Neville Morley's Blog, page 49

Caught in a (Thucydides) Trap

I’ve written on a number of occasions about Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ idea and why I disagree with it – indeed, I imagine that this is why the viewing stats for this blog have risen appreciably in recent weeks – but there’s nothing like reading someone else’s critical but largely wrong-headed review to prompt a bit of reflection. Arthur Waldron’s review in SupChina (and is that the worst name for a site ever?) has been widely circulated on the Twitter (at any rate by the normal standards of Thucydides-related references) with a measurable atmosphere of glee and Schadenfreude. It seems that a fair number of people want Allison to be not just wrong but catastrophically wrong – Ian Buruma’s New Yorker review is just as critical of Allison but much more measured, and hasn’t been nearly so widely cited as a result – and Waldron gives them what they want.

Waldron’s opening sentences are brutal – and frankly bizarre:

Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever.

Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed.

Okay… So far as I can recall, neither Kagan nor Badian actually wrote Thucydides’ history, so the final line really doesn’t work; it’s rather a case of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Denys Page?” Why Kagan and Badian, rather than, I dunno, G.E.M. de Ste Croix who wrote an entire book on The Origins of the Peloponnesian War? Because that’s what Waldron has read, or because those two suit his purposes and preferences in a way that de Ste Croix, with a much more structural approach to the issues, doesn’t? Not to mention the numerous discussions of Thucydides from within International Relations, more directly engaged with the question of how far his ideas can be usefully employed in the analysis of present-day inter-state politics.

Now, I’m certainly not insisting that Waldron must be a Thucydides expert and cite the whole range of specialised literature in reviewing this book, given that his very relevant expertise is in the modern history of China. But Waldron chooses to spend nearly half his review invoking the authority of classical studies to attack Allison, and so it’s legitimate to question his claims and methods in this area (and to note pedantically that Hobbes’ was not the first English translation). “There is no Thucydides Trap because Donald Kagan says so” is never the argument; firstly, because Kagan’s version of the Peloponnesian War is just one version, driven by his own set of assumptions and interpretative moves, and secondly because there appears to be a basic confusion between different levels of representation and past reality.

This may be partly because Allison’s analysis occasionally elides them, or at least an inattentive reader might get confused. His basic thesis is fourfold, (1) that Thucydides offers an analysis of the outbreak of war in terms of the rise of Athens and the fear this occasioned in Sparta, (2) that this was intended as a general principle of inter-state politics rather than just an interpretation of one specific war, (3) that this was a correct interpretation of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and (4) that it does work as a wider principle, as revealed by a study of a series of analogous cases over the following two and a half thousand years.

All four of these arguments are open to critique, to differing degrees. (1) Yes, Thucydides says this (more or less; there’s room for debate about how best to translate his statement), but arguable whether he meant to propose this as the sole explanation, or how exactly he understood the relationship between necessary structural conditions and contingent short-term causes; (2) yes, Thucydides definitely claims that understanding the specific events he describes will help his readers understand present and future events, but how exactly he intended this to be understood – whether it implies the existence of normative covering laws, as some modern social scientists have tended to assume – is definitely open to debate; (3) lots and lots of room for argument; (4) ditto, plus the question of whether, even if the principle can be shown to have operated in the majority of cases through history, it is necessarily still operable in the specific case of China, given (i) nuclear weapons, (ii) globalisation and (iii) the fact that everyone is very conscious of the possible risks of the principle operating, whether it’s real or not.

Waldron’s critique appears to focus almost entirely on (3); the only way of making sense of the statement that Kagan and Badian disproved the existence of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ decades before it was actually proposed as a theory is that they showed (to Waldron’s satisfaction, if not to universal agreement) that Thucydides’ interpretation of the war was either wrong or inadequate. “Every battlefield has been measured”; that’s an incredibly narrow – but rather Kaganesque – view of the terms of the debate. It doesn’t demonstrate that Thucydides didn’t hold such a view (1), nor that it was not intended by him as a broader principle (2); it offers an alternative version of events as if this is absolute truth, whereas Allison could undoubtedly cite alternative historical accounts which follow Thucydides’ version more closely; and it doesn’t really bother with (4) at all, having assumed that it’s enough to attack (3). In other words, it seeks to engage with a social-scientific argument that draws on historical data as if it were a solely historical account, but also does this in a manner that doesn’t take seriously the fact that all historical accounts involve interpretation and are always open to question.

