Neville Morley's Blog, page 35

No Thucydides

Obviously my ongoing survey of modern literary receptions can’t just stick to works I like and admire. The recent death of novelist Herman Wouk, none of whose books I’ve ever read (but I have seen most of The Caine Mutiny), has naturally prompted a burst of quotations, including the revelation that Thucydides is referenced several times in his late novels about the Second World War, Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978) – which were unironically compared by the Christian Science Monitor to Thucydides at the time (link). Wouk majored in philosophy and comparative literature at Columbia in early 1930s, and would certainly hav encountered Thucydides in the General Honors course established by John Erskine in 1920 (thanks to Liz Sawyer for confirming this), but it was in early 1960s that he turned to him and other historians in earnest, as noted in a profile in The Washington Post from 2000 (link):

He had never been much on history, so he started his research by reading Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. That taught him, he says, that history was not dull as he had thought, but a great drama of conflict. Soon he was devouring volume after volume of World War II history. But he also read “War and Peace” four or five times to see how Tolstoy unfolded Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the process of telling his tale. What he discovered, he says, was that the skeleton of “War and Peace” was provided not by Thucydides but by Thackeray. It was not all about Napoleon. It was all about who gets Natasha.

I’m not going to attempt here to discuss the whole range of possible Thucydides’s echoes in Wouk’s novels, as that would entail reading them (possible doctoral project, if anyone’s short of ideas, would be the influence of Thucydides in C20 war novels, from Jünger to Faulks via Heller, but since I don’t like war novels much…). Instead I’m going to confine myself to comments on the explicit references – with the promise that where Google Books’ snippet view limits my sense of the context, I will in due course do a bit more research…

There’s only one explicit reference to Thucydides in The Winds of War, fairly late on in the narrative (which runs to late 1941):

At the time of both attacks [Pearl Harbour and Barbarossa], of course, there were loud outcries of ‘infamy’ and ‘treachery’, as though these terms of private morality had any relevance to historical events. A poor nation seeking to supplant a rich one must use the best means it can find; moreover Thucydides said long ago that men by a natural law always rule where they are strongest. In history what is moral is what works. The will of God, Hegel taught, reveals itself only in historical outcomes. (p.787)

I really do need more context here, to get a sense of whose voice this is; my best guess for the moment is that this is one of the extracts Wouk inserts into the narrative from a book written in prison by former German officer Armin von Roon. In other words, this enthusiastic summary of the Melian Dialogue, with added Hegel, is intended to characterise the world-view that must be defeated, rather than the author’s own view.

This reading is, I think, supported by some of the references to Thucydides in War and Remembrance. Half of them come from Aaron Jastrow, a Jewish American Professor of Hebrew who has been living in Italy for ten years, whose diary of subsequent events, A Jew’s Journey, is interspersed with the narrative. In the first relevant scene, however, we are given the narrator’s account of a meeting between Jastrow and his former student, now a German diplomat, Werner Beck, who is pretending to be friendly and to repudiate the extreme elements of Nazi ideology. Jastrow is convinced that he will be perfectly safe in Italy, and that fleeing to the United States is no solution, given the level of anti-semitism there, and offers his view of current global politics. “Why are the Germans more wrong, in trying for world mastery, than the British were two centuries ago when they succeeded? Or than we Americans are, for making our own bid now?” He continues in this vein for some time, upsetting his niece. A little later, Beck remarks: “Professor, your discussion of the war stunned me. You spoke with the grasp of a Thucydides.”

This echoes the reference in the previous book (especially if it turns out that that was likewise presented as the thoughts of a Nazi): Thucydides as the hard-nosed prophet of power and realism, cited by aggressive imperialists to legitimise their conquests. The irony is that this ethics-free relativist view of Hitler’s foreign policy, in the mouth of a Jew, is bound to fall apart sooner rather than later, and so it has proved by Thucydides’ second appearance in an extract from Jastrow’s A Jew’s Journey:

The lesson was writ plain by Thucydides centuries before Christ was born. Democracy satisfies best the human thirst for freedom; yet, being undisciplined, turbulent, and luxury-seeking, it falls time and again to austere single-minded despotism.

Thucydides is now cited not as the legitimator of aggression and authoritarianism – that is revealed as the tendentious, self-serving reading of Beck and other Nazis – but as the bleakly illusionless chronicler of the human tragedy, in the vein of Auden’s “Exiled Thucydides knew… we must suffer it all again”.

The third reference offers a different spin in a different context, when another character, Leslie Slote, happens to meet a pilot called Bill Fenton in a bar.

He had a whole new vision of the war. In his fumed brain pictures reeled of aircraft crisscrossing the globe – bombers, fighters, transports, by the thousands – battling the weather and the enemy, bombing cities, railroads, and troop columns; crossing oceans, deserts, high mountain ranges; a war such as Thucydides had never imagined, filling the skies with hurtling machines manned by hordes of Bill Fentons.

