Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

Whenever sabers begin to rattle somewhere in the world, I am irresistibly drawn back to Thucydides, the Athenian general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, the deadly clash between Athens and Sparta that raged from 431 to 404 BCE and engulfed most of the Greek-speaking world in its chaos. He wrote, perhaps, precisely for people like us: in the first of the three introductions that he eventually added to his masterwork, he declared that he intended it as a “possession for all time,” and so it has been for over two millennia. No one has ever turned to Thucydides’ history for any sensation that could be called comfort. He presents a clear-eyed chronicle of war both as a constant of human life and as the ultimate form of human folly. But his clarity, won at a terrible personal price (he suffered both plague and exile because of it), has its own harsh beauty, and makes his work as piercing now, and as precious, as it has ever been to previous centuries. Our weaponry and the theaters of our conflicts may have changed, but the same basic forces still drive human beings to destroy one another, and everything else around them, for evanescent promises. The war between Athens and Sparta, at least as Thucydides presents it, may have been the inevitable result of too much power concentrated in two rival polities, but battling over their differences benefited neither state in the end; indeed, it came close to destroying them both. The conflict hinged on too many variables for anyone, however insightful, to predict, and thus Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War becomes a vast spectacle of misjudgment and its consequences. The fact that Thucydides himself provides that History with three separate introductions at three separative points in the narrative shows how radically he was compelled, by time and circumstance, to broaden his own point of view as the conflict dragged on for a generation. What he first may have seen as a straightforward duel turned out to be a bitter lesson in geopolitics. The first introduction appears where we would expect it, at the beginning, when he presents the object of his scrutiny as the war between Athens and Sparta. “Thucydides, an Athenian, recorded the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department at the peak of perfection, and he could see the rest of the Greeks taking sides in the quarrel.” But when he reaches the moment when Athens and Sparta strike a peace treaty in 421, after ten years of battle, Thucydides recasts his enterprise. The war may be officially over, but the peace is illusory: Though for six years and ten months they abstained from invasion of each other’s territory, yet abroad an unstable armistice did not prevent either party doing the other serious injury, until they were finally obliged to break the treaty. . . The history of this period has also been written by the same Thucydides, an Athenian. . . Only a mistaken judgment can object to including the interval of treaty in the war. I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them. It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years …, and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs more closely. In 423, as one of the ten generals elected each year in Athens, Thucydides had been put in charge of an Athenian fleet stationed in the north Aegean, a territory he knew intimately. When a Spartan army began to draw near Amphipolis, the chief Athenian outpost in the region, Thucydides mobilized his navy, but he arrived too late: a quick-moving Spartan general named Brasidas had reached Amphipolis ahead of him, though Thucydides did manage to save the settlement’s port from