Wow, I want to thank you all for coming. With the weather advisories-- we were talking before this event, we thought it would a little seminar with 10 people around a table. But look at this. We really have quite a great attendance. I want to thank you for coming to be with us this evening. Because you're in for a real treat.

I'm Gleaves Whitney. I'm Director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies. A very proud partner with Chuck Pazdernik, who is the head of the Classics Department here at Grand Valley. That in itself is a great story in its own right. The Classics Department, by way of introduction, is only 10 years old. Already has seven faculties. It's the second largest and probably the second best classics department in the state of Michigan. So they have some--

Second?

Some real-- well, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] on the other side of the state. They have some real heft here. And we're really pleased to be able to partner with them. And as a result of that, we're able to bring in quality speakers.

And to introduce our speaker today is Chuck Pazdernik. Thank you Chuck for partnering. And I look forward to your introduction.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, Gleaves, thank you very much. Gleaves and I had a little mutual admiration society going here. Because the Hauenstein Center was very gracious to involve us in classics in a wonderful conference they organized a couple of years ago. The title was Lessons From Antiquity For The Obama Administration. Well, there you go. And look where we're at. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] open ended. And ever since-- I mean I've been delighted-- I had the opportunity at that time to meet Ralph Hauenstein, who is such an inspiration. He turned 99 years old very recently.

Two days ago.

Two days ago. But also the opportunity that we've had to work with Gleaves and his staff on this. And the support we received. But we echo Gleaves and just thank you so much coming out under these inclement conditions and taking advantage of this occasion. I'm delighted. And I join with Gleaves and my colleagues in the Department of Classics in welcoming you here for this occasion.

And of course the opportunity that we have and the occasion that brings us here is also a wonderful one. Bob has asked me to keep the introductions brief. I'm not very capable of doing that. You figured that out already.

I like to say, and I've said in other contexts, that Bob has reached the pinnacle of at least careers and counting. Bob has said at the WGVU this morning, and a couple of other places, he just hasn't managed to pass Retirement 101 yet. But for someone to have reached the pinnacle of the profession of classics as the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Twenty-five years at Princeton, if I'm not mistaken, Bob.

To go on after that to head the National Humanities Research Center in North Carolina and to lead that organization with the great distinction the way that Bob has. And to be such an advocate and such a force on behalf of the humanities and on behalf of liberal education is a wonderful thing.

And then finally Bob's leadership as the President of The Teagle Foundation in New York. Again another organization-- this time private support in the area of strengthening the level of education in the area of what do we do to ensure something that I think we all have a great deal of stake in, which is ensuring that people who make the enormous sacrifices that are involved in getting a college education well-equipped citizens, well-equipped as workers and leaders. All of us have a lot to be grateful to Bob and his leadership for the good work that's he's done in each of those things. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

And I hope you'll join me now in welcoming Bob with Lessons From Antiquity For The Obama--

No.

--What Happened to the Future? Lessons From Ancient Anthens on Leadership and Its Limits. Thank you very much.

Thank you Chuck. Thank you Gleaves. Thank the Hauenstein Center. And to Grand Valley. And to all of you. By gosh. In North Carolina, if the weather forecasters had said the word ice, freezing rain, snow-- anything like that-- every single person in the state would have dashed as rapidly as possible to the local grocery store, bought out every loaf of white bread, every jar of peanut butter, and every battery-- holed up and nothing for the next five days could get them all out of their houses until the sun had melted the asphalt, let alone the ice. So I've gotta give it to you folks. This is a real solid, Midwest vacation.

I'll try to use this microphone. But if I wander away, as I've been known to do, and speak at far ends of the podium, and I've even been known to fall of them from time to time. If the volume isn't sufficient, will you raise your hand?

An Irish friend of mine told me-- he was once speaking in Dublin and he wanted to be sure that the audience-- a big audience-- could really hear him. And he said, can you hear me in back? And some of them nodded. And one boy said, louder, louder. And the one next to him said, funnier, funnier. I don't know whether I can live up to that expectation, but if you have any problem, raise your hand and let me know.

