Neville Morley's Blog, page 13

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 October 2023

The run of bad nights continues; waking some time around three or four (with some part of my brain being already awake, recognising that the rest of me is starting to wake and trying desperately to stop it, to no avail) and then just having to doze until the alarm goes a couple of hours later as everything else kicks in – work, horrific state of the world, general feelings of utter inadequacy in the face of the first two. And as ever Hans recognises that I’m not asleep – we do share some strange bond, whereby if one of us is disturbed at night the other is too, and not just because he resorts to prodding me and prowling to get attention – and expects some fuss; he does settle down quite quickly in the crook of my arm, but it means I can’t now move. And then the chihuahuas downstairs start whining…

There will be general relief when we hand the wretched dogs back to the son tomorrow, as this week has been a strain all round. The cats are deeply unenthusiastic about dogs in general, but seem to have a particular dislike of little skittery yappy dogs – and far worse is the extent to which having dogs in the kitchen cramps their style as they can’t go in and out of the catflap but have to be let out via the porch (at least they have me working at home today and available to minister to their demands, rather than being completely shut in). The dogs have been off their food for much of the week, pining for their master and/or nervous of the cars, or possibly just manipulating us for fancier food. I’m not a dog person at all, and A., insofar as she was in the past, prefers things like bull mastiffs.

The morning routine simply takes longer when you not only add in the need to feed and clean up after chihuahuas but also elaborate routines with doors to keep the feuding sides separate; the elaborate choreography whereby everything gets sorted out without either of us getting in the other’s way breaks down. Eventually A. heads off to work only slightly late, and I decide that I’m too tired to start work immediately so I’ll make parkin in the hope of being slightly more together by nine or so. It doesn’t work – and the problem with parkin is that it’s supposed to be kept for at least a few days before eating, so I don’t get to cheer myself up with cake.

The result is a bit of a nothing day; it’s not that I did nothing – in fact I worked through a lot of student emails, Reviews Editor business, writing a tenure review report and other stuff that would have needed to be done sooner or later – but I didn’t do what I had planned to do (draft questionnaire questions for project on Chat-GPT and historical skills assessment) and didn’t feel like I achieved anything at all substantial. I’m feeling very conscious that next week is Reading Week and that I have both loaded all my hopes of rest and recovery onto it and postponed a pile of tasks until then on the basis that without teaching and travelling into Exeter I’ll have lots of spare time…

Made supper (chicken tikka and a spinach dal) while A. had her online German lesson, unsuccessfully fighting the urge to start on beer at half five, successfully resisting temptation to kick dogs when they got underfoot while I was working at the stove. Then into our Friday evening routine: Taggeschau at seven (deeply depressing as ever, but it handles international affairs rather better than the BBC – not everything is presented in terms of how it will affect national politics, and there’s no obvious navel-gazing about its own choice of language) followed by at least an hour of Bayerisch drama. For years the latter has been Hubert und Staller, a pleasant and undemanding comedy Krimi set in the Bavarian countryside, but we’ve probably seen all the episodes at least twice, albeit not in the right order, even the far inferior Hubert ohne Staller in which they tried and failed to reboot after one half of the central double act decided he’d had enough.

Finally, however, we are offered something new: Himmel Herrgott Sakrament, in which a down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking priest from the countryside is brought to Munich to take charge of a huge but largely unfrequented church just off the Viktualienmarkt, and more generally to save the Catholic Church by acknowledging its deficiencies and offending traditionalists by being down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking (he rides a motorbike! he lets dogs into the church! he declares the need for the abolition of compulsory celibacy to the attractive divorced mother who’s developing a website for him!). On the basis of the first two episodes, shown back to back, it’s really rather good; the main problem is a lack of a decent villain, as the scheming cardinal turns out to be an old friend who is simply trying to save the Catholic Church by acknowledging its deficiencies and bringing a down-to-earth and somewhat free-thinking rural priest to the capital, and the traditionalist Stadträtin – who is of course the mother of the attractive divorced mother – is already being humanised.

One gets the sense that the people responsible are somewhat torn between serious issues-based drama and heart-warming religious comedy along the lines of Um Himmels Willen (the late-lamented #HeartwarmingNunDrama that regularly used social issues as a minor plot point to be resolved by the head nun artfully manipulating the devious Bürgermeister), and the example of twenty-odd highly popular series of Um Himmels Willen means that the heart-warming religious comedy instinct wins out every time. I mean, we had ten minutes tops of the attractive divorced mother’s angsty teen daughter causing concern, hanging out with a dodgy crowd, staying out all night to highlight mother’s failure to hold things together, and then it’s revealed that she’s hanging with a bunch of earnest environmental activitists whom the radical priest has already recruited to his cause. We are not getting heavy doses of suspense here.

But when we’re going to bed at half nine through general exhaustion (and to get away from the dogs), and that’s a late evening, a lack of suspense is an advantage. Half an hour of sudoku – my current reading, a rather good Scandinavian Krimi, has just offered two paragraphs’ worth of the point of view of someone locked in a pitch-black underground room with just a tiny slit for air and half a bottle of water, which is too much like one of my worst nightmares for me to feel up to reading any further at the moment – and then lights out, hoping once again to sleep past four…

Weak

Justice is possible only when power is in balance. Otherwise the strong exact what they want and the weak simply suffer.

