Episode 19: Thucydides: A Revolution in Strategic Thinking

Thucydides, who lived almost two-and-a-half millennia ago, revolutionised strategic analysis by asserting the place of human agency rather than attributing events as being shaped by Gods or fate. This is something that Machiavelli repeats centuries later in The Prince. Thucydides claimed to have identified patterns of strategic behaviour that he thought would be enacted ‘as long as human nature is the same’.  A fascinating question, however, is whether strategists have behaved according to these patterns because they have been inspired to do so by reading Thucydides, or did he truly discover patterns of behaviour that endure throughout time and space? Are modern scholars projecting their own strategic world views into Ancient Greece or has our Ancient Greek heritage determined how we see the world? Finally, did Thucydides think that a world in which ‘the strong do what they will and the weak have to put up with it’ is the only possible one?

Dr Roel Konijnendijk is the Derby Fellow of Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford. After his PhD from University College London, he held several prestigious research fellowships and taught ancient history at UCL, Birkbeck, Warwick, Oxford, and Edinburgh. He is the author of Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018) and Between Miltiades and Moltke: Early German Studies in Greek Military History (2022) as well as co-editor of Brill's Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx (2021).

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, e-book 2023

Simon Hornblower,A Commentary on Thucydides, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Edith Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Neville Morley, Thucydides and the Idea of History (New Directions in Classics), I.B. Taurus, 2014.

Jennifer Roberts, The Plague of War: Athens, Sparta and the Struggle for Ancient Greece, Oxford University Press USA, 2017.

Polly Low (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thucydides, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Roel Konijnendijk, ‘Ancient Greece: Strategy of the City-States (c.550-330 BC)’, in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Beatrice Heuser (eds.):The Cambridge History of Strategy, Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2025, pp. 33-72.

Cian O’Driscoll, ‘Rewriting the Just War Tradition: Just War in Classical Greek Political Thought and Practice’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 59 No. 1, 2015, pp. 1-10.