I want to think back a bit. December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor. November 9, 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11, 2001, I don't need to tell you what was. December 18, last year, Tunisia. February 11, 2011, Egypt. The ongoing transformation in Libya. Who knows what's next in North Africa and the Middle East.

The history of our time seems to be written in surprises. And not just in international relations. Think of the technological changes that have taken place in our time. And just gauge them for a second by terminology. Imagine yourself 20 years ago, and somebody said to you, email. Huh? Huh? What was email? Somebody said to you, Twitter. Someone said, I'm going to give you a digital camera. Maybe you'll put something up on YouTube or Facebook. Or supposing someone said to you, you know, I'm going to Google you. What would you do? I mean, you'd slug them, wouldn't you? You can't get away with that. All within what seems a very small period of time.

Are they trying to tell us something? Is there a secret in this-- If you don't mind, I'll stumble along and maybe we'll get the lights back before Tuesday. Here they come. Very, very good.

I don't have to remind you of the kind of unexpected, apparently unpredictable change that's taken place in our lighting system right here this very evening.

Or in that tragic situation that we've all been watching in Japan. Has an earthquake at the extreme edge of the prediction level. Followed by this astonishing tsunami. And then the hit on nuclear plants-- some which are overage, some of which were built with containment units that were fine for the normal range of prediction. I don't quite know whether they're adequate for the stresses that they're experiencing at the present time.

We're living in an age in other words of remarkable, rapid, extensive, and oftentimes unpredictable, change. That's not to deny that we've made-- particularly the scientists have made for us-- immense progress in understanding complex systems, explaining the dynamic behind them. Sometimes, but not always by any means, making the leap from that characterization of the systems into predictions on how those systems are going to perform.

And then we discovered that while some of those systems have recurrent patterns within them, while they seem to be determined in some way-- some kind of deterministic explanation prevails behind them-- they also seem unpredictable. And if I understand it-- as a very poor, impoverished layman on these matters-- that's what chaos theory is about.

And we've had to confront that in recent years. We have to start trying to think all the way through this. And we're going to be dependent clearly on the scientists to help us understand the implications of that.

Added uncertainties, and oftentimes added worries, come about as we look about the future of the economy in this country, which seems to be an extraordinary state. I know there are economists in this audience tonight. We'll be talking to someone on the panel tomorrow. I hope they're going to help me understand something. Because I don't understand how the stock market in the United States of America can be going up, and the employment rate crawling along at such a pitiful rate as it's going right now. I see in my local paper from time to time an item, 1,500 jobs cut. And I flip over to the stock page and online, and I discover that company's stock has gone up that very day.

Something strange is happening. We wouldn't have predicted it. We wouldn't have predicted this two or three years ago about the hallowing out of the American economy. And it's not surprising if a lot of us, not least young people facing this terrible uncertain job market that's out there, are incredibly nervous and worried about that.

I'm going to step back from that for a second. I'm not an expert on American society. All I could do I kept talking along this way would be to tell you more grounds for my scratching my head and seeming perplexed and worried about things. I want to step back tonight and see whether moving back historically to ancient Greece can be of any help to us in understanding the kind of phenomena that we're confronting in our society today. And are likely to be confronting, if we can guess at all, in even more intense forms in the future.

Every society I think-- every human society that we know-- feels anxiety, deep anxiety, about the future. And we will do some very, very bizarre things to try to get some kind of prediction about what it is we're going to face. It doesn't matter really how desperately bad that prediction might be. We'd rather have the bad news now than live with the uncertainty tied up with it. And societies then evolve what to the outsider may seem very strange or bizarre ways of dealing with the future.

Let me just list a few of them for you from ancient Greece.

If you worried about the future, what could you do? Well, you could go out and you could watch the birds. Are they on the left side or the right side? Do they fly this way or fly that way. They know something we don't know. We've got to figure out what are the birdies telling us.