There’s actually a decent case to be made that (3) isn’t even essential to Allison’s argument; the validity and potential usefulness of Thucydides’ alleged principle would not automatically be undermined if it didn’t wholly work for the Peloponnesian War, though admittedly it might raise some eyebrows. Indeed, given that Allison seems to be attaching the name of Thucydides to a variant on Power Transition Theory, rather than actually developing his entire theory out of a reading of Thucydides, one might suggest that the proper evaluation of his argument is completely separate from what he does with Thucydides (this is the approach that Buruma takes).

It’s only my personal concern with the reception of Thucydides that leads me to focus on the way that Allison employs Thucydides’ name as a kind of brand – but the fact that so many of his readers, including Waldron, do fixate on Thucydides as a source of legitimation and authority for his argument (or as the starting-point for any critique) does support the idea that this aspect is worth discussing.

Indeed, I would suggest that the real Thucydides Trap is not so much described by Thucydides as set by him; we are lured in by the promises of truth, knowledge and understanding, carefully disguised with apparent objectivity of narration and the trustworthy persona of the narrator. Having taken the bait, we find ourselves in Thunderdome, a no-holds-barred struggle between different interpretations and world-views – in which no argument ever dies completely, and no victory is ever permanent.

The struggle, not the end result, is the point of the exercise. Thucydides hasn’t set this up to prove the superiority of normative social science over wishy-washy humanities or the superiority of historicised interpretation over crude reductionism. Rather, each approach is shown to be ultimately inadequate as a complete explanation – and the same goes for other approaches. We are made to recognise that the world is complex, that it is shaped through the ideas we develop to try to interpret it, that we have to simplify things and resort to principles and rules of thumb in order to make sense of it, but that every time we do that we risk misunderstanding and worse. The risk is one of paralysis, as we see how the ideas we adopt to make sense of the world and identify the best way forward inevitably limit our understanding and start themselves to reshape events, as some people take them seriously and react accordingly. But the alternatives – ignorance, or blind unquestioning adherence to our prejudices – can only be worse…

 

Drinking Vessels of the Gods

It is a bizarre but entirely undiscussed paradox that the alleged technological underdevelopment and primitivist mindset of the ancient world – see M.I. Finley and his followers – was often illustrated by the story (Pliny NH 36.195, Petronius Satyricon 51) of the man who brought to the Emperor Tiberius a goblet made of unbreakable glass, that did not shatter when dropped and could be made perfectly whole again if damaged – and was put to death for his pains. “Hostility to innovation!” they cry. “And isn’t it significant that an inventor went to the emperor for a reward, not to a hi-tech start-up for capital investment?” Well, maybe. But the most important questions are: what was this material, and where did it come from?

Transparent, flexible, shatterproof, self-repairing; this sounds remarkably like a form of plastic, perhaps with embedded nanotech – not just a significant advance on standard ancient material techniques, but a quantum leap. And for a society that has often been characterised in terms of the efficient application of other people’s innovations, there are a couple of other fancy bits of technology that seem to be unique to the Romans: underwater concrete, for example, which can compete with the best of today’s construction techniques.

