What Would Thucydides Say About the Crisis in Greece?
The war between Athens and Sparta was already nearly two decades old, yet no end was in sight. With its citizens weary and restless, Athens adopted a brutal political calculus, declaring that those city-states not with them were, quite simply, against them. They threatened a neutral Melos with physical destruction if it refused to join the Delian League.
.. When Europe’s leaders insist that Greece belongs to the European “homeland” whether it likes it or not, ignore the growing social unrest and political paralysis in Greece, and refuse to reconsider the austerity package they previously negotiated with Athens’s former governing coalition, we are not that far from the Athenian claim at Melos that “the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”