You could detect that patterns in nature in other ways, as well. You could take leaves and toss them, rather like the Chinese toss sticks in the I Ching. And some way or other, one could make some prediction, some understanding, about what's happening in the future on the basis of where those leaves fall down.

You could go to a blind prophet. Prophets seemed to be particularly good if they can't see the physical reality. So they must be seeing some inner reality. We could go on with Tiresias for example, and ask what does the future hold for us?

You could cut open a sacrificial animal. And look down there at the liver and look at the lobes of the liver and there are people-- there were specialists in this society-- who would tell you what the lobes in that liver mean. And know what they predict and foretell about us.

Or you could consult a text of verses. Orpheus, who's had such a wonderful run in music from the Renaissance to the present, in antiquity, yeah, he had a lyre and he played and he charmed the wild animals. But also he apparently composed a book of enigmatic verses. And if you had the Orphic verses, you could look them up, and rather like Nostradamus in a later period, if you read them, you knew that was referring to our time. And you knew what it might mean about what we were likely to face.

And of course, you could go to Delphi. Get in a line. There were lots of people consulting. You could sacrifice the sheep. You could pose the question-- you have to be to the proper formulaic form-- to Pythian priestess, who was sitting there in some state of mind boggling perception. And she would give you an answer. It might be perfectly simple and straightforward. Yes. No. It might be sacrifice a sheep. Sacrifice a goat. Or it might be a riddle. An enigmatic riddle that you would have to figure out in some way.

Or, if none of these pleased you, could go big time. Necromancy. If you knew how, you could call up the dead. And the dead would know what was in store for you. How, I don't know. But they would know it.

Now, you came here-- you didn't come here to hear me give you a list of things that the ancient Greeks did. You came here to get very valuable advice about the President, right? So I'm going to tell you how to do necromancy.

And I have with me here, a irrefutable source on this, Homer, who in the 11th Book of the Odyssey, has Odysseus call up this blind, dead prophet, Tiresias, and ask him questions. Basically-- it seems to ought not to be a terribly geographically difficult problem-- how to get from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean back home to Ithaca, at the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. But, he needs help.

Here's what Homer tells us. He has Odysseus speaking in the 11th Book, and he says, I built a trench of about a four arms depth and length and around it poured libations out to all the dead.

Please take note of this. We'll need to come back to this later in this talk.

First with milk and honey, and then with mull wine, then water third, and last, and sprinkled it all over with glistening barley, and over it all, and time and time again, I vowed to all the dead, to the drifting, listless spirits, their ghosts, that once I return to Ithaca, I would slaughter a barren heifer in my hall, the best that I had.

Having done this-- dug the ditch, poured all these things in, made his promises, invoked and called them all, lo and behold, it worked. And up they come. Brides. And unwed young men. And old men, who had suffered much. And girls, with their tender hearts still scarred by sorrow. And great armies of battle dead, stabbed by bronze spears. Men of war, still wrapped in their bloody honor. And they all come up, wanting to feed.

You know, the underworld was not exactly a fast food joint for these Greeks. They wanted this blood, this honey, this milk. And Odysseus stands there with his sword, driving them away until Tiresias can come, and he could ask Tiresias the questions that he wants to put to them.

Death for the Greeks, you can see, was not a meal ticket to nectar and ambrosia. It was a long, painful, protracted period of drained blood, shadowy existence at the very best. Now you know how you do necromancy.

Well, let's step back from the Greeks for a second. This stuff seems bizarrely weird to us. It's a culture that in many ways to us seems radically different, perplexing in all its ways.

But there's an odd feature about the way in which human societies deal with the future and their anxieties about the future. If you're outside the culture, it seems very, very weird and bizarre, and you say, how could anybody possibly that necromancy and lobes of the liver and talking to blind prophets and things of the sort--

If you're within the culture, you say things like, well, you know, I don't necessarily believe it all. On the other hand, you know sometimes if you have an anecdote that somebody had given and it really seemed to work for them-- you make excuses for it. And then you talk about other cultures. And you say, they do something very, very bizarre and very weird indeed.

