Neville Morley's Blog, page 36

Thermopylae on Thames

The great advantage of classicists getting involved in the analysis of contemporary political rhetoric, given that it seems to be full of classical references at the moment (Johnson going on about Punic terms, the die-hard fanatics of the E”R”G – yes, the lunatic fringe’s lunatic fringe – going under the name of the Spartans, a Tory MP called David Jones citing chunks of Tacitus, including Latin, in a meeting of the influential 1922 Committee) is that they’re highly sensitive to nuance, allusion, and the history of reception of different figures, ideas and phrases. The disadvantage of classicists getting involved is that they’re highly sensitive to nuance, allusion etc etc. In other words: it’s not that these references are imaginary, but perhaps they aren’t as important as we tend to think they are. Or at least not as important to others, including those who made them in the first place, as they are to us, seeing classical antiquity yet again being besmirched by its appropriation by people with distasteful and dangerous politics.

I mean, yes, it’s mildly annoying, as well as extremely silly, that the old Thermopylae trope is being wheeled out to heroise bloody-mindedness and characterise political debate as life-or-death struggle – but it seems a lot less toxic than when Generation Identity and their ilk use it to legitimise racist Clash of Civilisation ideas. It feels to me more in the vein of the ‘tales from Plutarch’ image of Sparta – my grandmother’s fondness for the ‘boy and fox’ story – and, while it coincides with connections between some of the E”R”G and Steve Bannon’s would-be global insurgency, likewise fond of classical war motifs, my immediate reaction is that it’s unlikely to be the basis for that developing relationship (or even mentioned), and – unlike the recent reference to “cultural Marxism” from another right-wing Tory MP, Suella Braverman – unlikely to be an imitation of the rhetoric of that insurgence, but rather indigenous, from the same tradition that references Lysander et al in regimental songs and old school values.

It may be a joke to them, but the Spartan stuff is also the mythology that legitimises their do-or-die brinkmanship and their wannabe he-man nationalism. Play and allusion can help you say things (to yourselves and others) that if articulated wouldn’t survive scrutiny.

— Tim Whitmarsh (@Twhittermarsh) March 28, 2019

Yes, but… One obvious reason for questioning whether ‘Sparta’ works as a dog whistle in this manner, summoning up the values of aggressive masculinist nationalism and imperialist nostalgia for those who have ears to hear, is that Britain already has a whole raft-load of socially-sanctioned myths, focused above all on WWII but to a lesser extent evoking simulacra of an idealised British Empire, global role etc. – you don’t need Sparta in order to say such things (Jones’ evocation of Tacitus – leaving aside the fact that various other MPs noted in response that the rebellious Britons were slaughtered – at least claims some relevance to an imaginary British Identity). This isn’t about the West versus the Asiatic hordes, it’s not about the Defence of Civilization; it’s a way of over-dramatising reckless stubbornness, presenting a decision to disagree with party leadership as noble self-sacrifice.

There are lots of reasons to worry about these clowns and their disproportionate influence on current debates. A few classicising references isn’t one of them…

Lawful Neutral?

If what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If what you have is a copy of Thucydides, everything looks like the Melian Dialogue.

Sometimes, this is a great advantage: Thucydides offers a way – definitely not the only way – of seeing new connections between things, and asking new questions through a process of comparison and contrast. This was the way things turned out at Queen Elizabeth School, Crediton, yesterday, where Lynette Mitchell and I were running our first pilot session with Hattie Andrews from The Politics Project; the students had great fun playing what’s become known as the Peg Game – basically, the Peloponnesian War considered as Rock, Paper, Scissors – which then led perfectly into consideration of different examples of unequal power relationships, setting things up for next week’s exploration of the Melian Dilemma choose-your-own-adventure game. The only thing we could have asked for was an extra twenty minutes for discussion.

There were also some remarkable bits of strategic ingenuity and innovation within the simple rules of the game: the student who worked out that the way not to lose was not to play, and declared himself Switzerland; the various budding imperialists who focused on avoiding rivals of similar strength while hoovering up the small fry; and the future World Empress who subjugated a few such smaller players and then sent them out to conquer others on her behalf. All of which offered yet more material for debate about how power can and should be used, and how the powerful tend to behave, moving backwards and forwards between Thucydides’ account, historical reality, and the present.

The reason this works is that it treats Thucydides not as a hammer but as a crowbar: it doesn’t nail things shut by providing The Answer about how the world works, but opens them up so they can be examined. It’s the polar opposite of the annoying habit of ascribing any vague statement about power and weakness to Thucydides, as if that instantly confers legitimacy (or indeed sense). Case in point: various people on the Twitter claiming this week that Trump’s latest incoherent babbling is referencing the Melian Dialogue:

….must stay strong and fight back with vigor. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country. The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them. Be strong & prosper, be weak & die! Stay true….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2019

Yeah… The claim of Sebastian Gorka that Trump can intuit Thucydidean insights without actually reading any seems to carry more weight than that interpretation. Or, indeed, the hilarious assertion of Victor Davis Hanson, in his new book The Case for Trump, that Trump’s relentless focus on success and esteem as the only measure of value and the only thing anyone should care about echoes Thucydides’ distinction between prophasis and aitia – pay no attention to what people claim, but only to the real motives.

