Neville Morley's Blog, page 40

Good Rome, Bad Rome

How should we evaluate the Roman Empire? It’s an important question, given the role that the image of Rome has played in modern imperialism, both as a model for imperial powers and as a source of legitimisation for the whole enterprise (echoes of this recently in reports of Mark Zuckerberg’s reputed obsession with Augustus, which bears a striking resemblance to the sorts of claims made by IR theorists like Michael Doyle about the ‘Augustan moment’ when hegemonic power becomes accepted and welcomed by its subjects). It’s difficult to buy into the “and don’t forget the wine” discourse of What The Romans Did For Us without getting entangled in similar claims about the bringing of Civilisation (i.e. European Culture) to the benighted primitives of South America, Africa and Asia.

Fortunately the great scholar-politician of our time has the answer: it’s complicated.

‘In a deep Freudian way, I have no doubt that the EU integrationists want to recreate the Roman Empire. The differences between the EU and the Roman Empire are instructive.’ The EU’s attempts to create ‘a unity’ of laws and symbols has failed to create a ‘sense of allegiance’ of the kind that Roman citizens felt throughout their multi-ethnic empire. ‘The only parallel for that sense of E Pluribus Unum is the US. With the best will in the world, the EU is not like that.’

Even by Boris Johnson’s normal standards, this paragraph – taken from recent remarks in Washington DC on receiving the Irving Kristol Award for Being Right Wing from the American Enterprise Institute, as reported in The Spectator – is thoroughly incoherent. It’s entirely unclear whether the problem with the EU is its wish to recreate the Roman Empire by subsuming different ethnicities and cultures in a single polity, or its failure to do so successfully.

The most obvious explanation is that Johnson had launched into a boilerplate “why would anyone want to recreate Rome unless they were EVIL?” (note that his previous analogy was Brussels as the Death Star), and then suddenly realised that his hosts were perfectly happy with the idea of “doing Rome” as a positive thing and backtracked. After all, no one’s likely to try to make a story out of “Boris expresses regret that EU was unsuccessful in creating multi-ethnic empire”, least of all The Spectator which frames the story in terms of “Boris allowed to show his intellectual heft rather than being plagued by tittle-tattle”.

I’m most intrigued by the incongruous evocation of Freud. On first glance, it looks like a way of asserting something Johnson knows to be true despite not having a shred of evidence – the EU zealots don’t realise themselves that they are driven by an unconscious desire for imperium, while he possesses the analytical knowledge to discern the truth behind their policies. But the strict sense of the sentence is that it is Johnson’s lack of doubt that needs to be understood in Freudian terms – as the expression of its unconscious opposite (actually he doesn’t believe a word of this twaddle), or as the projection of his own desires for dominance, love and excretion onto the Other. America as Mother, Europe as Father, or vice versa..?

Unreliable Memoirs

I had completely forgotten – it’s well over thirty years since I read it – that the second volume of Spike Milligan’s war memoirs, Rommel? Gunner Who?, opens like this (thanks to @riversidewings on the Twitter for the reference):

I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. Thucydides. Peloponnesian War.

I’ve just jazzed mine up a little. Milligan. World War II.

It’s the Jowett translation, interestingly, rather than the more popular and widespread Crawley. I do wonder whether this might be a legacy of Milligan’s school education, but have too much else on to try trawling through biographies; I am also resisting the temptation to work through every episode of The Goon Show looking for echoes of the Melian Dialogue…

For the moment, it’s simply worth noting that Milligan here buys wholeheartedly into the 19th-Century view of Thucydides as the perfectly accurate and objective historian, the model for all proper accounts of past events. Milligan doesn’t repudiate this ideal – and for the most part he just describes what he experienced himself, rather than attempting wider enquiries; but Thucydides also disavowed entertainment as the purpose of his writing, whereas Milligan is more than happy to jazz things up a bit (and one wonders whether, although he doesn’t quote that line on Thucydides, this is evidence that he had indeed read it).

Contemporary references to Thucydides in the context of memoirs and popular accounts – seen most recently in discussions of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury version of the Trump White House – tend to stress instead the issue of making speakers say what was appropriate for them to say, i.e. emphasising questions of reliability and representation (no mention of Thucydides in relation to Bob Woodward’s Fear as yet, but since it isn’t published until next week…). Thucydides as Milligan, in a sense, as somrone who has jazzed things up a bit, albeit for polemical purposes as much as for entertainment…

Thucydides: Infinity Bore

How should we imagine the Athenians at Melos – coldly rational technocrats, bombastic neocons, sardonic British imperialists..? (As I’ve mentioned before, one of my embryonic projects is to explore different ways of presenting the Melian Dialogue, to bring out different facets). One obvious – probably too obvious – possibility is the comic book supervillain, not least because this draws attention to the ultimate hollowness of their words – we know that there’s going to be a weak spot in their master plan, probably intimately connected to their arrogant self-confidence, even if there’s a lot of explosive special-effects destruction to come first. Conversely, comic book supervillains do have a tendency to talk like bad versions of the Melian Dialogue, in capital letters: “MWAHAHA! SOON MY DEATH RAY WILL DESTROY METROPOLIS! THE STRONG DO WHAT THEY WANT AND THE WEAK WILL BOW BEFORE THORAXIS!”

The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) August 29, 2018

Is this a Thucydides reference, as a lot of people on the Twitter have been suggesting? Almost certainly not; yes, there’s the reference to the Strong and the Weak, but in boilerplate supervillain terms rather than anything actually resembling lines from the Melian Dialogue (even the Athenians don’t claim that the weak will all be slaughtered; that’s their fate only if they get ideas above their station and try resisting the demands of the strong). At the most, we might see the influence of a very crude version of C20 Realism, influenced at some remove by a crude reading of Thucydides – but even in crude Realism terms, let alone anything else, this is basically nonsense.

As an international relations professor, let me just say that this tweet is a crock of shit. https://t.co/D0hlFWblGU

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) September 1, 2018

Far from being a source of Netanyahu’s thinking, the Melian Dialogue offers a basis for a critical reading. Thucydides provides a primer in the rhetoric and self-delusions of the powerful; contempt for anyone perceived as weaker and any behaviour perceived as weak, belief that only ‘equals’ merit respect or consideration, confidence that strength can never be a problem and hidden fear that one’s own strength might not be as unassailable as believed (cf. the Athenians’ admission of the fragility of their own empire).

Believing in an anarchistic dog-eat-dog world becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as every state is terrified of being, or being thought, weak, and so acts as aggressively as possible to present itself as strong – which pushes others to act the same. That way leads to mutual destruction (or at the very least a lot of collateral damage); Thucydides invites us to consider whether there is an alternative, a way to break out of the cycle – to make Woodrue recognise his own delusions…

The Go-Between

The past is political is personal is political. It offers a wide range of resources for different political purposes: slogans, battle-cries, values and ideals, costumes, exemplary figures and actions, a stand-point from which the present can be viewed and held to account. Of course all such analogies and appropriations drastically simplify the complexity of the actual past, and even of later understanding of it – that’s how they’re able to operate, by emphasising resemblances and erasing differences. But this process is never wholly under the control of the one making a connection between past and present; the awkward bits of the past that get smoothed over or whitewashed for the purposes of making the comparison plausible have an awkward habit of re-emerging regardless…

[image error]In 1755, the Markgraf and Markgrafin of Bayreuth commissioned a painting from the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni; not a portrait (like the ones he had recently completed of their daughter and problematic son-in-law) but a historical scene. Cleopatra Before Augustus, as the painting (now in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Paris) is known, or Cleopatra Showing Augustus the Bust of Julius Caesar as in the etching I saw in Bayreuth last week, features the Markgrafin Wilhelmine as a rosy-cheeked, Northern European Cleopatra and, less distinctively, the Markgraf as the new Roman emperor – and if you wondered why the bust of Caesar doesn’t look too much like the more familiar portraits, that’s because it does bear a notable resemblance to Wilhelmine’s brother, Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Leaving aside issues of historical veracity – ancient accounts of the meeting between Octavian and Cleopatra after the death of Antony (e.g. Plutarch, Life of Antony 80ff) make no mention of them discussing Caesar, and also suggest a Queen in a considerably worse state of repair – it’s clear that there’s a Message here, from Wilhelmine (who took charge of all such cultural activities and threw herself into them wholeheartedly, as is clear from her exotically-decorated apartments in the Neues Schloss in Bayreuth) to her husband and/or to the world.

The standard interpretation is a narrowly political one, related to the immediate context of events. Despite being married to Frederick’s sister, the Markgraf Friedrich III had done quite well for himself through a policy of careful neutrality in the constant wars between Prussia and Austria, so here, it is argued, Wilhelmine is urging him to come off the fence, just in time for the outbreak of the Seven Years War. This strikes me as absurdly particular, and scarcely linked to the ancient events (Cleopatra can hardly be urging Augustus to ally with Caesar…). Better, surely, to see this as advocacy of a style of rule: Octavian learnt to imitate Ceasar (echoing, Penny Goodman tells me, the conventional C18 discourse that saw Caesar as a good ruler and Octavian as a bad one; look out for her edited collection from CUP on Afterlives of Augustus!) and so Friedrich of Bayreuth should look to the brilliant polymath and general Friedrich of Prussia for a model.

Of course, if it was just about ‘Augustus’ learning to be a Caesar, one could easily have chosen one of the occasions on which they actually met; this episode places ‘Cleopatra’ front and centre as the indispensable intermediary, interpreter, even teacher, the one who understands Caesar and understands what should be learnt from his example. This was exactly the role Wilhelmine had taken in real life, making the most of her exile from the Prussian court into the depths of the provinces by creating her own little centre of Enlightenment with her husband’s wealth, with music, art, philosophy, architecture and landscape gardening, and urging him to be similarly active. Indeed, perhaps we should see the picture as being about the past in two ways, not just evoking Roman models but also looking back on how Wilhelmine had shaped her husband’s rule by drawing on her brother’s example, rather than suggesting that it was still in need of improvement.

Still, by drawing attention to the triangular relationship in this way, Wilhelmine’s instructions to the artist inevitably…drew attention to the triangular relationship. Brother becomes dead lover; husband becomes cruel conqueror; woman can escape degradation only through death. You have to wonder what Markgraf Friedrich made of it; even for a pre-Freudian era, this seems distinctly odd. How much, if any, of the personal and sexual overtones were recognised or deliberate? Did Wilhelmine intend a straightforward political-moral message, that’s then potentially undermined by all the other associations of the Cleopatra story? Or was she actually seeking to make a multi-layered statement that could always be disavowed by insisting on the simple exemplary element?

At the least, Wilhelmine was fully aware of the complexity of Cleopatra’s story, and identified with it; in 1842 she had painted a portrait of herself as the Egyptian queen at the moment of suicide, clasping the snake to her bared breasts – a picture that was certainly intended for her private quarters only, but a daring and rather disturbing thing nevertheless. Her other great heroine, Semiramis – subject of the opera she wrote for her new opera house in Bayreuth, and of another picture she commissioned in the mid 1750s – was similarly ambiguous: the image of the good ruler putting the interests of the state first, but also originally a plaything and prize in the violent world of politics, whose beauty led to the death of her first husband.

I think the adjective I’d most readily apply to this picture is “playful”, and not just because I imagine an ironic glint in Cleopatra’s eyes while Augustus is taking the whole thing completely seriously (which would also echo the dynamics of their conversation in Plutarch’s account). It – she – is aware of the distance between past and present, of the mixture of acting and seriousness involved in putting on such costumes, and of the possibility of a single picture conveying multiple messages. It perhaps even anticipates Reinhard Koselleck’s observation on the decline of historia magistrate vitae in the early 19th century, that those who recognise the gap between experience and expectation can employ classical references to manipulate those who take them wholly at face value.

And the fact that it’s playful and ironic doesn’t mean that it isn’t serious. Wilhelmine depicts herself, or has herself depicted, as powerful women who develop dubious reputations because of their wielding of power – because what’s the alternative? Better Cleopatra or Semiramis, with all that follows, that nobody.

 

Tainted Love

I think it would be fair to say that the idea of Boris Johnson as a national figurehead for classics was problematic long before he started deploying far-right dog whistles in his newspaper column. I actually don’t intend this as a criticism of the charity Classics For All for having invited him to be one of their patrons; I can entirely understand the logic of seeking the support of a prominent public figure who not only studied classics but who continues to make classical references at every opportunity. But the benefits of such an association inevitably come with a potential cost, especially in today’s febrile culture where every controversy is immediately magnified and accentuated, and especially with a political figure who actively courts controversy, in the form of throwaway remarks that can always be excused as a joke if the consequences look like becoming too serious – the current burka fuss is by no means Johnson’s first foray into vulgar racism.

But this goes beyond the sort of embarrassment produced by, say, having a patron convicted of financial irregularities or seeing a prominent member of the discipline disgraced for sexual misconduct. Johnson’s classical education is so much part of his public persona, that this unavoidably reflects back on classics; it runs the risk of reinforcing, in the public mind, the association between classics and privilege, the role of the subject in a traditional elite education and its rhetorical deployment by the beneficiaries of such an education as a means of communicating cultural superiority – where it isn’t being more actively deployed in a politicised narrative of Western Civilisation. Presenting Johnson as a prominent – and by implication, approved – classicist conveys the message that this is what being a classicist is all about; that may attract some people, but surely alienates a great deal more, and precisely those from backgrounds that traditionally don’t have any engagement with classical antiquity or any thought of studying it.

I’ve found myself this morning idly wondering about a different sort of public engagement project for our discipline. Classics for All takes the first part of its name as a given; its mission is to extend the study of traditional classics as widely as possible. But, as I tried to argue in my recent book, traditional classics has some problematic associations; it’s difficult to separate it from traditions of elitism, sexism, classism and racism, even without the looming image of Johnson. Classical Studies for All would be as much about rethinking the discipline itself to make it fit for the 21st century, listening to a wider range of people about how it needs to change to become genuinely accessible, rather than seeing the problem as just a matter of resources to promote the existing form of the discipline.

And it would need different sorts of patrons: not the great and the good, however worthy, but the young and radical. Akala, for example, or Kate Tempest… Of course, as a middle-aged white professor I am the last person who should be trying to organise such a thing, but it would be good if someone did.

Treehouse in the Woods

One of the incidental benefits of researching the piece I’m currently trying to finish, exploring my attempt at turning the Melian Dialogue into a ‘choose your own adventure’ game, has been the discovery (courtesy of an article by Shawn Graham) of the concept of the ‘creepy treehouse’. To quote a definition from Jared M. Stein (cited from this blog, as the original page seems to have disappeared from the internet and links are broken):

Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards. Such institutional environments are often seen as more artificial in their construction and usage, and typically compete with pre-existing systems, environments, or applications. Creepy treehouses also have an aspect of closed-ness, where activity within is hidden from the outside world, and may not be easily transferred from the environment by the participants.

A concrete example: the blog or discussion board facilities on Blackboard and similar Virtual Learning Environments. We look at these and see a useful tool for our teaching, encouraging students to engage with the topic and with each other outside class, hoping to draw on the fact that they allegedly spend all their time online anyway; they see somewhere that is trying to look welcoming and familiar but isn’t, because they didn’t build it, and so at best this is a bit creepy, and most likely it’s some sort of trap…

Part of me wants to think of an equivalent concept that isn’t quite so specifically American – but it usefully puts a name to something very familiar. I’ve given up trying to get students to participate in blogs for any of my modules, after years of trying to promote this (simply because I get so much from online discussions), as response rates were always so low, even with the promise of additional marks for good contributions or reductions for non-participation.The problem is clearly not (or not just) idleness or disengagement, as the discussions in class were frequently great, and they’d clearly done the reading…

Rather, the idea of a space intermediate between the seminar room and everyday life, where they would be expected to talk about the subject only, in a more or less formal tone (not least because they would be writing rather than speaking), with the possibility that they’re being secretly monitored by me or others, pretty well epitomises the creepiness of the artificial treehouse; something’s not right, don’t go in there. And of course I couldn’t see this, not just because I was the one building it and setting the rules but also precisely because of my good intentions in doing this. I would feel quite at home in such an environment, and so don’t immediately think that someone else might not, or not for the reasons I would tend to imagine. Likewise attempts at encouraging them to use the Twitter, and even to live-tweet lectures if they felt so inclined; if any students are still on Twitter at all, that’s not how they use it, and so me encouraging them to do this feels odd.

Now, this doesn’t automatically rule out any attempts at using social media in teaching; given that blogs, online comments and Twitter are still commonly used by academics for academic purposes, there’s a case to be made that students ought to be inducted into the professional norms of these forms of communication as well as more traditional ones. But we need to do this in full consciousness that it is not, as we may have tended to assume, a matter of asking them to turn their existing practices and skills to academic use, so they ought to take to it naturally. On the contrary, these may be entirely unfamiliar environments and practices to them, and insofar as they do resemble familiar environments then we risk making them seem very creepy simply as a result of trying to turn them to other ends.

At least for someone of my vintage, a major part of the problem is a different sort of creepiness or alienation: the sense that the world is increasingly baffling and elusive, that there are too many new developments to keep up with, things that young people take for granted because they’ve grown up with them (whether this is entirely true or not doesn’t really matter). The adoption of social media as part of teaching thus becomes a way of trying to engage with an alien world, to find points of connection with what I assume to be their very different experience and expectations – again, with the motive of trying to meet them halfway rather than insist on them conforming completely to my old-fashioned ideas of how the pedagogical experience should go (however, the Buffy references are non-negotiable, even if they are now incomprehensible to everyone else). But this either creates a strange new place where none of us feels comfortable, or it starts to shade into the sort of creepiness where professors want to hang out with their students and pretend to be young again.

I’m starting to think that the motto needs to be something like ‘Keep it in the Classroom’. That is, make it clear to students that they’re expected to do a load of work outside scheduled teaching hours, and encourage them to talk to one another – but leave it to them how they organise that. Offer them opportunities to develop different approaches to learning and assessment, rather than requiring it of them. And then take full advantage of the opportunity presented by formal classes, when they’ve chosen to enter a different sort of space and accept its – my – rules, to unsettle, disorientate and terrify them (pedagogically speaking), knowing that it’s only for the duration of the class…

Backlash

Let’s assume that Brexit goes ahead in some form – a depressing thought, but serious people suggest that there simply isn’t time between now and the end of March to set up a second referendum even if the will was already there to do it, so the only hope would be an extension of the Article 50 period, if the will was there to ask for that. Let’s take the further giant imaginative leap and assume that Brexit turns out to be less than wonderful for most people and for the country as a whole. What might we expect – a revival of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ of courage and grit in the face of adversity? Seems unlikely, however much imaginary nostalgia for those days may be underpinning the “of course we can go it alone” project, given that it was all a myth and propaganda exercise in the first place. Thucydides offers an alternative view, in his account of the aftermath of the Sicilian expedition:

When the news reached Athens, for a long time people could not believe that their forces had been so completely destroyed, and they refused to believe even the unambiguous reports from soldiers who had actually witnessed the events and escaped. Then when they were forced to accept the truth they turned on the politicians who had played a part in calling for the expedition – as if they themselves had not voted for it – and were equally angry with the oracle-mongers, the prophets, and everyone else who had claimed to know the will of the gods and so encouraged their hope of conquering Sicily. Wherever they looked there was nothing but pain, and they were overcome with fear and absolute trepidation at what had happened… (Thucydides 8.1)

Obviously we can take this, as people normally do, as another bit of evidence for Thucydides’ personal dislike for democracy – the demos’ refusal to take any responsibility for its own decisions when they go wrong had already been identified as an issue back in Diodotus’ speech in the Mytilene debate (3.43). But we can equally well take it not (just) as snark but as another of his observations on political psychology, not to be dismissed just because it’s depressing: people don’t like admitting that they were wrong, and you can’t actually compel people in a democracy to take responsibility for the consequences of their individual vote.

Now, in Brexit terms there is a fairly long list of people who merrily promoted the Leave agenda (in some cases, at least, for their own private ends), offered misleading promises and prophecies, or simply failed to do their job in holding these others to account; it’s not going to break my heart if their erstwhile supporters turn on them in anger. The bigger risk, already emerging, is that these cheerleaders are bright enough to see the writing in the wall, get their excuses in early and find some alternative scapegoats: Brexit has been betrayed, Brexit was never properly tried, the Remoaning traitors and foreigners undermined everything etc. Not to mention the way that the knee jerk response to revelations about the illegal behaviour of the Leave campaign, its dodgy financial aspects and so forth has been “are you saying that Leave voters are stupid and were fooled by a few Facebook ads?” Yes, get them to double down on their original choice, even if it’s already turned into something dramatically different from what anyone was told they would be voting for, rather than admit to having been wrong in the first place.

It’s another example of how the Leave campaign was much more streetwise, committed, cunning and ruthless than Remain – and given Dominic Cummings’ known proclivity for Thucydides, maybe they’d just made better use of the classics of political thought… At the same time, we also have to consider the multiple respects in which the Remain campaign was hopeless, completely misjudging the situation and the sorts of arguments (in the broadest sense) that might gain traction with the mass of the population. If Leave showed its contempt for people by its willingness to engage in shameless dog whistles and button-pushing, Remain did so by refusing to take them or their concerns seriously – not so much bringing a knife to a gunfight as bringing a bag of sweets to a barroom brawl.

It’s worth looking back to that earlier episode in Thucydides’ account, the Mytilene Debate. Actually a fair number of people have already recommended this in the context of Brexit – but solely, it appears, to support the claim that it’s perfectly all right for a democracy to change its mind and vote again. Well, yes. Did we need Mytilene to tell us that – and does anyone seriously think that this example will persuade anyone who isn’t already of this opinion? No, the reason for re-reading Mytilene is to understand the sorts of arguments that might actually persuade people to change their minds, as well as to get a sense of what we’re up against in the brilliant rhetorical manipulations of Cleon. For example, here’s one part of Diodotus’ speech:

It has become the norm that good advice given without ulterior motive is suspected just as much as bad. The result is that, just as someone arguing for a completely disastrous policy can only win support for it through deception, so someone arguing for better policies has to lie to be believed. This is the only city where an excess of criticism makes it impossible for anyone to benefit the people openly and honestly – anyone who openly offers something good immediately falls under the suspicion that secretly there’s something in it for them. (Thucydides 3.43)

As ever with Thucydides, we don’t necessarily assume that these are the words that were actually spoken; rather, they serve to draw out the key issues. The necessity of unscrupulousness; the need to accept that bad faith will be assumed; the need to accept that things are as they are, not as we might wish them to be. Diodotus denounces Cleon’s immoral, instrumentalist arguments – but then offers arguments that are just as immoral and instrumentalist, just for a different end. Again, depending on our own beliefs, we can take this as evidence of Thucydides’ cynicism, or his realism and insight. Whatever else one might say, Diodotus was at least effective in changing the minds of enough people to swing the vote the other way.

As the Corcyrean stasis later in the same book shows, if you’re in a fundamentally divided society it’s rational to act on that knowledge – those who carried on trying to be moderate and rational got stomped by both sides – while at the same time such a course of action makes the triumph of factionalism ever more likely. But the Athens of the Mytilene Debate isn’t yet at that point; Diodotus’ rhetoric is certainly manipulative, but it doesn’t entirely descend to Cleon’s level – it’s just streetwise enough to pitch the argument in a way that might appeal to his listeners, in a way the Remain campaign certainly wasn’t.

This isn’t one of those regular pleas to listen to Very Real Concerns and then develop a policy that offers a cuddly, more liberal racism. Perhaps the campaign to reverse Brexit needs alternative ways of appealing to some of those people (that seems to be the basis of the overall Labour Party approach, even at the expense of not consistently opposing Brexit); perhaps it needs a pragmatic decision that some of them are currently unreachable without completely abandoning the higher ground, if then. Diodotus didn’t need to persuade everyone (and he failed to do so), just enough; and he did this in part by understanding the appeal of Cleon’s arguments and finding ways of not saying that people were stupid to have been persuaded by them.

We are Nicias; we failed to persuade the country not to throw itself off a cliff, partly because of an irresistible public mood but also because our one arguments weren’t good enough. But whereas Nicias then accepted the role of trying to make a doomed enterprise work – it is May, isn’t it? – our goal is still to try to stop the expedition sailing, and failing that to limit its effects. And to go that we have to admit our failures, to foresee events or get desperate enough to campaign properly or find the right tone and messages. Part of us, I suspect, still wants people to admit that they were wrong; but that’s not only unlikely, it’s an impediment to any hope of getting them to choose differently now and in future…

Incidentally, Victor Davis Hanson published a piece yesterday explaining how it’s the Left’s response to Trump that has destroyed all political consensus and civility and respect for law, just as at Corcyra. Yeah, right. The more usual reading, that Thucydides shows the spiralling dynamic of factionalism, as each side provokes the other into reaction – in the crudest way, both sides do it – is clearly liberal nonsense. It does highlight the same problem as with hardline Brexit supporters: Trumpists are not likely to abandon their support if that means admitting they were wrong in the first place. Hanson is clearly not in a place that can be reached through reasoned discourse; but opponents of Trump do need to think about how to reach others, less far gone, and speak to them not as a Nicias but as a Diodotus. That may not be a great choice, but it’s the one we’ve got.

Mourning Heavy Song

I’m in Berlin this week – a quick visit to meet collaborators and a PhD student, and try to get an article written – and, unusually, part of me wishes I could go back home immediately, for the simple reason that the great Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, one of my musical heroes, has just died, and I need to binge on his records. Unfortunately I have just the one out here with me, and isn’t one of my favourites; I have had to fight the urge to buy duplicate copies of a load of cds I already own.

What has this got to do with antiquity and modernity? Probably not a lot – but it’s my blog, and anyway I can’t find my log-in details for the music blog I occasionally contribute to. But I do think there are some connections. I’ve long maintained that jazz offers a model for academic discourse – the accumulation of enormous technical skill and knowledge through countless hours of effort, as the basis for spontaneous, playful invention in the moment, with books/articles/records capturing a specific moment in an ongoing process of creation and dialogue, rather than ever being a definitive statement. There’s the complex relationship in both cases between tradition and innovation and between elitism and populism (echoes of the first piece I ever published in German, on ‘Friedrich Nietzsche als Jazz-Kritiker’).

Stanko epitomised this as well as anyone: constantly moving between styles and groups and collaborators, yet always recognisably himself, and at times apparently working through countless variations of the same couple of tunes in multiple settings. It’s especially interesting to think of his status as not just a European working in an idiom that was still, when he began, dominated by the ongoing African American tradition, but as someone from the margins of ‘Europe’, where jazz retained its status as rebellious, subversive music, the sound of freedom in multiple senses. (Something which continues, I think, to judge from the number of contemporary Polish jazz groups who emphasise multicultural influences, especially klezmer and gypsy traditions).

I saw Stanko in concert only three times, only one of which was actually great (at St George’s in Bristol in the late 90s, on his first tour with the brilliant young group that’s become the Marcin Wasilewski Trio). The second time was a slightly odd multimedia thing at the Barbican with a bigger, rather unsympathetic group (or maybe it was the acoustic); finally, last year in Poznan, with a superb group but clearly old and easily tired, if not already ill.

But I have all the records, bar one of the electric fusion things he did in the 1970s and some of his early recordings with the great pisnist and composer Krzysztof Komeda (think of the soundtrack to Rosemary’s Baby). Almost all of them wonderful; often quiet and meditative – the common comparison to Kind of Blue is arguably not entirely a compliment – but with sudden bursts of noise and dissonance, playing with texture and tone in the manner of the later Miles. If there’s a recurring mood, it feels to me like a desperate sadness and sense of loss – and certainly one doesn’t gave to look far for a song that can serve as his own lament…

Games About Frontiers

So, is it 1919 or 1938? Which lessons from history should the European Union be keeping in mind in its negotiations with the UK, the dangers of imposing a humiliating settlement on a defeated enemy which leads to the rise of resentment, dangerous populism and violence, or the dangers of abandoning one’s ideals and giving in to aggressive and unjustifiable demands in the hope of keeping the peace, which fuels ever greater demands and does nothing to stop the rise of resentment, populism and violence? Or maybe it’s all about the Holy Roman Empire instead. Thank you, Timothy Garton Ash, your valiant efforts in trying to drum up support for the Chequers compromise when everybody else hates it will not be forgotten.

It’s the usual problem with historical analogies; you can pick whichever one you like (yes, some are much more familiar than others and hence may have more traction) depending on the lesson you intend to teach with it. You can always build a case for resemblances – just as someone else can always build a case for differences (“How dare you suggest that we’re the Germans! We have not been defeated, nor are we dominated by aggressive xenophobic nationalism and a sense of grievance and entitlement!”), or just as effectively argue that in any case there’s no reason to assume that things will turn out the same way. History doesn’t repeat itself in the way such articles imply – but historians continue to be regarded (and to present themselves) as people with special insight into the present because they know lots about things that happened in the past.

This isn’t to say that historical knowledge is useless; it’s a question of how you use it, and what you think it can tell you. It offers a range both of possibilities (what might happen in more or less similar situations) and, arguably more important, of counterfactual possibilities (what could have happened in a given situation, rather than assuming that what actually happened was the inevitable or even most likely outcome). It offers a basis for critique of over-confident predictions; and, most importantly, it offers a means of understanding the dynamics of situations, the multiple intersecting underlying causes, both material and ideological.

This is the particular genius of Thucydides: he doesn’t offer a load of information about past events as an end in themselves, nor does he offer abstract universalising theories (even if that’s how he often gets read by modern political theorists and IR types). Rather, he narrates concrete historical events in a manner intended to provoke reflection, including about possible resemblances to the present. His account of the Corcyrean stasis, for example, is an account of the breakdown of civil society in a particular city at a particular time under particular external circumstances – but it is also a paradigm for thinking about the dynamics of factionalism and the collapse of common political culture, that has seemed to generations of readers to speak to their own situation, and currently feels all too horribly familiar. Escalation of rhetoric, truth subordinated to partisan advantage, hollowing out of the ‘moderate’ centre ground, accusations of bad faith on all sides, impossibility of any reasoned dialogue: Brexit Britain in general, the internal politics of both Labour and the Tories, Trump’s America, any number of European countries facing the rise of populism – it’s all here.

And then there’s the Melian Dialogue, which really should have been required reading for Brexit negotiators (is it too late, or pointless, to write to Dominic Raab?). The familiar – well, should be familiar but probably isn’t – point is that we’re not intended to take the claims of the Athenians as true statements about the world (or as Thucydides’ own view of the world), but as an expression of their mindset. This tells us something about both past and subsequent events in the Peloponnesian War (this is why they attack Syracuse…), but also, like Corcyra, it is at the same time a paradigm for situations of unequal power: the dynamics of the relationship, the different rhetorics and psychologies of strength and weakness. It doesn’t tell us what’s going to happen; it does help us understand what is happening, and can potentially help us guard against less desirable outcomes.

Brexit has of course added the interesting spin that at various points the UK has acted as if it’s Athens confronting a weaker force, rather than the Melians faced with a united EU27. This has probably not been an advantage in adopting the correct tone… Admittedly, Yanis Varoufakis recognised that Greece was playing the Melian role, and that didn’t seem to help much either.

The crucial question – which is something I’m actually working on at the moment, in the context of the next iteration of my ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Dialogue – is whether there is a realistic way for the Melians to ‘win’. Part of the answer, relevant to Brexit and other attempts at applying this to modern situations, is that it depends on whether you think your opponent will go Full Athenian – the EU isn’t an aggressive empire, but does actually have an interest in reaching a long-term mutually beneficial compromise.

But it also depends on how you choose to define ‘winning’. Even in the original situation, the Melians could have had peace, if their leaders had not chosen to define that as a loss if it entailed the loss of sovereignty. In a similar manner, the Brexit ideologues seem determined to see any compromise as an unacceptable defeat – this is the obvious flaw in Garton Ash’s plea to the EU not to impose a settlement that leaves the UK (or its extremist elements) feeling humiliated, because anything short of the total surrender of the EU to all British demands will be presented as humiliating and used to fuel resentment.

