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The lede isn't just buried here, its almost unmentioned. At the end of this war the Athenian empire was no more and Athens was reduced to being a vassal state and didn't recover its prominence until the Greek revolution in the 19th century. Bad judgement, exceptionalism and overreaching driven by demagoguery lead to the end of an empire--not for the last time.

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This isn’t an entirely accurate picture. In Hanink’s first book, she demonstrates how the classical Athens that we think of today was largely an invention of Athens in the fourth century BCE.

To oversimplify a bit, although Athens lost its military hegemony at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Athens and Athenianness maintained a powerful cultural influence for centuries.

I think the lede, then, is clear from the first paragraph: classical Athens (synechdochically represented through Thucydides here) is a construct that can be used for diverse ends, and we need to pay careful to attention to who uses it and how.

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