All great texts are refracted through some version of Zeitgeist, and Thucydides is no exception. During the Cold War, international relations scholars saw parallels between the bipolarity of late fifth-century Greece and the postwar world and between the superpowers and Athens and Sparta. The greatest naval power once again confronted the greatest land power in a struggle that pitted the democracy against the “garrison polis.” The burning question was whether the superpowers, unlike Athens and Sparta, could avoid a mutually destructive war. The Vietnam War heightened interest in Thucydides. It undermined the Cold War consensus in the United States, and raised questions of morality and foreign policy to the forefront of public consciousness. W. Robert Connor, one of the great contemporary Thucydides scholars, was drawn to the subject by a March 1968 New Yorker essay by Jonathan Schell that described the destruction he had witnessed in Vietnam in detached language reminiscent of Thucydides' account of the suffering at Mycalessus.

Cold War interest in the origins of the Peloponnesian War drew attention away from the consequences of that war for Athens and Greece more generally. To be sure, the Melian Dialogue, which took place during the sixteenth year of the war, appeared regularly on college reading lists and is still hailed by realists as evidence of Thucydides' realism.