Walls crumble, words endure
In the year 431 BC, the world shook. Or so it must have seemed to one Athenian man, Thucydides, son of Olorus. He did what seemed best at that moment—began documenting the unfolding chaos around. But even as he recognized that something important was afoot, I wonder if he had any inkling that this war would continue for twenty-seven years. By the end of it, he was dead, his history unfinished. But perhaps, had he known, he would have done nothing different. In a world of crumbling walls, he hoped that mere words would somehow endure.
I think about this sometimes. How could someone ever know while living through an event that it wasn’t just an ordinary day but the beginning of something momentous? What is it like to write history as it is happening? More often, we are rather like Britain’s Neville Chamberlain in 1938—rolling our eyes at events elsewhere as localized squabbles, failing to see their true significance and ramifications for our own world. Or, in my case, living through events in the Soviet Union in 1989 and 1991, possessing zero understanding of anything significant being afoot. In all fairness to me, at least, I was in elementary school. Third-graders are not known for their historical awareness.
But perhaps all that matters for our purposes here is that Thucydides, son of Olorus, knew. His guess—and that is all it could have been at the moment—proved correct. His work writing the history of the Peloponnesian War as it was unfolding offers a chance to reflect on a conviction that I think was at the heart of his project, which has relevance for the story of Current too. It is, put simply, the importance of faithfully writing for the public good in a democracy in crisis.
***
It was in the year 1989—the same year that eight-year-old me was blissfully unaware of the Velvet Revolutions all over Europe—that Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History,” seeing history in terms of linear progress, a concept he had borrowed from Karl Marx, who in turn had borrowed it from Hegel. As far as Fukuyama was concerned in 1989, the Cold War was over, liberal democracy had won a decisive victory, and the Thucydidean mode of historical writing with all its angst about the corruptibility of the human condition and threats to democratic order could at last be put out to pasture. I am over-simplifying, but not by much.
Had Fukuyama been a better historian perhaps he would have recognized the irony of such a pronouncement—and its lack of originality. As H.G. Wells’s famous description of WWI should remind us—“the war to end all wars”—such optimism has previously attended other momentous events, each time proving false sooner rather than later. Fukuyama’s own proclamation has repeatedly been proven wrong, most recently in Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That invasion, indeed, inaugurated its own round of op-eds and reflections on the “return of history.” It is an insufficiently acknowledged fact, after all, that history departs and returns on tanks.
But some of us know better—because historians don’t forget. They keep on writing.
***
Early on in his work, Thucydides reflects on the unreliable nature of archaeology to reveal the past to the excavators of the future. For there are two great cities in his day: Athens and Sparta. And the great war he is writing is the tale of these two cities. They are the ones driving the Peloponnesian War with their long-standing rivalry and forcing everyone else throughout the Greek-speaking world to pick a side—or else. But while the first of these two cities created beautiful art and built magnificent buildings and powerful walls, the second one did none of this.
Quipping that their citizens were their walls, the Spartans considered not only fortifications, but all art and beautiful buildings to be unnecessary luxury—useless goods for their national project of military conquest and domination. Why bother building anything beautiful when utilitarian dorms for all would do? Besides, money and personal property largely did not exist in Sparta. All children belonged to the state. And with permission of a husband, another warrior could borrow his wife to beget excellent future warriors. (The wife’s permission in those instances was, needless to say, superfluous.)
What might hypothetical future archaeologists think, Thucydides mused, when they study the remains of these two cities in the future? It is easy for observers to form conclusions based entirely on the visible, material remains. And so, these observers would mistakenly assume that Athens had been a great civilization, whereas Sparta was nothing special. Oh, how wrong they would be!
Of course, we might do well to note something obvious that Thucydides took for granted: No matter how magnificent they are, all walls will crumble someday. All civilizations, no matter how great, will be destroyed. Build what you will, but know that just like you, o child of dust, from dust the labor of your hands has risen, and to dust it will return. Whether you will be around to see this end or not is immaterial. Aside from some rocks in the ground, all great cities will be forgotten, yielding fodder for that famous joke about the optimism of archaeologists—that whenever they find three stones in a row, this must have been a wall once. And four stones mean this was a Minoan palace.
Material remains, it appears, reveal little of their own accord, no matter how hard we coax them, putting broken bits together, restoring columns, or gluing millennia-old pots into wholeness to reveal glimpses of chariot-driving warriors in red figure clay. Crumbling walls can’t really speak, no matter how much agency we would like to grant them. But written words—they remain. The future in due time will repeat or at least resemble the past, Thucydides asserts. And so, his goal is to write a “possession for all time.”
The term he uses, ktêma, denotes a plot of land, an estate, something that is part of the family inheritance. But the inheritance Thucydides speaks of does not belong to him. The writer does not own history. Besides, a public good does not belong to any one man alone; the entire point, by definition, is that it is for the benefit of others.
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But why is writing a “possession for all time” a public good for a democracy in crisis? What can words do in the face of erosion of democratic institutions, when oligarchic takeovers loom, and when society is shaped increasingly in the anti-virtues? Thucydides must have thought a great deal about the ability of his words to make a difference, however small, whether in the present moment or beyond. One does not spend nearly three decades of one’s life eagerly researching and writing otherwise. We do not know what his day-to-day must have been like in the process, but I do not doubt that the task weighed heavy. So why do it?
