Neville Morley's Blog, page 31

Hunger Games

So, it appears that the app for the AIA/SCS annual meeting – the terrifyingly enormous gathering of US classicists, ancient historians and archaeologists – has a facility for rating papers from 1* to 5*. In a sensible world, I could sum this up in three words, and leave it at that: Meow Meow Beanz.

Since this is manifestly not a sensible world, not only but including the fact that certain works of cultural genius are not as widely known as they should be, a little more explanation may be required. In an episode of the sitcom Community, a couple of app designers test their new rating app, Meow Meow Beanz, which allows everyone to rate everyone else.

Within roughly an hour, Greendale Community College has become a fiercely competitive, viciously hierarchical dystopia, in which Fives enjoy a life of decadent luxury and mysterious rituals while Ones and Twos are humiliated and exploited. We see the way that the most popular can manipulate and patronise – and the range of tricks they use to maintain their position, together with the near impossibility of anyone actually being able to rise through the ranks of society to challenge them. The strong do what they want, the weak endure what they must…

It perfectly illustrates the problem with this sort of rating system – even if it doesn’t turn out that the SIA/SCS app gives greater weight to the ratings of senior and prestigious academics. Of course in theory everyone will just rate papers on quality, but that immediately raises questions about how quality is perceived within academic structures, including the possibility of bias towards or against certain topics, approaches, identities, institutions etc. And of course people will tend to favour their friends (hence those with the best networks do well), and try to undermine their rivals, and suck up to some superiors and tear down others. And the more that ratings become a focus, the more effort will be put into gaming them.

So, I firmly expect that by the end of the first afternoon the SCS annual meeting will have become a deeply segregated and hierarchical society, with the privileged few staging cutthroat competition between the desperate masses for their own amusement, holding out the promise of a few more Meow Meow Beanz for the last one standing. The actual papers are merely a means to an end, the basis for judgement, as the basis for sorting and the distribution of privilege across the hierarchy.

Insert punchline here.

I feel a certain hesitation in doing this, as I’ve never actually been to the SCS – but one of the reasons I’ve never been is a sense that the punchline could all too easily be: would anyone notice the difference? “You don’t go for the papers”, several people have remarked to me. For the established scholar, they’re an excuse to use travel/research funds to meet up with old friends, extend scholarly networks etc.; for the postgraduate students and early career people, they’re a tool in the ever more desperate struggle to win a place in the higher ranks, and a kind of alibi – a means of pretending that it really is all about scholarly merit and ability and ideas rather than connections and patronage.

Let the hunger games begin!

2019 on The Sphinx

As I now seem to remark at the end of every December, and yet persist in the belief that things will now be different: it’s been one of those years… I suppose the basic motive for persisting in that belief is that the alternative is uncomfortable; both that I will continue to feel tired all the time and uninspired – but on the edge of inspiration, if only I could get a couple of decent nights’ sleep – most of the time, and that I would then need to take some difficult but necessary decisions about whether I can really spare the time and energy to persist with this blog and all the other random stuff that tends to seem more attractive than solid, sober scholarship…

The balance has tipped slightly this year, simply because of the sense – which I’ve moaned about on several occasions – that blogs just aren’t being read as much as they used to be, and maybe I should switch to writing fewer, longer essays for Medium and/or for curated/edited publications. Viewing stats are down over 25% on last year, which was down 25% on the previous year, after all. But I still enjoy the opportunity for humour and sheer randomness that a ‘proper’ publication could never offer, and writing up this ‘best/favourite posts of the year’ is always a nice reminder that I did write some decent stuff (even if I then get sulky about the ones that were largely ignored…). And what else am I going to do on long train journeys in the evening?

January: ah, those happy days when one could mock the vacuity of the Brexit debate, rather than groaning in despair that the winning answer turned out to be “let’s just pretend we can ignore it and it’ll stop bothering us”. Otherwise, this was a month for discussing different aspects of the project to make Thucydides relevant and accessible to contemporary issues and debates in the good way, with the release of a Melian Dialogue Video and my attempts – for game design purposes – at calculating the probability of a Spartan rescue for the Melians…

February: I’ve listed Andrew Reinhard’s musical experiment piece in Epoiesen in my ‘blogs of the year’; here I get to recall the fun I had in developing a musical/remix critique – and to be reminded that I haven’t made any progress at all with the project to turn Thucydides (or at least Book 1) into a programmed modal jazz piece. Otherwise, I’d completely forgotten about a couple of posts on political subjects other than those that can easily be related to Thucydides: on the ideology of citizenship, and on the pernicious persistence of belief in ‘Western Civilisation’.

