Neville Morley's Blog, page 33

Between the Wars

One of my least favourite novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence is the sixth, The Kindly Ones. I’m not entirely sure why; it offers one of his most sustained bits of classical reception, the Kindly Ones being of course the Eumenides or Furies – but my love of Powell, and personal response to this book, long pre-date any serious classical interest – and is just as full of unforgettable scenes and character sketches. More than likely it’s my habit of over-identifying with certain characters and then feeling vicariously miserable, and perhaps I simply shouldn’t enquire too closely. But in the last year or so it’s been difficult to avoid being reminded of the book on a regular basis, and that is Not Good – finding oneself in The Kindly Ones is akin to the Chinese curse of living in ‘interesting times’.

The Kindly Ones is set in the period around Munich, with flashbacks to the eve of the First World War. It’s permeated with a sense of impending doom; in the flashbacks, this is entirely a matter for the narrator and the reader, with only a few characters seriously worried about the state of European affairs, whereas in the main narrative only a few – for reasons which are very revealing of their natures and/or ideological prejudices – think that war is avoidable. Disaster looms inexorably; people feel paralysed and helpless, at the mercy of events, and for the most part unable to ignore them.

The passage which keeps coming to mind is a conversation between the narrator, a writer, and his close friend, a composer, who is trying to work on a ballet but finds himself completely stuck. The key line: “It’s impossible to write with Hitler about.” I’m not (yet) risking the invocation of Godwin’s Law by claiming that Johnson and Cummings’ latest wheeze is a fascist putsch, but rather that this has, on and off, been my psychological state since mid-2016; the sense of being at the mercy of inexorable external processes and malign forces (not only political; climate change and the environmental crisis have the same effect), unable either to take constructive action or to ignore them, and so getting on with writing about ancient economic history or classical reception or whatever seems pointless and trivial.

Yes, first world problems and all that – being able to assume a relatively stable and predictable society, with collective norms respected by the majority of people (including those in power), or at least being able to believe in the possibility of such stability, is indeed a western middle-class privilege. All that is solid evaporates, until we are confronted with the real conditions of our existence etc. But that doesn’t help with the demoralisation and listlessness, the low-level miasma of depression – and the feeling that you wouldn’t start from here, so to speak, that if I were younger or a different sort of academic or a different kind of writer I might be coping less badly, but instead I find myself committed to a discipline that is perhaps at best a luxury in the world in which we find ourselves, and at worst is already doomed except as part of the ideological system of our rulers.

What did you do in 2019, grandad? I switched to a more plant-based diet and wrote some snarky blog posts about Dominic Cummings’ reading of Thucydides, because trying to get on with any proper work felt impossible, and darkest Somerset is not a great place for finding protests against the prorogation of Parliament…

Outnumbered

You know, I think the following tells us something vaguely interesting about the impact of the Internet. In 1998, the critic Harold Bloom edited a collection called The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, which he had selected from a regular publication called The Best American Poetry, with an introductory essay, also published as part of a forum in The Boston Review (April/May 1998), entitled ‘They have the numbers; we, the heights’. It opens like this:

My title is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp- followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little while longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic. There are still authentic poems being written in the United States.

Oh. Dear.

Not being any sort of aficionado of late 20th-century American poetry, I can’t say whether the image of a few naked, muscular aesthetes standing firm against the decadent foreign hordes dedicated to the destruction of Western Civilization is absurdly over the top or just very silly – but further research is definitely needed into the networks of influence between this essay and the other notorious bit of Laconophilia from 1998, Frank Miller’s 300. But at least Miller knew he was drawing on Herodotus; Bloom’s confident declaration that his source was Thucydides is either an in-joke, or an error of substantial proportions. It should be noted that I haven’t found the line in Herodotus yet either, or any other source, and of course the Spartan strategy scarcely depended on holding the higher ground, but if you’re going to make up bullshit quotes for your ex cathedra peroration, that attribution would at least be plausible.

Three things struck me about this… no, four. Among the things that struck me… Firstly, one assumes that in this day and age Bloom (or his editors) would have made at least a cursory effort to check such things (unless it was indeed deliberately made up) – but in 1998, there were no dodgy internet quote sites, just volumes like Bartlett’s, which could always be assumed not to be complete records. Secondly, in the absence of Twitter, there was no visible flurry of corrections or criticism; none of the contributors to the Boston Review forum remarked on the Thucydides reference, and the occasional later discussions all take Bloom’s Thucydides attribution at face value – they’re more interested in his evocation of martial metaphors in the cultural context.

