Views on Human Development

By the time Thucydides composed his History, the concept of “social evolution” (for want of a better term) was nothing new. Xenophanes, Protagoras, Demokritos, the author of the Prometheus Bound, Sophokles in the Antigone, and Euripides in the Suppliants, among others, had given expression to the idea that humans had developed from a primitive state not unlike that which Hobbes outlines in Leviathan, in which there was “no place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” ^[13] Enough survives to reveal that Thucydides’ picture of humans rising from weakness to strength fell squarely within a growing intellectual tradition. At the same time, however, our other sources, scattered and difficult to assess as they are, share many elements that set them apart from Thucydides and, in fact, emphasize how different and unique Thucydides’ analysis was.