March: a much quieter month, partly due to illness and intimations of mortality not unconnected to a significant birthday, but I did discover the existence of Thucydides Day, which should now be celebrated by all right-thinking people, and commentary on the rise of the European “Research” Group ‘Spartans’ seemed unavoidable…

April: a particularly ingenious bit of university press office over-selling, linking a Roman-period rabbit bone to the Easter Bunny; and I don’t know why Tolkien was so prominent around this time – some sort of anniversary, maybe? – but I had great fun going down the rabbit-hole of his reception of Thucydides – the strong seize the Silmarils, the weak get swallowed by the waves…

May: one of the nice things about having a blog is that it’s easy to write updates to already-published pieces (albeit it would be even nicer to add a link from the original), such as a 1918 Spectator piece that explicitly referenced Thucydides in relation to German behaviour in the Great War that would have been good in my CRJ article. Rather less positive was a response to a request to offer tips on academic writing that rapidly became a reflection on why I fail to get much writing done…

June: a lengthy lament on the decline of blogging, which was followed by the first of what was supposed to be a monthly podcast series that then ran out of steam in the early autumn – I have the ideas, I just haven’t had the time, and am not sure whether the potential audience justifies the additional effort (given that I can’t just scribble it on a train, unlike the blog posts). The fun thing this month was engaging with Will Pooley’s creative witchcraft project with a bit of The Naming of Parts…

July: a quiet month, with some random reflections on pictures from my holiday in Romania – so quiet that I could even Imagine No Thucydides.

August: okay, I’m starting to see why the viewing stats were down this year – yet another depressed reflection on the impossibility of writing, albeit filtered through a bit of Anthony Powell. But the big news – albeit prefaced by melancholy thoughts on academic life – was the premiere of the Thucydides the Heavyweight Champion animation, THE thing that I managed to achieve this year.

September: two long pieces this month, one trying to escape the ghastliness of British politics by reflecting on the Kosky production of Die Meistersinger and one diving into the heart of the ghastliness by exploring Dominic Cummings’ reception of Thucydides.

October: was struggling a bit to keep on top of teaching load at this point, but did find time to explore the Thucydidean poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, and to reflect on what the choose-your-own-adventure version of the Melian Dialogue might be able to tell us about time pressures in negotiation – an issue which will continue to be pressing next year…

November: one reason for the limited number of posts in the autumn, and their relative brevity, has been the work involved in preparing two-hour classes on Greek History – but that has been a great opportunity for messing about with pedagogical games. Much more cheering than further reflections on Cummings and Thucydides.

December: and here we are… One painfully autobiographical piece that will, I think, be timeless: my escalating series of explanations/excuses for why that article/chapter/review is late. One painfully autobiographical piece that is probably just stating the obvious. And another game, still looking for play-testers…

Leadership for Dummies

Suddenly the idea that political power should be allocated on the basis of legitimate descent from generations of ruthless thugs, or even on the whim of a strange woman in a lake handing out swords, doesn’t seem so bad, because apparently the alternative – the unanswerable reason why Labour politicians are unfit for government – is the ability to recite a large chunk of material in a foreign language, learnt by heart back at school.

Not just any material, of course. If Corbyn had quoted passages from Die achtzehnten Brumaire in the original, this would have been clinching proof that he was strange, humourless and unpatriotic (who knows German, for goodness’ sake?). If Swinson had recited Shakespeare: girly swot, clearly out of touch with Real People and at the same time boring and run of the mill because everyone does a bit of Shakespeare. Homer is different.

Johnson is also different, in his artfully constructed persona of self-mocking artlessness, and in the willingness of people – especially other media people – to be entertained and give him an easy ride. But the classical is not incidental to this; rather, it’s a symbiotic relationship. No Labour politician could get away with quoting classical texts today without ridicule (which is why there’s no point in looking up suitable rejoinders from Thucydides or Demosthenes), but equally Homer and the like work better for Johnson than other authors would; knowledge of dead languages as a marker of privilege and tradition where command of living ones would indicate dangerous cosmopolitan sympathies, adherence to old-fashioned ‘Western Civilisation’ rather than anything too modern or un-British, and above all the way that it feeds into his self-presentation as authentic and unmediated, because surely this sort of elitist pretentiousness would be the first thing to go if someone was not just being themselves..?

