Neville Morley's Blog, page 5

D.I.S.C.O.

The name of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff recurred time and again in the conference on Altertumswissenschaft and Historismus I was attending last week in London (one of the most intellectually stimulating conferences I’ve been to in recent years, despite my sleep deprivation); mostly only in passing, but his dominance in the field of classical philology in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, and still more his determined efforts in shaping not just the present state of the discipline but also its history in his own image, mean that even those who want to talk about other conceptions of the subject still end up discussing him. The great Jonas Grethlein focused his whole paper on Wilamowitz and his (implicit, possibly entirely naive) hermeneutic approach, and also offered extensive evidence of the purpleness of his prose. I especially liked this one:

The ultimate task of philological-historical scholarship is the revitalisation of past lives, sensations, feelings, thoughts and beliefs through the power of fantasy informed by scholarship, such that everything in the past which possesses invigorating force can continue to influenoce the present and future. For this to work, one must possess a cool head, but hot love must burn in one’s heart. Only Eros facilitates the beholding of truth and eternal life. (Erinnerungen, 1848-1914, 2nd edn, 1928: 104)

The power of fantasy informed by scholarship? One wonders if he kept a dream journal… Above all, of course, I was taken by the stuff about Hot Love, and couldn’t shake the image of Wilamowitz performing this as a funky disco number. “I’ve got a cool head/ And a critical method/ But what I really need from you/ Hot Love!”

A paper on Friday morning on Werner Jaeger’s conception of philology and history offered a slightly less overwrought quote, perhaps because it was a personal letter rather than a public lecture. It’s still over the top, but less conducive to being set to scratchy phased guitar and a conga rhythm.

The old poetry (and of course law and religion and history as well) is dead: it is our task to give it life, when one, for instance, explains Aeschylus and the language starts to ring and the rhythms to whisper… and the students then forget that there is a professor and a text full of vocabulary and corruptions…and now they have in front of their souls Aeschylus and Cassandra and the theatre of Dionysus with the Acropolis above then I feel that philology is something in itself after all… (letter to Usener, 1883)

I have genuinely mixed feelings about this quote. On the one hand, it’s a classic bit of positivism: the goal is direct communion between past and present, reader and text, ignoring all that nasty historicism and the essential mediating role of scholarship and interpretation. The text will speak to the students, the real past will become manifest to them. The choice of dead/living rather than past/present is a cliché, but an illuminating one.

And on the other hand, there is actually a lot to be said for the idea of the vanishing teacher; maybe not quite in the way Wilamowitz intended it, but I can imagine this fitting with my aspirations for teaching in at least two respects: the students feeling empowered to develop and articulate their own responses and interpretations, rather than waiting to be told what to think and reproduce, and the students forgetting about the formal context of education, the assessments and marks (the fundamental role of the teacher being to generate marks, obviously…) and just being immersed in the process of scholarship and critical thinking in the moment. Nothing to do with the deadness or otherwise of the material, which seems to be Wilamiwitz’s primary concern, but rather the dead hand of certain sorts of pedagogy…

And, yes, I do think this is one of my best ever blog titles.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th February 2025

There are times when a good night’s sleep is even more of an absolute necessity than usual. As a chronic insomniac who lives with three deranged and demanding cats, I’m used to getting by on the basis of less-than-deep-and-satisfying rest and not enough of it – but ideally not when I then have to get up at five to finish writing a conference paper that really needs another day or so of frantic scribbling as an absolute bare minimum, and then need to be in sparkling improvisational form to compensate for the fact that the topic is miles outside my intellectual comfort zone and, unlike with most things I do, there isn’t any plausible safe space to which I can retreat if necessary. A paper on Thucydides, or the ancient economy, or historiography, or decadence, or Marx, or Nietzsche, fine; within those topics, there are things I can talk about where I’m confident that I know more than most people, and if the discussion starts to feel perilous then I can drag it off in that direction. When it comes to the philological conceptions of Friedrich Creuzer, about which I am speaking this morning, I don’t have much idea of exactly how little I know, let alone how much anyone else will know. Does the fact that I can’t find a lot of relevant scholarship indicate that this is largely uncharted territory so I’m relatively safe, or on the contrary that my research has been inadequate? As will probably be my epitaph, this paper seemed like a good idea at the time…

And so of course I sleep abysmally, even without feline disturbances. Playing a bit of music doesn’t help – at best I drift off for twenty minutes or so, not even making it to the end of the record. Some of this may, I suspect, be that light sleep where you dream you’re awake, which I find more tiring than actually being awake; most of it definitely is being awake, desperately aware of how the theoretical possibility of a decent number of hours is steadily diminishing. It’s not even that the room is especially noisy, despite it being London (yes, I’m conscious of becoming ever more like Gussie Fink-Nottle, pining for the countryside and my newts); a few sirens but no serious disturbances in the corridor, just an inability to drop off.

Just after 3 am I give up and start working on the paper, on the basis that I’m now so tired and headachy that it will take me twice as long to finish it. Pause for a cup of (horrible) tea at four; no biscuits provided. Another cup of tea at half five. The good news is that the prior thinking and planning up to this point still seem to be making sense; the bad news is that I feel too tired and unsure of the material to risk just talking from notes, so have to write out the whole paper. By the time hotel breakfast starts at seven I’ve written three out of four sections – whether it makes the slightest sense goodness knows, but it’s something to hold on to that may be sufficiently coherent; the major issue is going to be timing, as I have no idea if the text is too short or, more likely, too long, even before we get into my tendency to ramble even more than usual when tired.

