242 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Thucydides therefore did something more than put forward a 
claim to anticipate future history, he did more than claim that history 
repeated itself. He did more than claim that history is written for 
the future, that the future may guide itself by the experience of the 
past: or—in the somewhat romantic and extravagant terms which are 
familiar to some of us from our school days—that history gives a 
young man all the advantages of age without its infirmities—all those 
claims I mean which have been definitely repudiated by some historians 
like Ranke, and which obviously leave out of sight the familiar ex- 
perience, that no man, and a fortiori, no nation, will agree to be taught 
by any experience except his own—these claims were not only put 
forward by Thucydides, but so successfully established by him, 
that a dramatic debate, like the Melian dialogue, can be pitchforked 
bodily into the year 1914 as a précis of the diplomatic history of 
Belgium and Germany in that eventful year. 
That debate indeed is doubly dramatic, as has been already suggest- 
ed. It is not only dramatic in its form, its dialogue, it is dramatic no less 
in its intense though unspoken irony. It precedes Bks. VI, VII, and 
Bks. VI, VII introduce the fall of Athens. “Strength goeth before a 
fall” is the religion of Herodotus. The same religion, but spiritualised, 
deepened, purified, is the religion of Thucydides. By painting strength 
in darker colours as pride, by heightening the picture of Athenian 
arrogance and cynicism towards Torone, Scione, Mende, Melos, and 
the rest of the cities and states which resisted Athens, he has given 
the Creed of Divine Jealousy a more righteous cast, a more humane 
interpretation. The humanitarianism of Athens—the better mind of 
Athens—is overheard in Thucydides confessing the justice of the 
Divine retribution which has fallen on her: not merely because she 
was powerful and ambitious, but because her subservience to her 
ambition and to her lust of power had dimmed and blighted all her 
greater and more characteristic qualities. “The war up to 415 B.C. 
made Athens great and Athenians small’’: that is the comment to 
be read between the lines of Thucydides. 
No man can say that modern Germany has not applied history 
to her politics—in spite of Ranke—: her politics have almost been 
made by her historians. It is a pity that her historians have not 
gone to ancient history, and in particular to Thucydides and the his- 
tory of Athens, when they were looking for historical omens. The 
Melian dialogue might have warned Germany off Belgium, if they 
had still cared for their classics. Curiously enough they did see the 
parallel between Great Britain and Sparta but not between themselves 
and Athens, or between Belgium and Melos.* 
* (vide —‘What Germany thinks,”’ p. 205 and foot note on Professor Reinhard 
Frank of Munich and Tubingen (p. 193). 