This is the classic argument against Thucydides’ relevance, that the world has changed so much since his time that his observations cannot possibly offer anything useful to modern readers. It’s not obvious (at least not to someone who hasn’t read the book…) why Slote would reach for such a comparison, whereas it seems a plausible point of reference for academics like Jastrow and Beck, so I wonder if this is simply Wout’s own reaction on reading Thucydides and reflecting on his wartime experiences.

The final reference comes from Jastrow again, now in Theresienstadt awaiting his fate.

Here I have seen German barbarism and duplicity with my own eyes, and have tried to record the truth in bald hurried language… Words break down as a means of describing [the atrocities]. So, in writing what I have heard, I have put down the plainest possible words that come to mind. The Thucydides who will tell this story so the world can picture, believe, and remember may not be born for centuries. Or if he lives now, I am not he.

Thucydides as archetypal historian, preserving the truth of the past – and perhaps the implication is that a Thucydides offers an overview where someone like Jastrow can give only one perspective. But the main focus seems to be on the difficulty of writing, the inadequacy of language to describe events; the talent of a Thucydides is to find the words to convey horrors to future audiences, not as a bit of entertainment but so that they can “picture, believe, and remember”. And perhaps by this point Wouk had determined that Tolstoy was the best model for a war narrative but less so for the problem of how to represent the Holocaust and its atrocities.

Get Real

It’s always going to be the case, I reassure myself, that when exploring the reception of a particular classical author or theme across the whole range of scholarship and other writing in a given period, you’re bound to miss loads of examples – at least until everything gets digitised and is easily searchable. All you can do is hope that new things coming to light don’t radically undermine what you’ve claimed, or, if they do, at least do it in an interesting way – and that it’s not utterly embarrassing that you didn’t find the reference in the first place. Beyond that, well, it’s one of the great advantages of having a blog that I can simply post an update to a previously published article (it would of course be even better if I could post a link on that article to the update), so I don’t have to feel too regretful that I wasn’t able to discuss this at the time…

Quick recap of one of the themes of my article on readings of Thucydides in WWI, ‘Legitimising war, defending peace’ (Classical Receptions Journal 10.4, 2018: link): it’s in this period that we find the origins of much of the later reception of Thucydides, especially the deployment of the Funeral Oration as a rally-cry to defend the state and readings of the Melian Dialogue in relation to a ‘realist’ attitude to inter-state politics. The latter theme is partly developed by German political and military theorists like Treitschke, but also by British authors denouncing the Germans for holding such attitudes – and that’s exactly where we can locate an anonymous article in The Spectator in the closing months of the war, ‘“Realpolitik” – the first and most approved specimen’ (19th October 1918).

German statesmen and political philosophers pride themselves upon being masters of Realpolitik. For them such abstract ideas as national honour, national probity, national good faith, do not exist. They are fantastic pieces of idealism with no sure foundation of reality, or, if they do exist, limitations of that sovereignty which is the essential of the State… The nearest approach you make towards a kindly sentiment is to remind the weaker Power of the terrible nature of the punishment that you are in a position to deal out to it, and to point out how much better its selfish interests will be served by submission than by foolishly calling the gods to witness to its helpless condition and virtuous intentions.

Such an attitude is of course nothing new – and the historical comparison highlights the “clumsiness and grossness” of German behaviour.

The Athenians who were the first exponents of Realpolitik did the thing not only much more gracefully but much more thoroughly and much better. When one reads an exposition of their principles and sees them put into practice, one’s blood simply runs cold, so inhuman, so brutal, so malignant are the principles laid down.

Thucydides’ account is “without qualification” “the most brilliant piece of political dialectic in all literature”; it’s supreme not just as history or politics but as drama, “an appeal to the sensations of pity and terror which is almost unbearable”, that Aristotle ought to have taken as an illustration of the function of tragedy (and I suddenly realise that I should perhaps have cited this in a research application I’ve just submitted, arguing the case for taking the dramatic qualities of the Melian Dialogue seriously…). “The naked horror is unassuaged…. a peep into the chamber of horrors of the human mind…”

The claim is not that the Germans are reading Thucydides, however – clearly they’re far too barbaric for that. Rather, it’s that Thucydides reveals the moral bankruptcy and self-defeating nature of such attitudes: “he recorded the facts, but he had clearly no sympathy with his fellow-countrymen”.

Thucydides provides no immediate and direct solution to quiet and steady the terrible emotions he has roused. But it is also true that if we take his book as a whole he proves to us that God is not always mocked. It is impossible to read the historian’s account of the final scenes of the tragedy at Syracuse without the thought arising in one’s mind that the Melians were well avenged in every trireme that sank in the harbour and in every prisoner sent to the quarries. Some day Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Alsace-Lorraine will find the same Justice, not poetic but real, in the doom and punishment of Prussian militarism and Prussian Realpolitik.

