Do Events in Ancient Athens Foreshadow Those Today in the United States

Edward Mendelson quotes from passages in Thucydides' writing which might presage the United States in the early 21st century. Mendelson frames Thucydides as a moral philospher and historian, noting:

He understands morals, not as a set of arbitrary rules imposed or wished upon reality, but part of the fabric of reality itself, in the same way that Greek philosophy had begun to understand physical laws as inseparable from reality. Thucydides came to the same insight that Ludwig Wittgenstein recorded centuries later when he wrote that ethics “must be a condition of the world like logic.”

-DD