The Melian Dialogue

I read the Melian Dialogue for the first time today.  I'd heard the famous quote before--the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must--but I never realized where it was from.

Here's the entire dialogue for anyone who wants to read it.  It's not long.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm

The context is the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  The Athenians want to capture the island of Melos in order to secure it as a safe harbor for their ships and deny it as a harbor for Sparta.  The Melians want to remain neutral.  The Athenians are much more powerful, though, and they mince no words about it.  The Melians can either submit or be destroyed.

The dialogue is interesting because the Athenians make an argument that is logical and rational but the Melians raise the possibility of divine intervention allowing them to win against the odds.  The Melians also believe the Spartans will come to their rescue out of blood kinship, and the Athenians think they're nuts to think that.

In the end, the Melians were conquered in what was basically a genocide, so their faith in the gods and Sparta didn't do them much good.  All it did was immortalize them in history as a warning to other weaker nations.

The Athenians and Spartans would also eventually be conquered by the Romans, and Greece has been little more than a European backwater ever since.  The real power on the continent shifted to Rome, then to Constantinople, and later to places like Spain, France, England, and so on.

Is there a moral to the story?  I don't know.  Neither the Athenians nor the Melians would fare well over the centuries following the war between the two.  If the Melians had had enough weapons to put up a decent fight, then perhaps they could have enforced their own neutrality.  As it was, they were basically sitting ducks, having outsourced their defense to others.  And if the Athenians had been a little less imperialist, then maybe they'd have had more resources left over for defense when the time came to face Rome.  I guess "don't outsource your own defense, and armed neutrality is the best policy" would be the takeaways here.

Anyway, it's an interesting dialogue.