Hmm. What’s God got to do with it? Thucydides might ask. The fact that the Athenians were mostly wrong doesn’t mean the Melians were not also deluded; the Athenians, not supernatural forces, were primarily responsible for the Athenians’ disaster. There is perhaps a hint of recognition in the article that Melian claims can’t necessarily be taken at face value, orvat any rate that not all Melian-like claims should be taken seriously, insofar as it’s noted that a defeated Germany will no longer dismiss appeals to humanity and mercy: “now that Germany is the under-dog we shall have plenty of appeals to sentiment rather than to the realities and brutalities of international relations”. This is the claimed virtue of reading the “Melian Controversy” at this time – not to acknowledge that Britain and the Allies are now in the Athenian position, but to remind everyone that the Germans are really still amoral bastards (n.b. not the Spectator’s actual phrase, but their tone…) behind their “diplomatic camouflage”.

We can certainly contrast the Spectator’s rejection of hard-nosed, illusionless Realism with the enthusiastic adoption of similar ideas by later US theorists and pundits, but it’s less obvious that replacing it with belief in sacred national honour, probity and good faith is necessarily an improvement. We can equally well contrast this article with the project of liberal internationalists like Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern, who drew partly on a different reading of Thucydides in seeking to address, however naively, the underlying causes of inter-state conflict rather than simply promoting different motives for it.

This does emphasise the openness of Thucydides to many different readings, always driven by the conviction that this is clearly the only reasonable interpretation, and that Thucydides would have agreed with us, not them. And of course this is the reason why we do need to take the dramatic aspects seriously: it’s not just about the arousing of emotion, but the staging of debate and confrontation, where our sympathies may be torn, and where we can perhaps see how each side sees the other and is convinced of its own position, rather than remaining comfortably secure in our own assumptions. Under certain conditions, we may all become Athenians – or even Spectator writers.

How Not To Write

I’m doing the final polish of this piece while wondering why watching Meet Me In St Louis seemed like a good idea – THIS is one of the classic movie musicals?!? – and ignoring the cats, who are NOT getting fed until half eight. It was sketched out last week, between rewatching Independence Day (far superior to Meet Me In St Louis despite lack of songs and some common themes), then drafted in between cooking vindaloo and chana masala, sitting on the train into work, and eating homemade muffin (proper English muffin) while being yelled at by cats who want to be let outside to intimidate the local wildlife.

Since this is the opening of a post about tips for academic writing, which I was asked about on the Twitter by Lakshmi Ramgopal, it might seem that the basic message is: you can write anywhere, any time, if you want to. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated, at least as far as my experience – which is what I’m supposed to be talking about – is concerned; if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be missing so many deadlines at the moment. In practice, I can write certain sorts of things – especially blog posts – almost anywhere, almost any time. Proper academic writing, however, is a whole other thing – and, in putting together this brief set of suggestions, I’m very conscious that it’s largely a theoretical explanation of what I would do in ideal circumstances, crossed with big flashing neon signs saying DON’T DO THIS…

(1) You need a place to write. I’m tempted to say that you’ll know what sort of place. For me, it’s uncluttered, with plenty of room to spread out (in other words, from my wife’s perspective, so that I can fill it with clutter), with as many books as possible to hand when you need them but not too visible as a distraction, and with a good view of the countryside. Keep the fridge well stocked, and/or have a good cafe nearby – ideally, you’d have a high-quality espresso machine on hand for regular usage with the cafe kept for special occasions… But this is all too specific. As I say, you should work out what you really need, and then work out how to get as close as possible to it as is practical.

(2) Work out the time when you write best – which for some reason for many people seems to be either early in the morning or late at night, rather than in normal working hours, but maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones. Ideally, keep this time clear; you won’t always feel like writing, but you’re more likely to feel like it then than at any other time. Of course, all this becomes trickier when there are other people and their inconvenient sleep patterns to worry about…

(3) Regular breaks, exercise, five-miles hikes through the countryside to clear the head and get the ideas flowing again. Or gardening, or squash, or whatever. Something physical.

(4) Write something, anything, however rubbish. Revising the useless sentences from the previous day remains the best way of getting going the next day. This is not news.

(5) There is almost always something you would rather be doing than writing. There is often something more important that you genuinely ought to get done first. There is always something else you could be doing. There are then two skills that ideally you need to have: knowing how to tell the difference between these things, and being able to make yourself do the thing you actually need to be doing. I’m aware that there are people out there who are quite capable of ignoring things like marking that actually need to be done because they prioritise their research, and I can only hope that they’re managing to get some writing done when they’re making everyone else’s lives unnecessarily difficult; but I suspect most of us suffer from the habit of prioritising everything except writing, because it can always be made to seem more urgent and/or easier just to get out of the way first, and then I’ll get properly down to it…

(6) This also applies to the demands of significant people and cats, except that it’s harder to resist these even if you want to. And, I am required to say, except that these demands are always higher priority than anything else you might have in mind.