Thirdly, this is one of those aggravating misattributions where I don’t have an original source that doesn’t mention Thucydides, which means it will be much harder to quash; it actually comes down to my asserting my authority in Thucydidean matters over Harold Bloom’s great reputation for learning, which actually I have no problem with, but others may think differently. If he dd get it from a written source, it isn’t one that’s been digitised, so the chances of my finding it are limited.

But, finally, it is striking that I’ve never encountered this line before. The usual quoters of Thucydides, I suspect, don’t generally read articles about the state of contemporary American poetry or the critical practices of Harold Bloom; those who do read and comment on such things don’t generally then quote Thucydides, except to explain why Bloom is wrong (or worse) in citing him. So until today the line has been absent from Twitter and from the usual rubbish quote websites – and maybe, just maybe, we can keep it that way…

Update: I did mean to add a comment to the effect that, were Harold Bloom still active, he would definitely be fulminating about Grievance Studies, and probably even Cultural Marxism. It isn’t a compliment to say that large sections of his essay feel rather familiar:

That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this essay, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet.

Though other parts are a little more quaint: “Enthusiastic young men and women (and some of their middle-aged gurus) rushed forth in a Great Awakening of Rock Religion in the closing years of the 1960s…”

The Outrage Machine

Victor Davis Hanson is at it again… “It’s fun to celebrate Sparta, but let’s look deeper,” he declares in The National Review. “There are so many lessons we can learn from the Greco-Roman city-state, especially from those who ran it.” So far so boilerplate – I’m not sure whether he’s directly responding to recent articles by Myke Cole and Nick Burns in The New Republic. Then it gets weird: “The main ideology of Sparta was that all men should be educated as scholars… Homer wrote that the culture wars are never ended. However, so long as our educational system leaves millions of young men without the basic technical know-how to wage war, the cult of arms continues to roam the Earth…”

Okay, it’s not actually VDH, but an AI-generated article from https://grover.allenai.org/ (h/t to Shawn Graham @electricarchaeo for the link to this), and I’ve carefully selected and edited sentences which are vaguely plausible rather than the ones which are manifestly nonsense (Homer is actually dated to the 9th century AD, there’s a long riff on Edmond of Macedon – though even there, we’re offered some rather VDH phrases: “Edmond’s name, as a naval captain (and I say this as an admiral) also means ‘warrior’…”). You give the system a media outlet, a date, an author and a title, and it generates an article; on the basis of my initial experiments, some are instantly recognisable as machine-generated gibberish, but some, if you don’t already have a fair amount of background knowledge, offer a combination of the sort of detail, confident assertion and polemical generalisation that is all too familiar from actual published articles – and potentially just as convincing.

The intended function of the model is to detect machine-generated stories, as it’s familiar with its own habits and traits in building articles on the basis of publicly-available news. But one can easily imagine other purposes to which it could be put (besides puerile sniggering…). For example, it offers a way round the paradox that those of us with a research interest in contemporary appropriations of classical antiquity would prefer not to have to read (and provide outrage clicks and advertising revenue to) the most egregious examples of it. Rather as the Pharos website reads ghastly alt-right blog posts so we don’t have to, the Grover machine can generate e.g. Peter Jones’ Spectator columns for us to get pleasurably annoyed about without having to read the real thing. Why is Boris Johnson the new Pericles?

Boris is no Demosthenes. His performance is not creating an epiphany but is chasing people. It is inspiring the few; it is devastating the many. What he is doing is profoundly impressive: he is going across the whole country, giving people a palpable boost. He gives us a real example of what can be done by a Government in a single performance. David Cameron could never manage it. He had to make it look like what it was not.

This is…not entirely implausible if you don’t read it too carefully.

But I am also inclined to treat the Grover machine as a handy equivalent of Ozymandias’ scanning of all the world’s media in Watchmen, a means of discerning themes and trends that may not yet be visible to human eyes. There can be disturbing truth in machine-generated gibberish. What does The Atlantic think Thucydides can tell us about contemporary politics, for example?

While political historians in recent years have identified two main ways in which politics has become more complex over the last hundred years—anti-intellectualism and the fragmentation of the nation—the figures of Thucydides, Socrates, and Plato may be the most central to our understanding of modern politics. They are central to understanding what, precisely, is happening now in Washington. But not to understanding modern politics.

In her recent book The Deadliest Warrior: Thucydides and America’s Transformation, The New York Times reporter Jennifer Rubin makes a strong case that the question of Thucydides is more significant in American politics than it deserves to be. While more is known about the two Athenian kings, “his record and his almost hidden legacy remain woefully neglected in modern American politics,” she says.