Of course the classics are not the exclusive preserve of Johnson and his class; indeed, part of the effect of such performances is the way he appears naively to assume that they’re for everyone, and that everyone will naturally share in his enthusiasm. To give credit where it’s due, this may even be genuine. But what it does convey – or, rather, reinforce – is a sense that the classics are the natural preserve of such people; a mark of their superiority, their freedom to indulge in such useless intellectual pursuits, that then confirms why they’re so fitted to rule.

In a culture of pervasive mistrust of politicians, we’ve ended up being dominated by a perversion of Douglas Adams’ maxim that that power should be given only to someone who doesn’t want it; we give power to people who can persuasively appear not to want it for any serious reason. Don’t trust do-gooders and people with plans to change the world, as they’re either naive or in it for themselves or will start preventing you from doing exactly what you want to; stick with those who go into politics in an off-hand manner because it’s just what one does.

Similarly, studying Classics is a sign of someone just doing something for the sake of it, and who can afford to do that, where another discipline like economics or science, let alone law, might seem like a means to an end and hence suggest that they have a Plan. Classics offers a means of demonstrating vast (exaggerated) intellectual powers without any worrying hint of seriousness of purpose.

It is the age-old belief that fitness to rule is determined not by demonstrable competence, integrity or values, but in a more mystical manner. The ability to pull a sword out of a stone is a sign of genetic entitlement, represented as nobility and virtue. The ability to recite a chunk of Homer is likewise a sign of entitlement, interpreted, in the spirit of the age, as authenticity and humour…

Blogs of the Year 2019

Several times this year I’ve found myself musing about the future of blogs, partly because of the apparently inexorable decline of the viewing stats for this one, which raises questions about if/when I’ll hit a tipping point as the cost in time, money, anxiety and the fact I should probably be writing other, more academically worthy stuff outweighs the pleasure I get from writing this stuff. I’m not sure if it’s reassuring or not that this seems to be a wider issue. Certainly, in compiling this annual list of the things I’ve most enjoyed or appreciated reading this year, it gets harder to decide whether some things are ‘proper’ blog posts or rather conventional articles that just happen to be online, let alone to decide I should operate a stricter policy on what I include here, beyond ‘I liked this!’. Maybe next year.

For 2019, this is the stuff I loved enough to make a note of it for reference in December – with some patchy bits in the year when I wasn’t feeling up to reading anything taxing, so apologies to the authors of stuff I might have loved if I’d come across it. Feel free to post additional recommendations in the comments, or links to your own ‘Best of 2019’ posts…

January: it’s interesting, looking back at this month, to realise how much it set the tone for the rest of the year, with pieces from two authors whose names will recur below. Sententiae Antiquae has published some great essays this year, besides the usual quotes from classical authors, and in January we got both a retrospective on Hanson & Heath’s Who Killed Homer? and a fascinating discussion of the different functions of pedantry in classical scholarship. Maria Farrell, meanwhile, has been phenomenal this year, starting with this Crooked Timber piece on being an EU citizen in Brexit Britain (and of course it’s now even more painful to think about this): At Least You Can Leave.

February: at this stage I hadn’t started worrying about the status of online articles, so two of the recommendations for this month would in future be ruled out for being properly published – Eidolon is now a fixture of the classical studies scene and needs no recommendation to anyone in the field (but Johanna Hanink’s piece on translation and “translation” is still worth reading if you don’t already know it), and Epoiesen has an ISSN number (but Andrew Reinhard’s Assemblage Theory musical experiment is simply essential). One proper blog post: of the many commentaries this year on the idea of classics and ‘Western Civilisation’, Maximus Planudes’ What is Classics? remains one of the best.

March: I can’t remember why there was so much Tolkien going on this month – an antidote to Brexit anxiety, perhaps – but that accounts for two of my picks, The Scholars’ Stage’s On the Tolkienic Hero, and the reliably brilliant Adam Roberts’ Lord of the Sommes on Tolkien, the Great War and literary modernism. Finally, an incredibly powerful article on the psychological effects of tyranny from a Syrian exile: On the Tyrant’s Ghost in my Head.

April felt slightly more light-hearted and random – though, having said that, the first piece on my list is a fascinating discussion of the politics of historical bike tours in New Orleans. Rosa Lyster was hilarious about yelling about historical figures on Twitter; Mathura Umachandran was excellent on the unspeakable ghastliness of Jeff Koons’ appropriation of antiquity; and Vox Clara offered the first post on what’s proving to be (except for the lack of posts since August) a fascinating blog on her experiences as a school Head of Classics, on Classics, fragments and voices.