I am conscious, in writing this, that the overall message is clearly tending towards the recommendation that you should become an 18th-century clergyman with a comfortable library full of books and a dutiful wife keeping the children quiet because Daddy is working on his book, or a bachelor scholar with college servants, or some other existence far removed from the realities of modern academic life and an even slightly healthy existence as a social being. And there are times – mostly when I wake at 4 am and just have to lie there instead of firing up the computer, when this does seem rather tempting. But, seriously, is anything I’m capable of writing ever going to justify disturbing the cats? I doubt it.

No, the real message is rather different. None of this actually matters; it may make things a little easier, but what you really need is to want to write, and want to write the thing you’re supposed to be writing. It’s all in the mind, which is deeply unhelpful but true. I can write blog posts wherever, whenever, because I want to write them – but also because I’m not afraid of them, and don’t feel that they have to meet any standard other than my personal satisfaction (which is mostly grammar-related). With ‘proper’ academic writing, I get the Fear – and when that strikes, every bit of advice about how to make writing easier also becomes a trap if you imagine that you can’t write properly without it.

And the only thing that works against the Fear is to switch off the Internet and forget every possible distraction; just fire up the computer, open the document, and write a word, any word. And a sentence. And then rewrite it. And rewrite it again. And delete it. And at some point the words will start to come. And if it was actually this easy I wouldn’t miss so many deadlines…

Lessons of War?

What’s the key lesson of the Melian Dialogue? The dominant tradition has been some sort of variant on Crude Realism, from the perspective of the would-be superior power: justice only between equals, we the strong have the right to dictate and you the weak must comply, and forget all this nonsense about hope. The usual response, from those who reject such a worldview and/or, perhaps more significantly, aren’t in any position to pursue it, is to question and reject the Athenian logic, by detaching it from the authority of Thucydides and pointing to the consequences of their attitude. But of course it is also possible to be one of the Weak and nevertheless accept the logic of the Strong; like the prisoner in Life of Brian who praises the Romans for their strict approach to crime and punishment, or the cow at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there are those who fully accept the right of others to dictate terms and exact obedience.

Or at least there’s one, as I discovered in a paper from Hans Kopp at a workshop yesterday in London on Thucydides Global. Danish socialist politician and classical scholar Hartvig Frisch recommended the Melian Dialogue as essential reading in the schools of all small nations, as a guide to the nature of the world in which they found themselves; arguably this was the motive for his quietism after the Nazi takeover, when he simply turned to classical scholarship and offered no support for the resistance at all; and it certainly informed his arguments at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations when he returned to politics after the war, opposing equal rights for all states and promoting the power of the Security Council and its permanent members’ veto. There was quite a good contemporary cartoon, of which I’m afraid I didn’t get the best of pictures, but you should be able to make out Frisch denouncing the Nazis, then seeing actual Nazis and hastily taking refuge in a book entitled Hellas…

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It is examples like these that make one wonder whether it would be better if people simply stopped reading Thucydides and trying to draw lessons from him; several papers at the workshop more or less suggested this, whether Michael Llewellyn Smith on Venizelos (which offered the fascinating news that the authoritarian regime in Greece led by John Metataxas sought to expunge the Funeral Oration from all Greek schoolbooks, for fear of its subversive potential), Liz Sawyer on the Great Books tradition and ‘Western Civilisation’ in the US, or Christian Wendt on the Thucydides Trap. The partial counterbalance came partly from me, talking about the potential usefulness of the game version of the Melian Dialogue, and more particularly a fascinating account of the Greek dramatisation of the first part of Thucydides, Lessons of War, from its writer John Lignadis – including plenty of video clips so we could at last see how it was staged.

A key theme in many of these discussions, crystallised in Peter Meineck’s contribution to the concluding round table, was the role of identification and involvement. The obvious reason for staging rather than just reading the Melian Dialogue is the possibility of arousing the audience’s sympathies and emotions, especially for the Melians, rather than treating it all as a bloodless intellectual exercise; and one of the things I’d like to do with the game is start gathering data about how people respond to the decisions they’re asked to make – including questions about how they feel about being in the position of Athenians or Melians. While Thucydides continues to generate new possibilities for academic analysis, one of the reasons for this is the capacity of his text to excite engagement and identification beyond the academy – hence, a continuing supply of new receptions.

That being said, probably the most crucial question from the audience was about absence: given its setting, where is Thucydides in Assassins’ Creed Odyssey? My current hypotheses is that he is either an absent presence – i.e. the whole thing is written against him (which is why you have to hang out with Herodotus the whole time) – or that he is all-pervasive, the air that the game breathes or the underlying system according to which its world operates. Anyone out there researched this? Because otherwise I fear I’m going to have to devote some serious time resources to getting to the bottom of this – time that could arguably be better spent pondering the ideas raised in the workshop…

Personal Meaning, Public Legitimation

There’s an interesting contrast of different dynamics of classical influence in two articles that I happened to read this morning. The first is George Monbiot‘s denunciation of capitalism in the Grauniad, in which he mentions an alternative principle of socio-economic organisation he’s been promoting for a couple of years: private sufficiency and public luxury. The more times I see this phrase – I was more sceptical when it first appeared – the more it looks like something derived from classical thought, and in particular the line from Cicero’s Pro Murena that the Roman people hates private luxury but loves public munificence; it’s not just the neat rhetorical antithesis, but also the recourse to value terms like sufficiency and luxury, and the idea that wealth is not good or bad per se, but it depends on whether it’s being deployed for public benefit.