And so, OK. Let's switch to contemporary America. How do we deal with this? I think it's a human neurosis about worrying about the future. I don't think my dog worries about the future. I don't think other mammals worry about the future very much. There are animals, of course, who know when to migrate. They know how to hibernate. After the Indonesia tsunami some years ago, there was stories that there were animals who ran for hills before the tsunami struck them. Before anybody had any basis for predictive thinking. They seemed to know that was coming. But anxiety for any other species about the future seems, as best I can tell, undocumented and very rare indeed.

But then we come here to the United States, to western Europe, modernized societies in general, and we discover that there is quite a remarkable industry tied up in exploiting the neuroses, the anxieties that we have. If you Google futurology, for example, you'll find a website very, very quickly that promises this: The ability to forecast humanity's millenia-- I'm sorry-- humanity's next two millennia to identify technological, sociopolitical and academic developments during that period. Over the next two millenia? No discussion of what the odds might be that they would actually be right on that at any point at all.

There is a publishing industry going on as you know, about books concerning with the future. My favorite one is Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century. And that seems to have done very, very well in the book sales. And it's not any means the only one to do that.

If you walk through any neighborhood that's perhaps going down now a little bit-- downscale-- you'll see the sign out-- 'Psychics". And apparently there's plenty of people utilizing them. I was going to ask you, but I don't want to embarrass you, how many people here have actually used a Tarot card reading? Don't put your hands up. Because the next question would be have you ever gone to a seance? And pretty soon after that, I'm going to ask you whether you're really going to use this necromancy stuff late tonight. It's best done in the evening, at a time of a near full moon. And we're pretty close to that.

So there is there a huge expenditure in our society, as you all know, dealing with this question of: How do we deal with our anxiety about the future?

Now, I've had a somewhat peculiar way of taking a look at some of the ways in which that operates in our society because of a rather peculiar accident. After I flunked Retirement 101 at my teaching job, I had two subsequent jobs, each one of which involved institutions that were very dependent upon their endowment. And the administrative structure put me, as the administrative officer for those organization, as the dumb outsider on investment committees. This gave me an opportunity to look at investment managers. And since the two organizations, not through me, but through their boards, had very good connections with Wall Street, I had an opportunity to see many of the people who were dealing with investment advice in this country.

And it was a terrific experience for a-- imagine a classicist walking down Wall Street. I mean a kid from an industrial town in Massachusetts in an old walk-up horror flat. They were so impressive. The quality of the suits. I could buy a truck for what they paid for their Gucci [? time ?] shoes. The cufflinks. Oh, my gosh. This strange sartorial habit has become a uniform. A shirt with one color. And the collar with another color. Smooth talking. Well informed. Predictive about grand trends in our societies and specific movement. I was so impressed. I sat there with my jaws down.

Until a friend of mine took me aside-- and I'm reporting this secondhand. you. May want to check these figures a little bit.

He said, Bob, you know about the study that was done of investment managers in the 1980s?

No, I'm a classicist. Come on.

He said, they looked at all the investment managers for a five year period beginning in 1980s. And they tracked all the ones who were in the top quarter and saw how they did in their performance in the second half of the 1980s.

Yeah.

He said, what was the survival rate? How many stayed in that top quarter?

I said, oh, well. You know some of them died. Some of them went out of business. Some new blood went in. Fifty percent of them survived. Not a bad guess?

The number's is 2%.

You've got to be kidding, I said. Two percent. Practically nobody who's scores big in one five-year period is able to score big-- In fact a lot of them ended up in the bottom quarter in the second five-year period.

Anybody who invests knows it's very hard to beat just randomization with the indices. It's hard to do better than that.

And that set me thinking. Why is that so difficult? What can I learn from that? Well, one thing was pretty obvious. That if you're doing that trade-- it's a very lucrative trade-- you've really got to win at the trifecta. It's like going to the races.