Time travel? That’s scarcely a historical argument. Better to think in terms of the well-documented tradition of encounters between earlier civilisations and extraterrestrial visitors. Did aliens give the secret of advanced concrete construction to Roman state architects – and, if so, what was their dark purpose? Is this the key to some of Vitruvius’ more gnomic pronouncements on architectural symbolism? Certainly we may suspect that Tiberius’ violent reaction to a stray bit of exotic tech was not due to hostility to anything new but because he knew exactly what it represented – this conspiracy went all the way to the top, and who knows what the ongoing archaeological work on the lower levels of Nero’s Golden House will uncover…

(with thanks to Jess Farr-Cox, @thefilthycomma, for the implicit challenge to come up with a career-ending argument. Still not sure if this is deranged enough, but putting it out there anyway. Given that at least one reader took my old ‘the Romans had steam engines” counterfactual article seriously, the reception of this may be interesting).

Brexit Means Brexit

[guest post from the official #CthulhuUK campaign]

If you are exposed to a vacuum, the tears that moisten and protect the outside of your eyeballs will evaporate within seconds. I therefore urge you: DO NOT attempt to read the Conservative Party’s 12-point Plan For Brexit! I, mighty Cthulhu, guarantee the continuing flow of tears over moist, succulent eyeballs. My 13-point Plan for Brexit is truly of the abyss, not merely abysmal.

1. Certainty and clarity that the land *will* be laid waste and your children and grandchildren will curse your name as they cower in makeshift shelters from the Fungi from Yuggoth.

2. End feeble attempts of EU institutions to ban noble British tradition of human sacrifice.

3. Unite all parts of the Union in suffering.

4. Restore historical tradition of wrecking Ireland as well.

5. Cut off all contact with so-called civilisation.

6. Foreigners will be treated in just the same way as natives [evil chuckle]

7. Worker’s rights. Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

8. Free cake.

9. Exciting new trading opportunities with Ulthar, Kadath in the Cold Waste and the Plateau of Leng.

10. A new technological revolution, as we return you to the Stone Age.

11. Full cooperation with global terror.

12. A smooth, orderly detachment of Britain from mundane reality.

13. Brexit means Brexit means Bragnarök!

A vote for any other party risks handing over management of the forthcoming apocalypse to weak, indecisive humans who are simply dying to backslide on the self-destructive instincts of the British people. Take back control from so-called experts and their rational calculations! #CthulhuUK

Burning Down the House

A new, and particularly useless, Thucydides misattribution; last night, a Twitter account largely dedicated to retweeting hard-line anti-Islamic and anti-climate change remarks from people like Richard Spencer and Paul Joseph Watson offered its own wannabe meme on the OneLove concert in Manchester: “THUCYDIDES said “while your houses are on fire, you sing.” Well, no, of course he didn’t, and there is precisely zero indication on the internet that anyone has ever suggested that he did – it’s actually taken from Aesop (no.54 in Perry’s index) – so this seems a clear-cut case of fake Thucydideana actually being created; Aesop much too fuzzy and associated with childhood to legitimise such a denunciation of modern liberalism, so let’s turn to the authoritative, hard-nosed Realist Thucydides. Thankfully the account has only 74 followers, and this tweet has been liked and retweeted only once each, so with a bit of luck it’s the last as well as the first we’ll be seeing of it…

Talk Thucydides To Me…

No, I haven’t seen the new Wonder Woman film – the reviews I’ve seen so far seem inclined to a position of “crashing disappointment” [ahem. see update below] – but I think I’ve managed to establish the identity of the alleged Thucydides reference without actually having to watch it. I’ve no idea how it plays out in the film, as the screenplay doesn’t seem to be online yet, but as far as the novelisation is concerned, Diana is busy getting smoochy with General Ludendorff, whom she suspects of being the god Ares in disguise…

“Enjoying the party?” Ludendorff asked her.

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “I confess I’m not sure what we’re celebrating tonight.”

“A German victory, of course,” he said with relish.

“Victory?” she echoed. “When I hear peace is so close?” He smiled. “Peace is only an armistice in an endless war.”

It was a famous quotation. Her heart turned over in her chest. She understood what he was saying. And whose words he was using to say them:

“Thucydides,” she replied, referring to the Greek general who had written about the long, terrible war between the Spartans and the Greeks. Mnemosyne, Diana’s last tutor, had forced her to memorize long passages of his work. She had told Diana that Thucydides was one of Hippolyta’s favorites – and by that she meant both the work and the man.

“You know your Ancient Greeks,” he said. “They understood that War is a God. A God that requires human sacrifice.”

Unfortunately, as I discussed in a previous blog post, this line doesn’t actually come from Thucydides; the earliest attribution to him that I’ve yet been able to find is from 1988, when it was painted on one of the walls of the newly-refurbished West Point museum, as one of a set of quotations suggested by the local history department. It does resemble a Napoleon quote (or at least a quote attributed to Napoleon), and much further back it bears a significant resemblance to a line in Plato’s Laws (626a). But Thucydides, as the great realist and historian of war, is so much more appropriate as the source.

In the context of this scene in Wonder Woman, this is in one sense perfect: it instantly reveals that Ludendorff cannot possibly be a genuine Prussian general. Just like the moment in Jo Walton’s The Philosopher Kings when Kebes sings a version of Summertime, it’s clear evidence that supernatural agency is involved; only a god like Ares could know about a fake Thucydides quote from seventy years in the future…

On the other hand, Diana is convinced that she recognises the line, and its author – although, since she also seems to think that the Peloponnesian War was between the Spartans and ‘the Greeks’, we probably don’t need to take her claims to knowledge too seriously [ahem; see update below]. What’s the point in having a magic lasso of truth if you don’t use it for anything useful? Unless she doesn’t bother taking pains to enquire into things or develop any sort of critical sense because she can always have resort to a magical gizmo.

It does all fit with the sense that Thucydides continues to have a worryingly high presence in the wider culture: the prevalence of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ meme with the publication now of Graham Allison’s book-length account, more references from Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, the recent burst of hyper-crude realism from H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn in the Wall Street Journal on Trump’s foreign policy ‘strategy’ (not directly citing Thuc, admittedly), and the response from David Brooks in the New York Times that he wishes McMaster was a better student of Thucydides.

But all those examples relate to the specific field of international relations, and Thucydides functions there as a kind of status symbol; it’s not that everyone is expected to have heard of him, but that he’s someone you ought to be familiar with if you want to be taken seriously. The Wonder Woman reference feels different, not least because I thought the whole point of the modern blockbuster was to be as non-culturally-specific and accessible as possible. The quote isn’t expected to be familiar (it’s the sort of thing a villainous Prussian general might say), but when Diana recognises it as Thucydides, that’s a signal to the audience – or at least intended to be: exotic, perhaps, but recognisable.

It is perhaps worth noting that Joss Whedon’s original screenplay for Wonder Woman didn’t misquote any Thucydides…

Update 5/6/17, on the basis of various recent conversations. Firstly, apologies to anyone who felt I was being gratuitously unfair to the character of Diana (views not to be taken seriously etc.) when this is clearly an issue with the author of the novelisation (and not the screenplay or the film, which doesn’t say anything about the different sides in the Peloponnesian War) attributing idiotic ideas to her that no genuine Amazon would actually hold. Secondly, it does seem that the reviews I saw may have been less than representative (and maybe too heavily invested in some of the original comics), as generally the film is being well received, and my pedantic quibbling on the specific issue of a dodgy Thucydides reference shouldn’t be held against it.

Thirdly, I’ve had a fascinating exchange with Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway, who was the Greek translator for the film; he comments on how seriously the filmmakers took the idea of Diana as speaker of a hundred languages and wanted to get the lines right, and also suggests a possible rationalisation for the ‘Thucydides’ line:

This film is evidently set in a world which is not ours, as witness the fact that Ludendorff dies twenty years early (for most people a rather more glaring licence than a bit of internet-approved pseudothucydideana), or maybe a copy of Thucydides book 9 in his daughter’s own hand survived in the library of Themyscira…

But of course; and if both Ares and Diana have access to passages of Thucydides not available to anyone else, that offers two different routes whereby that line might have found its way onto the walls of the West Point museum…

Luxury and Munificence

In this morning’s Grauniad, George Monbiot argues that the fundamental political decision of our age – not solely in Britain or Europe or the West, but across the globe – lies between “public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some.” My immediate thought was of the famous lines in Cicero’s Pro Murena (76):

The Roman people hates private luxury, it esteems public munificence; it does not love lavish banquets, still less sordid behaviour and brutality; it recognises differences in services and circumstances, the interchange of work and pleasure.

I’ve no idea if this is a deliberate reference (Monbiot hasn’t responded to a query on the Twitter); rather like the “many not the few” line, it’s such a boilerplate contrast that the resemblances don’t necessarily mean anything.

In its original context, of course, the remit is quite limited: this is about the political elite policing its own boundaries, in a society where wealth was essential to gain access to public office but there were strong motives to ensure that wealth alone was never sufficient (or any old scoundrel might buy his way into power, rather than socially acceptable scoundrels): what mattered was what you did with your wealth. It’s also not at all clear that “the Roman people” held such a view, but Cicero was never hesitant in claiming a popular mandate for his own agenda without much fear of contradiction.

Monbiot’s article reframes this as a question how ‘society’ should spend its wealth rather than how the political elite should; the feelings of ‘the people’ should be expressed not in choosing between different politicians on the basis of whether they build aqueducts or eat magnificent banquets from citrus-wood tables, but in deciding between political programmes on public programmes, taxation policies and the like. In Roman terms, this is the sort of populism – agrarian reform, corn doles etc. – that gave the Gracchi a bad name, but harnessed to the rhetoric of traditional aristocratic values.

It’s interesting that Monbiot retains the positive characterisation of ‘luxury’ as something to which everyone should be entitled – echoing the way that writers like Adam Smith rejected the traditional moralising discourse of luxuria in the late 18th century. For Smith, a labourer’s linen shirt could be considered a ‘luxury’, in the sense that it is not strictly a necessity in purely material terms – and such luxuries are good rather than bad, contrary to earlier claims, both for the individual (to maintain some social pride and gain some pleasure from life) and for the workings of the economy as a whole.

Likewise for Monbiot, nice parks and well-funded education could be considered luxuries, especially in a society where in practice they’re increasingly accessible only to those with private wealth, but they’re the sorts of luxuries that ought to be available to all. In other words, where Cicero wanted to contrast both public and private and luxury and munificence, Monbiot is happy to focus just on the first pair.

Of course, on a planet with finite resources and no magic pudding, there’s a decent case to be made that something like a long-distance transport system is a luxury in the bad old sense: not only not a necessity, but a corrupting, socially destructive indulgence. The argument should be less about ensuring that everyone can enjoy a particular thing and more about whether we can afford for anyone to have it. But given how far current political debate is even from Monbiot’s starting-point, it’s understandable that he doesn’t try to argue this position…

Evil Losers

Whom would you rather have make a speech about the death of one of your loved ones, Donald Trump or Pericles? For Simon Schama over on the Twitter yesterday, there’s no contest: “Grief obliges eloquence or silence. Pericles. Lincoln. Then ‘evil losers'”. It’s certainly true that there’s no contest when it comes to eloquence and rhetorical skill, or even basic grammar – but the differences aren’t so stark when it comes to the ends of such speeches. For Trump, the deaths of children, teenagers and their older relatives in Manchester are fuel for his confused, ill-directed crusade against ‘radical Islwmic terrorism’, fuelling suspicion of Muslims in general. For Pericles, the deaths of Athenian soldiers were weaponised to urge the survivors to sacrifice themselves for the city as well, with the grief of their families waved away. The issue with Schama’s contrast isn’t that Pericles lost the war or was responsible for starting it, as various people responded to him; it’s that the contrast isn’t as stark as he implies. As for his “Thucydides would block you and so will I”, nice line, but would the man willing to face up to the full ghastliness of human weakness and violence really filter reality like that?

Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse the sub-tweet, I feel ever more disturbed by the sorts of people who choose to incorporate Thucydides into their Twitter identity, and the violent right-wing views many of them seem to hold – and what this says about the modern image of Thucydides, if not necessarily the work itself…

A Serious Man?