Of course, in lots of ways (some of which I discussed two years ago) the Roman precedent is rather problematic for Monbiot’s agenda; it’s embedded in a system dedicated to the protection of the private property of the wealthy, in which the regulation of their use of that wealth is limited to trying to leverage their need for popular approval and acclamation – Cicero, one suspects, would be an enthusiastic advocate of libertarian arguments for minimal taxation so the rich could choose their own approach to philanthropy.

But this doesn’t matter for Monbiot’s project: he doesn’t credit the idea to Cicero or anyone else in any article that I’ve seen (so its intellectual origins remain uncertain), and he doesn’t attempt to bolster its credibility with appeals to historical precedent or timeless values. His advocacy is based on common sense and logic; if everyone is to enjoy the same private luxuries as everyone else, you end up with an endlessly sprawling Los Angeles, so doesn’t it make more sense to provide most things for the use of everyone? Cicero may not have approved of wealth taxation for the public good – but that doesn’t mean his idea can’t be repurposed for the present.

Perhaps this strikes me as interesting simply because I read Monbiot’s piece shortly after looking at a hilariously terrible article on ‘The Trump Doctrine’ by former foreign policy adviser Michael Anton – yes, he of the ‘Publius Decius Mus’ pseudonym. You might think that Trumpian foreign policy is driven by ignorance, vanity, mood swings, insularity and vacuous right-wing slogans, but, Anton is here to tell you, that’s because you lack the sophistication to discern not only its underlying philosophical coherence but its fundamental necessity, returning to harmony with nature and natural human instincts rather than hubristically trying to remake the world.

Right. Many years ago, someone demolished the claim of one of those pseudo-archaeologists that the layout of a set of temples in SE Asia reflected the stars by showing how you could draw lines between any selection of public monuments, e.g. in contemporary New York, and discern a significant pattern – so long as you selected the monuments carefully, and knew what pattern you were looking for beforehand. This is the Anton method, selecting odd quotes from different Trump speeches as having hitherto unrecognised significance, in order to draw lines between them and reveal the whole intricate design.

And even with all this effort, the end result is still a slightly more polished version of “yes, he’s an ignorant nationalist; what’s wrong with that?” This is where classics comes in: to present this ‘doctrine’ as the worthy successor of thinkers like Xenophon and Aristotle, and as a reflection of eternal and universal truths. After all, nationalism is a feature of human nature, as Aristotle tells us – there are always insiders and outsiders, citizens and subjects and foreigners, and it is simply natural to side with your own kind against the rest. “You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, Horace said, but it keeps on coming back.” Athens and Sparta could occasionally unite against a common foe, but their primary drive was to distinguish themselves from one another and pursue their own interests. Only empires attempt to be multi-ethnic, and we all know that empires are BAD.

Love of one’s own extends beyond the family to the clan, to the tribe, and to the nation. Human beings have always organized themselves around some concept of civic friendship that takes the bonds of family and extends them outward—but not indefinitely. On a fundamental level, politics is about banding together to do together what can’t be done (or done well) alone. So there will always be nations, and trying to suppress nationalist sentiment is like trying to suppress nature: It’s very hard, and dangerous, to do.

‘The nation’ is a natural and enduring object that always arouses such sentiments, whether it’s nations of a few tens of thousands in classical Greece or nations of hundreds of millions in the modern world? Historically, of course this is nonsense, but of course that’s not the point; such arguments start from an ideological position and then hunt around for some legitimising authority – and the old “ever since the days of Aristotle/Thucydides/Xenophon” routine still works better than anything.

One could argue that both Anton and Monbiot are mobilising and reinterpreting classical ideas for present political purposes, and in doing so both are thoroughly anachronistic. But Monbiot makes no claims about the past, nor seeks to draw any legitimacy from it; the sole test of his idea is whether it works in the present. Anton’s argument, on the other hand, is thoroughly historical, offering an account of Ancient Greece and of the ideas of its thinkers in order to establish that these represent the eternal nature of humans and human society – and so the fact that it’s all unhistorical nonsense matters rather more.