You've got to do three things. You got to figure out where your clients should put money their money. Which sector. Specific stocks. Other alternative assets. Bonds. Whatever. U.S. Overseas. Secondly, you have to figure out when they should put that money there. Where the price structure is right. And the hardest seems to be, you got to figure out when they got to get out. You've got to do all three of those. It's not surprising that if you're lucky enough to win the trifecta one five-year period, that you're going to have a lot of trouble when you get to the second. There's no guarantee you'll do all three of those a second time.

But behind that I think there are more fundamental difficulties. And just watching this investment stuff set me thinking and brought me back eventually trying to think a little bit more about what could we learn from the classical world.

Because when I say that there are some deeper difficulties on that, it's not a discovery that I'm making. Some of you have read Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan. And if not, I think you might enjoy it. The subtitle of that book is The Importance of the Improbable.

In other words, if you calculated probabilities at a 95% level, what are you missing? Ahh. I mean 95% probability. That's very high. That's enough to make my individual investment decisions, public policy. The way I sleep at night. That should be secure enough for me, shouldn't it?

How about the other 5%? What would happen if instead of having an earthquake that's 8.0 on the Richter scale, you had one was-- ahh, it's going to be rare-- one that was 9.0. What would happen if instead of having a tsunami that went up 10 feet, you had one that went up 30 feet. What would happen if you had six nuclear plants-- you get the picture.

The potential at that far end of the probability spectrum can be absolutely terrifying if you're suddenly trapped by it.

So that set me along another one of my kind of explorations of Greek wackiness. Supposing we flipped it over. We-- in the modern world-- we know how bizarre and strange and weird those Greeks were. Supposing we went to Delphi. And supposing there was the Phthian. Can you imagine, she sat on a tripod in the middle of this temple.

And we said to her, hey Phthian, tell us about out some of the features in our society-- how do they look to you?

Well, if we draw out on this-- I'm not sure we could-- she'd say, you guys believe a lot in numbers.

Oh yeah. Yeah, we absolutely do. I said in fact, the way these investment managers play the trifecta is with tons and tons and tons of data. I've seen them with five computer screens spread out in front of them, each one of which is divided in various ways. And constant information is fluxing through on a tenth of a second basis. You see this on the TV.

I said numbers in our society are the way out. It's the way you make decisions. We need, in our society, to figure out trends. What would the Phythian say?

She'd look at us and say, trends. Uhhuh. Once you've identified a trend, what do you do with it?

I said, what do you mean?

Do you extrapolate it? Is it going to keep going forever?

Well, I don't know.

Or do you regress it to the mean? It's gone that far. Sooner or later, it's going to go back to some past average, isn't it? How do you decide?

I said, well, let's talk about something else. I said you know trend stuff is difficult. Let's talk about correlations.

And she'd say, uhhuh. Is correlation causation?

Well, hmmm, a lot of the time, maybe hmmm 95% of the time.

How'd you derive that number? There could be a third cause operating behind the two things-- the two individual variables you seem to be correlating.

Yeah, I said. She would then say to me, you guys are quacks. You think these numbers are going to solve problems, but as soon as I push you on it, you yourself know that correlations, trends-- raise a whole set of further questions. Get out. Go away. Don't bother me any more.

Now, I don't think that that's by any means the whole story. And I'm not trying dismiss the importance of quantitative data. I think they're extremely important in our society.

But when I walk away from the Phythian in this imaginary conversation with her, I realize that we've got to be much more sophisticated and careful in our thinking about how we draw inferences from data than some of us are. Some very well-heeled people in this society are from time to time, at least.

So then I thought well, supposing I used some similar sort thought experiment, like the one of consulting the Phythian about quantitative data in our society. Supposing I tried to use something that I've studied and I have tried to learn about.

Supposing I tried to use the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century before our era. Not just as another thing that we historians do. Another war that I'd like to try to describe as exactly as possible to you and try to get the facts right and the narrative straight. Supposing instead I thought of it as a lens. And I took that lens and instead of looking way back to the fifth century before our era, I flipped it around and said, by looking through that lens-- by trying to understand this war, could I understand something about our society better?

