Thomas Hobbes’s State of Nature: A View From Thucydides’ Peloponnesus

Thucydides and Hobbes on Epidemics and Politics:

“…Therefore, the plague might also be responsible for Athens losing its most able general (Longrigg, 1992, pp. 41-42;H, 6.15, p. 385) who, moreover, betrayed Athens and directly helped Sparta win the war (Ribarević, 2022).…”

“…It was already in 1975 that Richard Schlatter noted in his edition of Hobbes's translation that "these famous paragraphs on the horrors of war and revolutionary spirit are pure Hobbes and might have come from the pages of Leviathan" (Thucydides, 1975, p. 580). In a recent article, I have tried to show that Thucydides' text might have informed Hobbes's ideas to a certain extent while he was working on the different aspects of his description of the state of nature (Ribarević, 2022). First, when formulating his famous description of the life in the pre-political state of nature existing before the founding of the state, Hobbes's Leviathan closely echoes Thucydides' depiction of the manner of life in the ancient Hellas.…”