The Melian Dialogue as Rorschach test? For well over a century, great powers and their ideologues have taken the Athenians’ claims to be (1) obviously Thucydides’ own beliefs and (2) obviously true. For most of the same period, those who find such ‘realism’ distasteful or unacceptable have observed that the episode is followed by the Sicilian Expedition, and so clearly Thucydides intends us to recognise the dangers of such hubris and amorality. Right and Realistic, or Wrong and Wrepulsive? Does anyone take the Melian arguments seriously? Their role in such readings is to be victims, either as naive fools to demonstrate the pointlessness of resisting one’s superiors, or helpless innocents to expose the moral bankruptcy of those supposed superiors.

A Plague On Both Their Houses? If you are instinctively on the side of the weak, then actually listening to the Melian arguments is a bit embarrassing. It’s a relief to be reminded that the Melians in the Dialogue are not representative of the whole people – that this is a leadership clique, refusing to allow the whole citizen body to deliberate on whether to embark on a hopeless military enterprise, let alone the women and children who will suffer the most (or does Thucydides actually mean us to despise the ordinary men who, given a choice, might prefer to abandon honour in favour of personal safety?). The Athenian generals have a stronger claim to be representing the views of the majority of Athenians – which is perhaps intended to reflect less well on the mindset of democracy, that the majority can happily vote to empower people who will massacre those who stand in the way of their ambitions. If we take the dialogue form seriously, it’s not at all clear that either side has good arguments. The point is rather that they are recognisable, familiar, bad arguments, that need to be confronted.

A Perfect Circle… If the world is like this, then it’s because of the mindset and assumptions of the men making the decisions. If this is how they see things, it’s because their perceptions have been shaped by experience and reported experience of engaging with the world as it is. If the world was like that, then…

…With A Ratchet. If justice is possible only between those with power to demand it, rather than being dictated to by others, then the only reasonable response is to try to be strong, or at least appear to be strong, or at least find a new means of making others weak. Which is the logic of endless escalation. No one aspires to be merely equal, for fear that the parameters might change, or justice might not turn out to one’s advantage; better to be strong and have the luxury of dictating terms.

Fractals. It is not just, as the Athenians observe elsewhere, that anyone else in their position would behave in exactly the same way (does this imply acceptance that, if they were the Spartans or the Melians, the same would also hold true?). It’s the fact that everyone else is in their position, in a different context. The Melian leadership are the strong in their communities, expecting submission and obedience on the grounds that this is natural and reasonable; the ordinary Melian citizen is the strong in his household. And the strong are conscious of being weak compared to others, and/or having been weak and vulnerable in the past.

There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here..? The Athenian commanders have the power, even if less than they might think; they could in theory show restraint and mercy – but would get no credit for it from their people. The Melian leadership could give up, and lose their power and probably their lives – or just hope that outside powers will intervene on their side, re-igniting broader conflicts. And even if one or both recognise their dilemma, they can’t admit it.

Why History Matters. Having an inaccurate, self-serving, mythologised idea of the past leads to bad decisions. This does not mean that having a clear, accurate, neutral idea of the past will lead to good decisions; it’s more like starting with a clean slate, seeing the present situation as it is rather than as one might wish or fear it to be. But this is also to recognise how far most of the people with actual power to make decisions do have an inaccurate, self-serving, mythologised view of the past. This might be the strongest evidence yet that Thucydides wrote for a tiny elite; for everyone else, the only reasonable conclusion from reading his work is that you too are weak and therefore vulnerable, and unless you can make yourself strong all you have is hope, danger’s comforter.

Why A Dialogue? There are always two sides, with different perspectives and assumptions. We should see something of ourselves in each, and feel disturbed or repulsed by both, and identify wholly with neither – and so recognise how much of us may be found in our supposed other, and how much of them in us. This doesn’t mean that justice is always evenly divided, but without some recognition of our own complicity and the other’s humanity, there is no way forward.

Is This What Thucydides Really Meant? I think that’s the least of our concerns right now.

Happy Talk

As P.G. Wodehouse almost remarked, it is never difficult to distinguish between Neville and a ray of sunshine. I am Wednesday’s child; my family nickname, still used by my father and brothers, is ‘Marvs’, for Marvin. Yes, I have a terrible pain in all the diodes down my left-hand side, especially when sitting on a damp, chilly station platform because my train is delayed or cancelled (at least at the time of writing it’s due to bad weather, rather than lack of train crew or engine failure or signalling problems, so I can spare some sympathy for the railway staff). Given that so far this term I’ve been going onto the ‘Delay Repay’ website on average twice a week, it’s difficult to avoid a sense that things really are falling apart day by day, even on days without two-hour meetings when I didn’t wake up at ten to five with a crushing sense of anxiety and failing to cope.

And yet, the title of this post is not sarcastic or ironic, because, discounting my almost constant tiredness, the utter nightmare of current world events and the problems of the UK railways, the abiding theme of the first four weeks of term has been that my students are happy, and that makes me happy. Teaching my two final-year seminars is actually a joy; they talk, they ask intelligent questions, they respond thoughtfully, they write to me for advice, and some of them even fill out mid-term feedback forms at substantial length, entirely in the spirit of “we’re enjoying the course but could you think about x?” I am fully prepare to take on board “you do tend to ramble a bit” if it’s prefaced by “I love the class and you’re a great lecturer, but”, not least because it is entirely true that I ramble – or at any rate offer answers that are more extensive and multi-layered than is necessarily helpful.