It’s the usual underlying two-step of Thucydides’ contemporary image: content/sensibility (the world is harsh and pitiless, only the strong survive) and authority/insight (only a few really get it, and see the world as it really is), each reinforcing the other – so that attaching oneself to Thucydidean sentiments is naturally taken to imply Thucydidean authority. Dismissing high-minded professed motives and seeing everything in terms of power and interest is ‘Thucydidean’, therefore Trump is Thucydidean; Thucydides is right, therefore Trump is right. It’s just the way things are, once you strip away your illusions and liberal prejudice.

It’s just a coincidence, but I was remined of another recent exchange on the Twitter, picked up by the indefatigable Thucydides bot:

Has anyone done a D&D alignment chart for Greek prose authors? Herodotus is 100% chaotic good, and Thucydides is lawful evil. Thinking about Xenophon – might be chaotic neutral…

— Stefano Frullini (@saxeusque) March 12, 2019

Okay, so the idea of alignments in D&D is widely agreed to be rather confused and silly, as illustrated by the fact that the rules have changed quite dramatically from edition to edition – and did anyone ever play the AD&D 2nd edn rule that acting out of alignment could lose you experience points? Such crude categories never serve adequately to characterise our own complexities, or those of beloved characters, but they’re always useful for dividing up the rest of the world and giving bits of it a good kicking.

It turned out that the main motive behind Stefano’s label for Thucydides was a sense of the malevolence of his prose style; which is not unreasonable in some ways (yes, Thucydides clearly wants his readers to suffer as a means to personal growth) but questionable if it’s meant as a description of what little we can discern of his moral and philosophical outlook. ‘Lawfulness’: okay, there is certainly a horror of chaos and the collapse of moral order, so not chaotic, but there’s also scepticism about the actual operations of Greek political institutions, which might point more towards neutrality. (Similarly, I assume that labeling Herodotus as Chaotic is because of his willingness to relativise customs – but his commitment to Greek political order is unmistakable also). ‘Evil’, though – selfishness and no respect for life, as opposed to altruism and respect for life? Difficult to reconcile with Thucydides’ clear view of the atrocities of war and the tragedy of human folly – but of course it fits perfectly with the image of Thucydides as someone who doesn’t just characterise the Athenians’ brutal imperialism in dramatic terms but wholeheartedly endorses their world view…

Thucydides appears twice more in Hanson’s book, plus as an opening epigraph. He’s mentioned in passing as one of the many Athenian writers who “dreamed of a better way of consensual government than Athenian radical democracy and its propensity to destroy – or to kill – by a 51% majority vote of the assembly on any given day anyone who might disagree with the supposed majority” – yes, we see what you did there, VDH, and the use of ‘consensual’ to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick. Trump and his “middle-class populism” are here presented as nothing new – but thus part of the noble tradition of Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and of course Thucydides (and in subsequent paragraphs Achilles, Ajax, Augustus, Martin Luther, Dirty Harry, and The Wild Bunch).

Secondly, Hanson acknowledges that critics have compared Trump to classical demagogues, including Cleon, “the bete noire of the aristocratic Thucydides’ masterful history” – but then turns this into a positive: “to ancient historians” – clearly distinguished from these carping critics – the speeches of rabble-rousers like Cleon and thugs like Catiline are models of rhetorical power and directness, as “those who cannot speak to a crowd cannot become demagogues”. The epigraph to the Introduction had likewise invoked Cleon as an implicit model, with his words from the opening of the Mytilene Debate: “ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows”.

Shorn of context – Hanson doesn’t at this point explain who Cleon son of Cleaenetus was, but simply launches into a description of Trump launching his campaign in 2015, albeit with the rather muddled classical analogy that “he postured like Caesar easily crossing the forbidden Rubicon and forcing an end to the old politics as usual” – this is deliciously ambiguous. Is he really describing the superhumanly gifted Trump as ‘ordinary’? Or quietly admitting that Trump’s great gifts may not entirely suit him to managing public affairs? Or simply suggesting parallels between the populist rhetoric of both men – both members of the elite who made considerable mileage out of posing as men of the people? It’s a phrase that seems to have its cake and eat it, simultaneously appealing to those who take it at face value as an attack on the failed politics of the Beltway elite (the way the quote is normally deployed on Twitter) and those who regard Trump with condescension (Hanson makes no bones about the “lowbrow, sometimes crude tone and content” of Trump’s “stream-of-consciousness talk”).

Contradiction? Only insofar as it’s one which Hanson himself is uniquely qualified to resolve. His first chapter explicitly presents The Two Americas as an echo of Athens v Sparta, sophisticated coastal elites versus rough unlettered rural folk, with the majority of Greek poleis rooting for the later. Hanson presents himself as the detached observer, who lives among the real people of the countryside on his ancestral estate but knows his way around the world of the city – and so his choice to side with the ‘Spartans’ is based on full knowledge and understanding of both sides, not the ignorance of knowing no other way of life (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well). Indeed, it’s surely not too much of a stretch to suggest that his depiction of a divided America is Thucydidean not only in its chosen tropes but in authorial self-conception: he sees events from both sides with scrupulous objectivity, and ultimately favours the stability of Sparta; he is a man who stays out of politics and does not seek power, but recognises, even as he recoils from it, the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness; Cleon’s methods are not those of Thucydides’ class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist.

