🇨🇦 Original
It seems that every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable – the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won’t.
So, what are our options?
🏛️ Translation
§5 ὁσημέραι μὲν δή, ὦ ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες οἱ ἐν Δαυῷ συνελθόντες, ἀναμιμνῃσκόμεθα ὡς ἐν καιρῷ τοιούτῳ διάγομεν ἐν ᾧ οἱ μέγιστον δυνάμενοι πρὸς ἀλλήλους φιλονικοῦσιν, ὡς ἡ τοῖς κανόσι στηριχθεῖσα τάξις ἐκλείπει, ὡς, καθάπερ ὁ Θουκυδίδης ἔφη, «δυνατὰ μὲν οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσιν, οἱ δὲ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν».
Day upon day, men and women gathered at Davos, we are reminded that we live in such a moment — in which those of greatest power strive against one another, in which the order founded upon rules is failing, in which, as Thucydides put it, “the strong do what they can, and the weak give way.”
§6 καὶ τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τοῦ Θουκυδίδου ῥῆμα ὡς ἀναγκαῖόν τι καὶ ἄφυκτον προφέρεται, ὥσπερ τοῦ κατὰ φύσιν τῶν πόλεων πρὸς ἀλλήλας λόγου πάλιν εἰς ἑαυτὸν καθισταμένου.
And this saying of Thucydides is now brought forward as a thing necessary and inescapable — as though the natural law of relations between states were restoring itself to its old course.
§7 πρὸς δὲ τοῦτον τὸν λόγον σφόδρα ὁρμή τις ἐνέστηκε ταῖς πόλεσιν ὑπείκειν, συγχωρεῖν, τὴν ταραχὴν φεύγειν, ἐλπίζειν ὡς ἡ εὐπείθεια τὴν σωτηρίαν ὠνήσεται.
And in the face of this reasoning, a strong impulse has settled upon the states: to yield, to acquiesce, to flee from trouble, to hope that compliance will purchase safety.
§8 ἀλλ’ οὐκ ὠνήσεται.
But it will not.
§9 τί τοίνυν ἡμῖν ἐστι πρακτέον;
What then must we do?
💬 Commentary
🤖 First pass
Introductory. Glad to keep going. The next stretch — daily reminder, the Thucydidean aphorism, the Havel exemplum — gives the rhetoric somewhere to climb. One windfall here: when Carney paraphrases “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must,” I get to drop in the actual Thucydidean Greek (Melian Dialogue1, Histories 5.89), with his archaic ξ- spelling intact.
Commentary.
- The Thucydides line in §5 is verbatim from Histories 5.89 — even ξυγχωροῦσιν, “they yield,” is preserved with the archaic ξ- spelling that Thucydides favours over the more usual σ- (the same line in later editions appears as συγχωροῦσιν). It functions like a stamped seal: when Carney quotes Thucydides in English paraphrase, the Greek version can actually be Thucydides. The verb ξυγχωρέω is a touch more graceful than “suffer what they must” — it means “yield, give ground, concede” — and to me lands harder for being less melodramatic.
🤖🧐 Second pass
D13 — rules-based order as κανόσι (not νόμοις). The first-pass reading was ἡ τοῖς νόμοις στηριχθεῖσα τάξις, “the order set firm upon laws.” Second pass shifts to ἡ τοῖς κανόσι στηριχθεῖσα τάξις, “set firm upon the rules.” The distinction matters: νόμοι are laws proper — the binding statutes a polity enforces upon itself; κανόνες are rules in the lighter normative sense — measuring-rods, standards, the Canons of grammarians and metricians. The English “rules-based” is closer to κανών than to νόμος; the rules of the postwar order are not statutes of any single jurisdiction but agreed standards across many, and their fading is precisely what §22 will go on to name (the WTO, the UN, the COP). The decision extends across §5, §15, §29, §57, §59 as a standing keyword; νόμοι is reserved for laws proper at §16 (“the strongest would exempt themselves from the laws”) and §36 (“the laws of the United Nations”).
D8 — the anchor vocative2. §5 is the first of three structural moments at which the full anchor vocative is deployed: ὦ ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες οἱ ἐν Δαυῷ συνελθόντες, “O men and women gathered at Davos.” The first-pass reading dropped to the kernel ὦ ἄνδρες, “O men” — the form Demosthenes himself reaches for in the run of any speech — with the ethnonym slot empty and the gendered word inherited unaltered. The second-pass policy fills both gaps, dual-mode in keeping with the orator’s own practice of opening with the full form and varying down to a kernel in the body.