The contrast with the last couple of years is stark, when getting any sort of response in class felt like pulling teeth with all but a handful of students, when attendance slipped well below 50% on average and only a few of them managed as much as 80% attendance over a term, when they were manifestly miserable and disengaged and would or could offer no suggestions at all as to what the problems were or what might help.

The expectation, last year and the year before, was that students who had spent a year of their degree under intermittent lockdown would jump at the chance of a return to normality, in-person classes, socialising and all, and that would then restore some normality for us as well, but it simply didn’t seem to be the case. Student work was sometimes great and sometimes less so, rather than there being a consistent impact on its quality, but I do wonder if somehow they had all taken on the idea that academic work was a solely solitary activity, that being in lectures or seminars couldn’t be important if it had been capable of being tossed aside (ignoring all the efforts that we made to try to replicate the interaction using discussion boards and the like, since they ignored them…).

And so there was real anxiety about subsequent cohorts. The majority of current third years lived through the extreme disruption of their final year of school AND the exams fiasco – and yet seem to be totally grounded and together and enthusiastically engaged. Perhaps the peek behind the curtain, realising how little A-level results might reflect on their actual abilities or performance, has shaped their worldview in interesting ways, or maybe they just determined to take university as a clean slate and enjoy it to the full.

This unexpected keenness to learn can itself be a new source of anxiety. I have been quite nervous about this week’s classes, because talking about classical Greek ideas of law and justice, and about Thucydides’ account of the outbreak of war and the relationship between power and violence, could so readily lead into very uncomfortable, contentious terrain – a great example of how one might use ancient material to think about current events, certainly, but only if one can navigate the dangers of crude partisan point-scoring and the possibility of strong emotions and commitments overriding reasoned exchange. I decided not to push the issue, but to see if anyone wanted to make the connection, and they didn’t raise it explicitly; but I found it impossible not to think of current events when we touched on the line from Pindar’s Olympian Ode 13 – “Eunomia and that unsullied fountain Dikē, her sister, sure support of cities; and Eirēnē of the same kin, who are the stewards of wealth for mankind” – and I doubt that none of them was struck by the idea of the interdependence of lawfulness, justice and peace…

Well, maybe they have adopted a certain wilful obliviousness to the horrors of the world outside as a means of maintaining their own equilibrium – not apathy, but self-care. At this point, given how much more pleasant and less stressful it makes my life, I’m inclined to wait a bit longer before trying to prod them out of it.

Little Lies

Contrary to my initial impression just under a week ago, there now does seem to have been a bit of a surge in Thucydides quotes/references on the Ex-Twitter. Not at all contrary to my initial impression, they do seem entirely boiler-plate; lots of vague references to the Melian Dialogue, a lot of context-less examples of that ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote (which did, however, generate the amusing situation of someone arguing with the Thucydides Bot by citing the academic article by Morley on misquoting Thucydides), and the second stanza of W.H. Auden’s 1 September 1939 has now entered the chat.

Rather more interesting was the advent of a little account that tweets out quotes from Ancient Greek authors of a philosophical persuasion – Aristotle, Pythagoras, Demosthenes, Plato, and of course Thucydides – in both Greek and English, offers some rather NewAgey reflections on their meaning, and an AI-generated image somehow, one supposes, connected to the foregoing (but I’m damned if I can see this). The Thucydides quotes were simultaneously unfamiliar and familiar – that is to say, not things that I know, but things that were very much in the standard idiom of modern Thucydides translations: “Do what’s possible in the present and look to the future”, for example.

So, after a cursory and unsuccessful Google, I asked politely for a reference; I wasn’t necessarily expecting a response – but also wasn’t especially bothered, partly because I have better things to do and partly because, to be honest, the presence of the Greek (which was entirely grammatical, diacritics and all, at least to my rather inexpert eye) suggested an air of authority and authenticity. Oh foolish man, how trusting you are! The account in question did respond, and, when I suggested providing proper references, agreed – and added “it’s GPT v.4 that gives the output with original text”. Oops. I explained about the tendency of LLMs to invent plausible-looking sources and citations. It couldn’t be that it had access to material that we don’t within its training material? Nope. Oh.

This is interesting, if nothing else, as confirmation that what I encountered in one essay last year, passages supposedly from ancient sources that read plausibly enough but couldn’t be traced, was LLM output (the student in question failed to respond to requests to explain what had happened, so this has remained a likely rather than proven hypothesis). I assume that, if this account had asked for references for the quotes, they would have been given something that looked like a reference, which would prove entirely useless. The sophistication of the latest iteration of Chat-GPT, it seems, is seen in its ability to make stuff up in classical Greek, not just English – but of course that’s its downfall, as while multiple translations of Thucydides exist and so it’s always possible to believe in the existence of another one even if I can’t find it online, there is only one basic text of Thucydides with minor variations, and if I can’t find these Greek quotes online then it is almost certain that they’re fake. Ditto Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes etc.

But we are back with the problem that, while I can detect this stuff due to an intimate familiarity with the standard repertoire of Thucydides quotes and a generally suspicious attitude, most people would take it at face value, probably distracted by the hideousness of the AI art. Even I thought it looked likely to be genuine, simply because of the trappings of authenticity (quoting Greek not just English); if it had given a reference, I’d have checked it because that’s what I do, but how many others would?