Bunny Business

One does have to admire, in a teeth-gritting sort of way, the unscrupulous ingenuity of university press offices: selling a story about the discovery of a rabbit leg bone* at Fishbourne villa dated to the first century CE** by linking it to the Easter Bunny, despite the fact that the earliest mention of the Osterhase comes in an early modern German text and no one has ever suggested either that it was a Roman custom or that it originated in Britain. All credit to Esther Addley in the Grauniad for dutifully summarising all the quotes from the academics, including “this very early rabbit is already revealing new insights into the history of the Easter traditions we are all enjoying this week” from the project leader, Naomi Sykes, and then adding a note of scepticism at the end.

The interesting aspect of this story has been the number of people responding on the Twitter with words to the effect of “didn’t we know this already?” Simple answer: we used to think we did – the rabbit was always included in the list of what the Romans brought to Britain, including in Ladybird books and similar introductions – but then realised that there wasn’t any actual evidence. Of course the Romans in Italy kept rabbits (having brought them back from Spain after their military campaigns there), and agricultural writers like Varro offer plentiful information about how lucrative it can be to have a rabbit warren on one’s suburban villa (it’s one of the elements of the new-fangled get-rich-quick-in-morally-dubious-manner pastio villatica, about which I have recently published a paper) – and so the assumption was naturally made that this must be the obvious means whereby the non-native rabbit made it to Britain as well. Except that no rabbit bones were discovered on Roman sites in Britain, unlike elsewhere, and it was only in the Norman period that we suddenly have copious records of rabbit warrens attached to manorial estates.

So, Normans not Romans – except that the message never got through to anyone who didn’t spend their time studying the subject. It’s comparable to the “whaddya mean there were black people in Roman Britain?!?” controversy of a few years back; academics were amazed that this was news to anyone, and everyone else was amazed at the very idea. It’s revealing of the dominance of out-moded conceptions in most people’s view of the past, and of the tendency to assume the dynamic role of the Romans in bringing civilisation to the barbarians in every possible instance – an assumption shared by earlier historians, simply taking a list of non-native-things-associated-with-the-Romans as their starting point, before they actually examined the evidence for the fauna of Roman Britain.

Without the spurious Easter tie-in, it’s not clear that this is much of a story: the Romans did after all introduce not rabbits but A rabbit (who may well have been a pet), and there have been finds of rabbit bones at other pre-Norman sites, just not in the sorts of quantities that would offer good reason to change the settled view that rabbits were not established as a species in Britain until the 11th century. Except that few people knew that was the settled view, and are now even less likely to take it on board. Personally, to offer my Easter tie-in, I blame Monty Python.

*Strictly speaking, the identification of a rabbit leg bone that was actually discovered in 1964, but who’s counting?

**Giving Radio 4 the opportunity to demonstrate complete ignorance of the precision of dating methods by announcing it was dated to 1 AD, which left me wondering whether there was exciting new evidence of Roman settlement before the Claudian invasion, before realising what must have happened.

Constant Craving

Change. War. Violence. Unpredictability. Competition. Malevolence. Food. Music. The Rangers in the universe of Babylon 5. Inter-ethnic slaughter. Death. And that no one cares a whit about the Armenians.

This is a precis of the search results for “the one constant in human history”. Add ‘Thucydides’ to the mix, and the themes narrow down to war, violence, and human nature – which doesn’t, however, get me any further in tracking down the source of the specific quote I’m looking for: “Human nature is the one constant through human history. It is always there.” Google that, and you get a large number of low-rent quote sites, a number of annoying motivational posters, and regular blogs from one Earl Heal for the Daily Republic, a local news site in California, who trots out the same set of quotes about the glories of classical political institutions on almost every occasion.It’s not actually Thucydides, but someone’s gloss on the to anthropinon line – but whose? Googling the exact phrase produces nothing; but the words and the sentiments are so vague and commonplace that googling anything else produces far too many hits, none of them very helpful. There was a point where I got quite excited about someone quoting Richard Schlatter’s classic 1945 article on ‘Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides (Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 3 (June, 1945), 357): “The idea of an unchanging human nature, the constant element in history…” – but that’s not the exact phrase, and how would that then have found its way in a garbled from onto a small number of websites peddling motivational quotations?

Without having the time to pursue it in depth – I really, really should be finishing an article, which is of course why my rate of posting in the blog has gone up – I am rather struck by the importance of this idea for the Australian League of Rights, a virulently anti-communist and anti-semitic organisation, whose founder, Eric Butler, offers the statement as definitive proof that collective organisation goes against eternal human nature and therefore the will of the Creator (see here, if you really want to). But no mention of Thucydides…

Smite the Sounding Furrows!

Since it more or less coincided with his decision to read the whole of that old warhorse, Tennyson’s Ulysses, at a meeting of the Bruges Group, hard-line Brexity Spart Mark François’s quotation of Pericles – “Freedom is the sole possession of those who have the courage to defend it” – at a Brexit rally on Official Leaving Day has gone relatively unnoticed, except of course by me. It did seem significant that this is the A.S. Way version of the Funeral Oration, as featured on various war memorials but not in any published translation of Thucydides (see Liz Sawyer‘s account); rather as the most obvious source of the poem is Judi Dench from Skyfall, so it seems more likely that the MP has been visiting the Bomber Command memorial rather than leafing through the Peloponnesian War.

