To return to an issue I’ve discussed before: do the Melians have any hope of rescue, if they decide to resist the Athenians? According to the conventional Realist reading, they are simply deluded, grasping at straws (the Spartans will come, the gods will help us, you never know what might happen) rather than accept the reality of their position and the way the world works. Whether Thucydides intended us to believe this – whether here, if not elsewhere, he shares the Athenian respective – is less clear. Certainly the Spartans (let alone the gods) fail to turn up, and there’s no indication in the text that this was even a possibility; we could then assume that T takes this as a given, and wants us to reflect on (among other things) the capacity for the ‘weak’ to start pleading unicorns, or we could assume that he leaves the counterfactual possibility hanging, so we might reflect both on how far the Athenians got lucky (and so were confirmed in their irrational belief in their own omnipotence) and on the question of how much hope is enough to make the Melian gamble worthwhile.
Regardless of what Thucydides himself may have thought, there’s nothing to stop us exploring the implied counterfactual, and I’ve been persuaded by my colleague and collaborator that the Melian Dilemma game ought to include rescue by the Spartans as a possible outcome, even if it’s an unlikely one; after all, they had sent military reinforcements to Melos in the past, and not long after this event they sent Gyllipus and a small detachment to Syracuse, where he rallied them against the Athenians and helped defeat the attempted invasion. So, not unprecedented, not impossible – but exactly how likely was it? Assigning an estimated probability to the event isn’t normal historical procedure – but for the purposes of modifying the game, I do need at least an order of magnitude.
I asked this question on the Twitter and was roundly ignored, apart from one response (for which I’m very grateful):
These are certainly relevant factors, and there are others (we’ll come back to the issue of numbers). There clearly are reasons why the Spartans might see this as a wise move – as the Melians argue in the Dialogue, sense of obligation to old allies, concern that other allies might lose trust in them, wish to deny tactical advantage to Athenians – even if it’s by no means a sure thing. On the other hand, there must be a real chance that they might fail to act on such a decision – poor omens, yet another religious festival that leads them to delay until it’s too late, logistical problems – and that they are prevented from reaching Melos by Athens and its allies (easier to control access to Melos than to Syracuse?). Finally, even if the Spartans did send forces to Melos, there’s no guarantee of success, even if they sent substantial numbers rather than just a commander and a small detachment.
Can we attach numbers to these factors with any degree of plausibility? We could start with a basic 50% for each: so, chance that Spartan forces make it to Melos, 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.125; chance that Melos is saved, 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.0625. I’d be tempted to give the Spartans slightly more credit – okay, yes, Marathon – and, in the absence of a detailed study of the actual likelihood of them having a religious festival at the relevant time, reduce the chances of them failing to set out to 0.25; on the other hand, perhaps we need to add a choice between a large and small force (50:50?), with the latter having only a 0.25 chance of winning – but a better chance of getting to Melos in the first place?
So, chance of Melian escape version 2: 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.5 (despatch large force) x 0.5 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.5 (victory!) PLUS 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.5 (despatch small force) x 0.75 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.25 (victory!) = 0.046875 + 0.03515625 = 0.082.
This might of course be refined and modified further, if not indefinitely, but we’re still in the vicinity of under 10%, which is something I can work with for the game. What I’m not sure about is whether this approach has the slightest validity. Any thoughts, anyone?
Update: as discussed in response to Phil’s comment below, I do think that there is a significant difference between a large Spartan contingent (similar order of magnitude to the Athenian forces) and a small one (a quarter of the size, maybe), both in terms of the chances of such an expedition making it to Melos without running into trouble and in terms of its chances of victory – but on reflection, it seems a lot more likely that they’d send a smaller force, given that they’re all supposed to be at peace at the moment.
Melian escape version 3: 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.25 (despatch large force) x 0.5 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.5 (victory!) PLUS 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.75 (despatch small force) x 0.75 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.25 (victory!) = 0.0234375 + 0.052734375 = 0.076.
I still think Dylwah’s joke is spot on, but maybe it is over-egging the pudding to include the ‘Spartans too busy being religious to seize strategic advantage’ factor…
So, chance of Melian escape version 4: 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.25 (despatch large force) x 0.5 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.5 (victory!) PLUS 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (despatch small force) x 0.75 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.25 (victory!) = 0.03125 + 0.0703125 = 0.102. We have 10%!
