---
title: "Thucydides, Shipwreck Steel, and Writing"
date: 2026-05-18
slug: thucydides-shipwreck-steel-and-writing
type: post
categories:
  - "Geopolitics"
tags:
  - "thucydides"
  - "history"
  - "writing"
  - "ai"
  - "training data"
original_url: https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/05/18/thucydides-shipwreck-steel-and-writing/
author: Bridgewalker
excerpt: "Why Thucydides survived 2,500 years, what low-background steel teaches us about pre-2022 writing, and why it is still worth writing after the LLMs arrived."
---

*Originally published at [humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/05/18/thucydides-shipwreck-steel-and-writing](https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/05/18/thucydides-shipwreck-steel-and-writing/)*

**Thucydides**

Thucydides' [History of the Peloponnesian War](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142) is one of my favorite pieces of writing. I first read it in my late 20s, and it captivated me much more than I expected it to. Thucydides writes about a recognizably human and yet alien world, where men thought, loved, and died like us in the 21st century, yet had seemingly little compunction about putting entire cities to the sword. Pericles' funeral oration still stirs my heart as the purest ode to love of city and country put to paper, and the 'Thucydides trap' is still one of the most common framings of the great power conflict between the US and China today.

If this iteration of our civilization slips the bonds of Earth and wins the stars, Thucydides' writing will go with us to the far-off stars as well.

And he did this, writing 400 years before Christ, in a civilization (Greece) with a population smaller than modern Singapore, from Athens, which had about as many souls as the town of Tampines in modern Singapore today.

Why has Thucydides' work survived, when most of the other writing throughout history has vanished in the mists of time?

It was partly the subject matter – Thucydides himself thought that the Great War between the Greek cities was greater than any that had occurred before it. It was also the Golden Age of Greece, the talent concentration in those small city states was extraordinarily high, and many other contemporaries or near contemporaries – Socrates, Plato, Xenophon – are read widely to this day. The human drama of battles and unexpected victories and defeats resonate.

But more than the action, it was the lessons Thucydides drew through the war that have remained. He was a general for the Athenians, but exiled midway through the war. We do not know if he was present at the key events – the Spartan defeat at Sphacteria, the Battle of Mantinea – and he certainly knew people who were there – but he wrote the speeches and dialogues himself.

It is in these dialogues and speeches that his writing shines. Pericles' funeral oration in the first year of the war lays out what it means to be Athenian and to love Athens and her democracy, while the Melian dialogue and the message of the Athenians – *"the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must"* – showcases their cruelty and is frequently reflected on in small countries like my homeland of Singapore.

In contrast, his description of events is direct, workmanlike, and strange to the modern reader. My favorite translation by Richard Crawley ends Chapter XVII on the Melians thus, after pages of high flown rhetoric on what is right and just in the face of dealing with overwhelming force:

> "… the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves."

Thucydides was a blogger of sorts, in an earlier time – writing about every year of the war as it happened, until he stopped mysteriously in the 21st year. We don't know which of his contemporaries read him or his writings – he was in exile and the Internet was 2,500 years away. We don't know much about him or his family, beyond what he writes. But posterity certainly read his writings, the earliest [papyrus copyings](https://papyri.info/dclp/62925) of his writing go back to the third century before Christ.

It probably also helped that he was one of the first writers in his genre. Herodotus, the father of Western history, was writing just a few years before him, and some stories have been passed on that Thucydides was inspired as a young child by hearing Herodotus himself at the agora of Athens.

But that is no knock on the quality of his work – to me, he is still a better writer of history than anyone else in the 2,500 years that come after, and I have a copy of Thucydides on my bookshelf, waiting for the day when my son will be happy to read it or have it read to him. It's too early now, he's only three and a half and prefers to listen to Hot Wheels racing books. But it will be there waiting for him, in 5, 10, 15 years, or maybe even in his late 20s just like it was for me. The History of the Peloponnesian War has stood the test of time.

**Shipwreck Steel**

Ships and shipwrecks play a key background role in Thucydides' account of this Great War.