May rather passed me by, but Velvet Yates was well worth reading in Eidolon on Aristotle, James Watson and ‘scientific racism‘.

June: by this point I had more or less decided to stop listing Eidolon pieces – but then Mathura wrote More Than a Common Tongue on the often-overlooked or misunderstood differences between the UK and US discourses on race and classics. Lots of other great pieces this month: Rachel Hammersley on David Hume and Thinkers as Readers; Arie Amaya-Akkermans’ guest post at Sententiae Antiquae on classics, westernisation and imperialism in Turkey; Deborah Cameron on the policing of masculine language; and Lakshmi Ramgopal’s moving Three Days on the death of her grandmother.

July: okay, Branko Milanoic scarcely needs the publicity, but I found this a fascinating take on the creation of Yugoslavia. Liv Yarrow wrote the best tribute to the late great Fergus Millar; and Will Pooley offered a very funny analysis of how crap magic can help us understand belief in witchcraft.

August: Adam Roberts again – but on a different blog, his book-by-book reading of Middlemarch – focusing on Odyssean echoes in Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon. Deborah Cameron again on the discourse of sexist beer names, including the useful concept of retrosexualism…

August: Maria Farrell is back, with a brilliant analysis of our toxic relationship with our smartphones; Nicholas Carr makes sense of our current cultural condition in terms of the shift from the public intellectual to the public influencer.

October: Jon Hesk was all too prescient in analysing the dangerous power of Johnson’s use of the sophistry of slogans; Bill Caraher’s response to Andrew Reinhard’s Assemblage Theory (see above) did many things, but above all illustrated why the Epoiesen approach of publishing thoughtful responses to main articles is so productive; and Maria Farrell offered a radical vision of why the Internet must be more than Facebook.

November: okay, November is when I really started disappearing into a hole, but I did take in Sententiae Antiquae‘s important critique of the aesthetic justifcation for the study of classics.

December: yes, a month we probably want to get out of as soon as possible and not look back. There have been some decent attempts at making sense of things, even if it is plausible much too early to say, but I imagine you’ll all already know them and/or happily remain disengaged. Rather, two pieces on totally different topics that shouldn’t be buried in the pile of coroners’ reports: John Holbo’s tongue-in-cheek-but-still-productive idea of Vavilovian philosophical mimicry, and Foluke Ifejola Adebisi’s provocative and important discussion of the problem of ‘decolonisation’ in British universities.

The Wicker Man

There’s a persistent belief that simply describing contemporary political figures in classical terms automatically furthers understanding; Trump is depicted as a Roman emperor, Johnson as Pericles, Cleon or Alcibades, as if this offers us vital clues to their personality or to the situation we’re in. I’m not referring to the passing comments or allusions – the endless evocation of Caligula supposedly making his horse a senator, whenever one or other of these modern autocrats makes an especially egregious appointment, for example – but to the longer-form discussions, the essays and op ed pieces, where the classical frame is clearly intended to illuminate (or at the least to indicate the illumination of the author; the audience may simply be expected to nod admiringly at their erudition).

A piece in the New Statesmen offers an especially baffling example: Helen Thompson explains Johnson’s glorious triumph as the product of his distinctive character.

His willingness to enter the realm of risk, his eagerness to trade his dignity, his indifference to conventional pieties and mundane detail all arise from that character, at the centre of which is his pagan energy.

Uh huh. Okay, I think we can all see the rejection of Christian morality and humanist ethics, but is it far to tarnish traditional polytheism with this association? It seems more like the sort of ‘paganism’ that ran through the creepier elements of mid-C20 magic and folklore into films that seized on the excuse to show lots of naked blondes indulging their carnal urges and burning passing authority figures. But Thompson insists on the classical connection even while admitting that Johnson shows little sign of adherence to any of their ethical or philosophical principles.

His is not a paganism drawn to classical stories of hubris and nemesis. He repudiates Ananke, the goddess of necessity whose net imposes unavoidable limits on gods as well as mortals. He is more a would-be Theseus…

Theseus? Thompson’s celebration of Johnson as a force of Id, unrestrained by any notions of altruism, reason or shame, that uniquely enables him to fulfill the Will of the People where everyone else has failed or not even tried, clearly owes a fair amount to Nietzsche in his wilder moments. Johnson could be portrayed in this register as a figure out of fairytale, as the uncontrollable exuberance of Good Honest Rural Folk bursting through the restraints imposed by the Puritans and Urban Intellectuals; yes, we do get the attempt to frustrate the Brexit vote being compared to the 1647 ban on Christmas festivities.