In fairness, the problem is bigger than Thucydides. The American system has undergone constant and longstanding transformations, just as it has in Athens. They may have changed, but they have remained constant: The democratic state has evolved, adapted to the moralistic Protestant ethic that prevailed in the ancient world, and in time evolved into the liberal, economic, and democratic democracy that prevails today. But historically, the flaws of democracy are far more extreme than the undemocratic venoms of democracy, and the relationship between ancient Athens and Athens-like societies in America has been contentious to say the least.

Thucydides first encountered this debate when he went to Athens in the early 300s B.C. and encountered a democracy nearly unrecognizable from the Athens of the previous century. Democracy, as it is known today, had evolved from the henhouse to the market place, from the burning sea to the Amazon rain forest. At the same time, the most valuable public resource in the country—the Cycladic islands—had radically changed over the previous five centuries: High tide brought the sea into the islands, leaving only the lowest sandbars, and high winds lashed the volcanic terraces. The ingredients of the new Athenian democracy were all present: Democracy required armed strength, markets, development, and a freewheeling mind.

Thucydides encounters these elements in the first two chapters of his epic History of the Peloponnesian War, which focuses on his 28-year-long visit to Athens. But it is the last two chapters of the book—three years after he has left—that capture the essence of the modern American political world. The problem with contemporary politics is not its complications but its complexity. Politicians speak to one another in abstract terms, view the world through a much more polarized prism, and treat the electorate as often indifferent or even contemptuous.

The people seem not to like either party or one of its ideas, and they have a weakness for leaders whose honesty and integrity seem to be lacking. Democracy has meant more harm than good.

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Times offers a much more detailed range of historical comparisons:

WITH the Greek-speaking nations of Europe at war for nearly two centuries and two world wars on their horizons, Thucydides examines what he sees as the basic causes of these conflicts and examines how humanity must deal with them.

This is first and foremost about two modern dramas that preoccupied Thucydides during his lifetime: Greece’s war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian war that swept across the area, including Northern Italy, over 300 years later. We follow his family, contemporaries and friends, who also tell tales of the violence of war in Sparta, the mayhem of Athens and even what happened to our Queen Elizabeth at the Battle of Hastings, and finally the simple notion of the battle, its causes and consequences. Thucydides’s son reveals how Sparta convinced itself that its brotherhood with Homer was incompatible with external enemies it could negotiate with; Thucydides reluctantly watched from the sidelines in Athens while his wife, sister and daughter were conscripted to the Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War.

In both episodes, Thucydides reflects on the core truths about war and empire, a point that connects these conflicts.

Every Spartan had to build his own military as far away as possible from Spartan camp. Indeed, Thucydides and a number of contemporaries viewed, with increasing incredulity, the escalating empire builders (Spartans) who set sail not only to the Mediterranean but right through England and beyond for the soldiers and treasure they required to expand their holdings.

The parallel that Thucydides draws between Sparta’s war against Athens and the Islamic conquest is striking. But in fact it is far more than that.

Thucydides sees the conflict between Athens and Sparta, and later the Greek-ness and foreignness of Rome, with reference to the struggles for imperial survival in all three cases. In all three cases, the struggle for key strategic resources has destroyed the empire, but sometimes not for long: Athens, Sparta and Rome are all no more.

Thucydides sees this clash of world-views in view of a very basic concept: diversity. In his day, Athens played a key role in the rebuilding of Sparta in 203BC. But as Athens readied for the fight that it had initiated, Thucydides in a moment of supreme self-confidence founded his empire – which, as it had started out, and the Aegean port it dominated, Rome never did. The clash of civilisations that started out as an Athenian-Spartan conflict reached boiling point when Priam, the king of Aelia Capitolina, struck at the heart of Athens in 221BC. Athens had dangled before its own people the prospect of peace. And it had dangled the prospect of its military occupation of Aelia Capitolina in exchange for political concessions to the invaders. These trade-offs were best avoided. The Athenians could not win. And their subsequent empire ended after 67BC, not the 44 years that Thucydides recorded in his Life of Heraclitus. Thucydides saw the English conquest of Scotland from the civil war that began with the victory of William of Orange against Robert the Bruce, when the object of the invasion was strategic advantage over France and England through London.

Thucydides’s finest work is here for the first time and his perspective on the darkest chapter of our history should be taken very seriously in a world in which the after-effects of war and conflict, as well as disasters, continue to do so. Thucydides makes his commentary on Sparta’s victory very clear, though a little less serious in the final episode when he ends the lesson with a tale that demonstrates the historical applicability of the Periclesist line of thought.

Yes, this is very very silly, and I really need to get on with some proper work – but is it entirely unreasonable to think that the machine has identified some significant points: a persistent concern with identity, imperialism and the struggle for resources, the notion of universal themes – and at the very least, the completely different take on what might be important in Thucydides’ work from the Atlantic take? And at the very least, the coining of ‘Periclesist’ may be all too prophetic; it’s not quite a neologism – but the only hit on Google is August Gottlieb Meissner’s 1791 book on Alcibiades, so this does suggest that the AI has already grasped the journalistic technique of inventing isms…

MUST STOP DOING THIS but I couldn’t resist checking what the Financial Times take might be…

No one has been more widely studied in economics and therefore sought to learn from, than Thucydides. The physician, historian and writer on social upheaval was a key adviser to the Athenian citizens of 480BC who analysed and rebuked the actions of the Peloponnesian senate.

His writing was not only a definitive success, turning out to be correct in every case in which he made a prediction, but he also developed a variety of economic concepts. His claim to fame was a wasschloss — an economic terminology — that has since become a well-established model for monetary analysis.

But what many scholars have ignored are the implications of his political study for today. There has been much recent attention on what turned out to be one of Thucydides’ most profound insights: that every society’s political system could be found similar to the Athenian senate, and that they can be reversible.

To his contemporaries, Thucydides plainly had in mind the immediate consequences of the Peloponnesian civil war that started in 451BC and engulfed Athens in a period of violence that lasted for three years. Yet the longer-term implication was that every society’s political system — democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, etc — could be modified, reversed or even reversed once again.

His timing, as well as the notion that each system is conservative and is liable to change in a risky way in the longer term, provides a useful lesson for politicians, their advisers and readers alike.

The conservatives were in the majority in Athens, but, after the Peloponnesian civil war, they eventually came to agree with the liberals on the priority of restoring democracy.

The conservatives won the most seats in the election, but when a quorum of 300 legislators was required to change the constitution, they could not find that number. The senate was reconvened and a special constitution was produced, which dealt with citizenship, property ownership and control, and the municipal regulation of wages.

It represented a compromise between the populist left, generally thought of as democratic and impatient with the slow pace of democratic change, and the committed conservative legislature. It was harder to get it through the country’s first parliament than to prevent it, but it did finally pass.

It did so because, unlike, say, democratic governments, it had to be approved by the assembly’s entire membership and this made politicians eager to act.

Such same ground rules applied even after all of this was done. All Greek states had a basic non-republican right to impose taxes and everyone was ready to do it.

And indeed the Peloponnesian senate was actually increasingly resigned to the idea that taxes would be raised in the future, as the economy took on new features that required the introduction of a number of new taxes to shore up taxation.

So, in 450BC, even after huge fresh and hard taxes had been introduced to bolster the capital stock and a wealth tax had been levied on a huge proportion of all land, the legislature approved yet another tax, the first petrol tax, which was eventually resumed after 36 years.

More than 40 years after the first petrol tax was introduced in 48BC, the Athenian senate again raised the petrol tax by 50 per cent on July 28.This is part of the pattern that must worry us — to reform our political system to meet the new needs and demands of the times, some adjustment of taxation has to take place — and, quite often, this happens without the decision maker having to raise any taxes at all.

This meant that the republic must be profoundly conservative in its principles, doctrines and institutions for the rest of its life.

Wasting Away the Moments…

Time, and Money. One of my most concrete achievements so far this summer – besides winning first prize for ‘a truss of cherry tomatoes’ at the local garden show – has been getting the front of the house painted. Does the money saved by doing it myself, and the sense of satisfaction, actually balance out the fact that a professional would have done it at a much lower hourly rate than one might calculate mine to be, so I could instead have devoted more time to working on all the chapters and articles I’m supposed to be writing / have written – with substantially less potential satisfaction? I do tend to revert to an autarkic ‘why pay someone if you can do it yourself?’ attitude, especially as I like doing practical things, rather than spending money to make everything but the research go away?

[image error]Of course it’s never just time and money (both direct expenditure, and the fact that some of my time has been paid for by the university). Even when I have days or weeks free from other commitments, sometimes the research and writing goes nowhere, if the energy and/or inspiration aren’t there, whereas doing other stuff sometimes gets everything moving. And there are issues even if I just think about how I distribute time and effort between different work-related tasks. How to balance a chapter for a conference-derived publication (no longer fired up by topic, not REF-able, but feeling of obligation to the organiser) against a journal article? How much time can I justify spending on the blog when there are so many other things I ought to have done? Is it worth writing yet another funding application that won’t get anywhere because no one seems to like my ideas, because it’s expected and because maybe, just maybe, this time..? Or writing a considered response to peer review reports when it’s already clear that one of the reviewers has put the kibosh on the whole enterprise…

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Put another way: it is rare that I do anything, however obviously necessary and justifiable (teaching prep, for example), without a nagging sense that there are other things I could be doing that perhaps should be more of a priority. I’m honestly not sure how much this is a symptom of higher education under late capitalism [carefully chosen phrase, since I recall someone getting very cross about the idea of ‘the neoliberal university’ last time I used it] and how much it’s my own ineptitude at prioritising, lack of focus, and terrible time management. It’s nice to feel wanted and get invitations to speak or contribute (I think I still have the ECR mentality of being delighted that anyone’s heard of me, so this might be the last invitation I ever get…), it’s nice to have ideas at the moment, and I know that I can’t do everything, but I don’t have an effective process for deciding which things can’t be done.

The other thing with money is that it’s not just a matter of calculating the value of my time; some things need actual funding or they can’t be done at all. Hence the funding applications; I can pay for the occasional research or conference trip, just as I could pay for someone to paint the house, but I can’t afford to buy out six months of my own time, or pay for a postdoc, or organise an entire event. Hence the need for funding applications, and the frustration at their lack of success, because I don’t do it just because it’s expected, but because I sometimes have ideas that can’t be done in the traditional lone scholar manner but need serious resources, and if they don’t get funded they just don’t happen.

Which does mean I feel enormous gratitude when someone does give me the money to do something I really want to do – which is actually the point of this post, despite the melancholy direction it’s taken so far. Last year, in one of the many meetings related to Impact stuff, someone mentioned the idea of a TED-Ed video on Thucydides, a short, accessible introduction to him and his work. Yes, one more one more thing to fill the already full day, but it was such an obviously good thing in itself, besides being potentially very useful as a resource for our work with schools. So, I pitched the idea to TED-Ed and had a Skype conversation where they seemed very enthusiastic about it; wrote the first draft of the script, waited, waited some more, sent a polite email because it was now well past the time they said they’d respond with comments on the script – and got a brief reply to say they were no longer pursuing the project.

Of all the knock-backs I’ve had this year, I think this was the second worst, as it felt so arbitrary; yes, bad peer reviews and being turned down for funding can also seem arbitrary, but they are always priced in as a possibility, however much you polish the application, whereas I thought this project had already had the green light. By this point, I was really devoted to the idea – but how could I come up with the money that would be needed to do it myself? I’m very grateful to Ray Laurence (who has of course produced that brilliant series of Life in Ancient Rome animations) for the suggestion of approaching universities/colleges where students might be looking for projects. I was delighted to find MAYN Creative, a creative agency at Falmouth University, who quoted a price that was potentially affordable, and organised the process of advertising the project and collecting pitches for me to consider – once I’d managed to confirm funding; this would never have been possible without the support of my Head of Department Barbara Borg and our College Associate Dean for Research James Clark (both of whom doubtless have specific hopes for the outcome, which I hope won’t be disappointed), and a grant for public engagement activities from the Institute of Classical Studies.

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But above all I have to thank the creative team, Bee Jamieson (illustration and direction) and Matt Hawkins (animation), who have been simply brilliant; if you have any sort of project like this, these are the people to get. They grasped the idea and tone of my script immediately (you just have to look at their portrait of Thucydides above, which I will now be using everywhere), they interpreted it imaginatively and added lots of their own ideas (the visual presentation of people believing any old nonsense about past events is completely theirs, and works perfectly), and they were excellent to work with – including showing great patience when I produced yet another version of the soundtrack when they’d just finished incorporating the previous one.

And here it is…

Breaking News

The problem with developing an interest in classical references in modern political discourse is that the evidence never stops piling up. It’s the advantage of blogging, of course, that it’s easy to update whenever something interesting comes along. When it comes to proper academic analysis, however – since blogs are still not taken seriously for that purpose – there’s a constant fear that a new development will suddenly put things into a different light, locked in endless struggle with the wish/need to get the thing finished.

I cannot decide whether it’s a good or bad thing that my chapter on depictions of Trump as Roman emperor was submitted months ago so can’t include references to the analogies being drawn between his 4th July authoritarian military spectacle and the vast, expensive shows put on for Caligula; the good news is that it fits perfectly with the general outline of such references. Johnson’s classical references continue to proliferate in an apparently random manner, but their overall role in his public persona seems pretty consistent; it’s more striking that apparently a quick re-read of his The Dream of Rome can fuel a front-page story – specifically on his criticism of Islam, but there’s so much more material there…

Thankfully I have not attempted to write anything substantial on the place of the classics in European Union politics, so I don’t have to worry too much about the fact that Ursula von Der Leyen threw a Pericles quote into her closing statement at the European Parliament before the confirmatory vote yesterday:

And at the very end, before we going to go in the vote tonight let me end perhaps with a saying that comes once again from a Greek statesman. He was one of the founders of democracy and I think it’s a wonderful motto for our common work. It says “the secret to happiness is freedom. The secret to freedom is courage.” Let’s have courage together, let’s be courageous on the European Union.

It’s not exactly earth-shattering – and there has to be a suspicion that it’s been pulled from a handy quotes website rather than based on detailed familiarity with the Funeral Oration. Interesting that Pericles isn’t named – is this line really so familiar, or is the assumption that everyone can Google? (I’m reminded of Adam Roberts’ The Real-Town Murders, one of my holiday books, in which everyday conversation is full of obscure quotes and allusions because everyone is running automatic annotation software in their visual feed). Founder of democracy? Okay. Continuation of sentence, “therefore do not be afraid of the dangers of war“? You can see why she left it out.
It may be over-interpretation, but I am struck by the possibility that this more than just a throwaway quote. Firstly, we can link it to a comment in von der Leyen’s main speech, in a section headed ‘Defending Europe’s Values’:

The cradle of our European civilisation is Greek philosophy and Roman Law. And our European continent went through its darkest period when we were ruled by dictators and Rule of Law was banished. For centuries, Europeans fought so hard for their liberty and independence.

It’s a while since we’ve had such an explicit reference to the ‘classical roots of Europe’; what this immediately reminded me of was the preface to the ill-fated draft European Constitution, which opened with similar claims – and with another quote from the Funeral Oration, this time attributed to Thucydides rather than his sock puppet: “Our constitution…is called a democracy…”. Is this a deliberate call-back, a revival of more ambitious plans for Europe and its values? I guess we’ll just have to see how much Thucydides gets cited in coming months…

Altered Images

One of the interesting aspects of being in a country like Romania where my grasp of the language is limited to essentials like hello, excuse me, please, thank you, and may I have a beer/coffee please? – the bare minimum for survival and politeness’ sake – is finding myself much more reliant than usual on visual signs and clues, not just carefully-chosen symbols intended to communicate messages visually but the form in which different unintelligible texts are presented – the structure of a menu, the font choices of official instructions or regulations. It’s a reminder of the wide variety of forms of literacy that exists; in this case, being able to recognise writing, and even hazard a guess at the kind of message intended, without knowing what it means.

There was a similar problem in the Bergkirche – the Church on the Hill – in the lovely medieval town of Sighişoara, where there was an English information sheet but it spent most of the time discussing controversies about the early phases of the building, and very little time explaining the wonderful medieval frescos that had been whitewashed over after the Reformation and then recovered only centuries later. Some iconography is instantly recognisable: armoured man on horse killing dragon, easy. But what about armoured man with horse and with dragon on a leash? Maybe it would have been more obvious if the pictures had been in better condition, but it really needed the explanation from the attendant that this is an episode in the longer version of the story. As to why Saxons – the German-speaking population in Transylvania – were so keen on St George, that remains a mystery.

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The meaning of this image, at the centre of several rows of unmistakable saints, was likewise easily guessed – I’ve never seen anything like it before, but discussions on the Twitter produced a couple more examples. What I wonder is how this actually worked on medieval viewers, given the prevailing view (or at least this was my understanding, erm, thirty-odd years ago…) that these pictures were all about teaching basic Christian ideas to the masses. Did the image of a three-faced figure actually help convey the doctrine of the trinity, or just give them nightmares..?

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It’s then quite comforting to come across a completely familiar image, even if it seems like an unexpected setting for it. Several cities we visited had the same Capitoline she-wolf with Romulus and Remus, often with an inscription to “Rome our mother” or something similar; a strong assertion of Roman ancestry, in places that could claim to have been founded between the conquest of Dacia (lots of portraits of Trajan, too) and its abandonment 170-odd years later. We look westwards, it says; we are part of classical culture and tradition, not like these Slavs or Magyars; visitors from the European heartland should feel right at home.

What’s been interesting about this visit is that Romania has felt thoroughly European and familiar – less alien than I expected, being so far east – but not in the least because of the Roman heritage…

Update: Katie Low has noted that, according to the Wikipedia, the Italian stare gave five copies of the Capitoline wolf to Romanian cities in 1920, including Târgu Mures (the other one I saw) – but not Sighişoara, which must have copied it. (See here). Mussolini was also a fan, donating copies to various US cities…

Imagine…

Everyone in the world has forgotten Thucydides. Everyone except Jill…

Suppose that the text of Thucydides never made it out of Constantinople before it was sacked; no Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla, no French translation by Claude de Seyssel, no English version from Thomas Hobbes, just a few passing mentions in authors like Cicero that don’t really convey much about what the work must have been like. No elevation of him as the model critical historian by nineteenth-century Germans; no quotes from the Funeral Oration on war memorials or in speeches; no Henry Kissinger, no Neorealism, no Neocons. Iraq remains uninvaded – or, alternatively, everyone is surprised when the invasion goes badly, as no one has been offering dire warnings based on the Sicilian Expedition. People find a different idea for explaining the relationship between the United States and China, without any difficulty.

But one young graduate student of international relations remembers, and starts to incorporate ideas from the Mytilenean Debate, the Melian Dialogue and other parts of the work into her own articles. People are astonished; where have these devastating insights into power, politics and war come from? Things look so different through a Thucydidean lens. She is rapidly elevated in the world of punditry, offered ever more lucrative book deals and consultancies, as the great powers realise that they must hastily convert their vast peace-keeping and humanitarian missions into war machines before the inevitable conflict. Only her former grad school flatmate, a poor Classicist who has been working on the text of Lucian’s How To Write History, knows the truth; will love, not war, conquer all..?

No, I am not Richard Curtis nor was meant to be, and this seems likely to be an even worse film than the original sounds (though probably with a better soundtrack). But it’s an interesting counterfactual nevertheless. The premise of Imagine is of course that the genius of the Beatles’ songs will shine through whoever plays them; is the same true of Thucydides’ work, or (as I frequently suspect) does most of his modern influence rest on the accumulated authority of his name, the reputation for hard-headed insight that precedes him, so that a statement with his name attached immediately carries more weight even if it’s basically saying things we already know or think? Would anyone be impressed by the ‘Thucydides Trap’ (whether or not they get the antagonists the right way round) if it didn’t come with his imprimatur?

This isn’t to question the power of Thucydides’ text and the experience of delving into its complexity and ambiguity, testing our experiences and assumptions against the detail of his account; it’s the attempts at turning this experience into one or more snappy principles – and not ‘the world is complicated and we’re not very good at understanding it’, but ‘this is how the world works’ that is problematic. To have the desired impact, our hypothetical pundit would need either to attribute Thucydides’ alleged insights to a different authority figure (The Socrates Syndrome! Cicero’s Choice!), or (better) to reconstruct the entire text, or at any rate some key episodes, from memory, and then try to get people to engage with them.

Imagine no Thucydides; it’s easy if you try. It’s not a text that makes people bellicose or cynical, it’s a text that bellicose and cynical people may invoke as justification for their existing plans and assumptions, and they could find others. The remake of the Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, in which a glamorous Classicist and her nerdy yet handsome research assistant have to uncover the clues buried in Thucydides’ text to track down the treasures of the Parthenon that Pericles had buried rather than sold or melted down to finance the war is looking much more promising…

Art and Poetry, Poetry and Art

It’s holiday time, at last – many, many apologies to the people to whom I owe a draft chapter by last month, but I have a five-hour train journey tomorrow, in which it will get finished… In the meantime, we’ve been exploring Bucharest, which has the expected range of classical elements in its architecture, especially the deranged Ceaucescu elements; his immediate inspiration for a giant palace of government and enormous boulevards and parade grounds may have North Korea, but the design has hefty doses of Fascist futuro-classicism (though a lot fewer heroic figures than you might expect).

There were also plenty of neoclassical motifs in the collection of paintings from Romanian artists on the first floor of the palace. I was especially struck by this one – can’t remember the title, and it hasn’t come out legibly in my photo – from 1988 (I think) by one Felix Lupu.

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I can find no information at all about Lupu in English, and precious little in Romanian, other than the fact that he was (is?) a poet as well as an painter. Which makes perfect sense. The artist dreams or meditates on his path; on the one hand, the cold perfect beauty of classical sculpture, symbolised by its epitome, on the other the hot immediacy of scribbling verses while a real woman sleeps in bed nearby – both depicted in a different art form. One wonders whether he wrote a poem about this too…

Borges’ Reception

One of the slightly awkward aspects of reviewing Laura Jansen’s Borges’ Classics recently for Classics for All was that I couldn’t for the life of me find my copy of his Collected Fictions, so had to rely partly on memory and partly on Laura’s summaries of key pieces. Now that I’ve found it again and am re-reading some old favourites, it seems that this may have been a good thing, as otherwise the temptation to do nothing but quote choice extracts, head off on any number of tangents and then have even more problems getting the review down to a manageable size would have been too great – as it was, I had at least another couple of thousand words of notes and arguments that had to be omitted. It make me admire even more Laura’s success in keeping her book to a reasonable length, rather than trying to tackle every aspect that invites discussion.

