Re: Re: Terror in war

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_NXrSHLHjfZ0YUWiFMxzpHx26VoYO_w8Qff1YVUzV5Zowpr5QIPn2nMLeqiwj9Kf5kcz>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:23:06 +1200


At 10:31 p.m. 23/08/2007, you wrote:

> > Actually 7.29. You might as well quote the sentence just before
> > it which reads "The Thracians bursting into Mycalessus sacked
> > the houses and temples and butchered the inhabitants, sparing
> > neither youth [...]" making it clear that the atrocity was committed
> > by them rather than "Athenians and their Thracian mercenaries".

>Not correct. Read Victor Davis Hanson's commentaries on Thucydides
>and it is pretty clear that the Athenians permitted and oversaw the
>buchery by their Thracian mercenaries.

That's only VDH's interpretation. In the text of the event surrounding the massacre, it is the thracians who are storming the city. When the Thebans catch up to them to exact revenge, it is only the Thracians that suffer. If the Athenians were overseeing the massacre, Thucydides would be writing about the punishment meted out to Diitrephes. But in the death toll of the battle, Thucydides lists only Thebans, Thracians and Boetians.

> > Furthermore Thucydides explicitly says the city was assaulted
> > at daybreak and the city easily captured because the inhabitants
> > did not expect anybody coming in so far from the sea. Even if
> > the facts were as you said they were, I fail to see how this even
> > remotely justifies a potrayal of Kallyr as a Red-headed bitch of
> > Beslan.

>I don't saw she was a bitch or even evil.

But you in implying that she would massacre a school (outside the context of storming a city) imply exactly that.

>But these are perfectly
>normal tactics in both guerilla and tribal warfare.

Wrong. The massacres you refer to are almost always about storming enemy cities or settlements either through an initial assualt or after a prolonged siege. Attacking a school and killing the kids inside is not and has never been normal tactics. If it were the usual thing during the Peloponesian war for example, do you think Thucydides would have made particular note of it?

--Peter Metcalfe            

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