What Thucydides Can Teach Us About Being Human
By Rachael Stover
There are some books that we read because we are supposed to know them.
And then there are books that, if we are fortunate, read us back. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War is one of those books.
More than two thousand years have passed since Thucydides watched Athens and Sparta move toward war, yet when I listen to a good history teacher discuss his work with students, I am struck by how little distance there really is between the ancient world and our own. The names are different. The weapons are different. The political institutions are different. But the people are remarkably familiar to us now. They are afraid. They want to be respected. They want security. They want power. They want to belong.
They convince themselves that what they desire is also what is right.
And, sometimes, they discover too late that the two are not the same thing. This is one reason I believe a school should ask more of history than the memorization of dates. History ought to help a young person become more observant about the human person. It should teach him not simply what happened, but something about why people act as they do, and, perhaps most importantly, something about oneself.
That is where James Griffin's history classroom at St. Bernard Prep becomes especially important. Mr. Griffin is not simply a history teacher. He is also a lawyer. That combination matters. The lawyer is trained to listen carefully to competing claims, to distinguish assertion from evidence, to pay attention to motives and consequences, and to recognize that the story people tell about themselves is not always identical to the truth of what they have done.
Those are useful habits in a history classroom. They are even more useful habits for life.