EconAir

Thucydides A friend of mine recently said that the most “useless” course he took in college was history. Let’s start with Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War . This was a war that took place over 2,400 years ago. What possible relevance could it have for Americans? In this war, Athens and Sparta, the two “superpowers” of Greece, were locked into a long war for the dominance of Greece. Athens, a democracy, had grown wealthy and powerful after the wars with the Persians. They had established an empire in the Aegean Sea, using taxes on Greek cities and islands to glorify Athens, including the Parthenon. Greek mainland city-states, led by Sparta, were jealous and fearful of Athenian power. Like World War I, the war in Greece began with a local dispute far from the major powers, in this case Athens and Sparta.  The climax to the story in Thucydides was that Athens decided to send its formidable fleet and much of its army to attack Syracuse, an ally of Sparta, far...