Okay, it’s an account with 30-odd followers; how much misinformation can it disseminate? But it could do. The proliferation of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote probably comes down to a single US officer in the early to mid 1990s wanting to use the quote and either misremembering or inventing the attribution, which then was repeated by others because the sentiment appealed and the supposed author offered legitimacy – it’s the theory of memes in microcosm.

Perhaps that ‘Thucydides’ line was too bland to take off in the same way – after all, Chat-GPT isn’t going to come up with something striking or original when the instruction is essentially to generate a pastiche of things that Thucydides is already known to have said. But it could have done. Worse, I might not have noticed until it was too late…

Thucydideeses!

Whatever you may think in general of the proliferation of Companions and Handbooks on ever more specific themes, there is no doubt that they are very well suited to handling authors who are complex and multi-faceted, either across their oeuvre (Xenophon’s remarkable track record of dabbling in every genre under the sun – surely at some point a box of stray papyri in Oxford is going to yield up a fragment of his lost tragedy Menelaus? – and inventing a few of his own), or within their single work (the inevitable Thucydides). Such authors really require a plethora of perspectives, a kaleidoscope of contexts, and the expertise of multiple disciplines.

That’s not to say that the individual synthetic account has no place – or I wouldn’t be trying to write one – but inevitably such accounts simplify and unify, even if they try not to. Even a book that expressly argues that, say, Thucydides is a profoundly elusive and deliberately ambiguous author and any strong claim about his work, let alone about him, is basically an imaginative construct, is clearly occluding all the interpretations that say, no, actually it’s all totally straightforward, stop reading your postmodern nonsense into a foundational historical text.

But this does highlight a problem with actually-existing Companions, at least when it comes to Thucydides [note to self: check ones on e.g. Xenophon and Tacitus before posting confident but unfounded assertions]: they deal with multifariousness by multiplying perspectives – but they rarely bring them into confrontation with one another, except implicitly. The big exception that comes to mind is Walter Scheidel’s Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, where the editor clearly looked at the then-current state of debate on the extent and nature of trade, concluded that whichever of four or five obvious specialists he choose to write that chapter would infuriate the rest of them, and so asked all of them to write something shorter.

This is, more or less, what we need when it comes to Thucydides: not a chapter on ‘T and his sources’ by a mainstream ancient historian and a chapter on ‘T and the rhetoric of historiography’ by a classicist, but chapters on ‘T as historian(?)’ by both of them; not a chapter on ‘T and the invention of history’ by a classicist and a chapter on ‘T and political theory’ by a political theorist – let alone the Oxford Handbook of T approach, with a whole section by classicists on the classical stuff and an entirely separate section almost entirely by political theorists on the political stuff – but two contending chapters on ‘The nature of T’s project’ with completely contradictory assumptions and conclusions. Thucydides Celebrity Deathmatch! Two interpretative approaches enter, one interpretative approach leaves! Emily Greenwood versus the Spectre of Strauss! Mighty Kinch Hoekstra versus Zombie Donald Kagan!

I really must stop thinking up new projects until I’ve made some progress with the current To Do list…

Everything’s Ruined

It’s hardly the most important thing, but, as many people have observed, events in Israel and Palestine this week have really brought home how far the enshittification, in Cory Doctorow’s term, of the thing that used to be Twitter has progressed. It’s symptomatic that the first I heard of the Hamas assault was not on there but via old-school legacy media; and, while I then did try to follow events via the platform in my customary manner, it proved more or less impossible to find reliable on-the-ground accounts in the way that used to provide real insight into what was going on – and this entailed wading through such quantities of vileness and mendacious bullshit that it didn’t seem worth it, so I stuck to following updates from accounts I already trusted.

Even the window onto the world provided by searching for mentions of Thucydides on a daily basis isn’t very illuminating any more. It’s been the case for some time that this practice no longer sheds much light on contemporary ideas of Thucydides and his work, but in the past (indeed, the recent past; cf. the study of Thucydides references in the invasion of Ukraine) one could learn something from patterns of people using him for different purposes and to support different positions. This time, not so much; there has been no particular upsurge in T. references in response to events, and indeed those that do make a link to the Hamas attack and Israeli retaliation are substantially exceeded in number by reference to the recent meeting of US senators with Premier Xi and the inevitable invocation of the Thucydides Trap.

What have we had? ‘The strong do what they can…’, both as an explanation that power is simply the way of the world and as a condemnation of Israeli force (incidentally, one of these offered a new variant, ‘The strong will do all that they can and the weak will suffer as much as they must’, which I don’t recall from any publshed translation and which doesn’t show up in a Google search; author’s own, or automatic translation?). Reference to fear/honor/interest as universal principles, again mostly as justification for a general ‘why is everyone shocked, this is the way of the world’ vibe. To be honest, compared with Ukraine last year, it feels as if no one is really trying – and maybe that is precisely the case, highlighting how far last year’s barrage of Thucydides and Realism references involved a prepared army of disinformation specialists trying to influence western policy deliberations and public opinion. Or maybe Ex-Twitter is just crap now.