Thucydides was not a happy bunny. Strictly speaking, we don’t know this – even if we trust the ancient biographical accounts, it’s not the sort of thing they talk about – but that has never stopped later readers imagining the personality of the author. In the tradition of ‘realism’, most explicit in Nietzsche’s account in Götzendämmerung but pervading many 20th-century political readings, Thucydides is presented as the sort of illusionless man who has the courage to face unvarnished reality; this reading is based on his stripping away of claims about justice and virtue to reveal the power struggles underneath, and then in turn this conception of his ruthless critical spirit is taken as a guarantee of the veracity of his account of the world. Arnold Toynbee in contrast detects an anguished, traumatised figure between the lines of his tightly controlled analytical prose, someone who was broken by his experience of failure, exile and defeat but put himself back together through sheer will and intellectual rigour. In either case, this is not a man who made balloon animals.

But of course we can’t know this; this is all projection, imagining the Thucydides that we want as reassuring authority figure and guru, taking his own (minimal) self-representation at face value and turning it up to eleven. He had a wife, and apparently at least one child; who’s to say that he wasn’t, at least by Athenian standards, a loving husband and father, a loyal friend, a cheerful companion who liked a drink or two?

[image error]This is the (marginally) more serious aspect of thinking about the Happy Thucydides, following the work of Martin O’Neill from Politics in York to apply FaceApp to portraits of different philosophers and thus create a Happy History of Western Philosophy (see also the hilarious captions added by Kieran Healy on the Twitter). We can imagine suitable rewrites of famous quotes from Thucydides’ work – “the secret of happiness is freedom, the secret of freedom is happiness, man”; “the strong do what they want? Let’s everybody do what they want!” – but also wonder what difference it would make to our reading of the work is we have this image of its author in mind.

How much do we need an idea of Thucydides as eternally serious and engaged with the world as it is, as someone we can trust and always turn to for enlightenment – but who actually relieves us of the need to be serious and critical all the time? Thucydides can be illusionless and anguished on our behalf – and the effect of this would be less if we had to think of him as someone less consistent, more subject to other emotions, more complicated, less in control.

I now feel the urge to research the theme of Thucydidean jokes.

The Many and the Few

How minimal and commonplace can a quotation or allusion be, and still be traced back to its source with some degree of confidence? Labour’s adoption of “For the many not the few” as its election slogan provoked comments on the Twitter (e.g. from Jonathan Freedland of the Grauniad) about whether Jeremy Corbyn realised he was quoting Tony Blair’s revised version of the infamous Clause IV – doing away with references to the common ownership of the means of production etc. – followed by the argument from Phillip Collins of the Times that this was actually taken from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, the famous line (as included in the preamble to the draft European Constitution!) that “our constitution is called a democracy, because it is administered for the sake not of the few but of the many [or: of the whole people]” (2.37).

I don’t actually recall any discussion, back in 1994/5, of the possible sources of Blair’s new wording, and I haven’t found anything helpful on the internet – any suggestions or information gratefully received! I’d always vaguely assumed it had some connection to Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy – “We are many – they are few” – which on reflection seems unlikely, but does highlight the fact that the words and phrasing are so vague and conventional that it’s difficult to make a definite link to anything. What makes the Thucydidean line distinctive is the whole phrase, defining democracy in opposition to oligarchy (even when this is problematic; one C19 French translation preferred “our constitution is called ‘popular'” because of the negative connotations of democracy at the time). Blair and Corbyn aren’t talking about democracy as a system but about how a democratic society should be managed (implying that the institutions alone aren’t adequate, which looks less like a Periclean claim that a Cleonic one…); why should they look back to Pericles at all?

