Neville Morley's Blog, page 37

Snow News Day

If you follow me on the Twitter, you might have noticed the little icon that appears when I post a link to this blog, showing a pile of Greek helmets; the same image appears on the cover of Harloe & Morley, eds., Thucydides and the Modern World (2012). It’s part of the Greek section of the Inter-Allied WWI Memorial at Liège, which also features a long quote from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, which is of course why I first came across it; with its explicit echo of ancient commemorative practices, the pile of empty helmets also evoking a macabre heap of skulls, it’s rather stunning. I’ve not seen it in the snow, so I’m very grateful to Bernard Wilkin, a historian at the Belgian State Archives, who spotted my image and sent over this recent picture…

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Lights! Camera! Thucydides!

Of course it’s an untestable, highly speculative hypothesis, if not downright wishful thinking, that the current unspeakable pantomime of stupidity, deranged ideology and blinkered short-term political self-interest that is the Brexit debate in Parliament – no, go on, Nevs, tell us what you really think – might have been slightly less awful if more people had read and reflected upon Thucydides, especially the Melian Dialogue. It’s been quoted, of course, but usually in the utterly reductive form of an isolated line here and there, rather than engaging with the developed arguments on both sides – the (ultimately delusional) self-confidence of the Athenians about their own power and the predictability of future events, the desperate scrabbling of the Melians to find anything – hope, allies, historical precedent, unicorns – to justify their own irrational unswerving commitments. So maybe what was needed was an accessible version, on the YouTube thing that all the young people are watching these days instead of television…

I’ve been wanting to do this for five years, since the original version of my adaptation was performed in Bristol in November 2013 – and not least because Lorna Hardwick wrote a bit about that performance in her chapter on Thucydidean Concepts in the Handbook on his reception. The student team responsible for that performance did actually film a re-run – and apparently then erased the file by mistake; attempts at getting them to do it again fell on deaf ears, and since then it’s been a problem of trying to get students, rehearsal time and money all to line up in the same place. Finally, in conjunction with the collaboration with the Politics Project, we got the go-ahead (and the money…). With many thanks to the Leventis Trust and the College of Humanities, here we go…

The one positive thing about the delay is that I think the script has got a bit tighter over the years. The staging is pretty well unchanged, aiming to be neutral rather than evoking any specific setting – as I’ve discussed elsewhere, it’s easy to imagine different ways of staging this to draw out different aspects and plug into different debates, but this one is intended to be as open as possible to the audience bringing their own concerns and perspectives to bear. It tries to distil the essence of the rhetorics of power and weakness, just as the different games seek to capture the essence of the situation and its dynamics. The big question – which we’ll be exploring with different groups over the next few months – is whether it works best to open with the video and then tease apart the issues raised through activities, or start with games and use the video to draw everything together.

Perhaps it should depend on the audience and the purpose of the exercise. For Brexit, the key point is of course the additional ending: They Were All Wrong And Made Stupid Decisions, And So They All Died…

They Win Again?

To return to an issue I’ve discussed before: do the Melians have any hope of rescue, if they decide to resist the Athenians? According to the conventional Realist reading, they are simply deluded, grasping at straws (the Spartans will come, the gods will help us, you never know what might happen) rather than accept the reality of their position and the way the world works. Whether Thucydides intended us to believe this – whether here, if not elsewhere, he shares the Athenian respective – is less clear. Certainly the Spartans (let alone the gods) fail to turn up, and there’s no indication in the text that this was even a possibility; we could then assume that T takes this as a given, and wants us to reflect on (among other things) the capacity for the ‘weak’ to start pleading unicorns, or we could assume that he leaves the counterfactual possibility hanging, so we might reflect both on how far the Athenians got lucky (and so were confirmed in their irrational belief in their own omnipotence) and on the question of how much hope is enough to make the Melian gamble worthwhile.

Regardless of what Thucydides himself may have thought, there’s nothing to stop us exploring the implied counterfactual, and I’ve been persuaded by my colleague and collaborator that the Melian Dilemma game ought to include rescue by the Spartans as a possible outcome, even if it’s an unlikely one; after all, they had sent military reinforcements to Melos in the past, and not long after this event they sent Gyllipus and a small detachment to Syracuse, where he rallied them against the Athenians and helped defeat the attempted invasion. So, not unprecedented, not impossible – but exactly how likely was it? Assigning an estimated probability to the event isn’t normal historical procedure – but for the purposes of modifying the game, I do need at least an order of magnitude.

I asked this question on the Twitter and was roundly ignored, apart from one response (for which I’m very grateful):

50% they decide it is a good idea to help, 90% that the omens aren’t right and they can’t leave in time to help

— dylwah (@dylwah) January 23, 2019

These are certainly relevant factors, and there are others (we’ll come back to the issue of numbers). There clearly are reasons why the Spartans might see this as a wise move – as the Melians argue in the Dialogue, sense of obligation to old allies, concern that other allies might lose trust in them, wish to deny tactical advantage to Athenians – even if it’s by no means a sure thing. On the other hand, there must be a real chance that they might fail to act on such a decision – poor omens, yet another religious festival that leads them to delay until it’s too late, logistical problems – and that they are prevented from reaching Melos by Athens and its allies (easier to control access to Melos than to Syracuse?). Finally, even if the Spartans did send forces to Melos, there’s no guarantee of success, even if they sent substantial numbers rather than just a commander and a small detachment.

Can we attach numbers to these factors with any degree of plausibility? We could start with a basic 50% for each: so, chance that Spartan forces make it to Melos, 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.125; chance that Melos is saved, 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.0625. I’d be tempted to give the Spartans slightly more credit – okay, yes, Marathon – and, in the absence of a detailed study of the actual likelihood of them having a religious festival at the relevant time, reduce the chances of them failing to set out to 0.25; on the other hand, perhaps we need to add a choice between a large and small force (50:50?), with the latter having only a 0.25 chance of winning – but a better chance of getting to Melos in the first place?

So, chance of Melian escape version 2: 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.5 (despatch large force) x 0.5 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.5 (victory!) PLUS 0.5 (Spartans decide to help) x 0.75 (Spartans actually set out) x 0.5 (despatch small force) x 0.75 (evades Athenians and reaches Melos) x 0.25 (victory!) = 0.046875 + 0.03515625 = 0.082.

This might of course be refined and modified further, if not indefinitely, but we’re still in the vicinity of under 10%, which is something I can work with for the game. What I’m not sure about is whether this approach has the slightest validity. Any thoughts, anyone?

Thinking, Through Thucydides

The Thucydides Paradox is the way that all the authority of a complex, ambiguous author is used to legitimise a simplistic, reductionist account of his work. The high reputation of Thucydides in historical, political and strategic thought was founded on the opinions of people like Thomas Hobbes or Leopold von Ranke who had meditated long and hard on the intricacies of his account and its relevance to the present – but it’s largely used to confer truisms and dubious sound-bites, like “the strong do what they will”, “there is justice only between equals” or “a rising power always threatens an established power”, with an undeserved gravitas. It’s as if the whole weight of David Bowie’s cultural significance was presented in terms of Let’s Dance; yes, it’s part of the oeuvre, and not exactly unrepresentative, but it’s not the central point or the only thing you really need.* Those Thucydides quotes are likewise genuine enough (unlike some), but at best (the last one) they offer a drastic simplification of his understanding of events, and at worst (the other two) they make the basic error of confusing the artist with his characters.

The most charitable interpretation for such an emphasis on a few isolated quotes** is that these are well-meaning attempts at tackling a genuine problem: we may take Thucydides at his word as a route to better understanding of human affairs, but if the political lessons he offers are accessible only to those with the leisure and inclination to reflect deeply on his entire work, his usefulness is strictly limited. Surely people’s lives will be enriched at least a little bit by encountering the Peloponnesian War equivalents of Life On Mars? and “Heroes”, even if they never get round to The Next Day? Better to read just the Melian Dialogue and the Corcyrean stasis, even out of context, than nothing at all? But of course – to flog the analogy one last time – the claim of most of these ‘lessons from Thucydides’ is not just that you can substitute a single track for a rich, multifaceted body of work but that there’s one specific line in that one song that’s all you really need to know to appreciate its significance…

Escaping the Thucydides Paradox, without simply retreating to the elitist position that his insights are only for the enlightened few, requires an equally paradoxical manoeuvre: creating a simple, accessible version of complexity and ambiguity. Such is the mission of the Might and Right: Thinking Through Thucydides project that Lynette Mitchell and I are developing with The Politics Project, a brilliant NGO dedicated to developing political literacy in schools, in particular through digital workshops in which students engage with their MP having been helped to prepare for the encounter.

At the heart of our approach is the idea that Thucydides doesn’t aim to teach us specific political lessons (the usual assumption, hence the desperate search for anything that looks vaguely like a political principle or law that can then be cited as Thucydides’ view on inter-state relations or democracy), but seeks rather to train us how to think about politics. It’s a text that, as is widely recognised, invites the drawing of comparisons between past and present – but also one which seeks to open up uncertainty and provoke debates, rather than closing things down with alleged answers. So we’re building on a couple of the games developed for the Being Human event in November 2017, and a new version of the ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Melian Dialogue***, as a means of high-lighting key issues of power, justice and inequality, and of encouraging students to relate these to their own experience and think about how best to negotiate such situations.

It’s the sort of project that shows how the dreaded impact agenda can be fun and intellectually invigorating, and that classical studies have as much to contribute as any discipline to pressing contemporary issues (it may be too late to force all MPs to play the Melian Dilemma game, but maybe we can raise future generations of politicians with such experience…). It’s also a project that demonstrates how vital collaboration can be for Suchbegriff an enterprise; we’ve got the Thucydides knowledge, but the Politics Project have all the experience in working with schools and thinking about political education in the round, and happily we have a shared enthusiasm for games and other activities as a way of opening up the issues. We’re really looking forward to this collaboration, and I’m planning to post updates on here as things develop.

If any teachers are reading this and thinking it sounds like something you’d like to try, the Politics Project are planning to set up pilots with schools in Manchester, London and Brighton, we’re always happy to work with people within reasonable reach of Exeter and south Somerset, and I’m sure they’ll be interested in expanding their activities into new regions in future…

*I did wonder about developing the analogy around Tin Machine or that unspeakable cover of Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby, but those Thucydides quotes *are* important for understanding him and his reception, they’re just not the only thing you need. Besides, I liked Tin Machine…

**Less charitable interpretations are available.

***Latest version of the full game, allowing you to play the Melian role as well as the Athenians – yes, we cater for masochists as well as sadists – is coming soon, promise.

Thucydides Told You So

A brief survey of recent British history as reflected in the changing title of my putative next Thucydides book…

2015: Thucydides and Modern Political Thought

2016: The Human Thing: Thucydides on Politics and its Failings

2017: Faction, Populism and the Politics of Truth; Hope, Danger’s Comforter

2018: It’s the Melian Dialogue, Stupid (And You’re the Melians)

2019: History Repeating: the Self-Inflicted Death of Democracy; The Human Thing: Why People Make Idiotic Decisions; A Possession for All Time (If Anyone Bothered to Pay Attention)

2020: Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You

On the Impossibility of Everything

As I have noted before, the key to understanding the Brexit debate remains the paradoxes of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (see previous discussions here and here), which were, it is implied in Plato’s Parmenides, originally composed to support his friend Parmenides’ contention that any perception of change or progress is an illusion designed to distract us from horror of a senseless universe. The relevant passage reads as follows:

When the recitation was completed, Socrates requested that the first thesis of the first argument might be read over again, and this having been done, he said: What is your meaning, Zeno? Do you maintain that if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and that this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like – is that your position?

Just so, said Zeno.

And if the unlike cannot be like, or the like unlike, then according to you, being could not be many; for this would involve an impossibility. And if we speak of a Brexit Debate, then this implies the existence of some shared conception of what is being debated, which is manifestly not the case. For men may have different ideas of the best way to achieve a particular goal, whether that is the health of the city or the establishment of justice, and they may therefore debate the best means of achieving this; and they may differ on the question of the definition of health or of justice, but if they agree that such a definition should be agreed among themselves then they may seek through the discussion of opinions to reach a shared understanding; but if each is concerned only with his own private conception of the good, and is unwilling to modify this conception even when he sees that others hold different views, then there is no Brexit Debate, for there is no Brexit, but only a multitude of personal delusions.

Yes, Socrates, said Zeno; and I think that the truth of this observation is evident.

And even if such a Debate were to exist, it can never reach any useful conclusion; for although a majority of men might be willing to accept solution A, some of them will not do this until solution B has been eliminated, but some of those who would join in voting to eliminate B would not do so until solution C has been ruled out, and some of those who would join in voting down C will not do so unless solution A has been ruled out. And so, while a majority might band together to defeat D, they are incapable of agreeing on an alternative; and while the partisans of D will divide between A, B and C, in no case are they numerous enough to swing the vote decisively.

Yes, Socrates, said Zeno. But although you are as keen as a Spartan hound in pursuing the track, you do not fully apprehend the true motive of the composition, which is not really such an artificial work as you imagine; for my purpose was to protect the arguments of Parmenides against those who make fun of him. I retort upon them that claim to believe in the existence of a Brexit Debate which will through reasoned deliberation reach a positive conclusion, that their hypothesis appears to be still more ridiculous than the hypothesis that there has never been any such thing…

Black, Black, Black

Would it be better if Thucydides had never written, or if his work had been lost altogether? (Not an entirely impossible scenario, given that nothing of his work was available in Western Europe before the 14th century, and any number of Greek works may have been lost when Constantinople fell). I’ve mused on this before, in the context of the stupid Thucydides Trap idea (which, insofar as it’s a well-intentioned policy intervention, seems just as likely to prompt aggressive war preparations as the de-escalation that its author urges), and one might have asked the same question about the US Neocons and their apparent belief that Thucydides licensed a new US world order, in which the Sicilian Expedition would have the right outcome.

Two things in the last day or so prompt the thought that the Thucydides virus may be truly nasty as well as virulent. The first was the reminder that the gigantic brain behind the Vote Leave campaign, Dominic Cummings, is a big Thucydides fan.

So it's all Thucydides' fault. Evening Standard Review of BREXITE: The Uncivil War on TV tonight 2100. Cumberbatch plays Brexit spin mastermind Dominic Cummings who apparently spent his breaks "Reading Thucydides" to run the campaign. @NevilleMorley pic.twitter.com/WKorw3QuyT

— Edith Hall (@edithmayhall) January 7, 2019

Now, either pedantically or desperately, I would note that Edith’s summary isn’t quite right: Cummings wasn’t reading Thucydides in breaks between orchestrating the collapse of British political culture, but rather he was summoned to orchestrate the collapse of British political culture from a break, after being forced out of his role under Michael Gove at the Department for Education – his own Thucydidean exile, if you will – during which he was writing lengthy manifestos about new systems of education in which Thucydides played a significant role. So, it could have been worse; maybe he put all thoughts of Thucydides from his mind during the campaign. But I fear a close scrutiny of his stated views on Thucydides and of his campaign strategy would find an uncomfortable number of connections.

That’s not to say Cummings wouldn’t have come up with such ideas unaided, but Thucydides provides them with legitimacy and authority. It’s the standard pattern, as seen in readers of Thucydides since the Renaissance; one discovers one’s own ideas in Thucydides’ open, ambiguous text, and can comfortably believe that they were always there, endorsed by *the* man who sees the world as it really is. The problem with Thucydides is not his own explicit ideas (which are largely absent) but the powerful sense his text excites that there are concealed ideas that offer the key to understanding, and the fact that the text then doesn’t do anything to rule out such interpretations.

The only argument against what Cummings or the Neocons make of Thucydides is that one can come up with an equally plausible (if not often more plausible) reading, based on different passages or different translations or just a different set of assumptions, that completely contradict theirs. But that doesn’t work, because they simply insist on the correctness of their reading – and centuries of interpreting Thucydides as a hard-line anti-democrat and apologist for imperialism and militarism means that readings of him as a subversive or radical are at a disadvantage from the start. People already know what he’s about – and the fact that Cummings was reading him at all is enough to cement a view of him as an elitist text in power politics.

The other, rather odder, example was a tweet from Trump in which several Twitter commentators saw Thucydidean echoes.

I think this is actually a direct quote from Thucydides.

— Gerard Baker (@gerardtbaker) January 8, 2019

No it isn’t, though some of the elements seem Thucydidean – expectations of a glorious conclusion to wars, for example. It’s a weird statement in any case, apparently melding different sorts of perspectives – criticising the false beliefs that lead people into wars at the same time as making confident assertions of future developments. It sounds like a mash-up of fragments of different policy briefings, all reduced to simplistic nuggets – and perhaps that’s what makes it seem Thucydidean, in the sense that one could imagine him putting such a sentence into the mouth of a character precisely in order to reveal that character’s confused understanding and motivation.

But I also worry that this may a sign of continuing Thucydidean influence in the White House – Stephen Miller is still there, for a start – even though there’s been a clear-out of Thucydides-quoting generals. The Thucydides of Mattis et al was surely the sober, cautious, realist Thucydides, advising against another Syracuse; the danger is that they’ve successfully established Thucydides as an authority, that can then be deployed by others, or in Trump’s one mind, to support a quite different agenda…

2018 on the Sphinx

It’s been one of those years… As far as the blog is concerned, I’ve managed to keep up a reasonably steady routine of posts – it does help that the WiFi on South Western trains is pretty reliable, so I can get things written on the commute down to Exeter – and the viewing figures have been pretty steady (no weird public controversies, and I managed to resist the temptation to launch unprovoked attacks on any prominent media figures during the slow weeks). I have at various points wondered whether it’s worth it; on the one hand, this remains a great opportunity to write about things that would never make for a proper academic article (or which perhaps might count as groundwork for something more substantial in due course – I am committed to giving a paper about Thucydides on Twitter in February), but on the other hand it is a time commitment, and in a year when it feels like I’ve lacked both time and energy even for the regular work stuff, sometimes it’s felt like that ‘one more bloody thing’ which could turn out to be that one thing too much.

January: definitive proof that the Rev Prof Nigel Biggar doesn’t read my blog, as despite my discussion of how ancient historians need to get actively involved in combatting such attempts at excusing and sanitising imperialism, especially when it involves That Life Of Brian sketch, later in the year I got an invitation to participate in one of his secret seminars. Meanwhile, I have to contemplate being nearly a year further on from my All The Books I Haven’t Written (Yet) post, with more or less no progress made on any of them (except that I do now know what novel I would be trying to write if I had any time or energy…

February: I’m not setting out to choose two posts per month (though I am feeling quite pleased that, at least so far, there are more than two posts per month to choose from – I think this may have got a bit patchier later in the year…), but that’s how it’s panning out: on the one hand, a post on Werner Heisenberg, Michael Frayn, Thucydides and The Uncertainty Principle that was great fun to research, and on the other hand a pertinent bit of feline-related self-reflection as we headed into the UCU strike…

March: one of the reasons this was a less than wonderful year was the strike, which I found utterly exhausting – above all, mentally exhausting – in a way that wiped me out for months to come. I honestly don’t know if it helped to reflect on the situation via the institutions of Roman slavery – mostly it just brought the reality of one’s dysfunctional relationship with the university system into sharper focus – but this could at least be leavened with the opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of the Melian Dialogue to absolutely everything…

April: I wasn’t terribly interesting in April, was I? A bit of self-promotion and self-congratulation to mark the publication of Classics: Why It Matters, which never comes terribly easily; a bit of complaining about popular history and trade books, which comes rather easier; but above all the opportunity to get back to talking about teaching, arguing with a colleague about whether or not various essay-writing rules are useful.