One thing which did strike me in the last few days, not for its prevalence or particular relevance to events but the simple fact that it’s new, was a repurposing of the familiar ‘Scholars and Warriors’ misattribution to target diversity in the US military – or rather, to be completely clear, the sort of people who like quoting that line, often in response to discussions of weightlifting or Jordan Peterson tweets or the need to raise one’s sons as chad-alpha-sigmas, are now quoting it in response to a picture of US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a face mask (“THIS is the current Secretary of Defense; tells you all you need to know”) or to a picture taken at a 2014 conference for transgender people serving in the military with the caption “Want to know why the Biden government didn’t anticipate the attack on Israel? Because this is what his cabinet looks like.”

As ever, they are disinclined to be told to credit William F. Butler instead, but can’t even summon up an entertaining counter-argument for how Thucydides must actually have said it because it’s the sort of thing he would have said. Twitter just isn’t what it used to be.

Update 11/10: this may, or more probably may not, turn out to be at all interesting, but this morning brought another variant on the Melian Dialogue line that doesn’t show up in a quick Google search: “The strong advance as far as their power allows, and the weak retreat as much as their weakness dictates.” Given the clear shift towards a focus on movement and territory – advance/retreat is quite different from do/suffer or exact/endure – it doesn’t seem likely that this is simply a variant translation. It could be a deliberate variation to suit a specific point, using the familiar structural contrast – the strong drink their coffee as black as the endless abyss, the weak drink skinny lattes – but if so it’s not obvious why, as it narrows the scope to no particular end and certainly not in a way that illuminates the situation in Gaza. Anyway, I’ve asked the poster, though without any great expectation of a reply.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27 September 2023

Slept heavily, which was very welcome after a fortnight of bad nights, perhaps due to the horrible antibiotics I’ve been taking for the last fortnight, perhaps due to the usual work-related anxiety. On a good night, either I can sleep through the cats getting restless or hungry in the small hours, or they’re less disturbed because I’m not tossing and turning – I’m not sure which. Strange dreams, revolving around superheroes, with a particular focus on Batman – and then a meta-analysis of the tendency to assume a simple divide between Adam West humourous/surreal and Burton/Nolan dark/serious, ignoring all the films inbetween (not sure if my subconscious is making them up) and really – I’m not sure who was castigating me about this – I should make as much effort thinking about how I’d restage Batman as I do in imagining my own productions of Wagner. Neither of these strikes me as a very likely prospect, but my unknown interlocutor is insistent.

It’s Wednesday, so the alarm is not set for the crack of dawn as on other weekdays; managed to sleep until just after seven before a combination of work anxieties and feeling under the weather – freshers’ flu? simple effect of two solid days’ teaching when out of practice? consequence of being stuck on damp station for an hour and a half as train cancelled? hypochondria? – kicked in. Made tea and did last night’s dishes, read the papers and caught up on social media, web cartoons and daily puzzles, worried about Sophie, who is definitely not right at the moment. After breakfast, finally completed the blog post for the 10th anniversary celebration – which should have been published yesterday, if not for cancelled trains – and then settled down to a couple of hours of emails and other admin while A heads off to get a haircut and have the car washed. Interrupted by delivery of garlic bulbs for autumn planting and a batch of coffee from my favourite roastery in Lower Bavaria – the first time I’ve ventured to import any directly since new Brexit rules came into forcd, so very relieved that it’s all gone smoothly, and I now have a couple of packs of their special limited edition Ugandan beans, besides an assortment of my usual favourites.

Lunchtime I had an online training session on PGR support, which turned out to be all quite familiar but seemed like a good idea simply because I haven’t had prime responsibility for any doctoral students for a while, and still feel that I’m rebuilding full confidence in my abilities as supervisor. The session facilitator’s presentation, however, was somewhat annoying – what A sometimes refers to as ‘Tellytubby’ style – especially when it came to the final half hour, asking us all to draw eight inspirational ideas about how we would support students better if we had infinite resources. I get a sudden flashback to an ancient history seminar in Cambridge, more than thirty years ago, when Mary Beard started by asking everyone to draw something – with a noticeable lack of cooperation from senior academics, whereas in this case the PVC in attendance enthusiastically joined in and was the first to volunteer to show his work. I felt very glad that my camera was having issues with Teams – random lines making me effectively invisible – so there was no risk of having to show any of my sketches of thumbscrews, hungry wolves or (in honour of my own supervisor’s key method) very sweet cake.

And then off to the vet, as Sophie really is under the weather, and it’s either now or in two days’ time, by which point she might have seriously deteriorated. Ah, the joys of cats with chronic health issues… We explain to the vet about her giardiasis infection as a kitten, and the consequent constipation issues; the vet palpitates her abdomen – Sophie’s abdomen, obviously – and notes that that there is some stuff in her bowels, but not a huge amount. We explain about her tendency to UTIs; yes, says the vet [prod, prod], her bladder is pretty full; we could do with a urine sample. We explain about the difficulty, or indeed impossibility, of getting a urine sample with three other cats in the house, all using the same litter trays. Hmm, says the vet [poke, poke], I guess we could try drawing some out with a needle [prod, prod] – and suddenly there is a pool of liquid on the table, rapidly expanding, starting to drip onto the floor, as Sophie has had enough of the prodding, or the talk of needles, or both. Her expression of wounded dignity, as the pool continues to expand, is priceless – a striking contrast to the vacant grin of Bailey, our late lamented greyhound, when (many years ago) he started pissing all over the sitting room floor in the middle of a drinks party. A and I get go work with paper towels while the vet gets a syringe to gather a sample.