And yet we keep getting classical references instead. Could it be that Thompson too fears the consequences of this blond beast rampaging indefinitely, and resorts to the hopeful belief that nemesis will sooner or later be visited upon hubris?

The precariousness of Johnson’s search for political intensity will one day crash into those pagan gods of limits to whom he offers no sacrifices. Theseus becomes King of Athens. Then he roams. Driven to sail with the Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece and embark upon a forbidden descent into the underworld to abduct Persephone, Theseus loses his kingdom. He meets his death off a cliff, murdered by the ruler of the island where he is exiled. But to the classical pagan imagination no god, not even Ananke, rules alone. When the sixth-century Athenians wanted a mythical champion for their new democracy, they opted for the stories of Theseus, complete with their heroic deeds and terrible violations.

I honestly have no idea. Even if Johnson is definitively Theseus, this is just one of many ways of producing a Theseus story from the multiple and contradictory traditions, rather than the inevitable path of destiny. Leaving that aside, what is this supposed to mean? Johnson will make a mess of things, come to a sticky end and then in years to come be celebrated as a cultural hero?

One might suggest instead, with no less explanatory power, that he is a great hollow construction (partly self-constructed, I’ll grant you) into which people are busy stuffing the things they hate, in order to set off a giant conflagration that will ensure prosperity for the future.

Or – and this was my first thought – that the whole thing is based on a confusion of ‘pagan’ and ‘paigon’…

This Is What We Do

Even before Friday morning, I was feeling despondent; partly premonitions of doom (local political doom, apocalyptical climate and environmental doom), partly the after-effects of a heavy teaching load this term and of a year in which I seem to have been ill and/or insomniac quite a lot of the time, hence massively behind with research and writing commitments. And now? We’re definitely leaving the EU, and still at risk of a disastrous version of that departure; the culture war will continue and probably accelerate, with Johnson’s ‘bring the country back together’ a form of ‘you lost, time to get with the programme’ coercion rather than a genuine concern about engaging with other views; nothing will be done about climate change, or poverty.

I’ll be fine, of course, which is why my age bracket is where a majority starts voting Tory despite everything they stand for; house ownership, secure job with good salary (universities are likely to be ever more beleaguered, but it’s a heck of a cushy number compared with most people), safely and obviously British in accent and appearance, and even the barriers going up against Europe will be a minor inconvenience rather than a serious problem. The issue is rather spiritual or psychological; the anger and frustration, the feeling of being out of step with (former?) friends and the country as a whole, the eroding sense of self, and above all a feeling of helplessness and uselessness, not just that the problems are too big – it is a constant struggle not to embrace total denial of climate change and environmental degradation, because thinking about it is too painful – but that my potential contribution to making a less crappy world is so pathetic.

I mean, who cares about another article on Roman economic thought or another blog post on Thucydides misattributions? I can well imagine that climate and environmental scientists struggle with the fact that nothing they do makes enough of a difference, but at least they’re doing something that’s relevant to the crises confronting humanity. As the result of a series of poorly-considered choices made decades ago, I find myself as a specialist in a branch of knowledge that is all too often elitist, a luxury indulgence for people who can afford it, a carrier of all the values that I loathe about our current political regime. And even if we struggle to decontaminate it of its more toxic elements, as Edith Hall continues to do magnificently and as I gestured towards in the Classics: What’s The Point? book, at best we produce something that’s not actively malign, rather than something that the world really needs.

Yes, of course this is the depression talking. I wouldn’t start from here if I were you, but there isn’t a terribly plausible scenario in which things end up very differently – I don’t think I’d be in a much stronger position to improve the world if I’d become a historian of medieval monasticism instead. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of novels or chefs, either, which were the main non-academic alternatives. I may sometimes wish I was working in a field where more than a handful of students want to talk about engaging with the modern world, not just the ancient one, but that’s probably a case of the grass being always greener and the students more engaged on the other side of the corridor, so to speak…

