Ancient Greek roots run deep in America. “What Athens was in miniature,” Thomas Paine predicted, “America will be in magnitude.” From the beginning of the American experiment, Thucydides’ history of the war between Athens and Sparta provided useful lessons for the nation’s founding fathers. John Adams wrote to his ten year old son, John Quincy, that his future country “may require other Wars, as well as Councils and Negotiations,” adding, “[t]here is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides.” Nearly two centuries later as an emerging Cold War threatened America’s sense of security, Secretary of State George Marshall declared, “I doubt seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and with deep convictions regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.”
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