Back home for a cup of tea – at which point the vet phoned, to confirm that Sophie’s pee was swimming with bacteria; back to Wincanton to pick up her pills, then a very rushed cooking of supper. Attempt at doing some jazz composition homework totally uninspired and unsuccessful – by this point I was just too tired, overwrought and feeling slightly grotty to concentrate on anything. On top of that, re-runs of MASH – the go-to mindless entertainment for the last month or so – have gone right back to the beginning without showing the final episode, which is very annoying. Listened to some very ECM relaxing Scandinavian abstract noodling before heading upstairs at nine. Cats were all being very odd because of the full moon – apart from Sophie who’s had her pill like a good girl and crashed out in bed already. Completed a couple of killer sudoku puzzles and fell into oblivion.

Ten Years After

What is this blog? Meticulous compilation and analysis of misattributed Thucydides quotes, repository of research too niche and/or random to consider publishing properly, collection of miscellaneous bits of snark and parody, chronicle of an ongoing academic mid-life crisis? Hard to believe that it’s been ten years; it feels longer. Technically, of course, it is longer: the first post on the original Bristol Classics collective blog was in November 2011, but just over ten years ago, September 26th 2013 – if it wasn’t for train cancellation issues and the impact of six hours of meetings and teaching in a row, this would have been posted yesterday – the department officially agreed to abandon any hope of regular contributions from a wider range of people, and this actually became ‘Neville’s blog’ rather than everyone simply assuming that it was.

Fair to say that it’s had its ups and downs; partly reflecting my own – believe it or not, these posts do require a certain amount of time, effort and inspiration, so I do need to have some to keep things going – and partly determined by external factors such as the power of a few prominent people to drive traffic by bestowing some attention or a passing mention (hi Mary!) and the overall decline in blogging. I recognised early on both that the way to build serious viewing figures was through controversy and that I was far too peaceable and conciliatory to pick regular fights with Tom Holland, say, just for the sake of clicks. Instead, I have tried to cultivate that classic motto of mediocrity, ‘I just try to please myself, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus’.

This does mean, of course, that I can’t simply put together a ten-year retrospective by looking at my most successful posts – that might give entirely the wrong impression! I was thinking of something more like Suede’s Sci-Fi Lullabies, or a bootleg of Miles Davis’ Lost Quintet, collecting the b-sides and outtakes that passed most people by the first time (for very small, regular readership values of ‘most people’). But I don’t have time to do a proper job of that, given that it’s the start of teaching, so actually this is more like one of those cheap, variable quality and yet somehow representative cassette compilations of obscure rock bands (Ten Years After! Camel! It tells you something that Hawkwind was probably the least obscure…) that I used to buy in Tesco in the late 80s on the basis that you got more tracks for your money than with a regular album…

2013: The possibility of publishing something like Final Report of the Bristol Thucydides Project was one of the major motives for claiming the blog as my own, rather than having to keep up a pose of respectability and seriousness – though there was a serious argument in there as well, honestly, about the dynamics of classical reception and Contagious Classics…

2014: In retrospect, I seem to have spent quite a lot of this year thinking about time and narrative; Waiting for the Great Leap Forward was a piece on Braudel and Ballard that I’d been meaning to write for ages and never got round to polishing, so a blog post seemed a convivial format, while I keep meaning to check whether ‘nanohistory’ has become a thing yet, and if so how far it resembles my musings on La très très courte Durée. But I was also starting to develop more in the way of personal reflections – which of course, as with Stuck in the Middle on academic mid-life crisis, now seem amusingly naive nearly ten years later.

2015: It’s tempting to characterise this blog in its mature form as a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, the serious and the silly, the fortnight and the frivolous, ignoring all of the filler in between – but what is a retrospective all about, if not ignoring the landfill indie stuff in favour of the highlights? On the one hand, this year saw a substantial analysis of Yanis Varoufakis’ take on Thucydides, both academic and in the context of the Greek economic crisis; on the other hand, there was Greek Economic Crisis Classical Reference Bingo…

2016: This was the year when, partly because of Too Many Bloody Things, I started the tradition of an end of the year review post, which partly makes this process of selection a lot easier and partly raises the question of whether there were things that I didn’t rate at the time but now might seem prescient. It was quite the year, both professionally and politically, and there were a lot of posts which function more like a diary than a publication; of the more stand-alone pieces, I have fondest memories of Eine Frage der Erziehung on language and translation, from Bridge of Spies to Anthony Powell, and Achilles and the Brexit on Zeno’s paradoxes applied to contemporary events.

2017: Was this my finest hour (year)? Some online spats are worth pursuing in the name of truth and humanistic values, and I haven’t changed my mind about any aspect of my set-to with David Engels in Bring On The Night and If It Comes Up Mud (vague idea that there’s also a later post somewhere about why fans of Oswald Spengler are dubious people). I was in a very arty and expansive mood this year, to judge from Vicarage Values, juxtaposing Theresa May’s reactionary political rhetoric with the Tcherniakov production of Parsifal, not to mention my commentary on Frank Castorf’s Bayreuth Ring in Kunst und Revolution. There’s also Return of the Slave Society, a piece that I still think is prescient and potentially relevant, making sense of the ongoing rise of ‘AI’ and the networked home in terms of the pervasive presence of enslaved people in the elite households of classical antiquity. And there was still time for gratuitous silliness, with the Emoji Thucydides and the first iteration of the Thucydides Christmas Carol…