The coffee at breakfast is truly dreadful – even the usual trick with crappy hotel coffee machines of combining an espresso with a flat white or milk coffee doesn’t help – but a dose of traditional stodge helps tide me over (I’ll pay for this later, but at this moment what’s needed is meat, fat, carbohydrates and sugar in some combination). Back to the room to finish the final part of the paper, desperately casting around for something resembling a conclusion or connection to the conference theme – although I have the safety net of being able to blame the organiser for suggesting this topic to me in the first place. By this point my brain has decided to tease me by coming up with further interesting ideas – that call for a few more days of research and further thought.

Onwards to the conference. Currently it feels as if it would be wonderful if it were one of those huge events where it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, rather than a dinky bespoke research workshop where everyone is being friendly and chatty, let alone where there are various old friends and acquaintances whom I haven’t seen for many years… It feels rather awkward to be withdrawn and curmudgeonly, given that part of Creuzer’s schtick was that the good philologist should also be a decent human being (hey, I’m not really a philologist…), but I just don’t have the mental bandwidth for chitchat. Also not sure that I can adequately calibrate the tone of various questions I have on some of the papers in the first session, even assuming that my queries aren’t just the product of tired misunderstanding rather than critical acumen, so largely stay quiet and mentally promise to talk to the speakers later. In fact the questions to one poor PhD student are far harsher than I would ever have been, but thankfully they’re handled confidently. Another speaker, talking about mid-C19 Polish scholars, quotes one criticising Creuzer; dammit, everything I’ve read suggests that by this date he was completely ignored by everyone. Clearly I know nothing. Make a marginal note to mention it, in the hope that this deflects potential awkward question. I accumulate rather a lot of these notes…

Time for my paper. Well, I get away with it; miraculously, the material fits the allotted time almost exactly, so I barely have to hurry up in the final sections, the response is friendly and interested, and people say nice things in the lunch break afterwards. I really do not merit this. Clearly the primary reason is that no one else knows much more about Creuzer than I do, but I think there are a couple of other factors: I speak very clear ‘BBC’ English, which non native speakers always appreciate; the subject matter organises itself into a logical structure without much need for me to kick it into shape, so the whole thing flows plausibly; and, as a middle-aged white male professor, I tend to sound authoritative even when making self-deprecating remarks about my limited knowledge. Basically, I am human ChatGPT, and people should be much more sceptical about the output, but currently I am too tired to feel ashamed.

I take the opportunity of an hour for lunch for an energetic walk to to try to clear my head a bit before the afternoon session – which isn’t wholly successful due to encountering too many slow-moving tourists, but definitely better than nothing. The afternoon papers show a distinct philosophical tendency, for which I am not entirely in the mood – they sound like things I ought to know about, like early Nietzsche or notions of historical time, but nothing is connecting at all. I feel very slow and stupid, and can only hope that I’ve been sufficiently constructive in earlier discussion, especially yesterday, to be given leeway. Also, the lunchtime sandwiches are weighing heavily on my stomach. The final paper, Jonas Grethlein offering his latest take-down of Wilamowitz’ conception of philology, is clear and thought-provoking, and also provides copious examples of the great scholar’s astonishingly purple and pompous prose – W not G, I should say – so a positive note on which to conclude for the day. But if Grethlein hasn’t grown even taller in the years since I last saw him, I am definitely shrinking.

I offer my apologies for the conference dinner; rare for me to turn down a free meal, especially as they are not going to the overly-familiar Greek restaurant that usually seems to be the venue for London events, but I am feeling far too tired to wait until eight o’clock for food and struggle to hear what anyone is saying. Walk back to the hotel via a supermarket to pick up a few snacks and a couple of cans of beer; log into my jazz composition class, which I had otherwise been set to miss, or rather to follow only via the recording – it’s not that I can make a huge amount of sense of the material on slash chords and modal structures in my present state, but it passes the time – and then talk briefly to A. on the phone before going to bed a bit before nine, hoping that this time I will sleep…

The Way I Feel

I’m trying to find the sweet spot between a transhistorical, universalising claim along the lines of Thucydides’ “most people do not take the trouble to enquire critically but believe any old crap” and a short-term ahistorical catastrophising claim about social media having rotted everyone’s brains. There was undoubtedly a lot of stupidity around in, say, the 1980s, but I don’t remember the times being so pervasively stupid as they are today (the feeling of doom, however, is extremely familiar). While I certainly think there is a plausible case that GenAI will seriously undermine cognitive skills if it’s allowed to take over schools and universities, that’s not the cause; rather, the widespread acceptance of GenAI outputs as authoritative even by people who are supposed to be learning critical skills suggests a culture where truthiness prevails over truth, where claims are judged plausible not because of evidence or logic but because of vibes.* Given that GenAI is simply producing a bland averaging of existing statements from its training data, you could say that it seems persuasive because it’s reflecting an already-existing preference for unsupported assertions that happen to suit our priors.

This morning’s case in point: someone responded to the Thucydiocy Bot’s dogged correction of the indestructible misattributed ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote (which has, incidentally, started to turn up on Bluesky; I guess it’s a proper grown-up social network now…) by citing Grok’s response to the question of whether Thucydides wrote it. Am I calling Grok a liar? Well, no – because that is to anthropomorphise a glorified autotext gadget. But also because the answer was surprisingly equivocal…

It feels a little surprising that anyone would cite this response as if it is a knock-down argument for attributing the quote to Thucydides; after all, it admits that the line is not found anywhere in his text. Clearly it’s sufficient that the Grok output maintains that there is some sort of connection, and, while acknowledging the existence of debate on the issue, effectively nullifies that by not providing any details or mentioning William F. Butler as the alternative (i.e. correct) author suggestion.