This Thucydides is Chaotic Evil: dedicated (even if just as cheer-leader) to the overthrow of the existing order and the triumph of individualism and naked self-interest. We are already well into the period of stasis, with the political culture broken beyond repair (by the actions of the enemy, of course); and so, as Thucydides described and this modern Thucydides exemplifies, every action is praiseworthy insofar as it benefits one’s own faction and hurts the enemy, and reckless vulgarity and self-interest are redefined as the traits of an off-putting Homeric hero…

No Direction Home

Every so often, the tireless labour of the Thucydides Bot – someone recently referred to it as Sisyphean, and in the midst of the current spate of misattributions being tweeted out by accounts with apparently Islamic and/or Indian sub-continental identities, that doesn’t feel too far off – throws up something valuable. Generally this means a new misattribution with an interesting back story, but very occasionally there’s something even more useful. I’m still waiting to find time to investigate Cornelius Castoriadis’ book on Thucydides, force and law (or might and right), partly because it looks like the source of a misattribution that’s recently become quite prominent – “either war or equanimity, you have to choose”, or variants thereof – but also because I wasn’t aware of its existence until I started tracking down the misquote. This morning brought a reference that will be very useful if I ever get round to writing a half-planned piece on Thucydides read through the lens of exile literature:

To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.

Don’t bother looking for it in Thucydides – nor on Twitter, where the couple of tweets this morning have now disappeared, perhaps as a result of my correction. It’s actually from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951), a collection of aphorisms (rather lengthy aphorisms, it must be said) dating from the previous decade or so. This is the clsing paragraph of number 51, from 1945:

Authors settle into their texts like home-dwellers. Just as one creates disorder by lugging papers, books, pencils and documents from one room to another, so too does one comport oneself with thoughts. They become pieces of furniture, on which one sits down, feeling at ease or annoyed. One strokes them tenderly, scuffs them up, jumbles them up, moves them around, trashes them. To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home. And therein one unavoidably generates, just like the family, all manner of household litter and junk. But one no longer has a shed, and it is not at all easy to separate oneself from cast-offs. So one pushes them to and fro, and in the end runs the risk of filling up the page with them. The necessity to harden oneself against pity for oneself includes the technical necessity, to counter the diminution of intellectual tension with the most extreme watchfulness, and to eliminate anything which forms on the work like a crust or runs on mechanically, which perhaps at an earlier stage produced, like gossip, the warm atmosphere which enabled it to grow, but which now remains fusty and stale. In the end, authors are not even allowed to be home in their writing.

Lots to unpack here. Any hint of a Thucydides connection? I’ll have to consult someone who’s more familiar with this material, but my initial reaction is: nope. Except that the line was used as a section heading in an article by Panos Christodoulou on ‘Thucydides Philosophistoricus (Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, no 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 151-167. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.07 – for some reason WordPress won’t let me link to the online pdf), which notes that exile enabled Thucydides to gather material and also offers the hypothesis “that in 5.26 Thucydides makes an indirect allusion to the fact that a life of quietude, which liberates the eminent thinker from engagement in political life, is the path leading to intellectual production.” The argument seems to me on first reading to be somewhat speculative (especially the attempt at linking Thucydides to the Socratic gang), but it’s certainly interesting, and worth another read at some point – even if it is, quite inadvertently, responsible for someone thinking that Adorno quote is actually from Thucydides…

O Frabjous Day!

I’ve just highlighted 8th March 2020 in my calendar, to make sure that I prepare properly for next year’s Thucydides Day. I must admit that I had not previously spent any time wondering why, despite his undeniable continuing influence in many areas of modern life, Thucydides fails to gain the level of attention and respect offered to Books, Martin Luther King, Women etc. Yes, one can imagine the ways in which one might celebrate it – very bitter chocolate brownies (probably with chilli), neat gin, Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s The Dead Flag Blues on repeat – but it’s not something one would choose to event. However, it turns out that someone has already invented it.

Yes, the great French thinker Auguste Comte proposed, in 1849, a Positivist Calendar, with 13 months of 28 days each, plus an extra day each year to commemorate the dead (Periclean epitaphios influence? I’ll have to look into that), with an additional Festival day every leap year to celebrate great women. Naturally Year Zero is 1789. Months and days are named after great figures in history (almost entirely male, inevitably) – and the 11th day of the month of Aristotle is Thucydides (since all months have 28 days, the 11th Aristotle is equivalent to our 11th March). Next year I will be fully prepared to break out the brownie mix…

Flat Earth Studies

It’s the annual meeting of the International Society for Dinosaur Research. Concerned by a fall-off in student recruitment, as young people increasingly look to more relevant, future-orientated degree programmes that offer a better chance of a job at the end, and shaken by its image as a hotbed of sexism and dodgy relationships with students (as seen on Friends), the Society has organised an open discussion of the future of the discipline. One delegate takes the microphone. “Our discipline was founded on the exploration of God’s miraculous creation, but we’ve increasingly abandoned those sacred values, and put off many students, through an emphasis on autonomous natural processes and time-spans of millions of years in a way that directly contradicts Scripture!” As members of the panel interject, and someone tries to take the microphone away: “You are betraying our heritage! We are the dinosaurs!”