That's turned out to me to be an extremely revealing way to deal with a historical episode, but also to deal with a remarkable text, the source upon which much of our knowledge of fifth century Athens depends. But certainly our knowledge of the Peloponnesian War-- the text of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. A man, a contemporary, he was in that war. Fought in it. Lost. Sent into exile. And in that exile, visited the other side. He was an Athenian. He visited the side of Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies. And wrote what is probably the most difficult prose text in Greek. Extraordinarily difficult. Many different levels. But one level that makes it difficult is he is thinking hard, challenging himself, and challenging his readers, to think hard about that war more in general and how in war we think about the future.

When you think about it after all, wars are bets about the future. The two parties both make bets that they're going to win. Or at least that they have a good chance of winning or at least it's worth taking the risk of losing. And after all, if you lose, you're going to lose big. You're going to lose your life. The two sides have to think, yeah, we're going to do it. I understand the future. We're going to win. And the other side says, I understand the future. We're going to win.

And then he doesn't. On a rational basis, both sides have to make that decision. They can't both be right. They could both be wrong, however. So war, in general, and I think the Peloponnesian War in particular, is a remarkable opportunity to project out. To look through this lens. And to project out much more broadly, issues about how we think about the future.

Let me jump ahead because having done that-- starting to get totally wound up and forget my main point-- let me tell you three inferences that I drew from trying to study this Peloponnesian War in this way, thinking about it as a lens for looking at our much wider set of issues concerning the future.

The first thing that seems to me to emerge from it is that war focuses the mind. Boy, it better, if your life's at stake. Your society's at stake. Your home. Your family. Everything that you value is about to be destroyed. You've got to focus in on it. Samuel Johnson said there's nothing like a public hanging to focus the attention. No, there is something. And it's war. As you do that, the blinders tend to get on. And it's very easy to get blindsided. Both Greek and English, and the other modern languages, use that terminology of vision and they use the terminology of being confined in vision.

In war, blindsidedness is one of the most common phenomena. And let's extrapolate it. Sure. Why not extrapolate this instead of some of those very problematic trends. Extrapolate that to other sides of our life. Blindsidedness is one of the things that most damages our ability to deal with the future.

Secondly, in war, as you push ahead with your strategy, or, after the war is over, as you push ahead with your agenda for having a peace, it is very easy to provoke unintended consequences. What seems very good and very desirable can suddenly open up possibilities for things that might be good maybe. Maybe there are wonderful benefits that you hadn't anticipated. Yeah. But much more likely, there are further problems and difficulties that jump up to confront you.

Thirdly, war does something very funny with time. Wars alternate between, as soldiers will tell you, periods of immense boredom-- nothing seems to be happening, total routine. Then wham. All of a sudden you're told to move. Told to move fast. Strong. And you're in the furious chaos of battle. There's a sudden abruptness from what would seem to us be continuous, homogeneous time, into this period of laxness followed by intense compression of what's happened. So intense that people can't describe with any adequacy the fury and the ferocity of battle.

War oftentimes leads to very strange calculations of time. And the lowest common of those, when you step back from the immediacy pf battle, is the vast tendency-- universal tendency I think-- to underestimate the amount of time which is involved or likely to be involved-- and we know that from Iraq.

I think of it on St. Patrick's Day of every year. Our first grandson was born on March 17, 2003. My wife and I went out to a local pub to celebrate. And there was the announcement. We were going into Iraq. Don't worry. We can lick that Iraq army. Like that. We can do that-- come on, we can do it in a week. Do it in a month. Victory will be ours very, very swiftly. It'll cost us money. We fired the guy who said it might cost $100 billion. What is he trying to do, subvert the administration? Out.

Every birthday of my grandson-- eight-- we're still there. The war is still going. I don't what's the figure is. Somebody in here made know what that money is. But it's an immense amount. And this is not conspiracy theory. This is not malevolence. It's a universal phenomena. You're going to a war. And you misestimate the time scale. War does funny things with time.

Now, those my-- before you fall asleep, I wanted to give you those three take-aways that you can jot down.

Now, I could tell you a little bit how I derived them from one historical situation. And you can try to judge whether they do indeed apply into other settings that you know about.

And I want to do this by talking a little bit the Peloponnesian War. But the classicists here will know that I have to be talking about Thucydides. And they'll say quietly under there breath, thank God, because Thucydides has a strong, analytical, powerful mind-- which we're not sure the speaker has this evening.

So let me tell you a little bit about this.

First off, I should tell you that for all the power of that mind, he's fairly rarely explicit. It's very hard to pin him down on exactly what he thinks about things. It's between the lines. And if you're reading Thucydides, you have to read between the lines and figure out what the implications are of what he's saying. But what he presents us in the lead-up to this war are two opposing views about how one thinks about strategy, about the likelihood of winning the war, but also then about how one thinks about the future.

The first of those ways of thinking about it is represented by one side in this Peloponnesian War-- specifically Sparta, in the southern part of Greece, with its allies in that region-- the Peloponnesians. They have a highly traditional way about thinking about Greek warfare, and how this war's going to go, and why they're going to win it.

It has three bases. The first of which is the training and the valor of their army. People were brought up in that society-- men were brought up in that society to stand unflinchingly in the front line of battle. When the other came, holding shields, thrusting spears, rammed up against them, thrust at them, pushed them as hard as they could-- if you could hold, you might eventually weary down that opposing force. And you'd be successful. If you broke, and you're tried to run out, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight rows of warriors behind you whose only job was to keep you from running. You dropped your shield. You tried to run-- casualties were horrendous. That was the way it was going to work.

The second basis was not just the valor of their own men, but the reliability and the loyalty of their allies, the Peloponnesians and the Spartans, in this case.

And thirdly, the favor of the gods. And on that basis, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] our projections about how things are going to go in the future. The Spartans developed a strategy. And the strategy was very simple. They would do what Greek armies had always done. They would march up to their enemy. They would into the region around Athens-- into Attica. They would start burning anything they saw. They would march if they needed to be, right up to the walls of Athens and call them a coward. And sooner or later, the enemy-- the Athenian force-- would come out and the Spartans would clobber them. They and their allies and the gods, who were clearly on their side. That's one way of looking at them.

The second one way of looking at it was something embodied in Athenian culture built in over a protracted period of time, but expressed most strongly by Pericles, the leader of the Athenians. They had a strategy. Quite a different strategy. They had a view of the future. Quite a different view of the future. But like the Spartans, it had three bases. Their three bases were this: One, naval power-- not army. Secondly, financial reserves and the flow of new income from tributary allies. You might prefer to say subject states. And thirdly, not the gods-- yeah, yeah, they want the gods too-- walls.

And here's the strategy. You have walls surrounding your port-- the Piraeus. You bring them up-country to the city of Athens. You surround Athens by the walls. You'd use your financial reserves to bring in and import whatever food you want. You use your navy to secure that transportation and to sail around the Peloponnese, inflicting harm whenever it can. And you bring every single citizen and family that you possibly can into Athens-- inside those walls.

And when the Spartans come marching in and say, come on and fight.

You say no.

What do you mean, no thanks. What are you? A bunch of wimps?

Call us what you want. Sticks and stones, they break my bones.

You're going to stay behind those walls?

We're going to chop down your olive trees, ha.

It sounded like a Monty Python show. Can you imagine chopping down an olive tree? These trees are like this. And you're doing it with bronze or iron axes, not chain saws. And logistically, a Spartan army, if it could stay in Attica for two months, in the hot summer, it was doing extremely well. At that point, supplies were running out. The men were exhausted. Pfft. And moved out.