2018: The problem with blog posts responding spontaneously to current events is that the context is all perfectly obvious at the time, but now needs footnotes – I think The Ladybird Book of Thucydides was a response to Sebastian Gorka making wild claims about Trump’s knowledge and understanding of Thucydides, but I’m really not sure; still rather funny, though… I’ve always tended to reflect on teaching, and especially assessment – it was rather sad to realise that various articles I wrote for what used to be the Institute for Learning and Teaching in HE have now entirely disappeared from the internet and I had better remove them from my cv – but this was the year I really started to do it on here, with Treehouse in the Woods exploring the problem of trying to use social media in the classroom. Finally, I enjoyed writing Fables of the Reconstruction, on some of the more annoying elements of the rhetoric of historical documentaries, and still wish someone would give me the money to produce a really effective satire on the whole tradition – and Some Guys From Spart on modern Lakonophilia.

2019: One Text To Rule Them All, on Tolkien’s (possible) reception of Thucydides, epitomises the sort of detailed dive into specific examples of Thucydideana that would never amount to a proper publication (and which I would struggle to connect to anything else to make a proper publication) but which are nevertheless fascinating to research; Project Fear, on Dominic Cummings’ disturbing readings of Thucydides, was at the time rather more pressing and important. On the personal side, Dear Editor was entirely heartfelt but also a very obvious deflection technique to avoid actually doing anything about the guilt over all the late reviews, chapters and articles.

2020: A very weird year, obviously, with a particular over-determined effect on my writing: a serious lack of energy once I actually went down with the plague in late April (and the first in an ongoing series of reflections on illness and convalescence, Consider the Beetles of the Pond), balanced out by the number of issues to be discussed, from silly references to the contemporary implications of Thucydides’ plague narrative to the rapidly changing circumstances of teaching. The latter was heavily influenced by my starting an online jazz composition course, and two posts stand out in retrospect: The Masterplan, thinking about the seminar as jam session, but above all Stupid Boy, on the experience – rarely felt by academics – of really struggling in class. Finally, combining the two themes: How Online Teaching Is Like Middle Age.

2021: There’s an argument to be made that this year the blog became more like a blog, with a lot of shorter and very ephemeral posts responding to immediate teaching issues and minor disturbances in the discipline (Peter Singer on Apuleius…), rather than more substantial pieces – not least because Long COVID meant I really was living day to day and trying to manage depleted stocks of energy. As with 2016, I suspect this might be worth reading as an ongoing (if fragmented) narrative rather than pulling out individual pieces – but the accentuated media fetishisation of lectures did prompt some wider thoughts in Video Killed The Radio Star on the fetishisation of lectures – and, while arguably it’s not entirely my work, I have huge affection for the Automatic Captions History of Classical Greece…

2022: Reading back through my Review of the Year in December, it’s clear that I was really at quite a low ebb at this point, cutting back on blogging in the interests of prioritising health, yet again contemplating giving the whole thing up as a bad job, and generally feeling uninspired. And yet if the perspective switches from month-by-month to year-by-year, it feels rather different, and the juxtaposition of serious (but perhaps unpublishable) research on Thucydides social media and the invasion of Ukraine on the one hand, and a glorious bit of snark on the Receptiogate saga on the other – further proof of the beneficial effect of a bit of controversy on viewing figures, though felt largely in 2023 – was precisely the idea that started me blogging in the first place.

2023: And finally… I don’t know how much sense it makes to try and pull out any highlights when the year isn’t remotely over. I have spent a lot of time thinking through the possible implications of Chat-GPT (maybe Almost But Not Quite… comes closest to a stand-alone piece, but mostly these are a work in progress) – and I did have some sensible thoughts about Receptio and the status of different sorts of publications in Nothing Even Matters.

One of these days I must do a proper read-through of all the posts, if only to get a sense of how many words I must have churned out over the years. Even on this somewhat hit-and-miss sample – a combination of tracking down things that I remember enjoying writing and/or thought was quite a good idea at the time and of skimming titles to see if they reminded me of anything – I get a sense that I could construct quite different images of the blog by offering different selections of posts, rather as one’s view of Dylan’s genius can be swayed according to whether you’re forced to recall Wiggle Wiggle.

And, while this blog has never become the sort of hub of conversation and debate that I once I hoped for, I know I do have some loyal readers out there, and I would be genuinely keen to know if you have any favourite posts that I haven’t mentioned, or indeed can remember anything I’ve ever written here…

Scheisskopf

Rishi Sunak has dramatically announced the cancellation of a series of policies intended to get the UK to Net Zero by 2050, including taxes on eating meat and compulsory car sharing, that neither the government nor the Labour opposition had ever adopted or proposed. There’s a name for this: the Scheisskopf Strategy.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961), pp.343-4 in my paperback edition. The useless, parade-obsessed Colonel Scheisskopf has just been transferred to Special Services in Rome, and is being questioned by his new commander, General Peckem.

He began to wonder with genuine concern just what sort of shithead the Pentagon had foisted on him. “What do you know about?” he asked acidly.

“Parades,” answered Colonel Scheisskopf eagerly. “Will I be able to send out memos about parades?”

“As long as you don’t schedule any.” General Peckem returned to his chair still wearing a frown. […]

“Can I schedule parades and then call them off?”

