[HUTTON] THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 241 
Imperialism to Thucydides was rather the idea still suggested by the 
word to the minds of a few fanatics and doctrinaires of Radical tem- 
perament in Great Britain, the idea of militarism, jingoism, flag- 
waving, red-painting. It was even worse than this, it was the idea 
suggested to Thucydides by the bitter evidence of the Peloponnesian 
war and to us by the bitter evidence of German ‘“‘frightfulness.”’ 
It was the idea that “‘Imperialism’’ means the most ruthless mili- 
tarism and ambition in the conduct of war and the most shameless 
materialism and the most unscrupulous Macchiavelism in the conduct 
of diplomacy. ; 
Thucydides discerned a progressive brutality and a progressive 
materialism in the Athenian treatment of the enemy and of the neutral 
states. It is no wonder that he became a little-Athens man. 
The received rules of war were barbarous enough to begin with 
and before the Peloponnesian war began. On the other hand, the 
Athenian temperament was humanitarian enough—before the war— 
to largely cancel these rules. Athens was the one State when Pericles 
delivered his Funeral Speech, in which “virtue’’ àperm stood not for 
virtus—valour, not for the religion of valour but for benevolence— 
humanity— generosity—charity: the men of “‘virtue’”’ says Thucydides 
in his account of the plague, that is to say, the kindly man and the 
charitable (2. 51) died of the plague in the largest numbers. Athens 
before the war in fact had been the one Greek State which was to a 
certain degree Christian before Christ. And all this was lost by the 
brutalising influence of the war, or at least by the influence of the bruta- 
lised and materialistic spirit in which the war was waged. No wonder 
that Thucydides had ceased to be—if he ever was—an Athenian 
Imperialist. 
Thucydides has told us that he wrote for all time and that his 
work would never be out of date. (1. 22). If any one wants to test 
that soaring ambition let him do what I was able to do recently. 
Let him sit down quietly and listen to two young students of Greek 
reading alternately from Thucydides, the dialogue at the end of Book 
V. called the Melian debate. One reader represents the unhappy 
and weak neutral—Melos: the other, the callous, cynical, militaristic 
and aggressive Athens. The readers translated almost literally: 
changed nothing but the names: put Belgium for Melos: and Germany 
for Athens: and Great Britain for Sparta. For nothing else needed to 
be changed; and we heard coming to us from the year 416, B.C., the 
first proof, the first edition, of the identical debate between Belgium 
and Germany, which was republished under other names and at various 
times between 1860 and 1914: but never so closely to the original as 
in 1914. 