Of course it wouldn’t happen. Yes, there are palaeontologists and other scientists who are also committed creationists – I was at university with some – but they keep their beliefs carefully separate from their work, for fear of discrediting the latter. Yes, there are plenty of people out there who reject the mainstream scientific perspective, and some of them have very deep pockets – but you keep them out of the profession, and resist attempts at getting you to skew your activities in return for funding, because their beliefs are incompatible with the basic assumptions of the modern discipline. Geologists don’t accept flat-earthers, however fervent and sincere their convictions. Archaeologists don’t rewrite their mission statements and teaching programmes to appeal to believers in ancient aliens.

In the humanities, however – and apparently especially in classical studies – old ways of thinking never completely die. The tradition of all the dead generations, especially the nineteenth-century ones, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. The charge-sheet against ‘Western Civilization’ as a concept is lengthy, even before we get onto the crimes that have been committed in its name and the causes for which it’s been offered in justification. And yet it persists; not, admittedly, as something that any respectable scholar would actually deploy to support their analysis – it’s not a ‘theory’ like Marxism or post-structuralism – but as a wider discourse that is assumed to pervade and inspire all our professional activities, and certainly to justify them. “We are Western Civilization” – and the crisis of the discipline is, from this viewpoint, fully explained by its failure to acknowledge this basic truth, seeking to change with the times rather than stick to its traditions.

Why this persistence? It’s over-determined, of course. The obvious reason is that humanities subjects don’t have paradigms in the manner of the sciences (and that’s true whether you see scientific paradigms through the lens of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Latour or whoever); that is, intellectual frameworks within which all research takes place and all knowledge is constituted at a given point. Rather, we have a cornucopia of theories and methodologies, and fuzzy values and assumptions, which move in and out of fashion according to how far different scholars find them useful and can make them persuasive; some of these are in due course abandoned, or at least not mentioned in polite company – but they’re rarely if ever exploded or demolished, just neglected or forgotten. In some respects it’s great that we can still read scholarship produced two centuries or more ago and still find it accessible and even useful, that we can think of ourselves if we wish as part of a continuous tradition rather than a series of jerky paradigm shifts. In other respects it’s scary: why isn’t this stuff obsolete and/or incomprehensible? Is there really so little progress in our understanding?

‘Western Civilization’ can’t be destroyed (literally, maybe, but not conceptually) so long as some people continue to find it a useful idea; it will persist as a possible way of interpreting the world, ‘cos that’s how humanities disciplines work. But we then have to ask why so many people within classical studies continue to find it useful and persuasive, rather than pointing and sniggering at anyone who raises it in conversation. External factors: it’s a story that lots of people with power and money want to hear, and a means for classical studies to insist on its contemporary relevance and importance. Internal: it’s an expression of identity, a form of self-aggrandisement, a defence mechanism against accusations that studying long-dead cultures is pretty pointless when our world is burning.

Put another way: it’s a normative interpretation of the history of classical reception, slipping from the historical fact that readings of Greek and Latin classics played a role in the shaping of the modern world (with a definite tendency to exaggerate their importance in this) to the claim or assumption that this was a necessary development. ‘Western Civilization’ is taken to be good; this retrospectively justifies classical antiquity and its study as the fount of this goodness, and then circles back to explain the goodness of modernity as the natural product of its classical roots.

This is a very odd combination of nostalgia – within this pattern of thought, classical studies is conceived as already in decline compared with the good old days, and so too is modern culture because it has less regard for the classics – and the unqualified celebration of the present. The fact that classical antiquity can be seen as a source also of some of the darkest elements of modernity – racism, misogyny etc. – is disqualified as a theme; criticising aspects of either contemporary society or the traditional image and valuation of classical antiquity is a ‘politicisation’, whereas taking the status quo for granted is apparently not. Such discussions are deemed illegitimate because they question the sacred traditions of the discipline and also undermine its conventional claims to respect, attention and funding – which then leaves classics open to continuing mobilisation in defence of the status quo, as an apolitical – because past, and great – support for the claims of Western Civ more generally.

The editor of the reliably awful Quillette tweeted this morning, in the context of publishing a piece by Mary Frances Williams about her perspective on the now-notorious ‘Future of Classics’ session at the meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in January*: “Classicists who hate Western civilisation are almost as painful to watch as venture capitalists who hate capitalism.” If this was a claim about “classicists who hate classical culture”, it would make a degree of sense – though the obvious response, as various people on the Twitter have noted, is that historians of slavery aren’t expected to love slavery. But the casual assumption that classics implies Western Civ and Western Civ implies classics, in perfect harmony and mutual affection, both makes no sense on the surface and completely gives the game away in ideological terms.**

But this leaves us with a problem: given that the idea of Western Civ and its intimate connection to classical antiquity won’t go away, and is indeed being boosted by some very noisy reactionary forces out in the wider world, what do we do when someone – a ‘colleague’ in the broadest sense – starts talking about it? It isn’t just that the concept persists; mention of it always comes equipped with plausible deniability – the fact that white supremacists talk of Western Civ the whole time doesn’t mean that’s what I mean when I use the term – and so objections can always be framed as polemical, ideological and indeed discourteous and unprofessional.