I do find this quite interesting – and so am grateful to this Ex-Twitter user for submitting the query, as I’ve decided on principle not to use GenAI tools if I can help it. A proper process of research by a human into this question of attribution would, I’d suggest, quickly identify that while the quote is frequently ascribed to Thucydides on the internet, this literally never involves offering a specific reference to the text or any other source for the idea; a longer search, wading through all of these useless examples, ought to locate (1) the Wikiquote page that provides links to supporting evidence in labelling the quote as ‘misattributed’ and (2) the sole peer-reviewed academic publication on the subject that establishes the same conclusion. Given that it’s an Ex-Twitter thing, one might also imagine that the persistent repetition of “It’s not Thucydides, it’s 19th-century soldier and author Sir William F. Butler” by the Thucydiocy Bot might have had an impact…

Best guess is that there is no, or at best insufficient, evaluation of source quality in whatever processes have generated this output; referenced academic analysis is not being heavily weighted against the sheer volume of people attributing the line to Thucydides, and the arguments against that attribution are incorporated as indications that there is a debate but not actually being evaluated as proof that the attribution is wrong. It’s difficult to avoid a sense that Grok could easily be used to generate BBC news reports – there is a debate, so we must offer a balanced, sitting on the fence summary of both sides, thereby legitimising the one that is unsupported ideology – if it isn’t already. Some people say it’s Thucydides, others say it isn’t.

If the output stopped there, it would be unhelpfully vague and incomplete but not actively misleading. Instead, it moves into the realm of vibes: Thucydides may not actually have written this, but doesn’t it feel like the sort of thing he would have said? Isn’t this a plausible version of what we find in his work? So even if someone else wrote this, we can still see it as a basically Thucydidean sentiment? This is heavily reminiscent of the sort of arguments regularly thrown at the Thucydiocy Bot by people who are, for whatever reason, heavily invested in the idea that Thucydides must be the originator of ‘Scholars and Warriors’ – the only thing missing here is a claim that perhaps it was in one of Thucydides’ other writings, now lost. My guess is that Grok is not programmed to have a Thucydides obsession, so this must simply be a reflection of the sorts of arguments found in its training data; evidence and logic being trumped again by vibes – my feelings don’t care about your facts.

A critical reader would take apart this output, distinguishing between statements of fact that could be verified (the line is often attributed to T; there is debate about its origin; it’s not a direct verbatim quote) and vibes-based speculation (it captures the spirit of his work; it’s more likely a modern paraphrase; it’s best understood as a Thucydidean sentiment). But then a critical reader wouldn’t be asking Grok in the first place – while the hedging and equivocating of the output apparently, in at least one instance, creates an impression of authority to legitimise the overall idea that the quote is Thucydidean, rather than (as the actual words say) establishing that there is at best considerable doubt on the matter.

*I did wonder about calling this piece ‘Looking Very Relaxed, Adolf Hitler on Vibes’, on the principle established by Alan Coren’s Golfing for Cats, in the interests of improving my visitor stats, but there are too many real Nazis around at the moment..

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Trump

I am almost entirely failing at the moment to live up to the model of some of my heroes: to be able to keep thinking and writing, to maintain the equanimity required to make proper sense of the world rather than falling back on clichés and polemic, to draw strength from one’s values rather than finding the mismatch between them and the apparent direction of historical developments a source of despair. It’s not just a feeling of having missed the boat – yes, the best time to have finished books on Thucydides and politics or on the power of the idea of ‘decadence’ was several years ago – but a paralysis in the face of Too Much Going On, too much material, too many different sources of fear and anxiety, too much of a sense of personal weakness and insignificance. Crafting short, snarky remarks on social media feels just about possible; sustained analysis or exposition, not so much (as Buffy remarked in relation to a college course on Introduction to the Modern Novel, “I guess that would mean I’d have to read the Modern Novel. Isn’t there an Introduction to the Modern Blurb?”).

So, I haven’t, for example, made any attempt at charting the abuses of the Melian Dialogue in relation to Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine; partly because there’s little sign of anything new or interesting about the conversation on Ex-Twitter beyond the fact that the Russia-adjacent trolls seem to be more blatant than three years ago in their celebration of ‘might makes right’ as a timeless principle, and partly because it’s just depressing. The one cause for optimism, in a black sort of way, is that American politics seem to be moving rapidly beyond Thucydides – whose main interest in tyranny was the way that irrational fear of it might provoke democracies into unwise decisions – and onto Tacitus and Suetonius, and the Carl Schmitt interpretation of the Roman dictatorship – autocracy as a legitimate response to crisis. The craven response of American media and many politicians – in the UK as much as in the US – does seem depressingly Tacitean.

The question is always whether such classical analogies, while they do come instinctively to the minds of those of us who do this stuff for a living and are increasingly desperate to defend its usefulness, actually help. One of the points I tried to make when I was analysing the ‘Trump as Roman Emperor’ discourse back in 2017-18 is that what looks to bien-pensant liberals like a slam-dunk – “Trump acts like Nero/Caligula! Emperors are bad and Un-American! Therefore Trump Bad! QED” – might not in fact be the most effective strategy, insofar as it’s obviously polemical but also underestimates the possibility that many people might be attracted by the idea of Strong Man Making Rome Great Again. This now seems somewhat prescient – unlike my hopes that the whole debate might be completely irrelevant by the time the chapter was published.

Of course, my claims to prescience, and still more the idea that Theodor Adorno is the thinker we need in this moment, are somewhat stifled by the fact that the piece in question was published in German, and so had little hope of being widely noticed. So, while I may not be capable of stringing proper sentences together at the moment, it did seem worth spending a couple of hours this morning translating the piece into English, in case anyone might find it useful.

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Trump (English)

Apologies in advance for awkward phrasing. This was a piece that I started writing in English with the idea of then translating it, before realising that there are things I can think in English that don’t work in German, and vice versa, so most of this was conceived in German – and so putting it into English really needs more time and energy than I can spare to rewrite sections properly. Also, I would recommend checking the original publication for the illustrations, as again I don’t have time to chase these up – a brief internet search suggests that several of the pictures I used are now extremely difficult if not impossible to find or reproduce legitimately, and also that searching for images of ‘Trump Roman Emperor’ now comes up with a majority of positive portrayals celebrating his power. Sign of the times.

