These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that all federal architecture needed to be ‘beautiful’, noting that the Founding Fathers ‘wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue’. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had therefore ‘consciously modelled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome’. It was time to go back to these principles, said Trump. From now on ‘classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings’ in the District of Columbia.
The Greek and Roman world still commands a special place in public consciousness, in other words, especially in the countries of the West. In his widely admired speech in Davos earlier this year, where he talked about the role of ‘middle powers’, Mark Carney talked about the fact that ‘it seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading’. It seemed a good time to quote Thucydides: ‘The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’
War did not stem from competition between Athens and Sparta – but from other states causing friction