We are where we are. There’s a case, I imagine, for treating the academic stuff as just a job, paying the bills so as to permit efforts to make things less bad in other ways. So, yes, I am thinking of trying to re-join the town council, if opportunity arises. But, at least at the moment, it’s a job that seems to consume all my energy and still demand more, so it’s hard to imagine doing much else. And so, if I want to make a difference, it has to start here; to rework Nietzsche: interest in classical antiquity may be just a Western prejudice, but let us at least try to employ it in the interests of the present. The content of our research and teaching is of course endlessly fascinating, but this is more about how we engage with it and present it to our interlocutors, above all our students. This is what we do…

(1) Teach, and exemplify, the search for truth; never stop asking questions, never settle for an answer – and especially not a simple or comforting answer – except as a provisional assumption as a basis for further enquiry; always push the analysis further, always open up problems and ambiguities rather than trying to close them down. Critical thinking is a skill, a praxis, and an attitude, not an innate talent. It can be taught; we can teach it.

(2) Teach the politics of truth: understanding rhetoric, recognising cognitive dissonance and cognitive traps, knowing how to engage with theory and ideology. The study of antiquity is inseparable from the history of scholarship and the study of classical reception, and the social and material conditions of the production and consumption of knowledge more generally; students need to see all of this, to recognise the mechanisms and tricks, and spot the man behind the curtain.

(3) Promote cosmopolitanism. As Lucian remarked, the true historian should not be a citizen of any specific polis – but, we must add, we should be familiar with as many of them as possible, to avoid the temptation to take our own assumptions and prejudices for granted as a norm. Yes, easier said than done – realistically, if I set reading in another language, it won’t be read – but I can make the effort to introduce non-anglophone scholarly traditions, to make them at least partly available to students even if they can’t engage directly.

(4) Create conditions for practising civil discourse; building the confidence to articulate one’s own views, while also respecting others and negotiating differences. This, I think, is the hardest thing; somehow both stepping back to create a space in which they don’t feel intimidated or constrained by fear of giving a wrong answer, and also actively managing the discussion where necessary, to make sure that everyone is included. Last term I tried to promote an idea suggested by the philosopher Harry Brighouse, of discouraging ‘ping-pong’ discussion – student addresses comment to lecturer, lecturer responds, another student responds to the first one but by addressing the lecturer etc. – but too often the result was three students talking energetically with each other and the rest feeling bored and disaffected, wishing (according to the mid-term feedback) for me to do a lot more talking. Next term I’m wondering about getting one student to act as ‘chair’ for discussion of another student’s presentation… It’s about trying to orchestrate and simultaneously model constructive engagement.

When I say “this is what we do”, I mean that partly as a statement; this is what we do. It’s not a call to change our practice or scholarly principles – but perhaps to be more consistent in applying them (I know there are times when I take the easy way out of setting a ‘good enough’ reading list, or giving up on class discussion because no one is engaged and it’s easier all round if I just talk at them), and perhaps to prioritise and emphasise some of them a bit more, if only for my own sake. This is what we do; this is why what we do matters, and could change people’s lives.

It’s not about the red pill; the idea of a single moment of enlightenment, a gnosis that will reveal the true nature of the world to the elect, is precisely one of those idiotic denials of complexity that plague humanity. It is rather the slow process of education, acquiring and practising the habits and attitudes of critical engagement and self-reflection, and critical respect for the strongly-held views of others while remaining dedicated above all to truth rather than lies and self-serving illusions. Our only hope is that more people learn to engage with the world critically.

Parlez-vous Thucydide?

Sprechen Sie Thukydideisch? I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me before to check for Thucydides references in other languages on the Twitter – I did it back when I was playing around with Google ngrams – but it took an error this morning to push me in this direction, leaving off the ‘s’ at the end and suddenly finding a lot of French tweets. Nowhere near as many per day as you get in English, unsurprisingly, but a lot of references to la piège de Thucydide, a certain number of references to the Castoriadis book that I still need to get round to reading, and evidence that someone has gone to the trouble of translating “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” so that it can be misattributed in French as well.

Searching for ‘Thukydides’, as of course I then had to do, turned out to be much more interesting. Lots of Turkish; clearly there isn’t a consistent version of the name in Turkish, so I wonder if the choice between ‘k’ and ‘c’ indicates the writer’s second language, or something else. The exciting thing, however, was to encounter a couple of completely new fake quotes, that have never to my knowledge appeared in English. Take this one:

Mit dem Feinde, der uns beleidigt, geht man ins Gericht; einem Freunde, der sich nur auf falschem Wege befindet, sagt man die Wahrheit.

