Stacy Schiff on the Libby trial, with a lovely line or two about memory, followed by Nicholas Kristof who says we should look back to Thucydides to understand the Iraqi adventure, and to Ahab to understand Bush.

Who knew that 12 angry Americans could be so easy to come by — and a jury so difficult to assemble? “It took us all day to get six jurors qualified,” Judge Reggie M. Walton lamented last Thursday, after a contentious afternoon of voir dire in the Scooter Libby trial. Judge Walton had hoped to have seated his panel by then; selection took twice as long as expected. Opening arguments are scheduled for today, not the sort of trailer you would normally run before a State of the Union address.

To some minds, a jury has not been the only thing missing from United States of America v. I. Lewis Libby. “In the most important sense, this is a case without a crime,” The Wall Street Journal reminded us over the weekend. An artful leap followed: “Yes, Mr. Libby is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, which are serious offenses.”

It is true that what began as a search for a leak ended — after much collateral damage — with an indictment for a lie. At this juncture it can be difficult to grasp what, precisely, is on trial. Some of us seem viscerally to wish something else were. While the original investigation stemmed from the charge that a public official had provided accurate information to the press, potential jurors appear more eager to charge a public official with having provided false information to a country. It was, after all, Mr. Libby who drafted the 2003 masterpiece that Colin Powell presented to the United Nations, the one about Iraq’s fabled chemical and biological weapons.

Juror 0420, an economist, couldn’t help but say she thought the Iraq war “a tremendous mistake, a horrendous mistake, and a betrayal.” She could not promise to be objective about Dick Cheney, who is slated to testify.

Juror 0244 reported “strong negative feelings about this current administration and its conduct of the war.” He was gone in seconds.

Juror 1140 admitted: “I believe the vice president would have had the defendant leak.” Had she any preconceived notions? “Guilty.”

Juror 1298 felt that she could muster the maturity to be open-minded about Mr. Libby. But when pressed by Judge Walton on whether a witness from the administration would carry “a strike against them,” she replied, “Probably.” Home she went.

Juror 1980 made herself crystal clear: “I cannot believe any statement from the Bush administration.” Bye-bye.

These exchanges produced a little rowdiness over in the press room, where stopwatches were set to see how long a potential juror could last. Remember that door-to-door campaign the president has promised for Baghdad? Those good-will ambassadors might be better deployed in our nation’s capital.

On the stand will be the vagaries of human memory. Hence the carefully crafted questions submitted by Libby’s team for prospective jurors: Can you honestly misremember? Is the memory like a tape recorder, or does it make mistakes? Can you falsely believe someone told you something when it was someone else, at a prior date? Can you hold to your memories even after they are found to be inaccurate?

The defense will contend that Mr. Libby’s recollections were honest, even if incorrect. “Confused, forgot or misremembered” are not crimes. Deliberate lying is; to be convicted, Mr. Libby must be shown to have willfully misled.

He claims to have been preoccupied with vital security issues and buried under intelligence information; he paid little heed to the matter of a C.I.A. officer’s employment. Technically this is called the “Honey, I was too busy preparing the family tax return to think clearly when you asked about the lap dancers” defense.

Surely it’s a legitimate one, if perhaps a little tough to swallow after six years of distorted intelligence and Enron-grade responsibility. Also, is it just me, or does that argument sound disconcertingly familiar? Wasn’t it Mr. Libby’s ex-boss who — when asked why he hadn’t served in Vietnam — replied, “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service”?

Generally, a memory can prove a dangerous thing to have under this administration. Even I can remember W.M.D., Mohamed Atta, African uranium, shock and awe, mission accomplished, and a heckuva job — and I’m lousy when it comes to plot. The prodigious Mr. Libby, on the other hand, remembers all 79 “Star Trek” episodes. And their titles, too.

Stacy Schiff is the author, most recently, of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America.” She is a guest columnist.

Now Mr. Kristof on Iraq and Thucydides, and Ahab and Bush.