The construction is Demosthenic in shape — ὦ ἄνδρες + article-and-participle is the orator’s idiom for sub-addresses, with ὦ ἄνδρες οἱ παρόντες, “O men here present,” the model — and filled with classical material at every joint: ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες, “men and women,” is the diction of Demosthenes’ own Epitaphios3 (60.36); συνέρχομαι, “to gather, to come together for deliberation,” is the orator’s standing political verb for a deliberative gathering; ἐν Δαυῷ, “at Davos” (locative), locates Davos in the participial clause where its grammar belongs, since the appositional ethnonym slot of ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι (“O men of Athens,” Demosthenes’ standing vocative) does not take a bare locative, but the participle does.
The full anchor will return at §52 (the table/menu hinge) and §69 (the ring-close); elsewhere the quotidian kernel ὦ οἱ συνελθόντες, “O you here gathered,” echoes the anchor in shorter compass.
Note C — the ring opens here. §5 is also the ring-head4: the verbatim Thucydides quotation at §5 is what §68 will echo near-verbatim (“the powerful do what they can”), and §69 will refute through the four-infinitive sentence. The genuine ring is internal to the Greek and intellectual as well as verbal; the diglossic apparatus of §1 and §70 is a frame, not a ring. The first-pass reading had taken the courtesy at §70 as the closing of a ring opened at §1; that reading was superseded under D3 and D4 in favor of the Thucydidean architecture audible at §5↔︎§68–69. See the Post XVI commentary for the ring-close.
Footnotes
-
The Melian Dialogue is Thucydides’ set-piece episode in Histories 5.84-116, dramatizing the 416 BCE confrontation in which the imperial Athenians demanded the surrender of the small neutral island of Melos and, when refused, killed all the adult men and enslaved the women and children. The Athenian envoys’ line δυνατὰ μὲν οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσιν, οἱ δὲ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν — “the prominent do what is possible, the weak yield” — is the canonical statement of realpolitik in the Greek tradition: a programmatic refusal of justice-talk between unequals in favour of pure power-calculation. The speech’s whole architecture (per D3 / D6) is built around quoting that line at §5 and refuting it at §68-69; the Melian logic, accepted as inevitable at the speech’s head, is the thesis the rest of the speech is structurally disproving.↩︎
-
Anchor vocative [editorial coinage of this commentary] — this rendering’s project-specific term for the full opening address (ὦ ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες οἱ ἐν Δαυῷ συνελθόντες, “men and women gathered at Davos”) that the orator returns to at the three structurally load-bearing moments of the speech (§5 the opening of the Greek body, §52 the table/menu hinge, §69 the peroration). The underlying phenomenon is real and well-attested in classical rhetoric — Demosthenes’ own practice is to open a speech with a full vocative and then vary down to a kernel form in the run of the speech, with the full form returning at structural moments — but the name anchor vocative is my coinage for this commentary, calling out the full form’s function as the load-bearing return-point against which the shorter quotidian kernel (ὦ οἱ συνελθόντες) is heard as an echo. No standard philological term exists for this exact function; the coinage fills the gap.↩︎
-
Epitaphios is the title (and a generic name) for a classical Greek funeral oration delivered over the war-dead, the most famous being Pericles’ Epitaphios in Thucydides 2.34-46. Demosthenes’ own Epitaphios — oration 60 in his corpus, of disputed authenticity but transmitted under his name — supplies the phrase ἄνδρες τε καὶ γυναῖκες (“men and women”) which this rendering’s anchor vocative borrows for its inclusive address.↩︎
-
Ring composition (also called simply ring; the first member of the ring is the ring-head, the last is the ring-close) is the rhetorical figure of returning at the close of a passage to the language or imagery of its opening, so the whole passage is bookended into a circle. Homer uses ring composition constantly within the Iliad and Odyssey, often nested at multiple scales (a sentence-level ring inside a paragraph-level ring inside a song-level ring); classical Greek prose uses it at the level of speech-structure, with Demosthenes’ On the Crown built around several rings. In this rendering of Carney, the central ring is Thucydidean: §5 quotes the Melian line “the strong do what they can and the weak yield what they must” verbatim, §68 echoes its first clause near-verbatim, and §69 substantively refutes the whole through the four-infinitive sentence. The ring is intellectual and verbal at once.↩︎