In 1959, in a Western civilization course at the University of Chicago, I read Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War for the first time. I read it a second time in a literature course, and yet again in a philosophy course. Each time, we approached the text with a different set of questions in mind: Thucydides was a wonderful vehicle for making students aware of multivocality. Approaching a rich text from different disciplinary perspectives also encouraged me to reflect back on the several disciplines, and to understand divisions among them as having more institutional than intellectual justification. Scholarship is, or ought to be, holistic, but such an approach, I soon learned, runs counter to the fragmentation and specialization of knowledge within the university.

I read Thucydides at what we now know to have been the highwater mark of the Cold War. My three readings spanned two Berlin crises and Cuba. The parallels between the Cold War and the run-up to the Peloponnesian War were unsettling, and all the more so because of my overly literal reading of I.23.5–6 and its apparent assertion that war was inevitable because of the rise to power of Athens and the fear it inspired in Sparta. In addition to scaring me, Thucydides' history, as I came to understand it more fully, provided a new purchase from which to approach the Cold War. It drew me back from the emotional and short-term perspectives that tend to dominate the untrained mind's response to dramatic contemporary events.