Maybe George W. Bush is the education president after all. Whatever one thinks of his No Child Left Behind initiative, he has made the classics powerfully resonant today.

So for those schoolchildren and university students out there struggling through “Moby-Dick” or the “Aeneid,” take heart! They’re not just about white whales or Trojan wanderers — they’re also about President Bush and Iraq.

Forget the Vietnam analogy that critics of the Iraq war usually toss out. A more trenchant analysis of Iraq-style adventures appears in the histories of Thucydides, written 2,400 years ago.

Great Athenian diplomats of the day, like Nicias, warned against military involvement in Sicily, calling it “a war that does not concern us,” according to Thucydides. But smooth-talking neocons of the day, like the brilliant Alcibiades, said in effect that the Sicilians would welcome the Athenians with flowers. He promised that they would be treated not as occupiers but as liberators.

“We shall have many barbarians ... join us,” Alcibiades declared, and he argued that the enemy would be easily defeated “rabble.” “Never were the Peloponnesians more hopeless against us,” he told the crowds.

So the Athenians rallied around the flag and dispatched a huge force. But as Thucydides notes, they had suffered a grievous intelligence failure: they did not get the support they had counted on, and the enemy was far larger and more organized than they had anticipated. The war went badly, and eventually Athens was forced to confront two options: withdraw or escalate.

The Athenians, deciding that defeat was not an option, went with the “surge.” They dispatched an additional 70-odd ships and 5,000 troops.

The result was a catastrophic defeat. Thousands of Athenians were killed far from home, and others were sold into slavery. The Athenian navy was destroyed, and the double-or-nothing gambit meant that other nonaligned states sided with the Athenians’ enemy, Sparta.

Within a few years, Athenian democracy had collapsed, and Athens, the great city-state of the ancient world, had been conquered by Sparta.

President Bush has lent a new thrill to readers of Virgil’s account of the adventures of Aeneas from Troy to Rome. A marvelous new translation of the “Aeneid,” by Robert Fagles, has just been published, and critics (and Professor Fagles himself) have noted its relevance: Virgil is suddenly newsy.

That’s because this is a tale of war and empire, and a constant subtext is how easy it is to be uncivilized when promoting civilization.

Aeneas is an exponent of reason who at the end of the book confronts an enemy who pleads with him to “go no further down the road of hatred.” Aeneas sees that the enemy is wearing the sword-belt of his slain friend, and reason dissolves into fury: “Blazing with wrath,” he plants his iron sword “hilt-deep in his enemy’s heart.” In war, moderation is the first casualty.

Yet the single best guide to Mr. Bush’s presidency may be “Moby-Dick.” Melville’s book is, of course, about much more than Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale — a “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly” symbol of all that is dark and unknown in the world.

Rather, it is an allegory about the cost of obsession. Ahab has a reasonable goal, capturing a whale, yet he allows this quest to overwhelm him and erode his sense of perspective and balance. Ignoring warnings, refusing to admit error, Ahab abandons all rules and limits in his quest.

Ahab finally throws his pipe overboard; he will enjoy no pleasures until he gets that whale. The fanaticism becomes self-destructive, eventually destroying Ahab and his ship.

To me at least, Melville captures the trajectory of the Bush years. It begins with a president who started out after 9/11 with immense support at home and abroad and a genuine mandate to fight terrorism. But then Mr. Bush became obsessed by his responsibility to prevent another terror attack.

This was an eminently worthy goal, but Mr. Bush abandoned traditional rules and boundaries — like bans on torture and indefinite detentions — and eventually blundered into Iraq. And in a way that Melville could have foretold, the compulsive search for security ended up creating insecurity.

Melville’s lesson is that even a heroic quest can be destructive when we abandon all sense of limits. And at a time when we hear the siren calls of moral clarity, the classics almost invariably emphasize the importance of moral nuance, an appreciation for complexity, the need for humility.

So, students, study those classics. They are timeless — and in the days of the Iraq war and Guantánamo, they have never been more timely.