With an enemy who harms us, we take them to court; with a friend who is simply on the wrong path, we tell them the truth.

Thucydides? I think not. Searching for the phrase led me initially to an entire webpage of alleged Thucydides quotes, at least two-thirds of which are, at first glance, nothing at all to do with Thucydides. (“Um die Seele zu füllen, muß sie erst entleert werden.” Yeah, right] It’s going to take me a while even to contemplate working through these… The line appears on only a few other websites, including the Tagesspiegel ‘inspirational quotes’ page – invariably attributed to Thucydides, whereas I was expecting to find someone citing the real source. Hmm.

This really does look like a ‘real’ quote from someone, but I’m not sure how to investigate further. One possibility, given that in Getman it’s only attributed to Thucydides, is that it’s been translated from another language – but searching for a combination of enemy, court, friend and truth hasn’t as yet yielded any useful results, and I doubt that searching for specific phrases will get me anywhere unless I’m incredibly lucky in hitting on the actual wording of the original. If anyone out there does recognise the line, please let me know.

Much more commonly quoted, partly because it’s been adopted by a rental company in Hamburg for its adverts: “Schönheit liegt im Auge des Betrachters.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Really? [you need to imagine that said with a strong South Wales accent – think Gavin and Stacey – for the full effect] Googling the phrase produces a lot of dodgy, unsourced quote websites – but also the Wikipedia.de page for ‘Betrachtung’, citing Jennifer Speake, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. This starts to look more credible – or, I can gear up to being heavily sarcastic about OUP fact-checking standards – except that Speake says no such thing. She plausible attributes an early statement of the idea to Theocritus (Idyll vi.18): “in the eyes of love that which is not beautiful often seems beautiful”. No mention of Thucydides; also no mention of Plato, who seems to get credited with the idea a lot in English.

Why on earth would anyone associate this idea with Thucydides?!? (Plato is more understandable, given his concern with beauty, even if it’s obviously wrong). Do Germans have a radically different idea of Thucydides from everyone else? Is there some tenuous connection to the claim in Pericles’ funeral oration that the Athenians are lovers of beauty without being unmanly? I need to explore this further – and work out how to edit German Wikipedia entries…

Beware The Locusts

One of my favourite passages in classical literature comes from the sixth-century CE historian and poet Agathias Scholasticus; it’s a poem preserved in the Greek Anthology (11.365), in which the farmer Calligenes goes to the house of Aristophanes the Astrologer and begs him to say whether he’ll get a good harvest.

Taking his counters and spreading them out on a tray, and then extending his fingers, Aristophanes said to Calligenes: “If your bit of land receives sufficient rain, and grows no crop of wild weeds; if frost does not break the furrows; if hail does not nip off the tops of the sprouting ears; if no deer grazes down the crops and if it meets with no other disaster from air or earth, I prophesy that your harvest will be excellent and you will cut the ears with success — only beware the locusts.”

Obviously the joke is that such a prophecy is utterly useless – if nothing goes wrong, then things will probably be okay – but it does sum up the uncertain, risk-dominated world of pre-modern agriculture (hell, going by the downbeat, phlegmatic moroseness of my Norfolk tenant farmer forebears, probably agriculture in general) rather well. So it was very much in this spirit that I attempted to produce a quick ‘Ancient Greek Subsistence Farming’ game for my Greek History students, to help break up the two hours (see here for context).

As it happened, I couldn’t get the technology to cooperate (exporting files from the Twine webpage turns out to be much trickier in Safari), and I had WAY too much material to get through in the lecture in any case – but, having got halfway through creating the game, I thought I might as well finish it and make it available:

https://nevillemorley.itch.io/the-agroikos-version-1

Now, I would be the first to admit that this isn’t remotely the right format for such a game, but it’s the technology I know and had to hand. Really this ought to be a ‘roll and move’ board game, with a board a bit like a Monopoly board in which most squares show the success of the harvests for barley and wheat (players have to decide which crop to sow before they roll the dice for each turn) and a few have events like ‘plague of locusts’ and ‘Spartan invasion’ that affect everyone equally; players have tokens to show their grain stocks, their money and their social credit, which then set limits on how they can get out of trouble.

Obviously barley harvests would fail much less frequently than wheat, but bring fewer rewards, and there are several clear strategies: profit maximisation versus risk minimisation, accumulation of cash or stores or social credit. It’s a death match between the Garnseyist risk-shy subsistence peasant and the Oberite entrepreneurial farmer… And if I could programme this as an electronic game, it could incorporate additional features like the chance to expand one’s land holdings or buy an ox or slave (increasing productivity – but eating into the food supplies).