Decline and Fall

Could we please stop with the relentless politicisation of ancient history? The past should not be deployed in a superficial and tendentious manner by someone with no understanding of historical research, all to support a wholly contemporary agenda intended to make Britons feel bad about themselves and their society. It’s a betrayal of the great tradition of historiography since the Enlightenment, and a devastating indictment of the British university system that it’s turning out people with no actual knowledge or critical sense, who simply parrot the latest trendy ideas they’ve read on the internet.

Yes, the Roman Empire variant of the anti-woke mind virus has hit British politics. In a rambling screed about The Crisis Of Western Civilisation at a gathering of contrarians and fascists, that pushed the Decadence Klaxon beyond normal tolerance levels, the alleged heir to centuries of respectable conservative politics decided that a bit of Roman history was in order. In recent decades, this sort of reference has tended to indicate a favourable view of the classically-embellished racism of Enoch Powell; in this case, I don’t think we can dignify it with anything like that sort of intellectual tradition, but rather it’s just another bit of sycophancy towards the Dork Lord of Mars and his cabal.

“It was fiscal weakness, not just war, that led to the decline of the Roman Empire.” Oh dear. One assumes she will expect credit for going beyond the usual right-wing version of Decline And Fall, blaming everything on terrifying hordes of dark-skinned barbarians overwhelming the frontiers at the same time as the liberal elites indulged in luxury and immorality. But it’s not at all obvious what she means. Diocletian’s Price Edict, intervening in the operations of the free market? The phenomenon of agri deserti and the crisis of the cities in the fourth century? The recruitment of federate troops rather than funding the army properly? The flow of gold to pay for spices from the Orient? The Eastern or Western empire..?

Actually the line is even stupider in context, one of a string of random non-sequiturs that presumably seemed to her and/or her speechwriter as a series of bold, insightful declarations:

Immigration is far too high. We cannot support all those who wish to come to our country. We have no obligation to do so. The British people must come first. We cannot keep racking up debt for our children, It was fiscal weakness, not just war, that led to the decline of the Roman Empire. We need smaller government and smarter spending. The belief that the state and not business creates wealth has become normalised. The world owes no one a living. Millions of people cannot just sit on welfare and expect to be paid to do so, and if they don’t like it, that’s their problem, not the state’s. Our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise. We don’t need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos islands. Free speech matters. Some cultures are better than others, and it’s only contentious to say this because honesty has become impossible. Most of all, we need to get up off our knees and start fighting not just for the UK, but for the west and our values.

What does Rome add to that, other than a bit of virtue signalling to the excessively online fascism crowd? One might hazard a guess that there’s some sort of mental association with immigration and cultural superiority and Western Civilisation – but manifestly this has nothing to do with genuine history, and everything to do with the poisoning of minds in right-wing circles, to the point where you can actually see the remnants dribbling out of their ears.

Note: I do have a tendency to write posts as if they will only ever be read by the usual crowd of twenty or so people who have a pretty clear sense of my take on things and so will immediately recognise, in a case like this, that either I’ve been kidnapped by the thought police and am putting out a disguised call for help or that I’m being sarcastic. For anyone else who’s stumbled across this: I don’t believe that a wholly objective and wholly apolitical historiography is possible – and I certainly have no time for those who, like Badenoch but also the vast majority of the anti-woke crowd, attack e.g. historians researching imperialism and slavery, the National Trust, universities etc in the name of Proper Objective Historiography and then produce this sort of unhistorical nonsense in the service of their own ideology or just to suck up to far-right billionaires.

Emotional Rescue

If I think about my research in terms of feelings – fear, dread, frustration, despair, brief moments of joy, the bewildering sense of dislocation induced by finding it impossible to imagine myself as someone who writes books – then it’s more or less always about the process, not the subject matter; I feel deeply curious about the things I (try to) write about, but not a lot else. Usually. This week is rather different.

To explain: I’m preparing a paper (conference in London at the end of the month) on the philologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer: professor at Heidelberg for most of the first half of the 19th century and designer of a pioneering new curriculum for classical philology there, author of a very interesting book on the origins of Greek historiography (which is what I’ve worked on before), one side of a MASSIVE scholarly row in the 1820s, known indeed as the Creuzerstreit, that ended up defining Altphilologie for the next century by establishing the norms and boundaries of the discipline as Not Creuzer on multiple dimensions, especially as regards whether ancient Greece should be assumed as an absolute norm and cultural model (Creuzer was heavily into cross-cultural comparisons). I’m going to be talking about his very late Geschichte der classischen Philologie, where (arguably) he sets up an alternative vision of what philology should have been if he’d won, or at least not lost so resoundingly – a vision that is not unproblematic, given that he starts by suggesting that true philology needs to be a kind of cult…

What I’ve never done before is spend any time worrying about, or even noticing, Creuzer’s private life. There may be well-educated people out there who saw the name Creuzer at the start of the last paragraph or in my original Bluesky thread and immediately thought ‘Aha! Karoline von Günderrode!’ Not I. And as I’ll explain below, that is perhaps a little surprising, and that in turn explains why I’m currently in a state of emotional confusion.

In brief: Karoline is educated but poor, as her father died when she was young, leaving her monther to cope with six children; as the eldest, from the age of 17 she is packed off to live on her own in a Frankfurt foundation for widows and unmarried women, and sets about trying to find a way out of it. While she takes greatest pleasure in being on her own and reading, and starting to write, she manages to find her way into local society, and hopes to marry a wealthy lawyer, but he goes off with a mutual friend.