He begins by writing about the rise of the Greeks and the founding of the first Navy by King Minos to clear the sea of pirates. The wreckage of the Athenian fleet at the hands of the Syracusans in Sicily was the key turning point of the war, with the entire army being killed or captured. And the mastery of the sea and winning of sea battles by the Spartans, funded with money from the Persian purse, is what drove the turning tides of war at the end where Sparta begins to exert her will on Athens.

Some shipwrecks from that age have been [discovered](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/diving-into-the-first-underwater-museum-in-greece), helping in our understanding of the trade relations and material conditions of the time. In more modern times, shipwrecks have also played an important role in research and our understanding of the world around us.

[Low background steel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel) refers to steel forged before 1945. The production of steel requires copious amounts of air, and all steel produced since the first atomic explosions in 1945 contain trace amounts of radiation from nuclear testing and the explosion of nuclear weapons. This meant that, for some highly sensitive radiation-detection instruments, pre-1945 steel became unusually valuable. The primary source of this low background steel is shipwreck steel, particularly from the [German fleet scuttled at Scapa Flow in 1919.](https://www.scapaflowwrecks.com/wrecks/)

**Writing**

Many in the AI field have started referring to pre-2022 writing as shipwreck steel, and some have even come up with websites to preserve this [low background steel](https://lowbackgroundsteel.ai/). This is because post 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT four years ago, an increasing amount of web content has been created by, or with the assistance of LLMs.

Training new AIs on LLM outputs is mostly avoided, as LLMs tend to converge to the "best" answer, reducing diversity and leading to a failure called [model collapse](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01171). Indeed, as I wrote before, the LLMs themselves have [trouble telling their outputs from those generated by other LLMs.](https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/05/04/blurred-mirrors/)

Techniques in synthetic data are being created to reduce this model collapse. The labs themselves are also becoming more aggressive in data curation, and also hiring experts to [curate their data pipelines](https://www.wired.com/story/i-work-in-hollywood-everyone-who-used-to-make-tv-now-training-ai/) and assist in reinforcement learning.

But what does this mean for those of us, who are still writing after 2022 then? Some will claim post-2022 writing is less reliable, less useful, and maybe even less true than writing from before 2022. This is because the writing is likely to be LLM assisted, which indicates that its usefulness for training may be lower, the human investment in writing is less, and the writing could suffer from hallucinations that still plague some models, particularly if the user has been intentionally, or unintentionally, misleading their writing assistant.

But I think there is still reason to write.

The forces that drive homogenization and lower quality writing in the post 2022 world have been accumulating even before the introduction of LLMs. The father of Chinese history, Sima Qian, is very different from Herodotus, because they had not heard of each other and were writing from opposite ends of Eurasia, separated by centuries as well as distance. Today, the worlds of humanity have converged – Xi Jinping has [cited Jack London as his favorite American author](https://en.people.cn/n3/2016/1014/c90000-9127419.html). The cost to replicate has also gone down. Since the heyday of blogging, anyone can pen his or her thoughts online and hit "publish". But in the days of copying on papyrus and vellum, or even stone, every word had real, immense cost. The LLM era may have accelerated this, but even before 2022 people wrote, with passion and conviction.

And writing may be important just for the writer himself. It is a way to form thoughts and share them, in an increasingly complicated and unruly world. We never know who, or anyone, might read what we write one day and have it affect his/her/its thoughts. Thucydides probably knew that his work would carry, as he declared himself, but I am not sure how many of his contemporaries read him in his day, or if he knew that one day, 2,500 years hence, there will be a father waiting to tell his son about the Greek wars.

Thucydides wrote one of the first histories, and made his mark in history itself with a work of unparalleled genius. We will not be his equal, but we can continue documenting our time in our own way – today is a pivot point in history at least as important as the time of war between the Athenians and the Spartans – with the advent of new forms of intelligence and [humanity's renewed push to the stars.](https://humanstoriesforaibots.com/2026/04/18/omega-speedmaster-professional-moonwatch/)

Pre-2022 writing may be the shipwreck steel of this age, but post-2022 writing is the record of this transition – the changing of the background itself.

*Postscript: This essay itself is an artifact of the transition it describes. The papyrus fragment was located with the assistance of ChatGPT and several models proofread this. Research would have taken weeks without their help. Any errors remain my own.*