My fictitious dinosaur scientists can afford to laugh at a creationist colleague, which is also the most effective means of undermining such claims within scientific discourse. Claims about Classics And Western Civilization seem to demand a more serious response, given the importance of the issues and given that such views are still relatively mainstream within the discipline – but a serious response immediately loses legitimacy in the eyes of those who see or claim to see disciplinary tradition as apolitical, and it immediately runs up against the norms of professional courtesy according to which we should pretend that everyone is acting with equal good faith and reasonableness.

But even if we assume good faith – that the person talking of the classical roots of Western Civilization is quite innocent of the problematic associations of the term – we’re still allowing that discourse to be normalised if we don’t counter it. Colleagues don’t let colleagues inadvertently bolster the narratives of white supremacy? Even if that means having to interrupt their exposition of the classical equivalent of young earth creationism…

*I haven’t previously written about this, simply because I wasn’t there (and now feel even less inclination ever to attend than I did before). But the news that Sarah Bond is to be censured by the SCS Ethics Committee for acting in a way not becoming to a scholar – a magnificently pompous phrase, that implies a rather limited knowledge of how scholars tended to engage with one another in the past – presumably for interrupting Williams’ ‘We Are Western Civilization’ intervention, demands a response.

**There is of course a reading of this tweet to the effect that, just as venture capitalists who hate capitalism should stop exploiting the system and instead work towards the revolution, so classicists who hate Western Civ should likewise stop drawing on the authority and prestige of the classical and start burning the whole thing down. Except that we get criticised for that too. Clearly the intended message is that the capitalists should accept that it’s the only game in town and abandon their silly moral objections, and likewise classicists should accept their destiny as fanatical initiates of the cult of Western Values.

More Than A Feeling

Last week I was at a fantastic conference in Newcastle on Authority and Contemporary Narratives about the Classics (details here), discussing different aspects of the image and appropriation of the ancient world in the public sphere; Rebecca Futo Kennedy gave the full version of the discussion of the history and problematic politics of ‘Western Civilization’ that she’s been trailing on the Twitter (@kataplexis if you don’t already follow her), and there were fascinating papers on topics like postgraduate blogging, the intersection of ideas on Roman imperialism and Realist international relations theory, concepts of myth in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and whether Livy was a good Wikpedian. As ever, the main problem was that we needed much more time for discussion – well, that, and the fact that I could carry only so many bottles of local craft beer home with me.

I was discussing, in a slightly aimless manner – perhaps because I don’t usually spend so much time talking about raw data – the presence of Thucydides on the Twitter, and the activities of the Thucydides Bot. As always, it’s difficult not to get distracted by the most egregious examples (that wretched ‘scholars and warriors’ quote, especially when accompanied by the daft graduation picture, and some of the funnier examples of new-agey motivational posters (#Thucydides #quote #love #bollocks):

[image error]

But understanding Thucydides references in terms of wider issues of information – whether Twitter is characterised as a marketplace of ideas or an informational ecosystem – needs to encompass the whole range of references. If we see fake quotes as a minor example of misinformation rather than disinformation (not disseminated for malign purposes – and for the most part not disseminated knowingly as fakes), then they may help shed light on the reasons why people are not as critical, or as consistently critical, as they might be.

One persistent theme in research on this topic is that people are not inclined to question things that ‘look right’ – not quite “accepting the first story they hear”, as Thucydides complained, but certainly accepting stories that confirm to their expectations and/or are presented by trusted sources like friends and family – without considering why something ‘looks right’. With Thucydides, of course, there’s a strong temptation to accept quotes that conform to the pervasive image of him as illusionless commentator on war and politics, as the sorts of things he would have said; far more than reliance on external authority (except perhaps GoodReads, as I’ve complained before).

But there’s also the negative factor that it can be difficult to establish the authenticity of a given quotation – even for someone who spends a lot of time working in this area. I’m still in the process of tracking down one recent example, which I think is a paraphrase or remark by the Franco-Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis that has become transmuted into a Thucydides quotation through a process of Chinese whispers, passing from blog to blog and from language to language (French into modern Greek into English). As this is the prompt I needed to engage properly with Castoriadis, but my French is rusty, this may take a while. In the meantime, another quote on the Twitter illustrates the problem nicely:

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.

One person had already seen this and alerted @Thucydiocy. My immediate reaction was that this is perfectly genuine, as I’d definitely seen something like it before – but after half an hour of googling produced nothing but dubious Great Thoughts websites (plus a critique of modern scientific culture published by Princeton; apparently The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology don’t include a failure to reference quotes) I was starting to wonder whether I was mistaken.