In 1804, at the age of 24, she publishes her first volume of poetry (under a male pseudonym) and, not necessarily in this order, starts a relationship with Creuzer, who is ten years older and married (to the rather older widow of a professor of natural history). In 1806 he promises to get a divorce so they can run off together and start a new life in Russia; his wife agrees, then changes her mind; and then he gets cold feet and/or falls into depression, retires to bed with hypochondria/illness – it should be noted that most of the story comes after the fact from Karoline’s best friend, so some of the details are perhaps not 100% reliable – and sends a message to say that it’s all off. Karoline responds to this by stabbing herself on the bank of the Rhine, and her corpse is pulled out next day.

Creuzer leaves Heidelberg not long afterwards to take up a new position in Leiden, perhaps to avoid scandal, but gets annoyed with the structure of the curriculum (“Four hundred students, but not a trace of a university!”), feels he cannot have artistic thoughts in such a flat, uninspired landscape and hates the weather, and so returns after a semester to Heidelberg, to finish work on the first volume of Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, which will annoy a lot of his colleagues and become the basis for the aforementioned Creuzerstreit. As far as I can see – I haven’t read it very closely – Creuzer’s Aus dem Leben eines alten Professors, a rambling patchwork of reminiscences, biographical sketches and letters that he published in 1848, says nothing at all about Karoline. Bastard.

There is a sad, beautiful novel by Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends (1978), that I absolutely love, which imagines a meeting and conversation between Karoline and another suicidal romantic poet, Heinrich von Kleist. It’s set in June 1804 (before Creuzer turns up? I can’t remember if he is mentioned). They bond over the fact that they’re both awkward outsiders, alienated by the rest of the party – but rather than being a clichéd meet-cute for a costume romcom, they’re equally awkward with one another. I don’t know if every (male?) reader of the book falls a bit in love with Karoline, but that was my experience (I wonder if female readers feel the same about Kleist), despite or because of the way that Wolf portrays her as difficult and uncompromising – clear echoes of her self-description in a letter: “I have no sense for feminine virtues, feminine bliss. Only that which is wild, great, radiant appeals to me.” We are tantalised with a sense that they are kindred spirits, if only they could see it – but then Kleist’s carriage is announced and he leaves. The novel concludes – I remember this strongly – “We know what happens next.” (Kleist shot himself as part of a suicide pact in 1811).

So, now I feel a powerful instinctive dislike for Creuzer for the way he apparently treated the historical original – about whom I know next to nothing, and who may have been a total nightmare – of a beloved fictional character. I’m not sure how this may affect my reading of a book he wrote nearly fifty years later. But I probably shouldn’t re-read Kein Ort. Nirgends until I’ve written this paper…

I also have not read many of Karoline’s poems, let alone plays, but did note that at least one of the former reflects on Brutus and Caesar, so there may be a classical reception excuse to spend some more time on this.

Update: This is why social media is great; I posted a link to this blog post on Bluesky, and within half an hour it was picked up by Anna Ezekiel (@annaezekiel.bsky.social), who provided a link to her fantastic online bibliography of scholarship on Karoline von Günderrode – https://acezekiel.com/__bibliography/ – which includes some of her own translations of the poems. Including a fragmentary one entitled ‘Antiquity and Modetnity’, which couldn’t be more aligned to my interests if it tried. So I now feel even more embarrassed, and indeed puzzled, that I loved Kein Ort. Nirgends but didn’t feel the slightest inclination to read any further. This must be remedied.

Twelve Days in the Year: 27th January 2025

Woke some time around four with a splitting headache, having slept lightly and fitfully; managed to fend off the dark thoughts of failure and inadequacy that always turn up in such circumstances at the moment, but didn’t manage to get back to sleep, not helped by the cats waking up and starting to make various unexplained and occasionally worrying noises – no vomit this morning, but a lot of crashes and rattles. A. woke around five and put the radio on, which helped me doze for a while. The shipping forecast confirms the impression from sounds outside that the weather isn’t getting any better. Get up after the inshore waters report passes St David’s Head to make tea.

The cats are fractious this morning; the younger ones are frustrated that it’s too dark and wet for them to be allowed out – we were away on Saturday, and yesterday was miserable weather, so they’re clearly getting a bit stir-crazy – while Buddy is easily provoked by Olga staring at him and erupts into growls and yowls, which then gets her hackles up. He’s been with us for long enough, and is clearly happy with us and the general set-up – he no longer needs his ‘safe box’, but has various cushions round the sitting room where he spends most of his time – that this is clearly just an intense dislike of other cats and jealousy that they get fuss and attention as well. The perils of adopting an elderly rescue cat… Things are most harmonious while we have tea in bed; he lounges about under my legs under the duvet, Hector snuggles next to me on top of the duvet, Olga fidgets happily. When we get up for breakfast, there’s a lot of prowling and Mexican standoffs.

Things do quieten down once A. has headed off to work – fingers crossed that the floods aren’t too bad on her usual route, as pictures and videos from other parts of the area look pretty dreadful after the solid downpour of the last twenty-four hours – and it gets light enough for the catflap to be opened. Buddy settles proprietorially onto my lap while the the other two goes backwards and forwards, damply. Once I’ve finished my cup of tea I head upstairs to the computer for an hour’s worth of emails and minor admin, mostly to do with journal editing, before returning to allow Buddy to resume occupation as I have to phone the head of a Historical Institute in Germany for whom I’m acting as an external referee. I don’t like phone conversations at the best of times, let alone when tired and headachy; on the other hand, I can take it as a positive that doing it in German is no worse than doing it in English, and efforts to watch a bit more German television over the weekend were not wasted – granted, Biathlon commentary isn’t entirely relevant, but it got me back into the swing of sentence structure…

Time for a hit of espresso to try to kick my brain into life – to Buddy’s vocal displeasure, obviously, as I put him off my lap. We haven’t had a cat who is either so vocal or so well supplied with a range of disgruntled noises. As soon as I sit down again he’s back, curling up and purring, which is pleasurable, as neither of the other two are lap cats (Hector is a weird ‘sit next to you and lie back’ cat, which gives more freedom to move and cross legs but is less warm and comforting). More emails, as it doesn’t entail having to get up, and there are as ever a lot of them. Outside it seems finally to have stopped raining, at least for the moment; checked water gauge and we’ve had 40mm in just the last twenty-four hours. It feels rather optimistic to be ordering seeds and seed potatoes on the assumption that the garden will be less of a swamp by April or May.

There is a plausible case that pressing on with emails, journal admin and reviewing an article submission is basically displacement activity, as I’m currently feeling absolute terror and despondency at the thought of trying to write any of the things I’m supposed to be writing. On the other hand, after last night, and with general feeling of brain fog and fatigue, at least these are things that I can still do to a reasonable level of efficiency and quality, so better to be doing these than doing nothing, and just hope that I sleep better and am in a better place tomorrow. For various reasons this hasn’t been a great month – mainly, I think, because I did have a couple of days (at a conference in London) where I felt a bit more myself, having ideas and thinking of connections between different things, and then went into a complete slump immediately afterwards and have struggled to recover.

I’m honestly not sure whether I should be accepting a state of erratic memory, tiredness and inability to maintain complex networks of ideas clear in my mind in the way I used to do as a new normal, and try to be realistic and resigned about this rather than frustrated and miserable, or keep striving for things to improve and thinking that if I just take the bad days easy then good days will come along in time, at the risk of getting miserable and frustrated when they don’t. And of course maybe I’m just getting old, and picking on Long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome as an alibi for just being a bit rubbish these days.

Finish writing review of article submission (sadly, very very bad indeed) and break for lunch, taking the opportunity to watch another episode of Blake’s 7 for the first time. I missed this completely at the time; a function of my parents not having a television when I was growing up, but also for some reason (scheduling?) I never caught even one episode when visiting friends or grandparents, so my total knowledge up until the point when I bought a second-hand set of DVDs (with Dutch subtitles, oddly enough, but they can be turned off) was based on the attempts of friends to teach me enough to participate in playground re-enactments (or possibly inventing new episodes with the characters). At this remove, I cannot for the life of me recall what character I was asked to play; not impossible, given my obliviousness, that it could have been Jenna or Servalan (in an all-boys school, who better to take on a female role than someone who doesn’t realise that it’s a female role?), but given that there were, I think, just five or six of us, it wouldn’t be a question of every role needing to be filled. If you were type-casting me at that age, it would probably have been Avon, but that’s surely too good a part to give to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it.

Headed out for a short walk, in between downpours, with the idea that this might help with the sleeping; further journal admin, plus updating a short proposal, plus more emails. It starts to rain again. The afternoon passes in a manner that is somehow productive and unproductive at the same time. A. returns home and I switch to preparing supper – which gets earlier and earlier, matching ever earlier bedtimes as we’re both too tired for anything else during the week. As ever, it’s a pleasure to do simple practical things like cooking, even if in this case it’s limited to peeling and sautéing potatoes and making coleslaw. Eating is interrupted by loud banging from upstairs and increasingly anguished cries from Olga, which turn out to be neither a querulous demand for affection nor unspecified angst but an attempt at alerting us to the fact that A. had accidentally shut Hector in the airing cupboard. One doubts that she would have done the same for Buddy – she would probably have shut him in herself.

Listen to news on the radio, wash up the dishes, watch Tagesschau. Both of course put the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the top; for multiple reasons, the German story (focused on the testimony of a survivor) feels not just weightier but also more sincere and less performative – it’s not about the feelings of the reporter, emoting for the audience. The fact that it’s followed by a story about Friedrich Merz’s plans for restricting migration and repatriating people is perhaps pointed but deniably so. And they end with a cheery story about the arrival of migrating cranes in the south of the country.

Half an hour or so’s work on music composition – still developing a piece that tries to echo the harmonies of the great Krzysztof Komeda. This isn’t exactly what our homework task is (that’s all about diatonic chord sequences, not strange modal ones) but isn’t totally irrelevant, as the development of interesting harmonic structures that make some sort of sense, without simply doing contrafacts on existing songs, is definitely an area I need to work on. In any case I’ve already prepared a homework piece in case I’m not able to escape scrutiny this week. The muse is upon me this evening – or at any rate the chord sequence I worked out over the weekend still seems to work (even if I couldn’t exactly explain why some of the chords work, which normally means that I’ve spelt some of them wrongly again), and the piano part is more or less worked out. It doesn’t sound much like Komeda, but perhaps that means it sounds more like me.

Back downstairs to turf Buddy out of my chair, for half an hour listening to music – a bit of the classic Bill Evans Trio with Scott LeFaro, as something that meets A.’s criterion of “not too frenetic” – before heading up to bed and hoping to sleep better than last night. Outside it’s still raining…

Rise

One of the resolutions I made a couple of years ago, which I have largely been successful in maintaining, was to spend as little time as possible worrying about levels of engagement online. Don’t chase likes or retweets, don’t worry about follower counts, and certainly don’t devote time and energy to trying to lift up views on the blog, as it’s obvious that all of these things are almost entirely beyond my control, and increased effort doesn’t have enough of an impact to make it worthwhile – given that, clearly, increased engagement would only ever be an end in itself rather than, as I once imagined, a path to new opportunities or influence. I do what I please, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus.

But this doesn’t mean that I pay no attention at all to such things, and so I was struck by the fact that page views on here for January seemed to have shot up by well over 50% in less than a week, for no very obvious reason – it’s not as if I’ve written anything that suddenly took off. Closer inspection in fact revealed that this upsurge occurred in the course of a single day – yesterday saw a rise of nearly 2000% over the typical average number of page views on a day when I didn’t post anything. Even more interestingly, the number of visitors wasn’t dramatically different – 34 rather than c.30 – so the obvious conclusion is that a small group of people was reading a lot of different posts; possibly, one new person was reading almost everything I’ve ever written.

