On Justice Power and Human Nature

What are the Peloponnesian war’s manifest and true causes, according to Thucydides?

Thucydides says of the speeches he reproduces, “I have made each speaker say what I thought the situation demanded, keeping as near as possible to the general sense of what was actually meant” (51). What does he mean by this? Support your position with at least three examples from the speeches.

How does Thucydides resemble poets and writers of his time, and how does he differ from them? Draw on at least three specific examples from the text in your discussion.

Compare and contrast Sparta and Athens. What are each city’s strengths and weaknesses? Why does Sparta win the war?

What does Thucydides suggest is the difference between a just ruler and an effective one?

Overall, does Thucydides take a positive, negative, or neutral view of human nature? Analyze at least three specific examples from the text to support your position.

Compare and contrast Athens’s position in the Melian Debate with Brasidas’s argument to the Acanthians. Which is the more convincing argument, and why?

Explaining his motives for defecting to Sparta, Alcibiades says, “A true lover of his city is not the man who refuses to invade the city he has lost through injustice, but the man who desires so much to be in it that he will attempt to recover it by any means he can” (158). To what extent is his position consistent, or not, with Pericles’s exhortation to citizens, in his Funeral Oration, to “become lovers of Athens” (79)?