Neville Morley

Neville Morley is a professor of classics and ancient history at Exeter.

From The Blog

Thucydides Traps

13 March 2026

Thucydides is having another moment. Donald Trump’s foreign policy has provoked a rash of allusions to a line from the Melian Dialogue: ‘The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they must.’ The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, referred to it at Davos in January in his lament for the fading of a rules-based order. But a Thucydidean world is not something to be welcomed.

See all contributors

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences