Neville Morley's Blog, page 48

Thucydides’ Corruption/ And Technological Disruption

It’s ages since there’s been an episode of Poetry Corner here – mainly because, oddly enough, Thucydides doesn’t inspire an enormous amount of poetry. But there is not none, and every so often a new poet draws on the same powerful images of conflict and the crisis of civilisation that inspired W.H. Auden in 1 September 1939. Thucydides is, as ever, the dark prophet who anticipated our fate, not least in his terrifying account of civil war and social breakdown in Corcyra.

A storm had brewed over Corfu Isle

Thunder roared with the sounds of revolt

Moods had fashioned this weather a while,

All that was needed was a bit of a jolt.

Thus begins Thucydides’ Corruption, by Ryan Khurana, published today in Devolution Review. The reference to Corfu (as Corcyra is of course known today) and the pervasive themes of escalating conflict and violence make it clear that this is a riff on 3.82-3 – Thucydides’ account of the corruption of society – rather than an accusation against the historian himself. Whereas most modern readings of this episode focus on political partisanship and factionalism, Khurana focuses instead on inter-generational conflicts, with the young proclaiming war on the ‘aged and wise’ and all their works, threatening to destroy all traditional culture through an obsession with material concerns.

“Leave the dead unburied!

Leave our thoughts unwritten!

Leave the girls unmarried!

For with prosperity we are smitten!”

Is Khurana, ventriloquising Thucydides, standing with the comfortable baby boomers against the angry youth of today? It’s difficult to see the former as the noble repositories of culture, indifferent to prosperity and the material. Rather, this is the conflict of historical ages, the materialistic modern period being rebuked by classical wisdom and virtue (compare his earlier essay on the tyranny of economic rationality). It doesn’t end well; as the world comes crashing down regardless, the words of Deuteronomy 8.3 are evoked.

No hearts were full, no stomach content,

For off this alone, man’s soul was not meant.

 

Diversitas et Multiculturalismus

This isn’t the Summer of Love; it may be the Summer of Bad-Tempered Arguments About Classics and Racism. Over in the US, Sarah Bond‘s articles on the ‘white-washing’ of classical statues – that is, why do we think of them in terms of gleaming white marble when they were actually painted? – have provoked a furious backlash from the far right, including death threats.* In the UK, an alt-right blogger objected to the fact that a BBC educational cartoon on life in Roman Britain included black people – “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” – and was carefully schooled by @MikeStuchbery_, Matthew Nicholls from Reading, Mary Beard and others – with the result that Mary, at least, now seems to be spending six hours a day responding to people on Twitter about this.

What is surprising about these two arguments is that the substantive issues – ancient statues were painted, the Roman Empire (including Britain) was ethnically diverse – are such old hat. This is stuff that today’s professional classicists and ancient historians take pretty well for granted, as a starting point for more detailed and interesting investigation – and yet the statement of such facts appears as an extreme provocation to certain people. The instinctive response is “That cannot possibly be right!”, followed by speculation about why someone would nevertheless promote an idea that cannot possibly be right (tl;dr: it’s all about the Political Correctness).

I’m not proposing to discuss these issues – because they’re banal, and because other colleagues are much better qualified to do so. What interests me is the framing of such historical arguments, and the dynamics of the encounter between academic studies of the ancient world and (certain sections of) the wider public. In brief, why do some people start from the position that painted statues and multi-coloured Romans cannot be right?

Because ideology. Because the Greeks and Romans were like us (sc. white Europeans and/or Noble Britons), and their culture is the basis of our ethnically pure civilisation and must be preserved from left-wing assault, and all attempts at mixing races are doomed to end in bloody failure because innate human nature and just look at Birmingham. Etc. Not a lot to be said here.

Because education. This is more interesting; the statements of academics seem wrong to people because they flatly contradict what someone has been taught. It’s a crucial part of Sarah’s argument that we tend to assume classical statues were white because that’s how they’ve been presented for centuries (and I would readily admit that’s how I instinctively think of them), and likewise Romans have been depicted for generations as just like us (if anything, more like us than the hairy Britons; civilisation, neat haircuts). The academic approach here is to say, yes, but we now know better, as a result of further research (e.g. evidence for wide range of different ethnic groups revealed by Romano-British epigraphy) and because we can now see how past historical interpretations were distorted by contemporary ideologies. For us, contemporary ideas – certainly if they’ve become widely accepted, rather than just being the brainwave of a single individual – are more likely to be more correct than those of a century ago. But is this view necessarily true of non-academics? The past doesn’t change, one might assume, so how does one explain interpretations of the past changing except by reference to external factors, like intrusive PC-ness?

Because equivocation. Our knowledge of the past, especially the more distant past, is patchy to say the least; further, academics are trained to consider the whole range of possibilities, to be honest about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of interpretation, and generally to insist on qualifying even simple answers. All of which invites the response “You mean you don’t know? Why should I take any notice of anything you say, then?” This then justifies a return to the (apparent) certainties of one’s existing ideas about the past, which were probably taught as straightforward fact without any of this shiftiness about probability and likelihood.

Because science. The latest twist in the debate on Roman Britain has been the arrival of the ‘genetics trumps humanistic waffle’** argument, some of them genuinely convinced that science offers a solid foundation of Objective Truth that renders everything else irrelevant, and others just seizing on it as a convenient prop for their existing views. I’m vaguely hoping that a specialist in this field is going to write a detailed piece of what we really learn from studies like the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics project on the genetic structure of the British population (see e.g. this New Scientist summary; full publication here for those with access to scientific journals). In the meantime, very briefly: (1) scientific results are also a matter of interpreting data sets, albeit better data sets than historians and archaeologists get to play with; we need to ask questions about sample size (2039 individuals in this study, carefully selected to try to ensure geographical coverage), confidence intervals and the like – note that the scientists themselves use words like “estimate” and “suggest” as soon as they move from describing the data to interpreting them; (2) the data tell us what they tell us, not more; in this case, that a particular analysis of the DNA of this sample shows little (not no) trace of African heritage, and also little trace of Mediterranean or Viking (except in Orkney) or Norman heritage – which clearly doesn’t show that all those people were myths or never invaded, but simply that they did not have much impact on the genetic makeup of the modern British population. We then, as the scientists did, can speculate on why this might be: how far is it a matter of numbers (how many Romans in proportion to total population?),  or of behaviour (how far did Romans interbreed with existing population?) or of other events (how many people, precisely those with Roman heritage, may have evacuated to continental Europe when the legions were withdrawn?). Jumping up and down yelling that “DNA shows there wasn’t any ethnic diversity in Roman Britain!” is completely wrong on multiple counts, even if you take the scientific results entirely at face value.

So, at least four reasons why these sorts of debates blow up. What do we academics do about this? In many cases – I’m going to be optimistic and say ‘most’ – it calls for explanation, helping people move beyond the myths and half-truths they may have acquired at school or from the media, to understand how historians (and scientists) actually go about investigating and reconstructing the past. This may not be easy, as I suspect many people want more certainty than we’re ever happy to give them, whereas we feel quite comfortable with debates and competing interpretations – and part of the task of taking our research to a wider public is to recognise this gap in expectations, and think of ways of bridging it.

This applies to those arguing or asking questions in good faith, which unfortunately doesn’t include everyone. Bluntly, those arguing on the basis of ideology are unlikely to be persuaded by evidence or logic; they already know why academics are saying these things, as part of our cultural Marxist campaign against civilisation and traditional values, and are simply trying to elicit some sort of admission to this effect. Which is why we have ‘mute’ and ‘block’.

*Yes, I know the original article was published in April, so not exactly summer, but the worst of the online fury seems to have extended well into June…

**Or ‘history is written by the winners, genetics is the history of the masses’, as Peter Donnelly, the lead scientist on the Wellcome project, suggested,

Dunkirk Spirit

Democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst. (Thucydides)

Alongside all the obviously false and/or completely unverifiable ‘Thucydides’ quotations to be encountered on the Twitter, there is a minor strand of what could be called ‘misleading paraphrases’, where someone quotes someone else’s summary of what Thucydides said as if it were Thucydides’ own words. I’ve previously discussed the Henry Kissinger version of 1.22.4 – “The present, while never repeating the past exactly, must inevitably resemble it. Hence, so must the future” – which Niall Ferguson and Graham Allison seem to have successfully launched as a genuine quotation. Yesterday I came across the quote above for the first time, a line which likewise looks not completely implausible but nevertheless wrong. And so it proved…

A quick Google of the phrase immediately reveals its source: John R. Hale‘s Lords of the Sea: the epic story of the Athenian navy and the birth of democracy (2010) – which also, slightly oddly, appears with alternative subtitles: how trireme battles changed history and how the Athenian navy changed the world. This offers an old-fashioned narrative of the rise of Athens, including the following account of the aftermath of the Syracuse disaster:

The prestige of Athenian democracy suffered with the failure of the Sicilian expedition, but Alcibiades and the rest of the Greeks overestimated the disaster’s impact. In this supreme crisis the Assembly rallied swiftly. Timber was found and new ships built. To retrench, the Athenians called in the triremes and troops from distant outposts. Messengers were sent to Athenian garrisons in allied cities, warning them that the Spartans could back oligarchic coups. All these steps were taken over the winter. When the historian Thucydides recorded the people’s energetic response, he observed that democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. True, the Athenians did not instantly collapse, and they did take these various actions, but this is a remarkably positive reading of events, as is clear when we compare it with what’s actually set out in Thucydides 8.1 (which is the source Hale gives for the paraphrased remark). In the first place, it passes over Thucydides’ account of how the Athenians actually responded to the news:

The Athenians could not believe that the armament had been so completely annihilated, although they had the positive assurances of the very soldiers who had escaped from the scene of action. At last they knew the truth; and then they were furious with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition —as if they had not voted it themselves—and with the soothsayers, and prophets, and all who by the influence of religion had at the time inspired them with the belief that they would conquer Sicily. Whichever way they looked there was trouble; they were overwhelmed by their calamity, and were in fear and consternation unutterable. The citizens and the city were alike distressed; they had lost a host of cavalry and hoplites and the flower of their youth, and there were none to replace them. And when they saw an insufficient number of ships in their docks, and no crews to man them, nor money in the treasury, they despaired of deliverance. (8.1.1-2)

So, not exactly the ‘keep calm and carry on’ spirit that Hale ascribes to them; rather, a quick hysterical search for scapegoats, conveniently forgetting their own responsibility for the whole shambles. As for the claim that their reaction showed democracy at its best, refusing to be cowed by adversity, what Thucydides actually said was that “after the manner of a democracy, they were very amenable to discipline while their fright lasted” (Jowett) or “in the panic of the moment they were ready to accept good discipline in everything, as the people tend to do in such circumstances” (Mynott).

Now of course Hale is entitled to deviate from Thucydides’ version, and to argue that that was deliberately skewed to show Athens in a negative light. The problem is that he doesn’t actually argue this – we’re simply offered an assertion of what happened, with the implication that this is solid undisputed fact, and the ‘quote’ from Thucydides clearly suggests that this is also his version. Moreover, this version of the quote is a complete misrepresentation of what Thucydides says – not, democracies are at their best in adversity, but, adversity causes democracies to behave more or less sensibly for a change. But of course that wouldn’t fit with the heroic narrative that Hale wants to present; it would still be quotable – but for a quite different agenda. Not ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’, as the British like to think of themselves – and it is surely only a matter of time before this misleading paraphrase starts getting cited more widely, what with Brexit and all – but the more realistic ‘Panic, and finally (briefly?) get real’.

Not the Daughters of Sphinx

I have sometimes wondered why, when the back end of this blog records the search terms that have lead them here, the phrase “daughters of sphinx” often appears. Well, I’ve finally got round to googling it myself, and I am now enlightened (but not in any gnostic sense). The Ancient Arabic Order of the Daughters of the Sphinx: a female branch of a fun-loving red-fez-wearing adjunct fraternity of freemasonry; I can only imagine how aspiring members feel when they wind up here instead. Sorry, guys, the knowledge here may be esoteric, but puzzling it out doesn’t get you any further towards acceptance and initiation – though of course I’d say that if I were trying to test your commitment and perseverance.

The fact that many readers of Thucydides act like a secret order of initiates, priding themselves in their possession of secret knowledge and swapping obscure code phrases with one another, is a different matter…

The Emoji Thucydides

In At The Deep End

A User’s Guide to Thucydides Part 3

Is Thucydides more like a swimming pool – best to dive right in – or a mountain, where the key is careful preparation and planning, construction of base camp etc.? In both cases it can be a daunting prospect; the question, prompted by a discussion on the Twitter last night where someone planning a Thucydides reading group asked for suggestions on preparatory reading, is how best to get started.

Personally, I’d go for the swimming-pool approach, taking it as read that you can actually swim (i.e. have some experience in reading and engaging with texts). Yes, it’s a difficult and forbidding work, that seems to expect a high level of prior knowledge as well as demanding a lot from the reader – but actually that’s a major reason why you might do better just to immerse yourself straight away. You surely can’t have missed the fact that there are a lot of contradictory interpretations of Thucydides out there, each of them claiming to be the one true, correct interpretation. One reason is that this is a complex, ambiguous work that demands a lot from its readers and refuses to be tied down to simple, straightforward messages. The other is that many (most?) people come to it with a preconceived idea of what it’s about, find this confirmed in their reading, and then insist that their preconception is the only possible reading, despite the fact that clearly other readings are possible.

In other words, if you come to Thucydides with the prior knowledge (as promoted by any number of introductory IR courses) that he is a Realist (or indeed the First Realist), then that’s what you’re likely to find when you read him – or at least you’ll focus on the question of whether or not he’s a Realist, in whatever sense. If you think he’s a political theorist, you’ll tend to read him in those terms, or at least engage with the debate about whether is a theorist in modern terms; likewise if you conceive of him as some sort of historian. None of these readings is wholly wrong, but they are all at best partial and at worst anachronistic, making sense of Thucydides in modern terms – without necessarily warning you that this is what they’re doing – and emphasising some aspects over others.

Works of secondary scholarship, whether the introductory chapters found in most editions of Thucydides or entire books like those of Kagan or Connor, offer more detailed and nuanced accounts of his approach and the nature of the text – but they may be even more insidious, since they appear to be offering a rounded picture while inevitably they are privileging some aspects and certain readings. Kagan’s Thucydides is definitely Kaganesque; the Thucydides of Peter Rhodes in the Hammond translation is very Rhodesian, and the Thucydides of M.I. Finley in the Penguin edition, presented as a kind of pioneering social theorist, has clear elements of Finley about him. They’re all perfectly plausible – but until you’ve read some Thucydides yourself, you’re in no position to judge their plausibility or develop alternative interpretations.

Of course, if you dive straight in you’re going to miss some stuff, and plenty of things will be more or less puzzling (though there’s no guarantee that preparatory reading will always help, since various things in Thucydides’ work remain more or less puzzling to people who’ve spent decades studying the thing). However, you’ll be in a position to develop your own sense of what he’s doing and how he presents his material – and why he does it like that, rather than following someone else’s lead.

This isn’t at all a new idea; the whole point of the original Naval War College curriculum was that students should immerse themselves in an unfamiliar world without any preconceptions, as training in how to engage with complexity and ambiguity. Coming to Thucydides with the prior conception that he’s a realist, or a neocon, or an anti-democrat, or whatever, does away with complexity and ambiguity from the start.

The NWC approach was all about using Thucydides as a means to an end, rather that reading Thucydides as an end in itself – but I think there’s a good case to be made that this echoes Thucydides’ own intentions for his work. It becomes a ‘possession for ever’ if we draw wider lessons from the account of events, rather than seeing the narrative as an end in itself; and, since the wider lessons are never explicitly stated, I’d argue that it is the very process of reading and making sense of the work that teaches us things, and so anything that closes down or limits our reading is problematic. Jump in, see what you make of it – and start arguing with other people about what they make of it. That’s why the reading group approach is so good.

Yes, I’m aware of the paradoxical element of proposing that you should avoid being influenced by other readings of Thucydides on the basis of my own reading of Thucydides…

Further Reading

At some point you may want to consult modern discussions of Thucydides, either to help explain confusing details in what you’re reading, or to put it all in context. The following are the things that come to mind as recommendations…

Historical Information This is one area where The Landmark Thucydides, ed. R. Strassler, is really useful, with lots of maps and contextual information – but with the downside that the Crawley translation it’s based on is really problematic. The Hammond translation for OUP has very good notes on names, events, puzzling points etc., which is one reason I recommend it highly; other editions are less informative. More detailed discussion of historical points and issues can be found in the multi-volume Historical Commentary on Thucydides by A.W. Gomme et al. (1945-81), and in S. Hornblower’s more recent Commentary on Thucydides (1991-2008), but with the caution that in both cases you’ll need to have the specific reference (book and chapter, if not lines) to be able to look up what you want, and they are written primarily for those reading a Greek text (and hence able to read ancient Greek), so sometimes not at all helpful for those who aren’t.

Historical Background The two big accounts of the Peloponnesian War are G.E.M. de Ste Croix’s The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972) and Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War (various editions). I do mean ‘big’, and personally, unless you’re proposing to embark on serious academic research in this field, I’d be inclined to stick to Thucydides – not least because he is by far the most important source for events, and so historical accounts consist largely of a mixture of paraphrase, exegesis and critique of what he has to say. You would probably be better off with a broader, more accessible history of the period (and wouldn’t necessarily have to read all of it), such as Robin Osborne’s Classical Greece 500-323 BC (Oxford, 2000).

Interpretations of Thucydides For its combination of scholarship and insight, I still swear by W.R. Connor’s Thucydides (Princeton, 1987) – it offers a take from the classics and ancient history perspective, rather than political theory or strategy, but in a very accessible manner. A more detailed account of Thucydides’ approach to history can be found in Emily Greenwood’s Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London, 2006); I think it’s a brilliant book, but perhaps a bit too specialised for casual readers. Donald Kagan is a big name in this field (if not necessarily one of the greatest ancient historians of the twentieth century, as has been suggested in some of the push-back against the ‘Thucydides Trap’ theory) and his Thucydides: the reinvention of history (New York, 2010) offers a summary of the interpretation that he develops at greater length in his Peloponnesian War. Finally, I really like Geoffrey Hawthorn’s Thucydides on Politics: back to the present (Cambridge, 2014), which offers a reading of the entire work; complex and occasionally tendentious, developing a distinctive interpretation without necessarily telling you what it’s doing – a bit like the original…

Online Seminar Finally, since I think it’s important for any reader of Thucydides to be conscious of how many different interpretations are possible and how arguable they all are, it’s well worth looking at the online discussion organised by Zenpundit last year, which offers a wealth of posts and comments on different aspects of the book, and a whole load of other resources.

‘Proper Classics’

One of the (probably innumerable) ways in which I irritate my wife is by going round claiming to have a classics degree, despite having studied no Greek or Latin at university. Actually I feel this characterisation is slightly unfair, as I do have a bona fide classics degree, 100% legitimate according to the rules of the university at the time, despite the lack of any language, and it’s not as if I have ever actually attempted to pass myself off as a ‘proper classicist’ with a permanent fear that someone might ask me to translate Vergil, revealing my deception and leading to summary dismissal in disgrace. On the contrary, I’m more likely to go to the other extreme of describing myself as not a classicist but a historian who happens to do ancient stuff; some of my best friends are classicists etc., but that’s not generally what I do. Still, I occasionally wonder how many of the colleagues who wearily tolerate this ideological pose do so in the belief that I actually have the grounding in ancient languages that would entitle me to the status of ‘proper classicist’ if I only chose to claim it, and might therefore look at me differently (or break out the pitchforks) if they knew the truth.

It is now many years since this idea of the discipline of Classics as essentially and fundamentally focused on Latin and Greek language and literature, potentially but not necessarily branching out at later stages into the study of topics (like history) suggested and illuminated by that literature, ceased to be taken for granted; since, in fact, it became necessary (in the view of some) to append the adjective ‘proper’ in the face of the proliferation of non-linguistic degree programmes like Ancient History and Classical Studies alongside the traditional approach.

However, the idea that Classics is really about language and literature – that these arriviste sub-disciplines are illegitimately trying to lay claim to some share of its status and glory despite their manifest inferiority – remains remarkably strong. It is manifested in the uncertainty about what their degrees are really about that I’ve heard expressed sometimes by students on these non-linguistic programmes, especially Classical Studies – Classics students have no such doubts about the nature of their studies, and this confident sense of identity often shades into a powerful sense of superiority. It features in the expectations held of postgrads and job candidates with respect to linguistic competence – as Miko Flohr once put it on the Twitter, “we love your research on the economy and society of Roman Italy, but can you teach Tacitus as well?”

Most obviously, over the last year or so it’s resurfaced several times in debates about the place of classical subjects in schools and the entry requirements for studying them at university; in arguments around the possible fate of OCR’s Classical Civilisation A-Level (the sense that A-Level Greek won’t ever be treated in the same manner, although it’s equally small and difficult to get marked, because Proper Classics), and the imbecilic claim of James Delingpole that Oxford has drunk the Social Justice Kool-Aid and wrecked its intellectual standing by admitting students without expensive, language-driven private educations to study classics.  It’s difficult to avoid the impression that these debates often reflect a certain disdain, to put it mildly, both for non-linguistic studies and as a consequence for those students who don’t enjoy the opportunity to study ‘proper’ traditional classics.

The obvious basis for this idea is historical: Latin and Greek are what Classics truly is about because that’s what it always has been about. But making this a normative claim rather than just a statement about the past seems rather dubious; other disciplines have proved capable of moving on or expanding beyond their nineteenth-century origins (many, indeed, act as if they’re frequently embarrassed by their naive, unsophisticated origins), so clearly this adherence to tradition is a matter of choice. One might surmise that it serves today a means of policing boundaries and claiming a distinctive identity – perhaps in a primarily defensive manner, trying to maintain a distinctive academic space, whereas non-linguistic approaches to the ancient world might get subsumed by more powerful, imperialist disciplines like History or Literature. It’s also a claim to intellectual superiority. Languages are hard, especially when learned in a traditional grammar-based manner, and attainment in them is directly measurable, in contrast to the more discursive and subjective skills of analysis and interpretation.

After all, it’s not that [traditional] Classics is only language; on the contrary, Classicists can do history, and literary criticism, and reception, and all the rest, and they can do these difficult languages. The claim that a grasp of other skills, theories etc. (those of modern historical approaches or archaeology, for example) offers a superior understanding of the subject matter is always open to contestation; the claim that high-level knowledge of ancient languages enables a better understanding of ancient texts is incontrovertible. The shift then from identifying language as an essential tool for understanding key aspects of classical antiquity to making it a shibboleth for the entire discipline involves a further step – but it’s often easily justified by the rhetorical question: it’s all very well for students to be encouraged to do inferior non-linguistic classical studies at school and undergraduate level, but would I really argue that someone could be an adequate researcher of classical things without language?

Well, maybe I would. The traditional approach may be justifiable if we assume that the single scholar should do everything, and therefore needs the skills to do everything (though of course there is never an expectation that every classicist should be fully qualified in epigraphy or archaeology). If, however, as I’ve argued before, it’s better to see research as a collaborative enterprise, then it’s reasonable for some people to specialise in historical or material approaches on the basis that someone else does the detailed linguistic stuff. Just as many ancient historians do with respect to archaeology, what matters is knowing enough to understand the findings of other specialists, rather than actually being a specialist.

But the model of the lone scholar who does everything persists, and is reinforced through the job market, with its insistence on an ability to teach language, just in case.* This sets up artificial barriers and instantly favours candidates with privileged backgrounds. I’m a case in point; I never studied languages at university, but because I had done them intensively at school I could make a reasonably plausible case for being able to teach them. When it comes to the skills I acquired for my research, on the other hand,  I have enough grasp of numismatics and archaeological survey to make effective use of such material for my own research, but wouldn’t presume to teach them at any level beyond a very basic introduction for non-specialists – and, more importantly, no one would bat an eyelid at this deficiency.

Basically, I was lucky. I never intended to study ancient history, but came to it via the study of other periods – and then just happened to have the necessary credentials. I can easily imagine someone following a similar route into the study of antiquity via history (or indeed into classical reception via modern literature), who hadn’t had the chance to acquire credentials in a subject they never planned to study. They could certainly gain enough language during their postgrad studies to hack their way through a text to the degree required for their research, but would need to expend extra – and, from the point of view of the research, unnecessary – effort to get this to a level where they could credibly present themselves as a potential language teacher.

The study of antiquity is not reducible to the study of the classical languages. This is why we need to fight for Classical Studies and Ancient History in schools; not driven by the narrow, self-interested assumption that this could be a way of bringing more students to Proper Classics from beyond the private schools, nor the self-interested and hypocritical drive to keep Proper Classics alive by recruiting students to inferior programmes to keep departmental numbers up, but because of the belief that the wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of classical antiquity and its legacy is valuable in itself, at any age. As Edith Hall’s new Advocating Classics Education project says in its mission statement:

Far too few British children are educated about the ancient Greeks and Romans at secondary level. Studying ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, history, thought, literature, art and archaeology is not only exciting and instructive, but confers profound advantages: it hones analytical and critical skills, trains minds in the comparative use of different types of evidence, introduces young people to the finest oratory and skills in argumentation and communication, enhances cultural literacy, refines consciousness of cultural difference and relativism, fosters awareness of a three-millennia long past, along with models and ideals of democracy, and develops identities founded in citizenship on the national, European and cosmopolitan, global level.

And this ought to feed into a more confident assertion of the value of non-linguistic degree programmes. Core units in literary or historical skills and theories should be seen not as a ‘substitute’ for Greek and Latin, as I’ve sometimes heard them referred to, but as the heart of equally valid and important approaches to studying antiquity. This is relatively easy for ancient history, as a branch of historical studies (hence needing to engage with the skills and theories of that discipline, and increasingly those of the social sciences) but with a distinctive interdisciplinary identity in terms of the range of types of evidence ancient historians use and their close engagement with literary, archaeological, philosophical etc approaches compared with the history of many other periods.

This is trickier with Classical Studies – but potentially more exciting. CS offers a kind of total cultural analysis, both comparative and transhistorical, in which issues of reception and reinterpretation are unavoidable. However, there has to be a concern that it will always be in a weaker position because of its name, if only because of inherited associations and the lack of a decent name for those who do it – classicists do Classics, ancient historians do Ancient History; Classical Studies is done by, erm, Classical Studies people. Personally I prefer the all-purpose German term Altertumswissenschaft for the discipline, but that still doesn’t give use a suitable name for the people who research it.

Perhaps we need to insist that it’s all Classical Studies, with some pursuing specialist linguistic pathways – or that we are all Proper Classicists, regardless of linguistic level or interests.  The alternative is a completely new name for the whole thing, if that’s what it takes for me no longer to have to make defensive noises about my degree, but more importantly to build a world in which thousands of students will no longer have any need to feel apologetic about theirs.

* On reflection, it’s actually a bit insulting to high-level Greek and Latin specialists to imply that anyone ought to be able to teach the languages adequately on the basis of a couple of years’ study at PG level. But having such an expectation, and enforcing it, serves to entrench the notion that all lecturers in a Classics department ought to be high-level Greek and Latin specialists, even when many of them aren’t.

Please note that I’m away at the moment, so it may take some time for any comments to get approved, let alone for me to get round to responding to them…

The Artless Reporter?

Further evidence of the ‘Thucydidean Moment’ of 2017 – and, yes, I’m aware that J.G.A. Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian Moment’ lasted rather longer than a fortnight – comes in this morning’s Financial Times Alphaville blog, with a post from Matthew C. Klein responding to last week’s Politico article and drawing on his own experiences of reading Thucydides in a class led by Donald Kagan. I rather liked this piece, for its cautions against simplistic readings – and not just because it included links to a couple of my recent posts.

However, it does offer as matters of fact a couple of arguable interpretations. The idea that Thucydides had “a massive axe to grind” as a result of his exile is certainly a possibility, and the idea of him as perfectly objective should never be taken on trust – but it’s an idea that is most often put forward by readers wanting to discredit or explain away his account of a specific event, whereas the majority of modern readers have been struck by the absence of obvious axe-grinding. The comparison with Kissinger seems way off; Thucydides was involved only briefly in the war, rather than being the key mover behind successive events, and his attempt at exculpation for Amphipolis is remarkably limited, referring to himself in the third person and barely hinting that it wasn’t really his fault. One would welcome such self-effacement from Kissinger and his partisans – even we read it as a subtle attempt by Thucydides to construct a trustworthy persona so that we’ll rehabilitate him ourselves rather than him having to do the work.

Secondly, Klein offers the idea of a clear distinction between “news” and “editorial” in Thucydides’ account. The vast majority of scholars over the last, what, thirty years or more would regard such a claim with suspicion; rather, Thucydides’ apparently straightforward narrative of events is seen to be ‘cunning’, advancing his interpretation of the war artfully as much if not more than his rare authorial pronouncements. Indeed, this was pretty well the view of Wilhelm Roscher back in 1842; it’s primarily the ancient historians, interested in reconstructing events rather than understanding Thucydides’ historiography, who seek to establish a barrier between good factual reporting and bad subjective interpretation.

Finally, Klein’s interpretation of Thucydides’ work as a whole is very Kaganesque: the failure of the Sicilian Expedition was Nicias’ fault, it could have been won rather than always being a doomed enterprise that demonstrated Athens’ hubris.

He was the first revisionist historian, determined to acquit Pericles and his fellow elites for starting and losing the war. To do this, he blamed impersonal historical forces and the ignorant rabble.

Rehabilitating imperialist Athens… Cautions against believing one has unlocked the secrets of international relations by reading a couple of the popular bits of Thucydides’ work are spot on, but that shouldn’t lead to the equal-but-opposite error of accepting without question an equally political reading based on the authority of Donald Kagan’s scholarship. But bonus points for proposing a film version of Thucydides (or tv series, as I keep arguing), even if the casting of Alcibiades might raise eyebrows.

And just as I finished writing that, Stephen Clark sends me another link; again pushing Kagan as the definitive answer to everything Thucydides-related, but this time with a much more explicitly bellicose message – perhaps unsurprising, because it’s an interview with the younger Kagan brother, co-author with his father of While America Sleeps, and his wife. They argue that “there is no Thucydides Trap” as war is not inevitable – which is something Allison would agree with – and that “it is quite wrong to conclude from Thucydides that war can be avoided by accommodating a rising power.”

Sparta sought to manage and accommodate Athens for many years before the war, but the more it did so, the more confident the Athenians became. It was that process, rather than any stiff-necked refusal of the Spartans to make room for a rising power, that actually led to the war.

If you want peace, prepare for war? I have a sinking feeling…

Update 28/6/17: offering a quite different perspective, the great Bob Connor has posted his thoughts on the question of the inevitability of war with China, based on his own vast knowledge and understanding of Thucydides rather than invoking the name of Kagan…

European Echoes

Where is Europe? It’s perhaps not the most obvious answer, but one possibility is: sitting in the elegant Kulturzentrum PFL in Oldenburg the week before last with a mixture of academics, activists, trade unionists, students and regular citizens, listening to an elderly trio playing 1950s British trad jazz a la Chris Barber and Ken Colyer as the introduction to a podium discussion on the theme Wo ist Europa? And, yes, I should have got a photo of the band, rather than this rather off-putting one of the panel.

Such an event felt like a very European thing – like the substantial displays in almost every German bookshop I’ve visited in recent years of books on the future of Europe, the current crisis etc. – a combination of a love of serious engagement with serious issues and a continuing majority commitment to Europe as an idea/ideal. I find it quite hard to imagine such a thing in Britain, at any rate outside the really big cities – let alone that it would involve a couple of ancient historians. Of course, it may be just an Oldenburg thing, or a particular thing for the organisers – both Prof Michael Sommer from the university and Dr Nicole Deufel, head of the city museums, have worked in the UK in the past, in the latter’s case returning to Germany just last year.

Anyway, it was another good work-out for my German, offering a British perspective – not least by emphasising that it was only a small minority of Britains who opted for catastrophe last year – in discussion with Michael (developing a vision for a ‘Europe of communities’ and strong citizenship based on the model of the Greek polis), a representative of the Pulse of Europe movement, and a banker and economics lecturer. We touched on the economic consequences of Brexit, ideas of subsidiarity, the lack of democracy and transparency in the current institutions and operation of the EU, the concept of a Europe of multiple speeds (economically rational, but what does it mean for law and human rights), the Roman approach to multiple civic and cultural identities, and Europe-wide copyright law – for Michael an example of unnecessary and damaging interference in local practices, for one of the musicians a necessary and important protection for artists. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, where actually is Europe – in the heart, in the soul, in the past or the future..?