Two minor additions this morning. The first is to note that it’s actually a mis-quote, and perhaps a significant one: Way’s original has “freedom is the sure possession…”, whereas François makes the more exclusive claim that only those who fight for freedom are entitled to it. He’s not the only person to do this on social media, and one might suggest that in the military and veteran circles where this line is often quoted, it’s a readily comprehensible mental step. The second is that, as I discovered in checking this, François has used the line several times in Parliament, in his erstwhile role as Armed Forces Minister. This was too late to appear in Liz’s survey of Thucydides quotes in British and US politics; I’m not sure if she’s done an update that I’ve missed, but given that her main conclusion was the marginal status of Thucydides in the UK compared with the US, it is interesting that at least in this context things are changing slightly. I am not saying that it’s a good thing…

One Text to Rule Them All

In a second-hand bookshop in Salisbury, in the year 1965 in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, there was once a Book.* There were of course many other books there, but only this one merited the capital letter: The Fifth Book of Thucydides, edited with a short introduction and notes by C.E. Graves, MA, Fellow and late Classics Lecturer of St John’s College, Cambridge, and published by Macmillan & Co. of London in 1891 (reprinted 1899, 1908).** History does not record why Zillah Shelling chose to leaf through this particular book, but she did so, and was struck by a series of curious annotations in an unknown script that a former owner had added to the pages, including one long one at the very back, as well as by one of the names written on the flyleaf: J.R.R. Tolkien. Intrigued, she wrote to Tolkien to ask whether the inscriptions were indeed his work, and he replied in a letter of 20th July:[image error]

The letter is of course familiar to Tolkien scholars as early evidence for his interest in non-classical languages, but I haven’t come across any discussion of its significance for the reception of Thucydides (and there’s no mention of Thucydides in a recent call for papers on Tolkien and the Classics). Most obviously, it’s useful evidence for the status of Thucydides as a high-level Greek text in British public schools in the early 20th century, or at least at King Edward’s School, Birmingham. My immediate thought was that Tolkien’s memory might have been a little faulty, as it seemed more likely that this was a general prize for Greek with the set text changing regularly, but no: there was indeed such a prize, Bishop Lightfoot’s Thucydides Prize, named after Joseph Barber Lightfoot, theologian, Scholar and later Bishop of Durham, who had been a pupil there in the 1830s and 1840s. Now, I really don’t have time at the moment to go down this particular rabbit-hole, but a quick internet search suggests that, while Lightfoot’s writings focused on the Pauline epistles and the Apostolic Fathers, he did have a habit of invoking Thucydides now and again, whether on the subject of human nature or to excuse Paul’s occasional grammatical infelicities when his thoughts became too profound for language adequately to express.

John Claughton, who was Chief Master at KES 2006-16 but, much more importantly, won the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize in 1975, tells me that it was one of a long list of prizes that reflected the great classical traditions of the school since the 1840s (and Yuddi Gershon says that in his not too distant day there was a rather battered photocopy of topics still going the rounds). Whereas most of these prizes involved the writing of a prize essay (and the Enoch Powell Prize for Biblical Hebrew, according to Yuddi, simply involved recitation), the Thucydides Prize was a rigorous exam, with a mixture of translation and commentary, focused on one book (John studied Book 1). Even in the mid 70s, many of the prizes on the list were competed for by at best one or two pupils; by the turn of the century, the prize essay had been almost entirely squeezed out by the decline of classics and curriculum pressures, and the extended essays written by students studying the IB today are now on very different topics.***

As Hamish Williams notes in the blogpost linked above, the general assumption in accounts of Tolkien’s literary influences is that his interest in classics – the subject he started at Oxford, after his intensive training at KES – was rapidly displaced by a focus on Norse, Anglo-Saxon and other non-classical languages; further, unlike some of his contemporary authors of imaginative literature, his world-building sought to be complete and self-contained, without references to or evocations of other literature. But that doesn’t preclude such influences – see the recent blog posts by Adam Roberts on Tolkien’s work as Great War literature, here and here – and it’s difficult – at any rate for me – not to start suspecting the unavoidable presence of Thucydides in Lord of the Rings, and above all that of the ubiquitous Melian Dialogue, the heart of the very book that Tolkien studied so assiduously for the Lightfoot Prize.

After all, power and how different people respond to it lies at the heart of the whole epic. Just as Thucydides’ account shows, coming into the possession of vast power is almost invariably corrupting; a whole series of characters are tested according to whether or not they are instinctively Athenians, susceptible to the lure of the Ring and the logic of superiority (including the claim that their dominance will be good for everyone). A Galadriel or a Gandalf can recognise the hidden dangers of the Athenian perspective, the way that it is ultimately self-defeating, and so decline the power in order to remain themselves; plenty of others either seek to seize the power without recognising the peril, like Boromir, or fall into the despair and despondency that is the inevitable result of adopting the Realist view of the world. Only a few exceptionally ordinary individuals can both wield the Ring and remain Melians at heart, rejecting the relentless logic of Realism and the superiority of might over right, and continuing to believe in Hope and the possibility of victory against the odds.