An obvious observation is that none of these minor refinements make any difference to the order of magnitude of the result, so maybe we should just stick with the basics: 50% chances that the Spartans send help (given that, in practice, they didn’t), 50% change that help then successfully reaches Melos (given Athenian dominance of the sea, and the example of Thucydides himself failing to relieve siege of Amphipolis), and 50% chance that this swings the contest: 12.5%. Upper limit of the Melians’ chances?
Update 25/1: a couple of additional things to report, and one bigger announcement. Firstly, I ran a Twitter poll to get a sense of the communis opinio on the Melians’ chances; only 29 people responded, unfortunately, but a resounding 62% voted for None. At. All., 31% for a 5% chance and 7% for a 25% chance. A little odd that no one at all went for my preferred 10%. I suppose that it isn’t too surprising that so many adopted the Athenian/Thucydidean view, given that it’s taken more than a year for me to be talked round to giving Melos a chance, but I would be interested to know the reasoning behind it.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a fascinating exchange of messages with the great Myles Lavan at St Andrews, who actually understands Bayesian approaches to probability and has applied them to historical problems with fascinating results; the good news from my perspective is that he didn’t think what I’m doing to be completely mad. That is to say: from a Bayesian perspective there is no such thing as “the probability” of a event that can be estimated, but rather probability expresses a belief – it’s a way of expressing my sense of the degree of (in)evitability in the course of events. I really do need to think of this in relation to my ongoing interest in the role of historical counterfactuals, which of course work to question any idea of inevitability or determinism, within limits.
Anyway, I do believe there was at least a chance that the Melians might have got lucky – and so this has been incorporated into the Melian Dilemma game, the latest version of which is now ready for release! Yes, not only can you now play the Melians as well as the Athenians, there is a small but not negligible chance that you can play the Melians and win! The bad news is that the Philomela website, where I put the original Athenian version, seems to be having a bad day and won’t let me log in, so you can’t play it yet. Worst case scenario is that you’ll have to wait until I finish writing up the piece I’m working on for Epoiesen…
Sphinx 
Uninformed opinion: most of those are ‘either/or’s, but I’m not crazy about hanging a lot on the distinction between ‘large’ and ‘small’ (unless you’ve got something specific in mind when you say ‘large force’/’small force’).
I think that’s a fair point; does it help to specify more clearly what I have in mind? ‘Small’ and ‘large’ are understood in relation to the Athenian expedition.
The Athenians sent 38 ships to Melos, according to Thucydides, with 2700 allied hoplites, plus archers; a ‘large’ expedition would be one of a similar order of magnitude, which when put together with the Melian forces would offer a reasonable chance of victory; a ‘small’ one would be substantially smaller, 20-25% of the size of the enemy forces or less. By comparison, the original Athenian expedition to Sicily was 134 triremes, with 5100 hoplites and a couple of thousand other troops, and the Spartans sent out 1000 Spartan hoplites plus allied troops in about 20 ships.
The Melians said that they placed their trust in two other things besides the Spartans: in the gods inclination to favor the just, and in good fortune.