We could quip back with Socrates’s famous cliché—that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” That’s a decent answer, albeit an incomplete one. This digestible bit is about the importance of reflection in one’s own life, first and foremost—the ideal of philosophy as a way of life. But Socrates spoke this in Plato’s Apology, the (likely fictional) speech he gave in his own defense while on trial for corrupting the Athenian youth and disrespecting the traditional gods. In his speech, he claims to have lived a life of challenging the Athenians to think more deeply for their own good. The Athenians who convicted him did not agree. Some of Socrates’s students, after all, were among the Thirty Tyrants who allied themselves with Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War, overthrew the Athenian democracy for a brief while, and unleashed a regime of bloodletting against fellow citizens for nearly a year until exiled democratic leaders banded together to restore the democracy in the state. Is this really the fruit of living a truly well-examined life? Is this the good that public intellectuals bring to their state?
A public good, by definition, benefits the public first and foremost. Its personal benefit to the doer or speaker must be secondary and perhaps not guaranteed. Doing something for the good of the public means, at the most obvious level, recognizing that what we do (including our writing) has a significance beyond just our own lives. It entails selfless recognition that we do not belong to ourselves alone. Actions of any one citizen have the potential to affect the well-being of the state for good or ill. Also, every citizen’s quality of life is inextricably bound with the flourishing of the state. These two axioms, by the way, sum up handily everything that ever goes wrong in Greek mythology. One man’s folly can handily unleash devastating plague, war, and more.
Had Socrates’s students turned out to be virtuous citizens willing to support Athens at a time of crisis, we could say that the famous teacher’s actions had benefited the state. But Socrates’s elaborate dialogues about the nature of courage, justice, virtue, love, and many more topics beside seem to have taught his students none of these qualities in practice. Instead, they allied themselves with the oligarchic state that Athens had been fighting for nearly three decades and profited from their homeland’s defeat by installing themselves as tyrants. Thucydides doesn’t get to this point in the war in his unfinished history. But oligarchic sympathizer though he was, he is concerned for the Athenian democracy—this much is clear.
Perhaps there is more than one way to live the well-examined life. For Thucydides, the priority of his historical inquiries—his attempt to live the examined life—was always the public good of Athens, even as he found himself exiled from his homeland in 424 BC and kept writing while traveling all around the Greek world as a sort of war correspondent for the twenty years that followed. And while Socrates claimed to be the gadfly stinging Athenians into conscience and the pursuit of that examined life, it was Thucydides who documented Athenian and Spartan war crimes, unflinchingly documenting the evil of war for eroding the character of his fellow-citizens as well as their enemies.
What good did this writing earn for Thucydides while alive? None at all, it seems. And yet, virtue is its own reward for the one who writes with conviction. More importantly, attempting to shape the state in the virtues is a noble goal, even if it fails. It is better to try and fail than to stand by and watch the disaster unfold. To offer this education in the virtues through his writing of present events is, Thucydides seems convinced, the best public good a writer like him could bring to his state.
***
The summer after my first year of graduate school, I at last got to travel to Greece and visit many majestic walls and ruins whose photographs I could recognize from textbooks—much as we might recognize someone from their website photograph when meeting in person for the first time.
I was studying at the American School at Athens, and that first night, we climbed up the Lykavittos Hill, the highest point in modern Athens, named after the wolves who once roamed it. Today the wolves have been replaced with picturesque homes, trendy boutiques, tucked-away restaurants that come alive only after dark, and kiosks selling sparkling water, newspapers, and cigarettes around the clock. The evening was hot and the hill steep. But finally, exhausted and sweaty, we all arrived at the top of the hill and the magnificent view it promised—more beautiful and overwhelming that any of us had expected.
Centuries collided all in one sight. Here was the city of Athena—and of Thucydides—laid out in front of us in a strange kaleidoscopic jumble: the ancient city coexisting with the medieval and modern iterations, buildings from two and a half millennia ago right alongside those built in this century. And towering over them all is the Acropolis, with its distinctive temple of Athena—the Parthenon, built in Thucydides’s own lifetime, but lit up with modern lights after dark like some sort of mythological disco hall.
The Parthenon is beautiful. It is also largely destroyed, a hollow relic of what it once was—the roof gone, pediment marble decorations removed and subject to controversy for centuries, and many columns and other bits and pieces pillaged over the course of centuries. And then there was that time in 1687 when the Ottomans used the Parthenon as gunpowder storage during a war with Venice. The Venetian army fired on the Parthenon and managed a direct hit on the gunpowder store, causing much destruction for the already insecure edifice. What we see today is the result of painstaking historical reconstruction.
At least it’s in better shape than the ancient precinct of Artemis Orthia in Sparta, which I got to visit a couple of weeks after that first hike up the Lykavittos. Only traces of walls remain of the area where ancient Spartans once worshipped their patron goddess. Incongruously mingled among the loose rocks and bare vestiges of ancient walls, some only three stones in a line, distinctly modern detritus blew in the summer air and littered the ground—an empty plastic chip bag, a coffee cup, empty cigarette packs. A street cat skulked by.
***
Thucydides was right. Buildings and great walls don’t endure, but written words do. But then, is any writer today another Thucydides—or is any publication? Isn’t this laughably presumptuous?
We say that we write for the public good, and we mean it. And yet, what is the minimum readership threshold for magazines to be able to make such a lofty claim? Current did not aspire to be The Atlantic or New Yorker. It simply did what truly little magazines do—offer a place for writers who are not household names to be Thucydides for a day and write “commentary, reflection, judgment” for the good of the American democracy. Just because it wasn’t read by millions does not mean it didn’t achieve this goal.
Isn’t this the most democratic work of all—to steward the work of faithful voices who bring reflection and expertise for the public good? Besides, every piece of writing is an act of faith and hope—that the labor is not in vain, and that one doesn’t have to be a Thucydides to do it.
“All good things come to an end, sometime,” said another sage, Mary Poppins. Can’t argue with that.
Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity, and Christians Reading Classics (forthcoming, Zondervan Academic, 2025). She is Managing Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog.
