{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02184939523995318, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005462348809988295, 'mean_word_length': 4.513978494623656, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Thucydides: Quoting and Misquoting

The Peloponnesian war was fought from 431 to 401 BC between the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta and the Athenian Empire, known as the Delian League led by Pericles, the ruler of Athens. In the initial phase of the war, Thucydides (460–395 BC) was removed from command by the Athenian government after he failed as the commanding general to prevent a Spartan occupation of Amphipolis. He was exiled for 20 years. This came as a blessing in disguise for the scholar in him. The exiled general now had the scholarly atmosphere of solitude to write his book as the war was fought. It is also known that he visited both sides and his work is also based on field work and oral history as we know it today. These set of circumstances gave him an opportunity to get to know the Spartans as well as Athenians. In the end, Sparta was the victor and Athens the vanquished. This history is the root text of a number of enduring realities in politics and International Relations(IR). Lawrence Freedman finds a realist philosophy embedded in the fact that, ‘What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta’. Freedman, as do many other scholars, rates Thucydides as a realist ‘describing human affairs as he found them rather than how he wish then to be...he did not suggest that men were bound to act on the basis of a narrow self-interest or that they actually served their broader interest if they did.’ Many key examples of power are relevant and enduring as they relate to human agency in IR. For example, the three motives of fear, honour and interest, and falsity of the argument that there is a law which says that the weaker should be subject to the power of the stronger as portrayed in the Melian Dialogue (covered later below). In their chapter ‘The Practice of Strategy’, Colin S. Gray and Jeannie L. Johnson in making a case for improving strategic education, suggest Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War as a canon of classic strategic theory. They tell the students that ‘Thucydides did not set out to write a general theory of strategy. The Peloponnesian War, however contains some of the finest literary examples of grand strategic reasoning ever committed to paper, as well as a richly detailed case of military strategy. The reader receives a general strategic education from the description and analysis in a historical context.’ Thucydides is popular and also relevant. In answering the question what do theory and history tell us is best captured in the following: