Greek and Roman Antiquity

Abstract

It is one of the popular, although ill-conceived, interpretations in IR to celebrate the Greek historian Thucydides as the first realist in international political thought. Neo-realists and neo-liberals in particular seem keen to promote this picture.¹⁷ Their narration goes as follows: Thucydides shares three common assumptions with twentieth century realism and neorealism: first, states are the key units in international politics; second, they seek power, either as an end in itself or as a means to other ends; and third, they behave in ways that are rational, and therefore comprehensible to outsiders in rational terms (see, for instance, Keohane, 1986, p. 7).¹⁸ With these views in common, so the narration continues, the neo-realist/neo-liberal paradigms of self-help and of the functional similarity of states could be located in a tradition of international political thought which traces back through the centuries to Greek Antiquity.