OPINION
By Valentine Obienyem
WHENEVER I witness power tussles among nations, I naturally recall the realist who once said that nations weigh words by counting guns. Is this true? At such times, I remember how the Great Ideas, in A Syntopicon, begins its treatise on justice by invoking the encounter between the Athenian envoys and the Melian representatives, when they stood on a sword’s edge. This dialogue, preserved by Thucydides, serves as the ultimate historical collision between the idealism of “right” and the realism of “might.”
When the Athenians arrived at the neutral island of Melos, they did not offer a moral justification for their aggression, but instead extended a cold invitation to acknowledge the reality of power. They swept aside the usual diplomatic appeals to justice, telling the Melians that they would not waste time on “specious pretences,” for they knew that in the real world “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, whereas the stronger do whatever they can and the weaker suffer whatever they must.”
This Athenian worldview defined justice purely as a matter of utility and strength, asserting that the only reasonable conclusion for any state is that “everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger.” To the Athenians, this was not a violation of law but a submission to a “necessary law of nature,” in which the powerful rule wherever they are able. They viewed the Melians’ desire for independence not as a right, but as an irrational resistance to the inevitable.
The Melians, facing the extinction of their sovereignty, desperately attempted to shift the conversation back to the ground of moral equality and the “common good.” They recognized the futility of their position, noting that if they insisted on their rights and refused to submit, they could expect nothing from the negotiations except “war and, in the end, slavery.” They challenged Athenian logic by pointing out the danger of abandoning universal justice, arguing, “You debar us from talking about justice and invite us to obey your interest.”
The Melians maintained that even a superpower should respect the laws of fair play, since the fall of an empire is always possible, and an aggressor who ignores justice today will have no protection when it eventually faces its own ruin. Ultimately, the Melian representatives chose to stake their lives on “hope” and on the belief that the gods would favour the “righteous” over the “unjust.” The Athenians, however, dismissed this as a fatal delusion, proving their point through the subsequent slaughter of the Melian men and the enslavement of their women.
Ultimately, much of Plato’s philosophy was a war against this very viewpoint. To Plato, the Athenian position was not “realism” but a soul-destroying sickness. In his Republic, he argues that justice is an objective, transcendent harmony—not a tool of the powerful. He suggests that a state or an individual governed solely by the “interest of the stronger” is inherently unstable and miserable, because it lacks the internal order of reason. For Plato, justice is the health of the soul and of the city; to act unjustly is to damage one’s own nature. He sought to demonstrate that it is always better to suffer injustice than to commit it, for the person who relies on might alone eventually becomes a slave to his own appetites and fears.
Source: Realnews Magazine