I’m well aware that demonstrating, rather than vaguely sketching in a suggestive manner, a link between Thucydides’ account and these episodes requires a lot more close reading, that I don’t remotely have time for at the moment. It’s both the genius and the enduring frustration of the Melian Dialogue that it is so flexible and vague, so amenable to every possible analogy. But can it really be a coincidence that a character called Melian appears in the Silmarillion – the mother of Luthien Tinuviel? Not, one may surmise, when her magical protection of the realm of Doriath, the Girdle of Melian, is described in these terms: “Its magic mazes of mists prevented anyone from entering the kingdom without her or Thingol’s consent, as long as they were less powerful than her.” The strong seize the Silmarils, the weak are swallowed beneath the waves…

*I owe this reference to @Megillus on the Twitter, who helpfully posted the screen shots from Tolkien’s Selected Letters, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien, of which this is no. 272.

**Of course, without being able to examine the actual copy, this is a guess, but the title matches the one mentioned in the letter exactly, and the publication dates fit very well.

***I am available to be patron of any campaign to restore the Lightfoot Prize on some footing. In the meantime, I’m extremely grateful to John and Yuddi for their contributions to this blog post.

Citations Needed

A passing thought, largely as a distraction from the fact that the paper I’m currently supposed to be writing is going absolutely nowhere; the idea is that writing anything may get the creativity flowing, or at least an ability to construct vaguely intelligible sentences… I’ve always felt rather uncomfortable when discussion on the Twitter turns, as it sometimes does, to condemnations of self-citation, because this is something I seem to end up doing quite a lot; not, honestly, as a means of self-promotion or gaming citation indices, but simply in order to supply a reference to discussion of a point or a topic that hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, been discussed elsewhere. Yes, there is an obvious risk that I’ll cite myself just because I’m more familiar with my work, rather than taking the trouble to seek out other relevant material, but in many cases I really don’t think there is anyone else.

It’s a particular hazard, I guess, of my habit of working out a research theme through a whole series of loosely-connected papers, produced over several years for a variety of conferences and other occasions; each one builds on previous ones, which makes more sense than repeating the same material multiple times but does lead to embarrassingly egocentric footnotes and bibliographies. It hadn’t occurred to me until now to think that it might also be rather annoying for readers, to feel forced to wade through a whole series of different pieces of varying degrees of obscurity, rather than being able to satisfy their curiosity with a single substantial article – but if I did that, I would have to turn down a lot more invitations, or – worse – accept invitations and then refuse to participate in the publication. Which would be much less work, but otherwise very uncollegial and ungrateful.

The real problem for me with this approach is that of sequencing; when I want to reference paper A in paper B, but it then appears that A isn’t going to appear in time. The most obvious recent case is the article that was published just this morning, on the idea of frugalitas in Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum and Roman economic thinking, in I Quaderni del Ramo d’Oro (see here). This was originally given as part of a fascinating conference on Roman ideas of frugality, some years ago; a few years later I developed some of the points for another conference paper, and cited the expected publication of the former in the anticipated conference volume. Several years after that, last autumn, already getting a little concerned that B looked as if it might appear before A, I got the news that the reviewers weren’t keen on A and so it wasn’t going to appear at all in the volume, whenever that might eventually appear.

Normally I’d have felt miserable for a few days and then moved on – but the non-appearance of A would create serious problems for B, implying the need for a serious rewrite and expansion of something that was already not too far off the word limit. Thankfully an alternative presented itself, and a less substantial rewrite of A saw it accepted by this online journal of anthropological approaches to classical antiquity – and the fact that it’s online may well mean that this gets noticed more than most of my stuff! The ease of the process suggests that I might take this route for one or two other things that have for different reasons never appeared; not that they will shake the world of scholarship, but they do arguably have at least a few points of interest.

And in the meantime I need to be more cautious about citing my own allegedly forthcoming work, in case it turns out not to be forthcoming after all. It is a bit of a pain, if the only alternatives are then to self-plagiarise by reproducing substantial chunks of material, or to have no reference at all. What I really want to do is imitate the approach of N* N* T*leb, whose recent book Skin in the Game, I happened to notice, abandons traditional citations linked to specific points in the text, and instead has a list of further reading for different themes. This is of course a total pain for a passing Thucydides scholar who thinks that the author’s claim about Thucydides’ views on courage look like complete twaddle but would like to check an exact reference for it – but I don’t imagine for a moment that the author is concerned about the inconvenience of academics who do not have any skin in the game of making lots of money from dramatic but unsupported assertions, as he repeatedly notes. (citation: Skin in the Game, Allen Lane 2018).