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The Message of Melos and  of Ukraine

3/7/2022

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​      Those of us who study Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war can’t escape thinking about Melos when we follow the news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Melos was a small, unprepossessing island in the Aegean, with no significant resources, military power or strategic significance. .  Yet Athens, after achieving a peace with Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies, demanded the Melians submit to Athenian control.  The Melians seem to have done nothing worse than try to stay independent.    Melos was eventually subdued and could easily have been forgotten.  Thucydides, however, , put a spot light on it  with one of his most brilliant pieces of writing, a debate about power and justice. 
      Questions proliferate: Why did Athens attack?  Why did it treat the Melians so brutally? Why did Thucydides mae so much of the episode?  Can answering these questions sharpen our understanding  of Russia’s attack o Ukraine?
The analogy between Melos and Ukraine  goes only so far. The parallels are skewed: Ukraine is stronger and fiercer than Melos, and  Russia, surely,  is no Athens.  Still,  vulnerable people attacked by a superior power  speak a universal language.   They have something important to tell us: The horror, the  misery, the terror in such atrocities are not  accidental byproducts of the violence.  They are its deliberate  message.
How should we read that message? In the case of Melos Thucydides will  help - provided we are alert to one simple fact and to his technique of juxtaposition.  The simple fact is that Melos is an island, and hence vulnerable to Athens’ great naval power. There’s no way a little island can stand  up against such force, nor was it likely  that landlubber Sparta would try to help.
 The juxtaposition is between Melos and another island.  That’s the next part of Thucydides’ story – a vast armament sent from  Athens to subdue Sicily.  Surely the Sicilians knew the implicit  message of Melos:  submit or  suffer what the Melians had suffered:
The juxtaposition of an elaborate story about Melos and the huge expedition to subdue Sicily is not a narratological game Thucydides plays with his readers.  Instead, it’s an invitation   to  solve for ourselves  the puzzling attack on  Melos.  With Sicily in mind we can recognize the unstated but deliberate purpose of the attack and the  brutality that followed.  The atrocity was not an accidental by product of an expedition undertaken for another purpose.  It was  itself the purpose of the operation: a  deliberate, premeditated, an  intentional way of sending a message far across the Hellenic world: Resist us and you will end up suffering as the Melians did:
Hungry and besieged the Melians finally gave in, agreeing that  the Athenians could do whatever they wished.  That turned out to be  that “The Athenians killed all the adult males ,they had taken and enslaved the women and children.   The place itself they occupied with their own people, sending out 500 colonists at some later time. “ (Thucydides 5.116.4   . tr. J. Mynott)
Russia’s message from its atrocity in  Ukraine, I believe, is not dissimilar, and its intended audience is also widespread.   Are you listening,  Moldava and Finland?  What about the rest of you Europeans? Do you get the message?
Why should Russia stop with Ukraine?  The big prizes are further west. The  suffering of the Ukrainian people will teach other countries, one by one, not to resist.
Messages reverberate, and tyrants across the world - are eagerly listening. They’ll get the message soon enough. They will do what Russia has done.  Impose immense suffering on one people, then threaten others with their example.   It’s such a compelling message that it doesn’t even have to be made explicit.  It will work.
 Unless ....  –
unless analogy comes through at last. The invasion of Sicily turned out to be a disaster for Athens.  The Syracusans stood strong; the Spartans learned to row.  Athens suffered a humiliating defeat.  They had every reason to fear that what they had done to Melos would in due course  be done to them.
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