If you’re reading this and thinking, ah yes, that was me, then I’d be very interested to hear more! In the meantime, I can speculate. Was this, as someone on BlueSky suggested, another LLM gathering up training material? If so, I hope it chokes on it… It seems more plausible that certain other things happening on Monday January 20th 2025 may have something to do with it, especially as almost all yesterday’s visitors came from the USA – in which case (assuming that I’m not being vetted, or investigated for some reason) the question is whether this blog is in some way providing respite from the ghastliness of current events, or on the contrary is being mined for resources to engage critically with them.

If it’s the latter, then I am conscious that this may have been a slightly frustrating experience – I really haven’t engaged much on here with Trump 2.0, partly because of a sense that I don’t have too much to add to the rather substantial collection of posts I wrote back in 2016, and partly because the fact that there’s not much new to say makes it significantly more depressing that it’s happened all over again. On the other hand, this might amount to a plausible argument in favour of working through my back catalogue; Thucydides, still unfortunately not yet irrelevant to contemporary developments.

I was struck by one line in the inaugural address:

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.

The obvious red flag here is the reference to expansion of territory: not just renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, but (deliberately, one assumes) bringing to mind recent references to the annexation of Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada. But I am struck by the wider framing, if only because it neatly brings together two of my current interests (and offers grounds for arguing that my mind isn’t quite as butterfly-like as it sometimes seems).

On the one hand, this echoes the conventional narrative of decadence: that nations or cultures that are not constantly expanding are stagnant and moribund and hence doomed to collapse (a narrative that often evokes the theory that Rome began to fall when its empire stopped expanding). It’s notable that Trump sees this partly in terms of the growth of cities, the quintessential modernist trope, when so much of his political movement seems to depend on the revolt of the countryside and small towns against decadent liberal urbanites, but who ever expected coherence from his babbling?

But it also, I think, has a geopolitical dimension, namely our old friend the so-called Thucydides Trap. While the standard Allison formulation represents this in terms of the dynamic between a rising and an established power, it is frequently (especially in superficial online discourse) seen as a relationship between a rising and a declining power – implying, perhaps, that the rising power wouldn’t dare challenge the hegemon unless it was weakening, and/or implying that the way out of the Trap is for the established power to keep expanding so that the rising power remains permanently inferior.

Even if you believe in the Trap in the conventional understanding, it’s not at all clear that this is a smart tactic or one that will have the (presumably) desired outcome of averting conflict. If the ‘rising’ power doesn’t see itself as an illegitimate upstart, as the US-centric framework implies, then simultaneously embarking on an arms race and on the repudiation of established international law and norms in the pursuit of territorial expansion seems liable to provoke or encourage rather than cow it. It’s not just me; proper professors of International Relations are suggesting similar things: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/a-great-power-war-is-coming.

As has long been pointed out, Allison’s original intentions in developing the whole Thucydides Trap thing (“the current dynamic might inadvertently lead to conflict so people need to work to avert it”) could never guarantee that no one drew the opposing lesson (“conflict may be inevitable in this situation so we need to escalate preparations for war”). This is simply a stupider version.

Take On Me

It is clear evidence for the growth and development of BlueSky as a social media platform that the Thucydides misquoters have started to arrive – I had to correct two misattributions of the familiar ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote in the last week. I continue to wonder whether this is sufficient incentive to set up an iteration of the Thucydiocy bot there rather than continue to do it in my own name (I’m no longer running a proper experiment as to whether people respond better to corrections from a supposedly automated system rather than from a credentialed academic, but am very conscious that the latter looks weird and obsessive on my part).

There’s still no real comparison; on Ex-Twitter I would need a sign for ‘x Hours Since Last Misattribution’, whereas here it’s a matter of days or weeks. A lot fewer people on BlueSky, so it’s still a niche place focused on conversation, whereas one thing that really drove Thucydiocy on the bird site was the idea (energetically pushed by low-rent social media management firms) that everyone needed to have an account and to build up followers as a business move, and that the way to do this was by tweeting lots of memorable quotes. It’s also likely that methods for building up followers are now a bit more sophisticated – and of course there is a rather different crowd on BlueSky, with (as yet) fewer military veterans and red-pilled body-builders, two groups that seem to be especially fond of the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ line.

This does mean that BlueSky rarely offers anything very interesting in this line – which is of course good for other areas of my (quasi-)academic activities – whereas Ex-Twitter continues to delight. In the last few days, for example, there have been two nice examples of the uselessness of GenAI; firstly, another entirely fake bit of ancient Greek offered as the original for a quote that definitely isn’t found in the Melian Dialogue (sadly the poster concerned deleted the thread rather than confirm that this was their source, but I am pretty certain – Thucydides’ text is on the internet, so a passage of dodgy-looking Greek that produces no hits in a Google search is ipso facto not from Thucydides), and secondly the insistence of Grok that the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote is from Mao, possibly referencing Thucydides – I’m much obliged to @siabaaLee for posting the screenshots.

I also had a really interesting exchange with @runthedigits, after they attributed “It is more blessed to give than to receive” to Thucydides as well as Acts 20:35. This seemed so utterly implausible that it had to be a joke, especially as the same tweet offered “Kick against the pricks” as both Dionysus in the Bacchae and Acts 25:14, but it turns out – and this is the sort of rabbit-hole I cannot resist – that there is a whole tradition of academic discussion on the possible relationship between Thucydides and St Paul.