Of course what we really want in Europe is more jazz, or jazz as a model of social and political life: honouring but also reinterpreting many different traditions, bringing them into new contexts and combinations without subsuming or erasing them (okay, I’d think more in terms of Berlin group Cyminology, using Persian and Arabic scales and melodies, or contemporary Polish jazz drawing on the klezmer tradition, but an Oldenburg trio playing a version of a sixty-year-old British reception of early C20 New Orleans jazz can work as well). The constant dynamic, constructive tension between predetermined structures and free improvisation, the balance between tradition and innovation, the fact that we can have a European jazz of many different speeds (sometimes within the same number…) without any need to argue over whether or not it counts as jazz – until some idiot starts insisting on the purity of a single definition. So, UKIP and AfD and the other idiots as the moldy figs of modern Europe…

1600 Pylos & Sphacteria Avenue

When I first began putting together a research project on the modern reception and influence of Thucydides, and writing funding applications, the big ‘hook’ – the thing that was going to persuade reviewers of the contemporary relevance of the theme – was Thucydides’ infiltration of the G.W. Bush White House. Irving Kristol’s claim that he was the favourite author of the Neocons, the relationship between Donald Kagan and the Project for a New American Century, and – from a less bellicose perspective, Colin Powell’s love of the (fake) Thucydides quote about manifestations of power and restraint, were not intended to be the central focus of the project, but they showed the importance of understanding the context of such readings, the traditions of reception and reinterpretation that made powerful people think, or at least claim, that Thucydides speaks to the present.

Here we are again, with a new article on ‘Why everyone in the White House is reading Thucydides’ suggesting the Obama adminstration’s relative restraint in such matters (occasional references from Martin Dempsey when Chair of the Joint Chiefs) was just a blip. Actually the article doesn’t have too much new information: we knew about Bannon’s loopy views on Sparta already, and likewise the tendency for senior military types like Mattis and McMaster to cite Thucydides is entirely predictable. The additions to our knowledge are Michael Anton’s insistence that only people who read the Hobbes translation are worth bothering with – one suspects that this has less to do with the scholarly and literary qualities of Hobbes’ version that with sending up a big “Hey, I like it nasty, brutish and short!” signal – and the fact that Graham Allison has wrangled an invitation to sell his new Wonder Woman novelisation. Indeed, one suspects that the main reason for the article’s existence is as part of that ongoing marketing campaign – but it still has the effect of making it seem like Thucydides is having a Moment. Certainly the Twitter thought so…

I can’t help worrying that this is more confirming data for my ‘Thucydides is a virus turning people into aggressive shambling zombies’ thesis, increasing the likelihood that they’ll start looking for a new Syracuse, and suggesting that we should start stock-piling canned goods and drinking water. However, it brings into focus the fact that these zombies are groaning quite different things. Mattis and McMaster fall into the tradition of old-fashioned realism, seeing international actors as basically rational, driven by motives of fear, interest and honour. The ‘Thucydides Trap’ offers instead a variant on power transition theory, emphasising structural factors rather than conscious decision-making. And Bannon seems to think that Cleon was the real hero of Thucydides’ narrative (or at any rate ought to have won the Mytilene Debate), and that the oft-cited democratic values of Pericles’ Funeral Oration need to be scrapped completely in favour of Spartan violence and anti-culture.

Saying that “They’re all reading Thucydides!” disguises the extent of radical disagreement; promoters of different interpretations of the same author can disagree far more viciously, and loathe one another far more, than those promoting different authors or theories, as feelings of identification and ownership kick in. There is surely a chance that the White House will now occupy itself with bad-tempered book seminars for the next few years, arguing themselves into the ground over the correct understanding of prophasis and aitia, and will do a lot less damage elsewhere as a result.

But Thucydides has always accommodated such tensions and contradictions, without this ever leading to anyone deciding to drop him as an authority. It seems sadly possible that shared worship of Thucydides will provide different White House factions with some common ground, a basis for communication and negotiation, enabling them to start acting in the world. Or, it may supply someone like a Bannon with a lever, using M&McM’s reverence for the name of Thucydides as a basis for disarming criticism of his own agenda – shades of the anecdote in Reinhard Koselleck, where a clever young Prussian swings a debate on financial policy by referencing what Thucydides had said about the evils of paper money in Athens…

Some readers of Thucydides see it as a warning against war, others as a licence for the exercise of power. As a text, it doesn’t do enough to discourage those determined to find a simplistic justification of their wish to burn the world. Start digging those bunkers, people; Thucydides is back in the White House.