In other words, the E”R”G fanatics at least seem ready to go Full Melian without a moment’s hesitation, trusting in the support of old allies, in (their conviction of) the justice of their cause, in the gods (magic technology) and in hope (you just have to believe in Britain…). History suggests that this probably won’t end well…

Theatre of War

The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must…

A familiar line, but context and performance are everything. How do you picture the speaker? A calm, rational, ruthless dictator? A super-villain with a death ray? This is the sort of thing such figures tend to claim – which doesn’t mean that we necessarily accept it at face value. What about a fallen tyrant, a Lear or a Nero, still asserting such arrogance as their world falls apart around them? What if a super-hero was the speaker? (Echoes of Miller’s Batman or Alex Ross’s far superior Kingdom Come). What if it was a woman – whether downtrodden or triumphant? The line becomes less of a statement about the world, and more of a statement about the person speaking…

Of course, when we encounter this line in contemporary debates about politics, war or international relations, it’s presented in far less ambiguous – or interesting – terms. The standard version is the kind of schematic account of the origins of ‘Realism’ found in introductory textbooks, but just in the last week there have been two prominent examples in the British media, Nick Cohen citing “Thucydides’s warning” in a column on Brexit in the Observer, and just this morning Margaret Macmillan in her Reith Lecture on ‘Managing the Unmanageable’ on BBC Radio 4 (8’23”). Most often, as in both these cases, the line is ascribed to Thucydides himself, as his own belief or theory; on the rarer occasions when it’s attributed to the Athenians in his Melian Dialogue, it’s taken for granted that Thucydides shared their view.

For many, the authority of Thucydides – the man who saw the world as it really is, as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed; in Auden’s words, “exiled Thucydides knew” – gives weight and authority to this statement of the Realist perspective: the world is anarchic and pitiless, there is justice only between equals, and otherwise it’s the rule of the stronger. In characterising this as a warning, Cohen doesn’t adopt the celebratory tone of certain Neoconservatives – but he takes it as a statement of truth that modern nations forget at their peril. Macmillan doesn’t endorse the claim – rather, she contrasts it with later attempts at justifying war rather than simply taking it for granted – but she shows no sign of questioning its attribution to Thucydides.

Such readings ignore the complexity of Thucydides’ account: that not only are these words that he puts into the mouths of characters in his account rather than his own, but that the narrative context immediately places them under question – the Athenians act according to their claim, in the belief that they are superior and therefore can do what they want without fear, and directly as a consequence they march into catastrophe. This is far from an endorsement: Thucydides seems rather to be suggesting that reality is not so subservient to the will of the strong as the strong tend to assume, and/or that belief in one’s own strength is not the same as certainty that one is the strongest. The Melian Dialogue is concerned less with the nature and workings of the world than with the nature and consequences of people’s beliefs about the world and the actions that result; it’s about the pathologies of power and aggression, not a justification of them.

But pathologies not only of power and aggression, but also of weakness, stubbornness and self-delusion. It’s not just about the Athenians. All too often, half the Dialogue is simply ignored or forgotten – but the Melians have as much to say as their opponents, from a very different perspective, and they are not simply the innocent victims of Athenian aggression but equally deluded and compelled by their beliefs and assumptions. It’s a dialogue – and there is no reason to suppose that Thucydides intends us to identify with one side rather than the other (except for our own prior assumptions and loyalties). Two different perspectives on the world are set out in debate with one another, probing one another’s weaknesses and seeking the decisive counter-argument – and we readers see how neither can actually persuade the other, even though the result is tragic and destructive for both (on slightly different timescales).

The Melian Dialogue is not a philosophical dialogue like those offered by Plato; there is no guiding intelligence drawing the others through the thickets of complexity and ambiguity towards true understanding, but rather the confrontation of incompatible beliefs and attitudes, presented by people who are swayed by emotions and motivated by self-interest rather than wholly in the service of reason. We can’t take their words at face value, as philosophical propositions; each speaker is trying to manipulate the other, each speaker inadvertently reveals their hidden thoughts and assumptions while criticising those of their opponent, and often their words carry layers of meaning and association.

Quite simply, this is drama, with a close connection to Attic tragedy – and our reading of Thucydides would benefit from taking these dramatic qualities more seriously. We should not be trying to turn this into a single theory or proposition, to be attributed to Thucydides, or even into an abstract exchange of views; it’s a matter of life and death, of dog-eat-dog survival, of overwhelming emotions and the clash of heartfelt values (including the rejection of values in favour of the material). As its audience, we should be moved, shaken, shocked, disturbed; our sympathies should be torn.

Reading the words on the page offers us the opportunity to explore these conflicts and confrontations in our own mind, weighing up different interpretations. But for many it may be difficult to shake off prior assumptions about what the Dialogue is ‘about’ – and so we also need to explore new ways of staging it, beyond the static, ‘straight’ approach that’s been used on the few attempts so far (especially John Barton’s The War That Still Goes On, discussed by Lorna Hardwick in ‘Thucydidean Concepts’ in A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides). Imagining different settings, different ways of conceiving of the characters; placing less emphasis on the text, and more on gesture and movement (I am now envisaging a Melian Ballet…); deploying video for multiple perspectives – well, I’m not a theatrical director, so my imagination is limited by things that I’ve seen on stage in the past, but I am seriously interested in trying to pursue this with people who do actually know what they’re doing…