Thucydides 2022

To the question why they broke the treaty, I answer by placing first an account of their grounds of complaint and points of difference, that no one may ever have to ask the immediate cause which plunged the Hellenes into a war of such magnitude. The real cause, however, I consider to be the one which was formally most kept out of sight. The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable. Still it is well to give the grounds alleged by either side, which led to the dissolution of the treaty and the breaking out of the war.¹

This project is a compilation of assignments for the Catholic University of Portugal’s BA in Political Science and International Relations’ course on geopolitics and geostrategy during Spring 2022. During this course me and my classmates had the priviledge to study Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War that raged in the late 4th century BCE — an account of the highest value in the fields of literature, history, political philosophy, and international relations — during the outbreak of the largest war in Europe since 1945.

Over the semester me and my class were challenged to write: a memorandum; two essays; and a video essay. These are the materials which this project seeks to share.

I hope that, with me sharing these materials, you may experience a bit of what it was like to read Thucydides in 2022, as war raged yet again at the gates of Europe, and when conquest returned to the glossary of international relations.