So take a look at this just for a second. Think of these two conflicting strategies. First off, there's an unexpected outcome. Why do this? The Spartans were blindsided by the Athenian strategy. And the unexpected outcome for them was that the war did not take one year. Thucydides tells us most people thought it would be done in a single campaigning season, because they thought the Athenians they would come out and fight and get defeated and that would be that. Or two. [? Song ?] said it might take as much as three years. They were off by a factor of ten. The war took 27 years. Three times three times three. They missed. It was the cube of what people were-- the extreme projection that people had.

War has a way of playing funny with time. But there was another little spin on this. And I have to confess that while we've studied the Peloponnesian War very, very carefully. We haven't always paid close attention to one little detail. I mentioned that for the Spartans it was extremely important to have the favor of the gods on their side. And you'd think, ahh, come on, it's not the way god works. Psychologically, however, it may be the way an army works. It's extremely important to know in a traditional society that the traditional divinities are on your side if they're going to help.

So the Spartans did something that was, in fact, rather uncommon, unconventional, perhaps even outrageous in Greek terms. They sent to Delphi. They went up to see our friend, the Phythian priestist. And they said, is it better for us to go to war. That's the way you would properly consult or ask a question like that. You don't ask-- what's in the future for me? Am I going to be rich? Am I going to live forever? No. You ask a very specific question. Is it better for me if I go to war?

Now, Xenophon tells us, the continuator of Thucydides, that you don't-- Greeks do not ask that question about wars with other Greeks. He makes it explicit, albeit in another context, it's not the way you do it. So it was somewhat surprising that the Spartans did that. But they did because of their nervousness. Their concern about being able to win a war against what they knew in their heart of hearts was a formidable enemy. So they go and ask this question. The Pythian priestess could perfectly well have said to them, get out. That's a legitimate response from her.

But there at the Oracle of Delphi-- the priestess says them-- if you fight with all your might and main, victory will be yours. And I-- she's speaking as Apollo is speaking through her-- and I will be helping you, whether you ask for it or not. Wow. This is again extraordinary to have an oracle say that the god is about to come out and favor one Greek state against another Greek state.

But, of course, any you're hearing that would know that when branch were fighting a non-Greek state-- at the beginning of Homer's Illiad-- that's exactly what happened. Apollo got very angry, not at the Trojans, but at the Greeks in this case-- for various offenses against one of his priests. And all of a sudden, he came down and started with his silver bow, shooting arrows at the army. And it's clear that the arrows are the invisible symbols of plague-- of death brought upon this unsuspecting army because of the outrage and the anger they had provoked on Apollo's part for violations of the way a priest ought to be properly treated.

Any Greek hearing the god Apollo say that he was about to help the Spartans on this, would know what that meant. It would mean plague upon the Athenians. And sure enough, late in the first year of the war, a plague breaks out in Athens. We don't know what disease this was for sure. I think there's on average 2.5 articles a year printed and explaining which disease this was. What one can say is very clearly it was an infectious disease. It was a virgin population upon which this disease was visited. And while we can't say the numbers precisely, 25% or 30% of the population died in that plague. A huge toll, but not unprecedented in other disease situations of this sort.

Thucydides explains all that. He doesn't make explicit something that we know. If you take the population of an area-- and you can gauge the course-- the rough size of Attica because you remember the Marathon race. It came from Marathon and the periphery of Attica into Athens, 26 something, point something miles. Imagine that group of people-- they're farmers, they were scattered-- but still a huge number of people, crowding into the city. Poor sanitary conditions. Is this not a perfect prescription for infectious disease?

A brilliant strategy on the part of the Athenians, put through by eloquence, strong arguments by Pericles, with the unintended consequence that a huge percentage of the Athenian population died. Blindsideness. Strange senses of time. And, of course, unintended consequences.

But Athens bounced back. It's from Pericles. After awhile they were prepared to make a settlement. Prepared to give up their war. No. They revived. They stuck it out. The war went on-- the second year, the third year, the fourth year-- 10 years into that war, They won. They had a peace treaty with Sparta. It gave them almost everything that they had been hoping for at the beginning of this war. And the Spartans had to eat humble pie.