Half a century after the victory over Persia, Athens had passed decisively from being the liberator of Hellas to being its master, and this mastery acquired a philosophy of its own. In 431 BC the Peloponnesian War broke out between Athens and Sparta — long, exhausting, and cleaving the Greek world in two. At its midpoint the historian Thucydides recorded a scene that became the eternal formula of the idol of force. In 416 BC Athens demanded the submission of the neutral island of Melos; in the "Melian Dialogue" the Athenian envoys cast aside every pretense of right: justice, they say, has meaning only between equals in power, while in the world as it is "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." Force declares itself its own justification — here is the idol at the limit of its candor.
The word was followed by the deed, and the deed by its reckoning. When the Melians refused to yield, the Athenians laid siege to their city, and having taken it, put the men to death and sold the women and children into slavery. Almost at once, in 415-413 BC, that same imperial self-assurance drove Athens into the grand Sicilian expedition — an attempt to subdue distant Syracuse. The campaign ended in catastrophe: army and fleet were annihilated, and thousands of Athenians perished or wasted away in the Sicilian quarries. The empire of force had broken its back on its own strength.
Then came the captivity. In 405 BC, at Aegospotami, the Spartans destroyed the last Athenian fleet; cut off from its grain supply, the city capitulated in 404. The victors tore down the Long Walls — the very symbol of Athenian power — to the sound of flutes, and handed authority to a pro-Spartan oligarchy that entered history as the Thirty Tyrants, whose brief rule drenched Athens in the blood of her own citizens.
Out of this catastrophe a return began to grow — not as a restoration of greatness, but as the birth of a question. It was precisely in a broken Athens, stripped of its imperial arrogance, that Socrates asked most insistently: what is justice in truth, and is not wrongdoing the worst of evils for the one who commits it? Yet the return remained unfinished: in 399 BC that same Athens condemned Socrates to death — a sign that the city had not yet outgrown its pride, that the courage to question oneself comes harder than the courage to conquer. At the station of Kingdoms the Melian Dialogue remains forever — as the pure, wholly unmasked formula of "the right of the strong," and as a reminder of how such a right ends for the strong themselves.