It’s the familiar translation problem: if the version being disseminated doesn’t come from any standard translation, it’s a waste of time searching for exact key phrases; instead, I had to switch to searching for key terms – a waste of time, as there are so many discussions of Thucydides using terms like ‘argument’ and ‘reason’ that don’t have anything to do with this quote – and finally to trying to imagine alternative ways of translating what I imagined the original Greek may have said, if this was genuine – and searching for “full force of reason” yielded a passing reference to 4.108, where Thucydides offers a passing comment on cities abandoning their alliances with Athens to surrender to Brasidas:

The usual thing among men is that when they want something they will, without any reflection, leave that to hope, while they will employ the full force of reason in rejecting what they find unpalatable. (Warner version)

I did have a full-back plan – which was simply to skim through all the passages in Thucydides where such a sentiment might be appropriate. I’ll be completely honest, I think it would have taken me a while to get round to this bit – and actually it’s very unusual to come across a quote that isn’t from one of the familiar set-pieces.

What can we conclude from this? My initial reaction was correct – but I came close to thinking that I’d got it wrong. Plenty of people would accept this line because it looks like the sort of thing Thucydides would say, and the process of evaluation is long and tedious even for someone professionally committed to this stuff – but someone who was initially suspicious would probably have concluded, wrongly, that it was fake, because searching for the passage produces only unreferenced, unscholarly sites (plus, passing reference in academic work from a non-historical discipline, which is never a good guide).

I think the crucial issue, for thinking about information and misinformation, is understanding the reasons why we do or don’t accept something at face value, and what we then do about it. The primary goal of @Thucydiocy – given that the task of driving the ‘scholars and warriors’ quote from the face of the earth seems to be quixotic at best – is to interrupt the flow, to raise questions where people might have taken things for granted, to prompt critical enquiry about everything. But, realistically, if it takes me this long to check one Thucydides quote, even drawing on existing knowledge and expertise, I can just imagine how much dodgy stuff I’m letting pass because I’ve already unconsciously assessed it on the basis of my priors, or just because I’m not paying attention…

Shot By Both Sides

Obviously the current febrile atmosphere in British politics lends itself to quotations from Thucydides’ account of the stasis at Corcyra (though I must remember to look up his narrative of the coup of the 400 as well) – but, been there, done that, still deeply depressed by the state of things. Instead, let’s quote mid-C20 Hungarian political and novelist Miklós Bánffy, who in his Transylvanian Trilogy (which I’ve never read, but clearly need to; this reference comes via the Twitter courtesy of @simonahac, as apparently his wife is reading it) looks remarkably as if he’s referencing Corcyra:

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Yes, it’s the ‘Centrists piss EVERYBODY off’ bit – those who presented themselves as reasonable moderates were the first to perish. It’s not an original reading, but it is the first example I’ve stumbled across from this period.There is ongoing sympathy in Thucydides for those who could be termed ‘collateral damage’ from the over-arching conflict, like the Plataeans – and contempt for those, like the Thebans, who take advantage of the situation to pursue their own interests. As I tried to say on BBC Radio 4’s Making History Programme this week – impeded by cold/flu and hefty doses of drugs – the problem with the ‘Thucydides Trap’ idea is that it strips out all the complexity and tries to reduce everything to a single dynamic, ignoring the roles of chance, uncertainty and any number of self-interested smaller players.

I wonder how far this theme is lurking beneath the surface in a newly-published poem – yes, it’s another episode in the very very occasional series of Thucydides-related poetry! (no, intoning the name of Thucydides over some electronic burbling doesn’t count…) – by Rishi Dastidar (see Magma Poetry).

Thucydides eats a macaron

by Rishi Dastidar

Once again we are facing the trap, the sea

which the continental sillies are trying

to claim as theirs rather than everyone’s;

and the old man is exceeding

his birthright by consuming civilizations

like so many macarons after a fast.

He’s indifferent to his conquests

yet obsessed by being conquered,

becoming irrelevant thanks to his desire

for omnipotence, a frog around an eternal

network, trying to enforce its forced meanderings.

You’d struggle too if all you had left

in the afterglow of European time

was a picture of reason subduing force.

Dashtar’s own explanation of the genesis of the poem is that he was visiting Nice at the same time as Emmanuel Macron was commemorating the terrorist attacks there, and was plunged into a deep depression about the state of the world:

I think we’ll avoid a global conflagration in some form in the next 50 years only if we’re very lucky. And if geopolitical amour propre isn’t the cause, a fight over access to ever-scarce resources, or the blow back of people being displaced by climate change, will be.

There seem to be definite echoes of Auden’s 1 September 1939 – “we must suffer it all again” – in the Thucydides Trap age. I’m really not sure who the old man is: war? time? Thucydides himself, driving states into conflict through his own insatiable desire for ever more events that he can explain? But I assume the frog is there to echo the old ‘frogs around a pond’ image of Greek cities around the Mediterranean: we’re all now frogs around the network, getting slowly boiled…

Fables of the Reconstruction

I’ve just published a piece in Epoiesen, the fantastic online journal for creative engagements with history and archaeology, on the Melian Dilemma game and some of the thinking behind it. I’ve been meaning to get round to this for ages – and I’ve been given extra reason to regret not getting my act together sooner, as my fate now is to be completely overshadowed by Assemblage Theory, the brilliant contribution by Andrew Reinhard, published a few days earlier, on his latest musical experiments: exploring different conceptions of the idea of ‘assemblage’ by producing new songs using ‘found sounds’. Go read, go listen. If this piece doesn’t single-handedly exemplify why a journal of wacky historical creativity is an absolute necessity, you are beyond saving.

