both Hellenic and
native, and they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost
the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians.” 37 Despite
Nicias’ warnings about the folly of far-flung aggression, the Athenians,
drunk with hybris, pressed on to Sicily. When “this most costly and
finest-looking force of Hellenic troops up to that time” was poised to set
sail, Thucydides tells us that crowds gathered on the shore “merely to see
the show and to admire the incredible ambition of the thing.” Wine was
poured, prayers were made, and the spectacular armada of the “most
far-reaching kind” set sail for disaster. 38 The overweening Athenians
suffered ignominious defeat at Syracuse, and would eventually lose the
Peloponnesian War to Sparta.
Thucydides’ narration continues in the tradition of Herodotus’ tragic
Histories. In their circumference the Histories of Herodotus present the
rise and fall of four successive Persian emperors beginning with Cyrus in
559 and ending with Xerxes’ final defeat at Plataea in the summer of 479
at the hands of Spartan hoplites. Each king of the Achaemenid empire –
Cyrus (559–529 B.C.E.), Cambyses (529–522), Darius (521–486), and his
son Xerxes (486–465) – follows a distinct cycle of consolidation, territorial
expansion, and military defeat at the edges of their realm. Each
defeat is final and irreversible; each defeat comes on the heels of wise
counsel strongly admonishing the emperor in question to reconsider his
expansionist plans; and each emperor appears as a living violation of the
Delphic maxims “know thyself” and “nothing in excess” as he succumbs
to the belief that he is god-like, and that the expansion of his realm has
no natural limits. At the moment of their most frivolous annexation their
fortunes are dramatically reversed. Herodotus’ story of the Persian
invasions is cast as a story of over-reaching emperors who invite godly