Neville Morley's Blog, page 44

Atrocity Exhibition

Things happen out in the world, and someone, somewhere, then tweets a bit of Thucydides. (I’m aware that my perspective on this is skewed, because I actively monitor it, but it does happen). Over the last week, two different events have prompted such a response. The murders at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, brought this thoughtful post from the ever-interesting Sententiae Antiquae, quoting 7.29-30 on the massacre of schoolboys in Mycalessus by a gang of Thracian merceneries who’d been let go by the Athenians. As SA notes, when we think about this passage in relation to school shootings in the US, it is the differences between the situations that seem most productive and disturbing.

This passage is affecting and Thucydides’ Greek is really powerful here. But when compared to the situation of school shootings in the United States, it is more troubling. For Thucydides, the Thracians have been sent home by the Athenians and are at best only quasi-civilized… So this murderous rampage is performed by a people, marked judgmentally as barbarians, in a time of war. (Yes, we try to “other” the murderers by marking them as insane or disturbed in some way.) More importantly, even in a narrative about one of the greatest wars of all times (from Thucydides’ perspective) the murder of children is seen as an (1) unexpected calamity for the (2) whole civic entity. Can we honestly say our acts of violence are unexpected when they happen with such frequency?

The massacre at Mycalessus is a notable atrocity in a long war full of atrocities; the Parkland murders are just one more instance in an enduring peace full of such atrocities. With 1300 children dying every year in the US from gunshot wounds, “maybe we should rethink what atrocity and ‘war’ is”. Meanwhile, various people on the Twitter have been quoting that moronic pseudo-Thucydides “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” quote in defence of unrestricted gun ownership and, apparently, in support of the view that what’s really needed to solve the problem is armed teachers. The fact that I study people who cite Thucydides does not mean that I like them; quite the opposite…

The second evocation of Thucydides occurred in an even more problematic context: the revelation of unethical, abusive behaviour by certain Oxfam aid workers in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake – or, to be more precise, the debate about the tweet by Mary Beard about that issue, including her remark that “I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone.” One apparently obvious example, raised by one of Mary’s supporters rather than herself: Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens (2.47-54), and especially passages like this:

It was the plague that first led to other forms of lawlessness in the city too. People were emboldened to indulge themselves in ways they would previously have concealed, since they saw the rapid change in fortune both for those who were well off and died suddenly and for those who originally had nothing but in a moment got possession of the property of these others. They therefore resolved to exploit these opportunites for enjoyment quickly, regarding their lives and their property as equally ephemeral. No one was eager to add to their own hardships for supposedly fine objectives, since they were uncertain whether they would die before achieving them. Whatever gave immediate pleasure or in any way facilitated it became the standard of what was good and useful. Neither fear of the gods nor law of many was any restraint: they judged it made no difference whether or not they showed them respect, seeing that everyone died just the same… (2.53.1-4)

One of the central concerns of Thucydides’ work is trauma and its consequences (see for example much of Cliff Orwin’s readings on violence and the depiction of physical fragility and vulnerability) – and there’s a case, as I’ve recently argued, that we may also need to understand Thucydides himself as traumatised. The plague narrative is one of the most important examples of this, showing the collapse of social norms and solidarity under intolerable pressure.

But, as with the evocation of the Mycalessus massacre in the context of the Parkland school murders, the evocation of the Athenian plague in the context of a modern disaster zone tends to emphasise the critical differences more than the superficial similarities. Thucydides’ account applies to those whose lives have actually been devastated by plague, and could certainly be extended to those who have endured earthquake or flood or some other catastrophe. It is less obviously applicable to those who come in from outside afterwards; who may indeed find the experience deeply traumatic, but who have also received training precisely in how to cope in such situations, and who have protocols and a support structure, and better access to food and shelter and medical care, and the possibility of getting out if it all gets too much.

Thucydides’ world did not contain aid workers – nor did his account of the Athenian plague have to contend with the issues of race, empire and the rhetoric of ‘civilisation’ that are unavoidable in any instance of western humanitarianism in former colonies. What he does offer is a sequence of examples of the abuse of power and the appalling consequences for the less powerful; and I find it all too easy to imagine how he would have depicted such abusers, who take advantage of the chaos of the situation to indulge their own appetites and lust for power while dressing up their actions in high-minded rhetoric – because that is exactly what we find in his account of the civil war in Corcyra in the following book…

The Uncertainty Principle

The physicist Werner Heisenberg opens Der Teil und das Ganze (1969; published in English as Physics and Beyond in 1971), his personal account of the development of atomic physics in the first half of the twentieth century, with a citation from Thucydides; 1.22.1, to be precise:

Was nun die Reden betrifft, die … gehalten worden sind, so war es mir als Ohrenzeugen … unmöglich, den genauen Wortlaut des Gesagten im Gedächtnis zu behalten. Daher habe ich die einzelnen Redner so sprechen lassen, wie sie nach meinem Vermuten den jeweiligen Umständen am ehesten gerecht geworden sein dürften, indem ich mich dabei so eng wie möglich an den Gedankengang des wirklich Gesprochenen hielt.