A major part of the raison d’etre of such an enterprise is of course to provoke a reaction – any reaction.Once I’d got over the ‘awe’ phase, I found that the discussion raised lots of questions in my mind that the music doesn’t really answer. Is the creator playing the role of time and/or other impersonal forces, selecting some sounds for preservation from the total array and thus creating the assemblage, or the role of the archaeologist, interpreting the assemblage and turning it into a more structured form imbued with meaning? The music itself raises questions too; if this is an archaeological assemblage, isn’t it a bit…coherent?

Maybe it’s just because I’m not such a pop traditionalist, but like a bit of dissonance, noise and unexpected silence in my music. In my mind, archaeological music should be more like the Schwarzwaldfahrt album recorded by Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink, in which those giants of European free jazz wandered round the Black Forest with a tape machine, recording themselves duetting with birdsong and using trees, rocks and streams as percussion instruments. We need music that’s actually made using fragments of Dressel 4 amphorae, rather than just echoing the process of putting the fragments back together, or which records the soundscape of an excavation, including the work songs of the toiling students.

But one really great thing about Andrew’s article is that he’s made available the sound files he used for one of his tracks, so that anyone can muck about with them. I’ve spent a happy hour and a half today doing just that (it does help that I’m quite familiar with Audacity, the free editing software). My aim was to produce two tracks. The first, Fables of the Reconstruction, is a sort of tone poem, echoing Charles Mingus’ classic Pithecanthropus Erectus, which depicts the evolution, growing superiority complex, and resultant decline of humanity. The track is intended as a representation of an archaeological interpretation of a site, region or culture in terms of its development and destruction. It offers a rather obvious musical narrative, gradually building complexity up to a point of crisis; it is deliberately coherent, and deliberately quite predictable (at least by my rather random standards and given the time constraints).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwkyv0pftcuj4qz/fables.mp3?dl=0

I really need to have another go at this piece. However, it is really only a means to an end: the real goal is to partially destroy it – deleting substantial sections, distorting others, moving some bits around and out of sync; drawing inspiration from ‘glitch’ music – in order to create a track that represents the ambiguous and fragmentary record that lies behind the processed sounds of Fables… The two (so far) versions of Gaps in the (Material) Record are intended to be much more ambiguous pieces, hinting at structures and themes rather than developing them; of course you can see their relationship to Fables… – but the idea is that they could have been interpreted quite differently, to produce quite different reconstructions.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jvi39yafdrwnzin/gaps1.mp3?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8jacd69d2gx4cr/gaps2.mp3?dl=0

Put another way: the ‘assemblage’ out of which both Andrew and I created our original tracks is one that has already been sorted into neatly organised compartments (musical fragments in the same key and tempo, that can be duplicated and combined). These tracks represent the earlier stage, before the different components have been excavated from their context and immediate relationship to one another…

Bottom line: this is FUN.

Of All Manifestations Of Power…

…restraint impresses men most. Not Thucydides but attributed to him e.g. by former Secretary of State Colin Powell, but it does, as Tim Rood has pointed out, bear a certain resemblance to Nicias’ claim, in the Sicilian Debate, that it’s better to be feared from a distance for what you might do than to put it into action and be found wanting. This directly contradicts the claim of the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue that if they don’t crush the Melians they will be thought weak by enemies and potentially rebellious subjects, and it’s in that context that I’m thinking about this, as – inevitably – no sooner have I developed a full version of The Melian Dilemma game then I start tinkering with it.

Specifically, having spent a lot of time thinking about the Melians and their options, I’ve now turned back to the Athenians. In the original game, they are – oddly? – passive, with the power to bring the Dialogue to an end and decide how it ends but no influence on what direction it takes; that reflects the original text, where they let the Melians offer desperate argument after desperate argument without any sign that they’ll take a blind bit of notice of any of them. They are guaranteed to win, in the historically authentic manner; they can choose to lose, by sailing away. But the most interesting question is whether they can win without having to kill everyone – and that makes things more complicated because it depends on the Melians, rather than being wholly in the Athenians’ control – which is to say, I need to set up the choices and possible outcomes in a more complex manner than hitherto.

At present, the Athenians have the chance to get a Melian surrender if they address the whole people and are reasonably civil to them – a possibility that’s hinted at in Thucydides. Once they’re in private discussions, there’s no chance; the Melian leaders, as in the original, double down on their defiance and wishful thinking. Should there be a possibility of winning them round, and, if so, what do the Athenians need to do to get there: be reasonable and accommodating rather than aggressive and sarcastic, or try to make sure the Melians think rationally rather than indulging in hopeless fantasies (as, arguably, the Athenians try to do in the original)? There’s a case to be made that the Athenians need to hear the Melians out (so, possibility of surrende doesn’t get unlocked until they’ve had several rounds of desperate pleading), but also a case that – after a certain point? – the Melians simply work themselves into a state of righteous indignation and become incapable of listening to reason (so, the Athenians can miss their moment).

