Legitimising war and defending peace: Thucydides in WWI and after

Abstract

Thucydides was one of many classical authors who was cited and reinterpreted in the course of the First World War, with parallels identified or asserted between his account of the war between Athens and Sparta and contemporary events. The origins of the Peloponnesian War, and especially the question of responsibility for the outbreak of hostilities, were debated by German classicists, while extracts from Pericles’ Funeral Oration were distributed as cheap pamphlets in both Germany and Britain, used in a British advertising campaign to support conscription, and after the War featured on public war memorials. This cemented an association between Thucydides and the celebration of military service, especially within veterans’ organizations, that persists today; at the same time the idea that his account offers a model of an engaged, present-focused historiography was taken up by key figures in the emerging post-war discipline of international relations, giving him his continuing status as intellectual inspiration and foundational thinker.