As for the speeches, which…took place, it was for me as a hearing witness… impossible, to retain in my memory the exact wording of what was said. Therefore I have made the individuals speak as they were in my estimation most likely to have done in accordance with the circumstances, while I kept as closely as possible to the train of thought of what was really said.*

This is somewhat unexpected for a book about physics, but the rationale is simple. Science, Heisenberg argues, is made by people – an obvious fact that is easily forgotten. It proceeds through experiments – which produce results as a result of the conversations of those carrying them out, discussing with one another their significance; hence, such conversations form the main content of his book. However…

Dabei versteht es sich von selbst, daß Gespräche nach mehreren Jahrzehnten nicht mehr wörtlich wiedergegeben werden können. Nur Briefstellen sind, wo sie zitiert werden, im Wortlaut angeführt. Es soll sich auch nicht eigentlich um Lebenserinnerungen handeln. Daher hat der Verfasser sich erlaubt, immer wieder zusammenzuziehen, zu straffen und auf historische Genauigkeit zu verzichten; nur in den wesentlichen Zügen sollte das Bild korrekt sein.

It goes without saying that, after multiple decades, conversations can no longer be reproduced verbatim. Only extracts from letters, where these are cited, are quoted word for word. This book is not actually intended to be autobiographical. Therefore the author has permitted himself to abridge, to condense, and to refrain from historical accuracy; the picture is correct only in its essential details.

Heisenberg goes still further: he has not attempted to describe or characterise the individuals involved in the conversations he presents, or in most cases to identify them with more than a forename. In this way it’s easier to avoid the impression that he’s offering a historically accurate reproduction of actual events, in order to make the reader concentrate on what is said by different people, and how they said it.

Großer Wert wurde jedoch gelegt auf die korrekte und lebendige Schilderung der Atmosphäre, in der die Gespräche stattgefunden haben. Denn in ihr wird der Entstehungsprozeß der Wissenschaft deutlich, an ihr kann am besten verstanden werden, wie das Zusammenwirken sehr verschiedener Menschen schließlich zu wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen von großer Tragweite führen kann.

However, great importance was attached to the correct and vivid depiction of the atmosphere in which the conversations took place. Because in this depiction the process of development of science becomes clear, and it can best be understood how the interaction of very different people can in the end lead to scientific results of great significance.

Heisenberg makes a final claim; his chosen method is concerned not just with communicating the real processes of scientific investigation and discovery to a lay audience – but also with trying to broaden the discussion of the implications of those processes beyond the narrow, or at least tightly focused, perspective of science:

Endlich hat der Verfasser mit der Aufzeichnung der Gespräche noch ein weiteres Ziel verfolgt. Die moderne Atomphysik hat grundlegende philosophische, ethische und politische Probleme neu zur Diskussion gestellt, und an dieser Diskussion sollte ein möglichst großer Kreis von Menschen teilnehmen. Vielleicht kann das vorliegende Buch auch dazu beitragen, die Grundlage dafür zu schaffen.

Finally, the author has with his depiction of these conversations had yet another goal in mind. Modern atomic physics has opened up new discussions about fundamental philosophical, ethical and political problems, and these discussions should involve the greatest possible circle of people. Perhaps this book can also lay the groundwork for this.

Heisenberg’s father was the Byzantinist August Heisenberg, who received his Habilitation in Mittel- und Neugreichische Philologie in Wurzburg in the year of Werner’s birth, and was called to the chair of Byzantinistik in Munich in 1910. His maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was Nikolaus Wecklein, a prolific scholar of classical Greek drama, and headmaster of the Maximiliansgymnasium in Munich where Werner studied – including the thorough grounding in classics that was a standard component of such an education. It seems most likely that this is where he encountered Thucydides (and that’s a useful bit of evidence for the presence of that text in early C20 German schools), though he continued to engage with Greek philosophy (especially Plato) through his career, and could conceivably have returned to Thucydides at some point.

In his postscript to Copenhagen (1998), a play that dramatises the meeting between Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1941, Michael Frayn evokes Heisenberg’s evocation of Thucydides as justification for his own dramatic license:

Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it’s reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play. The central event in it is a real one. Heisenberg did go to Copenhagen in 1941, and there was a meeting with Bohr…  The question of what they actually said to each other has been even more disputed, and where there’s ambiguity in the play about what happened, it’s because there is in the recollection of the participants…

The actual words spoken by my characters are of course entirely their own. If this needs any justification then I can only appeal to Heisenberg himself. In his memoirs dialogue plays an important part, he says, because he hopes ‘to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations.’ But, as he explains, conversations, even real conversations, cannot be reconstructed literally several decades later. So he freely reinvents them, and appeals in his turn to Thucydides. (Heisenberg’s father was a professor of classics, and he was an accomplished classicist himself, on top of all his other distinctions.) Thucydides explains in his preface to the History of the Peloponnesian War that, although he had avoided all ‘storytelling’, when it came to the speeches, ‘I have found it impossible to remember their exact wording. Hence I have made each orator speak as, in my opinion, he would have done in the circumstances, but keeping as close as I could to the train of thought that guided his actual speech.’ Thucydides was trying to give an account of speeches that had actually been made, many of which he had himself heard. Some of the dialogue in my play represents speeches that must have been made in one form or another; some of it speeches that were certainly never made at all. I hope, though, that in some sense it respects the Thucydidean principle, and that speeches (and indeed actions) follow in so far as possible the original protagonists’ train of thought.

But how far is it possible to know what their train of thought was? This is where I have departed from the established historical record – from any possible historical record. The great challenge facing the storyteller and the historian alike is to get inside people’s heads, to stand where they stood and see the world as they saw it, to make some informed estimate of their motives and intentions – and this is precisely where recorded and recordable history cannot reach. Even when all the external evidence has been mastered, the only way into the protagonists’ heads is through the imagination.

Frayn aims to convey a deeper understanding, and to draw out the wider implications, of the event he depicts. Of course, a play is nothing without words;  as a playwright, Frayn’s choice is between inventing, and not writing at all, and his primary goal is to represent as far as possible what the original protagonists thought (even if they didn’t actually express it). He also, or therefore, characterises Thucydides’ project in similarly limited terms (including the odd claim that he had eschewed “story-telling”) as an attempt at giving an accurate account of speeches actually made, despite the difficulties involved. This is understandable, for how else can Frayn dramatise the debates and the issues, and make them come alive for his audience – but it’s a rather limited reading of Thucydides.

I found myself reminded of some of the discussions last month of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: inside the Trump White House, which likewise presents conversations whose veracity may be questioned, at any rate on the grounds that Wolff himself cannot have been present – where at least some people on the Twitter invoked Thucydides, occasionally as a kind of justification of such reporting, but mostly as a means of disparaging the whole account – very much a “who does Wolff think he is, Thucydides?” Characters, especially Trump, are made to condemn themselves out of their own mouths – the Thucydidean approach to Cleon, according to most readers, and one of things that raises the most questions about any claim to objectivity or impartiality. The idea of Thucydides as offering a license to invent stuff for dramatic effect may be acceptable to writers of historical drama, but it sits awkwardly with any attempt at providing a reliable non-fiction account of ‘what really happened’.

But that is precisely what Heisenberg insists he is not trying to do – and it’s also worth emphasising that, unlike Frayn, he could easily have advanced his arguments about the nature of scientific progress in a quite different manner, without any recourse to invented dialogue. Speeches that don’t pretend to be exact transcriptions, because of the difficulty of accurate recollection, but which aim to reproduce what was appropriate for the speaker and the situation – with the aim not merely of recording past events as an end in itself, but of giving the reader an understanding of them, and of provoking further thought about their wider implications; this is very Thucydidean. That Heisenberg chooses such a mode of presentation is clearly not a matter of mere entertainment, but of creating a text that conveys important lessons – not presented as abstract principles but conveyed through narrative and speech.

Frayn wisely warns against trite evocations of “uncertainty” when it comes to Heisenberg; his famous Principle does not imply that everything is uncertain and/or unknowable. But perhaps an alternative trite evocation of the idea of indeterminacy may be permissible, as a reading (not necessarily an intended reading) of Heisenberg’s approach in Der Teil und das Ganze: that there is a limit to the precision with which two complementary aspects of a historical account can be known, that the more we emphasise the specific historical details and fetishise the reconstruction of details of events, the less we may understand their significance…

*Heisenberg uses August Horneffer’s 1912 translation – so, more than likely the version that he used at school, omitting Thucydides’ references to the problematic memories of other witnesses as well as his own. As is also the case with English renditions of this passage, a comparison of different German versions of Thucydides’ complex and confusing words is very illuminating when it comes to different conceptions of what the Greek author was attempting to do and how it relates to contemporary ideas of the appropriate level of invention in historiography. Also fascinated to discover, in the course of looking this up, that last year one Johann Martin Thesz published his dissertation on German Thucydides translations between the 18th and 20th centuries, and I will now have to get hold of this somehow or other…

DOOOOMMM!!!!!!!

If ever there was a figure to be taken seriously but not literally, it’s Oswald Spengler. The catty remark of A.L. Rowse, that “because the Germans were defeated, Western civilisation is to be regarded as coming to an end”, is unfair but not completely untrue. There’s a lot more to Spengler’s ideas than that characterisation (not least because much of his framework of thought predated WWI), but they are pervaded with the masochistic joys of apocalyptic expectation, and a sense of superiority over everyone else who hasn’t yet realised that they’re living in decadent and pathetic times. Spengler represents a fascinating offshoot of C19 critiques of modernity, throwing biological analogies and the second law of thermodynamics into the mix as explanations and justifications of feelings of Weltschmerz and cultural malaise.

It’s therefore entirely reasonable that there should be a conference to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Der Untergang des Abendlandes; it’s a complex work, frequently coming across as entirely mad if you read it as an account of the actual world in historical or social-scientific terms, but never less than a window into its cultural epoch, a key moment in the development of the literature of cultural decline whose influence persists. It’s a more open question whether a newly-founded society named after and dedicated to the principles and intellectual project of Oswald Spengler is necessarily going to welcome the critical voices needed for a proper evaluation of the work, and one hopes they will also try to something about the extreme maleness of their activities so far.

Much as I would like to eavesdrop – not least as an opportunity to break out my collection of black, doom-related t-shirts (Bohren und der Club of Gore’s Black Earth, Questionable Content’s Coffee of Doom, Girls With Slingshot’s Ghost Kitty etc.) – I am too over-committed to contemplate it, even if I thought they’d have me. But this does seem an opportune moment to get round to making another of my past publications available to those without JSTOR access: Decadence as a Theory of History, from 2004, which is still one of my favourites…

Should Know Better

One of my main aims, in monitoring references to Thucydides on the Twitter, is to keep a sense of proportion. Partly this is about relative scale: fifteen fake quotations in a day is a lot, relative to normal traffic in this area – but given that over 6,000 tweets get fired off every second, it’s thoroughly negligible in the greater scheme of things. Similarly, it’s about remembering that my view of this is very odd; for me, a tweet may be the sixth tedious repetition of the misattributed ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote that afternoon, but for the person tweeting it this is generally the first time they’ve done it, having found a really neat quote that sums up the point they want to make perfectly. Even with that annoying Social Jukebox system I aim to stay civil unless it’s from a user whom I’ve attempted to correct many times and so I know they won’t pay any attention anyway, and if there’s the faintest possibility that I’m dealing with a real person tweeting in good faith, I do my best to interact in the spirit of truth, not snark.

It’s important to discriminate, to identify degrees of culpability. Someone who saw Wonder Woman and liked the “Peace is just an armistice in an endless war” line: fine, gentle correction. The scriptwriter who attributed that line to Thucydides despite being told that it wasn’t genuine: well, it’s been a pain in the neck, but this is fiction rather than history, and it is at least another example for exploring the popular image of Thucydides. The publicity machine for Graham Allison’s Destined for War? book, which makes great play of its expert understanding of Thucydides, developing a “Wonder Woman knows Thucydides; how about you?” image; deeply unimpressive.

Or take the W.F. Butler “Scholars and Warriors” quote; this has been misattributed to Thucydides for at least a couple of decades, and therefore now appears on many internet quote sites (despite my writing polite requests for it to be taken down) and in printed anthologies, so despite the fact that Thucydides’ Wikiquote page explicitly identifies it as a misattribution, it’s entirely reasonable to assume that someone quoting this for the first time is doing so in all sincerity. The aforementioned social jukebox and associated accounts? Not so much. The House Armed Services Committee’s 2010 report on professional military education? Basic incompetence, not least given that this report was explicitly a follow-up to the 1989 Skelton Report that quoted William F. Butler correctly. And as for this…

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As I’ve remarked before, I’m not a big fan of the Landmark Thucydides; great maps and contextual information, but there are so many issues with Richard Crawley’s translation – as Mary Beard once remarked of it in a review, the more memorable the phrase, the less likely it is to be genuine Thucydides – that perpetuating it through this reader-friendly volume is deeply unhelpful. But it’s whole heap more unhelpful for a website associated with a scholarly enterprise also to lend credence to this quotation. It raises the prospect of what the mighty XKCD labelled ‘citogenesis’, albeit in this instance with Wikipedia entirely blameless…

The Landmark Histories website doesn’t have any sort of contact email; I’ve written to Robert Strassler’s literary agents, in the hope they will pass on a message. It seems entirely likely that this was a bit of enterprise from whoever he hired to produce the website, rather than his own work – but that doesn’t alter the fact that a Thucydides translation is being advertised with a quotation that anyone besides a few pedants (plus the people who’ve already encountered the @Thucydiocy bot) will naturally assume to have come from the translation itself. And if the quotation *does* come down, I’m claiming it as impact…

Who Dares Quotes

Increasingly, the most interesting aspect of investigating fake or dubious Thucydides quotes on the internet is not establishing their fakeness (Morley’s Law: the majority of quotations attributed to Thucydides on the internet fall into one of three categories: not quite what he said, not really what he meant, or not actually Thucydides at all) but exploring the processes by which anyone came to believe in them in the first place, and what this tells us about the cultural image of Thucydides. I’m grateful to @regponciano over on the Twitter for bringing a quote from a blog by one Steve Fuller on Post-Truth and the STS Symmetry Principle to my attention:

While it is possible to defer democracy by trying to deflect attention from the naked power dynamics, as Latour does, with fancy metaphysical diversions and occasional outbursts in high dudgeon, those are leonine tactics that only serve to repress STS’s foxy roots. In 2017, we should finally embrace our responsibility for the post-truth world and call forth our vulpine spirit to do something unexpectedly creative with it.

The hidden truth of Aude sapere (Kant’s ‘Dare to know’) is Audet adipiscitur (Thucydides’ ‘Whoever dares, wins’).

Total bollocks – obviously I’m talking about that final sentence – but it turns out to be interesting total bollocks. No, it isn’t Thucydides, and not just because he didn’t write in Latin. “Who dares wins” is of course the motto of the Special Air Service, later adopted by similar forces in other countries, and a brief internet search suggests that the motto was invented – in English – by its founder, David Stirling, early in WWII. But clearly that’s an inadequate pedigree for many people, hence not only the Latinised version (which is scarcely mentioned on the internet before 2008 or so, and then largely in discussions about the best way to translate the SAS motto into Latin for a tattoo or, heaven help us, an inscribed sword) but also the suggestion on the rather lame Wikipedia page that the sentiment of the motto at least can be traced back further:

An early statement of the idea is ‘τοῖς τολμῶσιν ἡ τύχη ξύμφορος’ (“fortune favours the bold”) from the Ancient Greek soldier and historian Thucydides.

Again, nope. Once you strip out all the sites that simply reproduce this Wikipedia passage without attribution, there isn’t a lot of support for this. The has apparently adopted a version of it as their motto (I can’t be bothered at this point to try and work out when they did this; the Centre was founded under that name in 1961, but I don’t know whether they adopted the emblem at that point, or later, or took it over from a previous organisation), but otherwise the main discussion is on a translation forum, with someone looking for a source for the quote (for a tattoo, again) and being told that it’s actually from Aeneid 10.284, “audentes fortuna iuvat” – which is true, except that Turnus actually used the singular, audentis. Oddly, the Wikipedia page on this phrase thinks it comes from line 344, but it does supply the further information that this and other variants come originally from Terence’s Phormio, in the form “Fortes fortuna adiuvat”.

It seems unlikely in the extreme that these modern attempts to link Thucydides and the SAS have very deep historical roots – but this isn’t the first time that the connection has been made. In 1566, when the Turks were threatening Venetian territories, one Bernardino Rocca urged the Governor-General of Venice to draw the lesson from, among other examples, Alcibiades’ speech urging the attack on Syracuse, “che la fortuna favorisce i coraggiosi”, that fortune favours the brave (noted in Kinch Hoekstra’s excellent chapter on ‘Thucydides and the bellicose beginnings of modern political theory’ in the invaluable collection on Thucydides and the Modern World edited by Harloe and Morley, p. 30).

Rocca’s book, Imprese, strategemi et errori militari (loosely, Actions, Strategems and Military Errors) looks to be well worth exploring for further possible references to Thucydidean military exempla, if I had the time to work through C16 Italian; for the moment, I would simply note that at this point, at least, the focus is on Alcibiades’ argument as an example of strategic boldness, rather than the Sicilian Expedition as the epitome of ‘Who dares, needs to be very lucky…’ Which might not make for such a good tattoo.

Further thoughts: obviously certain sorts of people would be entirely happy with the SAS symbol and original motto in English… Having it put into Latin or Greek sets up a distance from the original while keeping the sentiment – how far does it retain a military association, given the wider habit of adopting Greek (or ‘Greek’) symbols and phrases to assert a link with the Spartans?

Why Thucydides Hated Medieval History

There’s a very peculiar article in today’s Observer, picking up on the predictably gormless comments earlier this week from Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Education, about medieval history being fine for those who want to pay for such a luxury but undeserving of public support. To be precise, most of the article is great, as it’s based around eminently sensible comments from medieval historians like Miri Rubin and John Arnold, but the opening paragraphs are really odd.

Historians have been ridiculed since Herodotus, the “father of history”, was mocked by his Athenian contemporary, Thucydides, as a mere storyteller. So it was with some weariness that medieval historians took to their keyboards last week to respond to the latest slur against their discipline.

Robert Halfon, who chairs the Commons select committee on education, is no Thucydides, but he echoed complaints down the ages when he singled out medieval historians as undeserving of public funding.

Okay… This is obviously written by someone who knows a bit about the Greek historians in question – it’s a lot more than boilerplate evocation of the Thucydides Trap, instead focusing on a less well-known passage – but that actually makes it more peculiar. Yes, Thucydides does criticise Herodotus (without naming him; it’s simply that two errors he focuses on are both found in Herodotus, as was noted in antiquity) – but not for being “a mere storyteller” but for factual inaccuracy and failing to be critical enough. His comments a little later, criticising writers whose aim is to be entertaining rather than truthful, may refer to Herodotus (and that’s how they have often been interpreted), but there’s no indication of this in the text – and the fact that Thucydides passes over the Persian Wars quite briefly, effectively leaving that topic to Herodotus’ account, is a pretty clear indication that there were many aspects of his predecessor/rival’s work that he found perfectly acceptable.

But all of this is about Thucydides criticising Herodotus for his failure to match up to his, Thucydides’, idea of the proper way to write an account of the past. It’s fair to say that in Thucydides’ view any non-Thucydidean account is largely worthless (and this is an attitude echoed by his fervent admirers over the ages) – but that is still vastly removed from a critique of the idea of writing about the past at all – the implication that Thucydides was the first in a tradition of disparaging history (or at least medieval history) in general. “Historians have been arguing about the proper way to study the past since Herodotus and Thucydides”, fine. “Historians have been questioning popular, uncritical views of the past since Thucydides”, fine. “People have been attacking history since Thucydides”, not so much.

The best sense I can make of these two paragraphs is that this is someone who’s picked up on the tradition of seeing Thucydides as separate from his cultural context, not a historian in the conventional Greco-Roman tradition – either a modern critical historian as he was seen in the 19th century, or even more likely a political theorist of some kind, someone opposed to the ‘past as an end in itself’, non-analytical, historicising approach to history (rather as Leo Strauss tends to read him). Thucydides’ attack on Other Historians who lack his critical rigour and idiosyncratic conceptions – and his implicit rejection of the term istorie that Herodotus had adopted for his work – is interpreted as an attack on History by a social scientist. Possibly.

Siezen Perdu

The ending of Ulrich Ritzel’s most recent novel, Nadjas Katze, is quietly lovely. I’m planning to blog on the book more extensively in the near future, so won’t go into the full details of the plot here; the key point is that Berndorf, the detective, has uncovered the possibility that Nadja his client may actually be his half-sister (this depends less on utterly improbable coincidence than it might at first appear). He’s back home in Berlin; the phone rings, and it’s Nadja, whom he last saw storming off in fury. “Well,” she says – or something like that; the book is also in Berlin, and I’m not. “I guess you’ve heard that the test results are in.”

Leaving us hanging? Not in German, because Nadja uses the familiar Du form, having up to this point stuck grimly to Sie in addressing Berndorf; there can be no doubt that the DNA results are positive. In English, one would have to do something like adding “Well, big brother”; in German, it’s so much more subtle – but also a vastly bigger thing, with the choice of form signalling a complete transformation of the relationship. I immediately thought of a poem I’d recently read by the German-based Japanese author Yoko Tawada, ‘Die zweite Person Ich’, from her collection Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Adventures of German Grammar). Pretty sure this isn’t going to work in English at all, but here goes…

The Second First Person / The Second Person I

When I still addressed you formally

I said I and by that meant

me.

Since yesterday I call you ‘Du’,

but still don’t know

how I should rename me.

I am now the person who duzes dich, not siezes Sie, we are both now different people to one another, and that’s a massive thing – and yet the pronoun stays the same.

One reason I like this practice is that it offers a subtle manner of maintaining an appropriate degree of distance without being rude or excessively formal. As I think I’ve discussed on here before, I find it an issue with students that either we must be very formal (I address them as Mr or Ms, they have to use “Professor Morley” whether they like it or not), or we are all on first name terms but actually of course there is an implicit hierarchy and we are not actually friends and shouldn’t be friends, or we make the hierarchy very explicit so that I refer to them by first name while they have to be formal. Using the first name but with the Sie form seems to me, at least in theory, to strike a reasonable balance.

Whether it works in practice is another question; I find it tricky enough navigating the transition between Sie and Du with academic colleagues, where it ought to be relatively straightforward – but of course I’m a foreigner and less familiar with judging exactly when the transition becomes appropriate, and in any case we are dealing with academics and their known proficiency in social interaction… I’ve been surprised – shocked, even – by one colleague who wanted to embark on Du from only our second meeting; I continue to struggle with the fact that another whom I’ve known for years continues to reply to all my messages in English, apparently just to avoid having to make a commitment to one conception of the relationship rather than another, where I’ve been ostentatiously addressing him as Sie in the hope either of getting confirmation when he writes back to me as Sie, or prompting him (as the more senior party) into initiating the transition.

Of course it may be a problem if people think I am older and more senior than I really am, so they think it’s my job to take the initiative in proposing a more familiar form of addess…

Esprit de l’Escalier

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One of the things I really like about formal gatherings in Germany (okay, extrapolating from a sample of two, plus the father’s birthday party in Goodbye Lenin!, but it’s 100% so far) is the fact that they always seem to feature a jazz combo noodling away in the background before the speeches start. The Neujahrsempfang of the Einstein Foundation in the Bärensaal of the Altes Rathaus in Berlin this morning went one better, getting the band to play appropriate intro music for the winners of the awards for supporting doctoral students: ‘Route 66’ for North American Studies, Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ for the Centre for Muslim Societies and Cultures usw.

I didn’t get an intro for my cameo role in proceedings; I imagine that they simply couldn’t decide between the Imperial March from Star Wars, for the Thucydidean power politics element, and ‘Send in the Clowns’. It should all have been so simple: a few words about the research I’m pursuing with colleagues in Berlin, emphasising gratitude to the Foundation for its support, and a few words about why I love Berlin – none of which is exactly a tricky assignment, given that (1) I have brilliant colleagues here and it’s great to be able to work with them and with young postdocs and doctorands, (2) it’s Berlin, for goodness’ sake, so culture, history, opera, jazz, museums, beer, Käsekuchen usw, and (3) the Foundation makes all this possible.

But then Jörg Thadeusz, journalist and tv moderator, who was introducing the whole thing, offered a five-minute discussion about the unexpected relevance of Thucydides that took half my best lines, then asked me the second question first, and then bowled the googly: Hätte Thukydides für Brexit zugestimmt?

Really not fair… I think I muttered something about what Thucydides has to say about populism in general, and hastily segued into what I’d planned for the question I was expecting, namely that the times become ever more Thucydidean, which isn’t exactly good news, but he can help. Ten minutes later I had a much better answer: Thukydides steht immer für Vernunft; Brexit ist völlig unvernünftig; Schluss. Ten minutes too late. L’esprit de l’escalier…

All The Books I Haven’t Written (Yet)

A day or so ago, I remarked that one reason I take a “that’ll do” approach to writing books is the fact that there’s always the next thing that I want to move on to writing about. Yes, butterfly mind and all that. This thought was then powerfully reinforced by the remark of a friend on Facebook: “Anyone else at that age when they think ‘that would be a great project, conference, grant, book…’ and then, ‘hmm, I wonder how much longer I’ve got?’” Oh god yes – and I’m not thinking about retirement, because (1) I suspect retirement ages are going to retreat endlessly into the future as we approach them, as in one of Xeno’s paradoxes, and (2) I have every intention that retirement will enable me to write much more, whatever my wife thinks about finally getting the garden sorted out.

No, we’re talking about death here. It could be decades away, as body and mind are only just starting to deteriorate (I think), BUT IT’S THERE. Or maybe a diagnosis arrives giving me just six months, and I’m left wondering why I spent so much time writing worthy articles about ancient economic history when I could have done that screenplay for a rebooted-BSG-style science fiction Peloponnesian War series… Just to focus the mind, in the hope of firing myself up with energy and enthusiasm rather than blind panic, this is the list of all the books I have in mind but haven’t got round to writing yet.

(1) In progress (ish)

Yes I will finish this bloody book about Marx and bloody antiquity

(2) Developing out of current research activities

Reception of Thucydides; just to make life more complicated, this now seems to want to become two different books, one on Thucydides and political thought and one on his wider cultural significance.

Roman Economic Thinking: at the moment, just a series of meditations on the Roman agronomists, but at some point I’ll broaden the focus and attempt to talk about all of it.

(3) Related to stuff I’ve done in the past

Ecology and History in the Ancient Mediterranean: at one point this looked like being the next major project, drawing on a final-year UG course I taught for years; there are certainly people out there better qualified to write this than I am (though of course that’s true of most of my work), but someone needs to write an accessible, polemical guide to this topic..

(4) Really want to do, no idea when

Christa Wolf and Antiquity: I was asked several years ago if I was interested in writing a proposal for this, and the answer is still yes, but I can’t see myself getting time to do the research for years to come. Unless I do get the “six months to live” diagnosis, in which case this is up there with Thucydides as a priority.

The Novel: no, I don’t know what novel, but I always meant to become a creative writer rather than an academic, and I want to leave some evidence of this.

(5) Fun, and possibly lucrative

Thucydides’ Guide to Business Success: I have no idea why this hasn’t been written yet, but since it hasn’t…

(6) May have missed its moment, which would be a shame

The Spartan Mother: taking its cue from that ghastly Tiger Mother book, which from a Spartan perspective is ridiculously soft on children.

So, that’s only six proper academic books, several of which are at least partly researched already; if I can manage one every 2.5 years, and fit some of the more humorous and/or creative stuff into my train journeys, along with keeping up the blog posts. The positive view is that this is much more of a plan than I ever had in the first twenty-five years of my academic career, which has often consisted of writing books that someone else suggested and seemed like a good idea at the time. Death does concentrate the mind…

Update: Well, I have now done the maths, and things could be…a little tricky. Seven books in just over twenty years of academic career looks okay, except that one of those was the book of the PhD so really I need to include the research time, so seven books in c.28 years is pushing towards four years each, so even if I can accelerate my rate of production on the basis of experience, to counteract the inevitable slowing of mental facilities, I still need to keep doing this until well into my 70s…

Never-Ending Story

When it comes to my own writing, at least, I’ve always been a follower of the “that’ll do” principle; not quite the slapdash approach the phrase might imply (though doubtless there are critics out there who think my books exemplify the slapdash approach), but the art of recognising the point of diminishing marginal returns, when – given that perfection will always remain out of reach – the expenditure of addition time and effort ceases to yield proportionate improvements in the quality of the manuscript, especially when it’s probably already months (if not years) overdue and double especially when there are loads of other things I want to write about as well. It’s all about the jazz idea of creating something in the moment, of the moment, and then moving onto what the next moment calls for, rather than endlessly honing the same thing in the hope of transcending intellectual entropy.

This approach has worked well enough – until now. I may have mentioned that I have a short, stroppy book coming out in a couple of months’ time on Classics: why it matters. Because this will be part of an X: why it matters series, the publisher has been much stricter about sticking to deadlines, with the aim of having the first couple of volumes appear simultaneously; I would actually have liked a couple more months to work on polishing the argument, but that wasn’t an option. More than that, however, the fact that the book engages with the current state of classics as a discipline and its place in the wider cultural context means that things keep happening that shed a new light on themes and issues that I discuss there, so I keep thinking about how I might have said things differently (in the same way that the piece I’m working on about comparisons between Trump and Roman Emperors will never be finished because they Won’t Stop With The Crappy Analogies, The Bastards).

Yesterday brought two examples. The first was the piece in Eidolon by Savannah Marquardt, on the Nashville Parthenon, and what it says about the status and meaning of the classical in the American South. This instantly reminded me of the passage in Derek Walcott’s Omeros (XL.1.i) where he talks of “small squares with Athenian principles and pillars” in “a wedding-cake Republic”, with “its pillared façade that looked down on the black/ shadows that they case as an enraging nuisance”. A white-washed classics as the essence of whiteness, loathing and mistrusting the black shadows that are inseparable from its foundation; I don’t think the Nashville Parthenon or Marquardt’s fascinating discussion of it contradicts any of my brief comments in the book, but I’d dearly like to have had the opportunity to mention it in passing.

More troubling and thought-provoking was the piece by Grace Bertelli, a Columbia University student, about the barriers to low-income students getting involved with classical language. This emphasised my relative ignorance of the detail of how US classical programmes work (or maybe it’s just Columbia). I had no idea, for example, that one could lighten the overall course load by taking exams (‘testing out’) if you happen to have had the opportunity of learning classical languages at an earlier stage; the UK system may sometimes make it difficult for students from schools which didn’t offer languages, but it doesn’t at the same time make things easier for those who did enjoy such advantages (not just those with private educations, of course, but certainly including them).

Even more interesting were some of the reactions to the article, instinctively rejecting the accusation that classics could be in any way ‘classist’, and insisting that if such students had a true passion for the subject they’d be able to overcome any such barriers – offering as case studies the janitor who got a Classics BA, or their own experiences. Such an insistence on the necessity of undergoing hardship to prove one’s worthiness of being accepted into the cult of classics doesn’t actually do much to modify its image of elitist exclusivity, and maybe that’s precisely the point. As someone who has never been a Proper Classicist, and who moreover didn’t actually develop a passion for the subject until relatively late in my undergraduate studies, I am utterly opposed to the idea of making entry into the discipline really hard from the very beginning – but am currently more exercised by the fact that this would have been a really good example to discuss in my first chapter, ‘What’s Wrong With Classics’…