I’d be very interested in comments on this question, not least because I’m developing a shorter version of the game for use in classrooms, workshops, corporate training events etc., which needs to be more explicitly organised around the key issues to be discussed; in other words, the Athenian choices need to be more interesting and/or provocative than just ‘carry on listening’, ‘suddenly abandon enterprise’ and ‘bored now, kill them all’. If we think of this as an exercise in negotiation, what are the lessons that it needs to incorporate – which aren’t in Thucydides, because his negotiation fails miserably.

And, yes, in the light of the previous discussion, I do need to build into the main game the possibility that the Athenians lose patience and start the siege – and the Spartans actually turn up and defeat them…

We Belong?

Everybody so often, a student will come up with something that is simply perfect – they may not do it perfectly, but the idea is just so right. This week, it was the student in my Greek Political Thought class who organised their short presentation for a seminar on citizenship around the UK citizenship test; yes, they could have put more emphasis on the analytical side, comparing and contrasting the assumptions inherent in the questions with the assumptions we see in ancient sources rather than just working through the whole of a practice quiz, but it still raised so many important issues in interesting and accessible ways – as well as, for me, offering an insight into how young people think about such things. The complete incredulity among the students that anyone should need to know about Boudicca to qualify for citizen rights – let alone their reaction when I sketched out the old Tebbit Cricket Test – suggests a radically different conception of Britishness from that which continues to dominate public debates.

Of course, this is likely to be at least partly connected to the fact that all but two of the class can take their British citizenship for granted, and had clearly not thought much before about how others might acquire such status – so one of the problems in the seminar was having to explain UK law, then explain how far it reflects a quite different tradition of thought (partly the ‘subjects not citizens’ thing, partly the influence of Roman law and ideas), so that we could then reflect on Greek conceptions and debates, which was what the class was supposed to be about. Yes, this could lead into the “most Greeks took this stuff completely for granted too” point (since we’re considering Greek political thinking, not just the narrower theme of Greek political theory), but we still ended up spending much less time on detailed discussion of ancient sources than planned.

If I do this course again, I’d be strongly inclined to ask the students to devise their own Athenian citizenship test, on the basis of their assumptions about how one should qualify for political rights, and then compare and contrast with both the historical Greek and the actual British realities (whatever the latter is by then). I’ll also make sure we do actually spend sufficient time talking about Lysias, as I’d planned, and the question of whether we get a better sense of the meaning and importance of citizenship if we pay more attention to those who are looking at it from the outside. A few days later I was strongly reminded of the speeches he wrote for non-Athenians, pointing to everything they’d done for the communities while those who enjoyed citizenship by right flouted its norms and damaged their own people through self-interest, when reading a powerful and heart-breaking blog by the ever-thought-provoking Maria Farrell on her feelings, as an Irish citizen living in London, on being told that At Least You Can Leave.

There’s an obvious risk of competitive complaint – is it worse to be terrified of losing one’s job, home, access to medical care etc and being targeted for not being One Of Us, while retaining the right to escape elsewhere in Europe, or to have all the privileges of a native but to lose one’s rights as a European citizen and so feel trapped in an increasingly narrow-minded, xenophobic and angry community?* – when we** really need to be pulling together. The “duty of hope” that Maria’s written about in the past might suggest that we should entertain the possibility that her blog will turn out to be a museum piece, a bit of a bad dream that disappeared in the morning light when unexpected events made the whole Brexit thing go away. But I’m always more inclined to Thucydides’ sarcastic “hope? a great comfort in danger…” position; in which case it’s probably time to start thinking of ways of “prepping” for Brexit in ways that go beyond stock-piling tinned goods and water purification tablets and identifying suitable locations for the fortified stockade in anticipation of needing to fight off bandits, right-wing mobs, zombies etc.***

Things which come immediately to mind… Well, listening to what EU citizens themselves want and need is an obvious one, via organisations like the3million and simply by talking to friends and colleagues; everything we know about the track record of the Home Office points to massive problems with applications for settled status, and any number of miscarriages of justice and acts of malice and stupidity, so moral, financial and any other sort of support will be needed. Assume continuing xenophobia, attacks on people speaking foreign languages (regardless of whether they’re EU or not); we need to be ready to step in and stand by anyone in that position. And more positively, assuming that insular attitudes will just get worse, an ongoing commitment to European cultures and languages, even or especially out in the Brexity wastelands beyond the big cities; film clubs, literature clubs, language classes – clandestine if need be…

We may getting to the point where Classicists for the EU needs to be revived, as Classicists for EU Colleagues and Students, to ensure that they can still feel they belong – and don’t abandon us. As both Lysias and Xenophon observed, from different perspectives, Athens would have been in deep trouble without its metics.

*The former, obviously, but that doesn’t mean the latter is trivial.

**Yes, I’m using “we” in a sense that certainly doesn’t apply to a significant proportion of the British population. And your point is?

***Not necessarily distinct categories.