In the absence of further information, I’m sceptical that this is a quote or reference, rather than a very banal rhetorical trope (I mean, is *any* western political party ever going to claim to represent the few? Rather, they simply redefine the many to suit their own agendas). In which case the more interesting questions are about the process of attribution – is this another sign of the creeping Americanisation of a British political discourse, or of the ongoing infiltration of it by Thucydides, references to the Thucydides Trap and all (which, is, of course, simply a more specialised version of Americanisation)? Freedland’s original tweet has a certain ‘Gotcha!’ tone – hey, bet Corbyn doesn’t realise he’s quoting the accursed Blair! – whereas Collins seems less concerned to defend Corbyn than to deny Blair credit for coining the phrase (which is fair enough)…

Freedom or Death or None Of The Above?

Is there a plausible outcome in the Melian Dialogue situation in which the Melians ‘win’ in any sense? I’m starting to think about developing the second half of my “choose your own adventure” version, and obviously this is a crucial issue; is the point of the exercise that players should try every possible approach and gradually recognise the bleak reality of their fate, or that there should be a way out, however obscure and improbable? This question was actually brought into focus this week by the spectacle of Yanis Varoufakis offering advice to Theresa May on negotiating with the EU: the man who knew he was in a Melian Dialogue situation, but still tried to force it to a different outcome. Yes, that went well…

One obvious point is that it all depends on how you define winning. If it’s getting everything you want (continuing independence) then you’re going to be disappointed; yes, in the game someone playing the Athenians could choose to agree to Melian neutrality, but the likely result is a furious reaction from the Athenian demos directed against their wimpy generals for ignoring orders – in reality, it seems unlikely to impossible that an Athenian commander would have made such a decision.

Would ‘survival, under Athenian hegemony’ count as winning, as that’s a much more plausible outcome? At this point it becomes clear that this also depends on how you define ‘the Melians’. The point is obscured by our (and to a lesser degree Thucydides’) tendency to talk about ‘the Melians’, but the Athenians’ interlocutors are the representatives of the Melian oligarchs, who have requested private discussions precisely – as the Athenians point out – because they’re afraid the people will much more readily agree to Athenian demands, even absolute surrender.

It’s not just the possibility that the people might prioritise their survival over abstract conceptions of sovereignty and resistance to foreign domination, whereas their leaders are more strongly committed to such ideals. It is also the case that the oligarchs would most likely lose out personally if Melos surrenders; the first step of the Athenians would be to install a more friendly regime, doubtless drawn from the democratic party in Melos, and that would entail exile at best, more likely execution for the oligarchs. “Better death than dishonour” becomes a different calculation when the ‘dishonour’ option involves death as well. The definition of ‘winning’ depends in part on whether the Melian oligarchs assume complete identity between their own preferences and those of their people, or recognise a possible divergence and accept the possibility of self-sacrifice for the greater good.

And obviously there’s then the possibility of extending this analysis to other, more recent Melian Dialogue situations – where it actually becomes rather trite. It is difficult to have confidence that the UK government is working wholeheartedly in the interests of the whole country as it approaches negotiations over Brexit; at best it’s working in the interests of the slim majority who voted to Leave, but more plausibly it’s working on the basis of self-interested electoral calculation, fulfilling the alleged desires of that slim majority regardless of the likely impact on their actual interests.

The Melian oligarchs were honest enough not to pretend that the masses were anything other than spear-fodder; May et al claim to be acting in their name, as mere instruments of the popular will, with this mandate to be renewed and expanded next month. The optimistic view is that an increased majority will make it easier for the strong, stable and sensible Tories to ignore the most deranged Brexiteers – but that assumes there is some recognition of the possibility of a national interest separate from the personal preferences of the oligarchs and their calculations of future electoral advantage.

Put another way: one key issue in any Melian Dialogue situation is how each side conceives of a successful outcome – how far it excludes from consideration, for its own selfish reasons, outcomes that others within that community might consider acceptable. Thucydides’ account, and subsequent analyses, show how unlikely a good compromise outcome is from the beginning. Artificial constraints – that the Melian oligarchs must come out on top, that any agreement with the EU must enhance the Tories’ electoral prospects – make it even less likely.