May: yes, this was rather dominated by That Review of my new book – I am never going to remove “the Übermensch of the West Country” from my Twitter bio – but much more substantial was my contribution to discussions of the alt-right appropriations of Sparta, and potentially more significant in the long term may be my brilliant idea for a new television series that may even help to humanise academics…

June: I don’t actually remember very much about June, but judging by the shortness of the posts – apart from one long and heartfelt one about issues of student assessment and how it’s changed since my day – it was busy. Still, some quite fun posts that no one paid much attention to, on the need for clandestine support for conservative academics and on the songs from François Ozon’s magnificent 8 Women.

July: I am indeed incapable of going on holiday and reading an introductory book on the history of Croatia without getting cross and writing a blog post about it; and then I arranged to call in at a conference on the way home… Almost a relief to get back to more sensible work-related stuff, including reflections on Theatre of War and the staging of the Melian Dialogue – and of course The Ladybird Book of Thucydides…

August: a fairly quiet month, but a chance to reflect on my attempts at getting students to engage with social media in classroom settings via the concept of the Creepy Treehouse, and the fascinating topic of the ways in which Wilhelmine of Bayreuth had herself portrayed in classical guises…

September: the summer having been less relaxing than hoped or planned, the key post this month was a powerful sense that it really was all getting to be Too Much – but there was still a chance to reflect on Thucydides and Spike Millegsn’s Unreliable Memoirs and on Boris Johnson’s latest classical inanities…

October: not a great month, partly because things did now get a bit too much and partly because of the trauma endured by poor little Hector. But there was a chance to develop my theory of the enduring attractions of Thucydides in terms of the great Time Bandits.

November: in some way this feels too recent to have much sense of which posts it’s worth mentioning, and yet at the same time I can’t actually remember them. Like I said, it’s been one of those years… Still, I can remind myself of some ranting about the feebleness of Fables of the Reconstruction in historical documentaries, and about the problem of Classics’ Brexit problem.

December: and here we are… Again, I seem to have forgotten a lot of these already, but it was good to revisit some passing thoughts on the history of sausage-making, and the idea of the Melians having a Meaningful Vote…

Good Immigrant, Bad Immigrant

One of the ways in which the Athens of Pericles is a terrible model for how to manage a just society is the ultra-restrictive citizenship law he introduced in 451, reserving full legal and political status only for those whose parents were both Athenians. At least in part because of a shortage of sources, the context and purpose of this law is much disputed; Aristotle’s suggestion (Politics 1278a) seems as plausible as any, that this is a means of restricting the numbers of citizens in a polis that is expanding, presumably in order not to spread the benefits of citizenship (and, in Athens, of empire) too widely. In other circumstances, the benefits of immigrants are widely recognised; we can see this in Xenophon’s proposals in the Poroi for revitalising the Athenian economy by attracting more foreign traders and other entrepreneurs – though without actually opening up citizenship – and still more in Thucydides’ account of the way early Athens grew through offering a safe haven to refugees from other parts of Greece: “by becoming citizens from the very earliest times they so increased the city’s population that Attica could not contain them and the Athenians later sent out colonies to occupy Ionia as well” (1.2.6). Immigrants as an asset – but sometimes a state decides that it wants all the benefits of their contributions without offering anything much in return, however long they’ve lived there and however much they’ve done for their adopted home…

Earlier today, in the middle of the Christmas holidays, the Home Office posted a clip with smiling stock photography faces and upbeat music telling us EU citizens at home in the UK that we have to apply if we want to stay. This is what the clip should really look like and say. 1/ pic.twitter.com/TTzkFFZvxe

— Prof Tanja Bueltmann (@cliodiaspora) December 27, 2018

#EUCitizensChampion

Jocks and Greeks

Just to prove that I don’t only care about misquotations of Thucydides – though admittedly I came across this one in the course of correcting yet another occurrence of the familiar “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” line. In this case, it was being cited in response to this tweet:

“He who is only an athlete is too crude, too vulgar, too much a savage. He who is a scholar only is too soft, to effeminate. The ideal citizen is the scholar athlete, the man of thought and the man of action.” – Plato

—