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The Limits of Anachronism: Hobbes, Thucydides, and Us. (Bay Woods, h2so4)

Eric Voegelin claims that the Peloponnesian War wasn't known as such until after Thucydides' book was published, after his death. It had not been conceived of by its principle players as a single and unified war. Rather, because of its length and its dispersal over many fronts, it had generally been considered a series of conflicts. The specificity of this particular "situation"—both its own internal coherence and its external differentiation from prior conflicts—was lost on Thucydides' contemporaries. This is why Thucydides begins his work by distinguishing it from that of Homer and Herodotus, in the same way that one would need to distinguish an account of the present conflict from both World War II and Viet Nam in order to be able to think it clearly and responsibly. [...]

It is possible that people in the future will consider the present conflict as a part of a larger conflict that began, perhaps, with the Gulf War: "The Arab-American War" or something of the sort. Americans have been able to forget the Gulf War or to say that it "never took place," but to the people in Iraq it has not yet ended. Reading Thucydides may give us a chance to uncover the lost horizons of our own history, extending in every direction.

The Gulf War? If it does end up appearing to be a truly extended war in retrospect--and it seems likely that it should--it will almost certainly be considered to have begun with the Yom Kippur War and the Arab Oil Embargo. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2003 12:14 AM