What I could try to do with the Twine format is introduce more randomness (at the moment there are only a couple of points where the outcome isn’t determined by your choices) or more conditional moves (“if social credit > 2 then neighbours help out, if not then GOTO ‘starve'”). Should be reasonably straightforward; it is simply, as ever, a question of the trade-off between spare time (none) and potential benefit (erm)…

Dear Editor…

Subject Heading: Why you are not getting that article/chapter any time soon

(1) It’s been a horribly busy term and I simply haven’t had any time to focus on research or writing. I have a couple of commitments in June and early July, plus taking a short holiday (at last!), but I’ll then be able to get down to this properly.

(2) I have, as I do every year, underestimated my tiredness and overestimated how much I can get done during the vacation. I now have to focus on teaching prep as I’m doing a couple of new courses, but once term settles down I’ll be able to get back to it, honest.

(3) I’ve got a heavier teaching load than normal, including topics I’ve never taught before, but things should get better by late November as we move on to more familiar ground. Once I’ve got the first batch of marking out of the way.

(4) I’ve been ill. Again.

(5) This isn’t something I tell every editor – you’re special and I know I can trust you – but the illness, as you’ve probably guessed, is depression with a side order of severe insomnia. I can manage the teaching, but writing is a different matter. I think the fog is starting to clear a bit…

(6) The paper is actually rubbish, and your volume would be much better off without it. Seriously. Please stop extending all your deadlines for my benefit. I don’t actually want to write the damned thing.

(7) There’s a bit in Anthony Powell’s The Kindly Ones, set in the period of the Phoney War, when one character remarks “It’s impossible to write with Hitler about”. That, but for Trump, Brexit, Johnson, Syria, Brazil, China, climate change, plastic, insect apocalypse (not the fun kind), antibiotic resistance…

(8) Having now read through your editorial comments in detail, I need a couple of weeks to rewrite the entire paper as an acrostic expressing my view of your professionalism and manners.

(9) In terms of the universe, we have the lifespans of mayflies, and I’m spending this brief moment in the sunlight writing pointless words about some Ancient Greek whom nobody is interested in except to misquote him. Who cares? Seriously?

(10) Black, black, black.

(11) Okay, I had a slightly better afternoon and managed to hack out the attached; I think it’s a pile of crap, but if you’re so desperate to include something from me, here’s something, take it or leave it.

(12) And of course I’m now even further behind with everything else I’m supposed to be writing, but the fact I’ve actually managed to get this done, and can have a brief moment of relief at ticking something off the list and feeling slightly less guilty, means that I then move on to the next overdue commitment, rather than giving up the whole enterprise as a bad job…

Selling Thucydides by the Pound

One assumes that it’s something to do with the imminence of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Remortgage Wednesday and the rest of the run-up to Christmas, but in the last week or so a couple of very strange accounts have appeared on the Twitter. One (“Towoti Group”) has a profile picture of Ryan Gosling, the other (which has now disappeared completely ) had picture of Jake Gyllenhaal, and they tweet punctiliously every fifteen minutes, on a regular cycle of advert, advert, Thucydides quote, advert, advert, Thucydides quote. The quote is always “The secret of happiness is freedom… the secret of freedom is courage”; the adverts are mostly for women’s clothing, with the occasional LED illuminated bracelet, Christmas elf costume for your dog or cat, 90% human hair hairdressing training mannequin head, and so forth. I have questions…

Most of the questions are pretty easy to answer. Yes, of course they’re bots. No, it’s unlikely in the extreme that this is a successful way of drumming up business – the only people following these accounts are pretty clearly bots themselves. My best guess is that this is scamming the businesses, selling them a promise of social media advertising and engagement via motivational quotations (or rather quotation). It’s a cheaper version of junk mail – maybe someone will glance at it en route to the paper recycling, maybe some proportion of the people who do that will follow it up.

No, the real question is whether there are other such accounts, tweeting different quotations to reach different demographics. Thucydides doesn’t have any obvious connection to what’s being advertised, but you might imagine that it’s tailored to reach a certain audience; so, are the same goods being promoted by other accounts, with different profile pictures and quotes? Or, if Thucydides really is the key influencer in this field, when can we expect the breakthrough into mainstream media or the invitation to the next series of Strictly..?