At first blush the pairing of an essay on Thucydides' Peloponnesian War with ones on Aristotle's Politics and Plato's Republic might seem a bit odd, but it's both brilliant and quite purposeful. Each essay is excellent on its own, while the combination allows Strauss to present perspectives on classical political thought that wouldn't be possible if he limited the subjects strictly to political philosophy. There's a lot of food for thought in these dense 240 pages.
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One can read reviews of Strauss the reactionary or Strauss the left-wing nationalist, suggesting that Strauss is usually viewed through an ideological lens (ref. his assertion in The City and Man [1964] that political philosophy has been replaced by ideology). Anyone who incites such divergent interpretations must be on to something.

Strauss did not write aphorisms, nor did he commit to any easily identifiable position on anyone else’s spectrum of conceivable political positions. Instead, he wrote incisive, analytical commentaries on key classical and Renaissance texts in political philosophy, which he presented as attempts to excavate complex substrata of logic and purpose. Strauss believed that the understanding of a philosophical text required a reader to comprehend the intentions of the writer, “to study political philosophies as they were understood by their originators in contradistinction to the way in which they were understood by their adversaries and even by detached or indifferent bystanders.”

At the same time, he argued that certain philosophical texts were comprehendible only as a kind of esoteric writing—the writer’s true intentions conveyed subtly, concealed as in code. Uncovering the true meaning requires approaching the text from different angles. Consequently, Strauss’ own views are difficult to discern in his explications of the work of others. I mean not to imply that Strauss was some fuzzy obscurantist, only that he was a polygonal peg in a world of round holes.

The City and Man comprises three long essays—on Plato’s Republic, the Politics of Aristotle, and The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides—which together illustrate what Strauss took to be the advantages of classical political philosophy over modern scientific thought. His critique of modern (post-Enlightenment) thought was in part a lamentation, for what had been lost, as Strauss saw it; not so much a rejection of modernity as it was an attempt at a revaluation of principles that had been obscured.

Strauss plays the three Greeks off of each other while all along insisting on a genuine consensus of the wise. He clearly admired the Greek philosophers, for their emphasis on the rewards of prudence, moderation, and justice, and for their philosophical techné. Aristotle had great faith in man, in his inclination toward happiness and in his endeavors toward seeing and knowing for their own sake. Modern thought, writes Strauss, has rejected Aristotle’s view of a harmony between the whole of nature and the human mind, thus setting up nature as an enemy to be subjugated and overcome. Strauss himself was admirably skeptical of claims to ‘progress’: the advance of science and the growth of knowledge had not produced virtue and happiness, and political society had abandoned the cultivation of virtue for the pursuit of ‘freedom,’ i.e. “the freedom to live either nobly or basely according to one’s liking.”

Strauss’ Aristotle "founded political science as an independent discipline and discovered moral virtue, which for Plato had been only a kind of halfway house between political virtue (that which was in the service of self-preservation or peace) and genuine virtue, which animated only the true philosophers." The possibility of a natural, reasoned virtue is one of the pursuits that modern scientific thought has abandoned, according to Strauss, along with an ability to validate any value-judgments as proper.

Plato’s teaching could not be understood apart from the form in which it was presented, writes Strauss, and a crucial component of the form was a radical irony. Socrates, as a character in a poetic form (the Platonic dialogue), asserted the value of philosophy over poetry. Socrates described justice as the supreme virtue of the city, but the dialogue form exposed justice as untenable—not because justice was impossible, but because it was an idea “beyond all becoming.” Strauss’ succinct exegesis of Plato’s doctrine of ideas illuminates that notoriously difficult set of concepts, and the whole chapter serves as a valuable reminder of the genius of Plato. The Republic was contrived so as to say different things to different people, and perhaps Socrates (or Plato? or Leo Strauss?) did not primarily intend to teach a doctrine but "to educate human beings—to make them better, more just or gentle, more aware of their limitations."

The most surprising chapter in The City and Man is the one on Thucydides, whose book was not just a narrative of war but a study of the nature of war. Strauss, of course, was not to be satisfied with the traditional conception of Thucydides’ as a “scientific” historian. The surface narrative of the events of war “hid” a deeper stratum of thought. Strauss’ Thucydides was a philosophic historian: he was in fundamental agreement with Plato on the good and the bad, the noble and the base, and he shared with Aristotle the quest for a ‘common sense’ understanding of political things.

But for all that philosophical affinity, writes Strauss, the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole rendered questionable a presupposition of classical philosophy. "Both Plato and Aristotle neglected ‘foreign affairs’ in visualizing their perfectly good cities, whereas Thucydides taught that the city was neither self-sufficient nor was it essentially a part of a good or just order comprising many or all cities." In what has come to be recognized as a fundamental tenet of international relations, the unequal power of different cities inevitably leads to the consequences that "the most powerful cities cannot help being hegemonic or even imperial." The ‘anarchical system’ which characterizes the ‘society of cities’ and the omnipresence of war “puts a much lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted.” It’s hard to be good in war, which is not the same as being good at war.

The excavation of Thucydides’ thought from the narrative of the Peloponnesian War is the clearest example here of Strauss’ approach to esoteric texts. I didn’t even know that The Peloponnesian War was an esoteric text. And it’s not that one has to agree with Strauss, but that any claim to understanding that disregards Strauss would ring false and incomplete. Too many writers and scholars assume and then take for granted that the ancient Greeks gloried in war, that their greatest accomplishments were the consequences of victory in battle. Their own greatest narratives were war stories—Trojan, Persian, Peloponnesian. But Strauss’ esoteric reading of Thucydides allows for a reconsideration. “Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle,” Strauss wrote, “in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said.’ It can only be ‘done.’” He was thinking not of Greek soldiers, but of philosophers. ( )

Commentary on Aristotle's "Politics", Plato's "Republic", and Thucydides' peloponnesian war. Professor Strauss attempts to "liberate" modern political philosophy from ideology.