One thing that I regularly forget is how funny Borges can be, above all in the self-parodic persona he adopts for his ‘literary’ essays. If one took him seriously, one might end up with a very skewed idea of his approach to literature. How can he be offered up as a key figure in classical reception, for example, when he says things like the following, from ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’?

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.

Setting An Example

There are times when – if I was completely confident that he is human, rather than a papier-maché marionette enchanted with a spirit of pure ambition and entitlement – I could almost feel sorry for Boris Johnson. How to answer questions about one’s self, when either it doesn’t exist or it has been firmly suppressed in favour of an attention-seeking public persona? Brexit? Easy: optimism, boldness, do or die, codswallop, no surrender, blah blah. Domestic policy? Tax cuts and infrastructure investment for everyone! Private life? That should remain private, so there. Okay, which figure from history would you like to be…?

It looks like an easy lob – like the question on hobbies – but there are so many potential pitfalls. Churchill is too obvious, perhaps even too reminiscent of the pre-statesmanlike Johnson, and everyone is already primed with the predictable retorts. Thatcher would go down a storm with party members, but alienate all the wavering liberals and young people that the Johnson magic is supposed to win back, and anyway not historical enough. Someone classical, then – safely insulated from contemporary problems, fits the persona and has gravitas. Caesar, Alexander – but they weren’t really about the politics, were they? Monarchy and dictatorship maybe not such a good look…*

Aha, Pericles! Claim the mantle of democracy! Back to the true roots of that “politics is about the many not the few” line that people liked with Corbyn! (Is that the exact quote? No matter) Great oratory! (That’s so me) Infrastructure projects! (Hold on, elaborate temple not quite the HS2 analogy I was looking for…) Piraeus! (Or was that Themistocles? Well, who’s going to check..?) Um… (Oh, dodgy private life, unnecessary war…) Um…

Obviously if the plan is to introduce nativist restrictions on citizenship rights, then retreat into a bunker and die of plague, we’re right on track. This does raise the question of why one should heroise Pericles at all, other than buying into the anti-democratic argument that Athens worked best when the assembly did what it was told while thinking that it was in control (Thucydides’ “rule of the first man in what was called a democracy”). Which again might not be the ideal image…

The oft-cited Funeral Oration offers a vision of an apparently open, liberal society that has attracted many, and a model for the role of the citizen (eagerly self-sacrificing) that has attracted many in power – but Pericles mostly gets credit for articulating this, rather than creating it. I start to wonder whether the modern heroisation of Pericles – he certainly wasn’t seen in unequivocally positive terms in antiquity – is partly or largely a product of the belief that the incomparable Thucydides was a fan, so there must be something in it.

Now, the obvious point is that any ancient (or modern) figure would raise such problems – the point about exemplary figures, underpinning ancient biographies like those of Plutarch, is not that they ever offer unequivocally positive models for slavish imitation, but that their careers present examples of actions and decisions that are worth thinking about. An honest explanation of why X is a political hero and why you’d want to be them will always, entirely reasonably, need to be hedged with qualifications; despite A, they achieved B and stood for C.

The problem for any contemporary politician is that questions about political heroes isn’t necessarily asking for an honest answer, but for the naming of a totemic figure whose values, virtues, flaws and failures will all then be taken as reflections of the politician in question. Whoever they name, something negative will be identified in the career of the historical figure, and held against them, as if by naming this ‘hero’ they were deliberately affirming every single act and aspect.

Which is of course what I’m doing in pointing out the aspects of Pericles’ career that make him a less than suitable model for a modern politician. I would feel more ucomfortable about this if I was more convinced by Johnson’s espousement of Pericles – if it felt more like an honest answer (in the way that Alexander would have felt like an honest answer) rather than an attempt at not giving a wrong answer. The reasons given for wanting to be Pericles feel like attempts at pushing buttons (anti-elitism! infrastructure investment!) with only a loose connection to a genuine, rounded view of his career and significance or a genuine desire to imagine oneself in that role.

I’m not sure there is a way of not answering such a question badly or problematically – I just wish that Johnson hadn’t picked a classical figure…

*I still think we were lucky to escape Alexander, not least because of the opportunities presented by the Gordian Knot anecdote as a means of characterising a bold, decisive approach to Brexit. Actually, since I have to teach on Alexander next year, further evidence of why hero-worshipping him is a sign of moral failure and poor character might not have been such a bad thing…