In Acts 20:35, Paul closes an address with “It is more blessed to give than to receive” as a saying of Jesus. The problem is that this line is not found anywhere in the Gospels. The idea that this might just have been a saying of Jesus that didn’t make it into the Gospels seems to have been quite unpopular in various traditions of biblical exegesis – perhaps because the author of Acts is often take to have been the author of Luke’s gospel as well, so why didn’t he include it there? Casting around for alternative sources, Ernst Haenchen (Die Apostelgeschichte, 5th edn, Göttingen, 1965, 526-7) came across Thucydides 2.97, which indicates in passing that the custom of the Persians was similar (in order to contrast this with the behaviour of a Thracian tribe, the Odrysians, who prefer to receive rather than give and who regard asking but not receiving as less shameful than failing to give having been asked). Maybe, Haenchen argued, Luke/Paul/Jesus was echoing a traditional Greek proverb, and the formulation of it offered by Thucydides was especially influential, which is why the Acts version seems so close in its wording to his.

Well… As John J. Kilgallen (1993: ‘Acts 20:35 and Thucydides 2.97.4’, Journal of Biblical Literature 112.2: 312-314) noted, this seems implausible on multiple counts: none of the other Greek phrases/proverbs quoted by Haenchen bear much resemblance to either Thuc or Acts, and the whole point of T’s account is that it’s not a Greek but a Persian principle, which in any case he offers only in order to draw out the idiosyncrasies of Thracian customs. (For some reason no one seems to be terribly interested in the possible influence of Persian rather than Greek moral thought on early Christianity…). The idea is found in other early Christian texts (see John-Christian Eurell (2021), ’The saying attributed to Jesus at Acts 20:35’, JGRChJ 17: 196-204 for recent research in this area), which might suggest that it was widely attributed to Jesus at the time even if it didn’t make it into the gospels, or at any rate that no one objected if Paul/Luke misattributed it to him.

Two things really struck me about this whole debate. The first is the sheer weirdness of Thucydides getting pulled into it at all, or at any rate in such an emphatic way; I can imagine him being mentioned as one of many references in a general discussion of Greek attitudes towards what ancient historians might call reciprocity and gift-giving (though a lot less obvious than many others), but the claim that he is in some way a key source, let alone the actual origin of the idea, seems to derive from a specific approach to scholarship (particular to old-fashioned German biblical studies, maybe?) that focuses obsessively on specific phrases and wording repeated between different texts. Intertextuality for Dummies? Thucydides from this perspective is merely a collection of Greek words, part of a corpus of Greek words that can be searched for echoes of the Christian phrase, rather than being taken seriously or even considered as a discrete text (at which point one might have started to wonder whether this was a plausible source for a saying of Jesus).

Secondly, it’s an interesting example of the mis-reception of academic articles in non-academic discourse. @runthedigits cited Thucydides in connection with Acts because of an online discussion about the latter quote (here), noting its absence from the gospels, in which one contributor cited the Kilgallen article as suggesting that Thucydides might be the source. But of course this is a partial, and inaccurate, account of Kilgallen, who summarises Haenchen’s claims about Thucydides not to promote them as true but as a basis for then showing that they’re implausible.

This is something I have seen with some of my students; they tend sometimes to take an author’s summary of someone else’s argument as an endorsement or development of that argument, rather than either as a neutral account of the state of scholarly debate or as a deliberate scene-setting for a demolition job. Maybe these summaries are sometimes too scrupulously neutral; more likely, the subtle disparagement is largely invisible to non-specialists. But if it’s invisible to students, it sure as hell is going to be invisible to AI summarisers… Expect more of this sort of misrepresentation. In the meantime, I look forward to finding more parallels between Thucydides and the New Testament.

She Blinded Me With Science

I see that we’re sciencing the Fall of the Roman Empire again. Science reveals that, while conventional non-science studies are obsessed with what the Romans might have done for us, actually what mattered is what they did to themselves, releasing huge quantities of lead particles into the atmosphere as a result of their mining and metal-working. If our scientific estimate of the total volume of lead released over two centuries is combined with scientific reconstructions of how this pollution might have spread across Europe and scientific studies of how this might have lead to increased levels of lead in people’s blood then we might hypothesise, following other scientific research, a possible drop of 2.5-3 points in overall Roman IQ levels.

Which, given that IQ is defined in terms of a normal distribution of ‘intelligence’ across a population with 100 as the mean, is completely meaningless unless it’s compared with something else, whether that is “Romans were stupider than they might otherwise have been”, or “Romans of the Principate were stupider than Romans of the Republic”, or maybe “if we could carry out IQ tests on the Roman population, and then compare the data with the equally non-existent data on IQ from other parts of the world in this period, then we would see that the Romans were statistically stupider, which explains Something,”. Here’s a 1965 article by a scientist speculating that lead poisoning caused the Fall of the Roman Empire, which is a purely historiographical construct located centuries later, but don’t worry about that because Science.

I mean, the least they could do is offer another scientific study on how quickly one might expect changes in atmospheric pollution, blood levels and notional IQ to shift after the substantial reduction in smelting activity revealed by those same ice cores. Were the Romans still cognitively disabled in the late third century, explaining their hapless economic management? Is this why they were so easily outwitted by wily fourth-century barbarians whose healthy lifestyle out on the steppe had kept their blood pure and their minds clear? Or, on the contrary, was it lead poisoning that kept the population quiescent during the famed Pax Romana, whereas the clearing of minds in later centuries resulted in social disruption and hostility to the Establishment, just as we have seen in Western societies since bans on lead in petrol? Science!

I hope it’s obvious that my objection is not to the study of historical atmospheric pollution levels through analysis of ice cores, which was revelatory when it began thirty or more years ago, nor – rather more hesitantly – to drawing out the possible implications of this data through the multiplication of if/then conjectures. What annoys me is rather the breathless and frequently silly reporting of such studies, which may or may not be driven by the university’s press release or the laziness of the journalists, or both. New scientific findings rewrite history through Science! Because obviously that is so much less speculative and more significant than anything that those silly historians might get up to.