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Followers of @Thucydiocy will have seen this quote often. Funny thing is that it makes no sense in a Greek context (they never had a separate warrior class or profession) but fits perfectly into C19 debate about whether officer training should be broad/humanist or technical. https://twitter.com/tim_fargo/status/1297270119924674560
One victim of this debate was Wilhelm Rüstow - also famous scholar of Greek warfare - who advocated a humanist mil. education and was thrown under the bus by the professors at Zürich Polytechnikum who wanted officer training to be focused like other professional education.
Everywhere in the West, the technical side won the debate in the decades leading up to WW1. This meant drastic cuts to teaching of general milhist at war academies. War academies no longer claimed milhist as their prerogative, allowing uni profs to become mil historians.
Fascinating work by Sven Lange and others shows the decline of milhist in German officer training especially after Schlieffen took over as CGGS in 1891.
Something something Germany, WW1, scholars and fools.
Something something Germany, WW1, scholars and fools.
This should be read in the context of rapidly changing military tech and the very valid question whether it is efficient to make officers read Thucydides when Thucydides didn't know about railroads and Maxim guns.
I should clean up this thread, it wanders all over the place. But the point is: while (as @Thucydiocy tirelessly points out) the quote is not from Thucydides, it is in many ways *about* Thucydides - who reads him, and why, and how.