This is true, but I am not going to add a potential divine intervention to the game… The possibility of the Spartans intervening is surely real, even if limited and not a great basis for choosing to fight; the other factors can presumably be included in that (the gods help them by having the Spartans intervene; good fortune allows the Spartan force to make it through), no? I mean, 60% of Twitter respondents thought I was being too generous in allowing even that possibility…
Clearly the Spartans didn’t arrive. Nonetheless, the Melians put up a surprisingly tough and effective resistance — despite all of their strength and bluster, the Athenians did not have an easy time of it. Thucydides makes a point that it was TREACHERY from among the Melians themselves, and not Athenian strength, that ultimately succeeded. Be that as it may, Thucydides also weaves into the Melian argument a prophetic warning to those who ignore justice — that someday the Athenian empire would end, and when it did, the resulting crushing punishment that Athens would suffer would be a lesson to the world. This in fact happened exactly as the Melians predicted. Though Athens may have wiped the Melians from the face of the earth, Athens eventually lost the war in a most crushing and humiliating way. A contemporary Greek observer, and perhaps Thucydides himself, may well have detected hand of the gods and a just universe in the Athenian plague, for example. Moreover, the Athenians scoffed at the hope that the Melians placed in good fortune. The Greeks of the time knew that fortune is fickle, unpredictable, and two-faced. It was largely fortune that failed the Athenians in their colossally catastrophic Sicily campaign. So, in short, when one looks at the Melian Dialogue in isolation, the cynical Athenian expression of realpolitik seems vindicated. However, when one reads the dialogue as an episode in the larger drama of the Peloponnesian War, then perhaps the larger point that Thucydides was trying to make was that the Athenians’ arguments at Melos were dead wrong; that the Athenians, not the Melians, misunderstood the eternal laws that govern the universe; that they were mistaken in their belief that the universe and the gods favor the mighty over the just. Perhaps the point that Thucydides was trying to make is that the Melians were the ones who were prophetic and correct; that in the long run, the gods and the order of the universe DOES in fact favor justice. Martin Luther King, Jr. made an argument that the Melians would have understood — and perhaps that Thucydides also understood — when he said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Absolutely; it’s the fundamental flaw in many crude ‘Realist’ interpretations of Thucydides that (1) they simply assume that the views of the Athenians are his views, (2) they simply assume that these are universal truths, and (3) they don’t look at the wider context, or the fact that it’s the Athenians’ attitude that, in Thucydudes’ account, leads them to launch the Sicilian expedition. While the game does focus just on the Melian Dialogue, I’ve brought in the ‘what happened next’ issues in some of the endings. Of course; I’m not sure that Thucydides intends us to think that the Melians were right either, except in the vaguest sense – the Athenians aren’t punished by the gods or the moral order of the universe, but brought down by their own folly.
(Thumbs up!)
This comment is somewhat of a tangent to your original question, and I’m just an average, casual, and curious reader of this literature. I’ve never taken a class in this, for example — I’m not an expert by any means. So, I would not be offended or surprised if this comment just sort of sits there. Here goes…
In the opening pages of ‘The History of the Peloponnesian War,’ Thucydides described his sources for the actual words of the various speeches that appear throughout the book. He said that he composed these speeches by piecing together the accounts of others, and — this is key — from his own imagination, so as to be consistent with what he imagined the various characters might say under the circumstances, regardless of what they actually did say.
In that sense, the ‘Melian Dialogue’ is more of a piece of imaginative literature than it is history, strictly speaking, just as Henry V’s ‘St. Crispin’s Day’ speech and Mark Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech are products of Shakespeare’s imagination, though they too refer to real historical events — The Battle of Agincourt and the assassination of Julius Caesar. Consciously or unconsciously, Thucydides, like Shakespeare, may have created the ‘Melian Dialogue’ to be consistent with or to give meaning to the larger historical events that Thucydides was trying to comprehend and record.
Also, to me, the ‘Melian Dialogue’ resembles the twisted prophecies of Greek oracles found throughout Greek literature. Often an oracle’s prophecy seemed to have a certain meaning; the protagonist would act upon that presumption; and the story would reach its conclusion when the protagonist realized his folly too late to avoid the catastrophe brought on by his own flaws and blindness.
In the case of the ‘Melian Dialogue,’ both the Melians and the Athenians were trying to ‘read the tea leaves,’ in a sense. Each interpreted the will of the gods and the nature of the moral universe in a way that turned out to be true, but with an unforeseen and catastrophic twist in store, surprising to each, but for different reasons — sort of a double tragedy. It seems to me that Thucydides’ ‘Melian Dialogue’ fits comfortably in that tragic Greek literary tradition.
I think this is basically right; one of the reasons I feel I have some license to muck about with the Melian Dialogue, turning it into games and parodies and performances and so forth, is that it is already a highly rhetorical, imaginative text, where Thucydides was experimenting with different forms. Even with the other, more conventional speeches, there’s a never-ending debate about how far they can be considered ‘historical’ (and what we think that means) – as one German scholar remarked, “all the speakers speak Thucydidean”. The Melian Dialogue is certainly invented (Melians all dead, for a start), so at the very least T has composed this on the basis of his understanding of how the Athenians thought, how people responded to them, how this episode fits into the wider narrative arc etc. Definite influence from the conventional ‘agon’ scene in tragedies, where two contending views are set out against one another.