I do recommend you read this, it's fascinating

I'd considered my youthful reading of Will and Ariel Durant's "History of Civilization" to have been enough exposure to ancient history. I had subsequently been too much a maven of mid-20th century history, and now I can understand why.

In our present political season, the one commodity a candidate offers to us is "hope". Thucydides explained that "hope is an expensive commodity".

I'm only halfway through the book, and already I've seen numerous parallels to recent and modern events.
For instance, modern states struggle to drive Sicilian mafiosi from their commercial and political sectors. The seeds of "La Cosa Nostra" are exposed in the outcome of the Athenian expedition in Sicily. A war had broken out between two states on Sicily, and Athens picked a side and joined in, hoping to intensify their naval encirclement of the Peloponnese. After a year of shifting alliances and various battles and laying waste to the land, one Sicilian proposed the radical solution that all Sicilians stop fighting with one another, make a unified effort to expell the Athenians, and commit to living peacefully with one another. His argument persuaded all Sicilian states, and the Athenians were compelled to leave. There it is. "Our thing", a Sicilian inwardness, was first proposed and first used and first succeeded 2400 years ago.

Looking forward, because I know how it turns out, we can use the outcome of the Peloponnesian War as an instructive lesson for our own nation today. In military matters, the two alliances were equal. They both had triremes, hoplites, and peltasts. They both had to deal with shifting and collapsing alliances, defeats, and hubris. That Sparta eventually did in fact conquer Athens speaks to the value of persistence in state policy, a policy seen time and again lately, from the Western Allies' Yalta Declaration calling for unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers, to the relatively easy achievement of Ronald Reagan's four-word policy toward the USSR, "We win, they lose", to the long Islamist war against the U.S.