Athens did manage to **lose** the Peloponnesian War. It lost the Peloponnesian War even though it had 40000 (adult male) citizens and Sparta had only 5000. It lost the Peloponnesian War even though it was vastly richer than Sparta, both in terms of income flowing in and through Athens and in terms of the ability of its workers to do stuff and build ships and weapons. It lost the Peloponnesian War even though its navy dominated the entire Aegean much more than Sparta's army dominated the land Peloponnese. It lost the Peloponnesian War even though oligarchy of the Spartan sort was certainly no easier a political system to maintain in Hellas in the -400s then was democracy of the Athenian sort.

It is hard to read Thucydides's history as not teaching that Athens lost the Peloponnesian War because many who ought to have been its natural allies concluded that it was, well, a menace—doing what it could on impulse, rather than striving to be a benevolent hegemon sensitive to concerns of justice. And it is hard to read that s an unintended lesson: Thucydides gives the Melian Dialogue, the Mytilene Decree, the Syracusan expedition the prominence he does for reasons, after all.

You have to work hard not to see the major underlying theme as justice vs. hubris, and in the end justice wins—Athens's rogue elephant actions calling into being a Grand Alliance opposed to it, and so by the music of the flute-girls they tore down the Long Walls.

> Robert Tallarita: The Thucydidean Slip: On Mark Carney's speech in Davos, Thucydides, and the repressed tension between justice and necessity...