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. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘statistics’
They Win Again?
Posted in Research in Progress, tagged games, Melian Dialogue, statistics, Thucydides on January 24, 2019| 9 Comments »
Sphinx 