General Peckem brightened instantly. “Why, that’s a wonderful idea! But just send out weekly announcements postponing the parades. Don’t even bother to schedule them. That would be infinitely more disconcerting.” General Peckem was blossoming spryly with cordiality again. “Yes, Scheisskopf,” he said, “I think you’ve really hit on something. After all, what combat commander could possibly quarrel with us for notifying his men that there won’t be a parade that coming Sunday? We’d be merely stating a widely known fact. But the implication is beautiful. Yes, positively beautiful. We’re implying that we could schedule a parade if we chose to.”

If life were fair, this should really be called the Peckem Strategy, but, just as Peckham’s scheme to be promoted to head of combat operations comes to fruition just as his other scheme to have combat operations subordinated to Special Services comes to fruition, leaving Scheisskopf as the overall commander, so The Scheisskopt Strategy it is.

Backing down on an unpopular policy looks weak, and at best removes some grounds for dislike rather than anything more positive, so it’s scarcely surprising that most politicians avoid doing it if they can, and do their best to attribute the original policy to someone else. Announcing the cancellation of a policy that never existed looks like a net gain, implying that they could have done this but chose not to, winning gratitude for paying attention to ‘the concerns of ordinary people’ and admiration for pragmatism without having had to take the hit to popularity from introducing it in the first place.

Further, the idea that this could have been introduced but wasn’t carries the further implication that Others, less concerned with the concerns of ordinary people and less pragmatic, might indeed do it – regardless of whether the Labour Party would have contemplated it for a moment (this current iteration? not a chance), they are forced into denials, and subtly tarred with continuing suspicion by a right-wing media that has been deploying a variant of the Scheisskopf Strategy for years, battling to save Christmas and Easter Eggs and the Last Night of the Proms from entirely imaginary cancellation threats.

It’s not a new phenomenon, but it’s time it had a decent name…

Summer Holiday

It’s not often that I can claim to be following in the footsteps of one of the greats of twentieth-century historiography, but this summer we spent part of our holiday in the small town of Weyer an der Enns, just on the edge of Upper Austria. Walking down the side of the river (not in fact the Enns, but a tributary, that joins it about a mile further down the valley), we suddenly came across a pair of information boards at the edge of a small children’s play area:

Eric Hobsbawm! (Ed Miliband!?!) The long extract on the first board from Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting Times, did in fact immediately ring a bell, though I’d had no memory of the name of the place, nor made any connection until this moment.

In the summer of 1930 I made friends in Weyer, a village in Upper Austria where the doctors were vainly trying to deal with my mother’s lungs, with Haller Peter, the boy of the family from whom we rented lodgings. We fished and went robbing orchards together. Since Peter’s father was a railwayman, the family was Red: in Austria, and especially in the countryside, it would not have occurred to any non-agricultural worker in those days to be anything else. Though Peter – about my age – was not visibly interested in public affairs, he also took it for granted that he was Red; and somehow, between lobbing stones at trout and stealing apples, I also decided to become a Communist. (2002, p.13; where the German text from the board deviates slightly from the original, I’ve followed the former)

I’m happy to report that the river is still remarkably full of trout, and there are lots of apples around (this is one of the regions that produces lots of Most and Apfelwein – and also ‘cider’, the technical Austrian definition of which I now understand, but that’s another story). In other respects, this seemed utterly incongruous – especially given that the news that week was dominated by the youth wing of the FPÖ putting out a video that denounced journalists and left-wing politicians as traitors and criminals, agitated about Regenbogenterror, and featured blond youths in front of the balcony from which Hitler addressed the Austrian nation after the Nazi takeover…

Was this a gigantic wind-up by a lone subversive on the town council? Or a tourism campaign of unparalleled desperation, seizing upon anyone vaguely well-known who had ever holidayed in Weyer to promote its charms? Neither. Despite looking like a picture-postcard little Austrian town (with a particular enthusiasm for the beaver, the town’s patron animal with associated legends), this part of the country had long been industrialised, famous for metal-working as well as wood and using the mountain streams to power mills – and was still firmly socialist in its voting behaviour. Hobsbawm wasn’t just a famous person who happened to visit; he was a case study in how Weyer aspired to influence its visitors.

As it turned out, Weyer is also the sort of place where the owner of our Ferienwohnung, to whom we’d casually mentioned our interest in the Hobsbawm commemoration, rushed over in the middle of the Sunday craft market in order to introduce us to the man responsible for it: Dr Kurt Scholz, who’d grown up in the town but then departed at 17 to embark on a distinguished administrative career, not least in leading efforts to commemorate the Jewish families of Vienna and to push for the restitution of their property. He’d met Hobsbawm on multiple occasions, including when he returned to Vienna in 1996 to look unsuccessfully for his mother’s grave (recounted in Interesting Times, p.42) – which Herr Scholz was later able to track down and have restored, though sadly too late for H. to visit.

The particular distinction of Dr Scholz’s public career was something I realised only later, with the aid of the Internet, or our conversation would have lasted even longer. One of his stories was unforgettable; that when Hobsbawm visited Weyer, S. was able to inform him that Peter Haller was still living in the town, and did he want to meet him? Absolutely not; on no account! The explanation, it transpired, was that one of Hobsbawm’s Berlin schoolfriends from 1931-3 had become a Nazi in the end, and he couldn’t bear the thought that the same might have happened with Peter. (It hadn’t, S. assured me. Of course not; Weyer has the opposite effect on people).