Neville Morley's Blog, page 54

European Social Science History Conference 2018

Just a quick heads up that the call for papers and panels for the next European Social Science History Conference, to be held at Queen’s Belfast in April 2018, has just been published. Full details for the Antiquity Network, which I co-chair, can be found over at the little-frequented Social Science Ancient History blog (https://socsciah.wordpress.com/2016/12/09/esshc-2018-belfast-call-for-proposals/), so I won’t go into detail here, except to say that this is always a great opportunity to meet not only fellow ancient historians working on topics in economic, social and cultural history, but also to engage with colleagues from all periods and geographical areas. If you have an idea for a panel – and don’t feel that you need to be a senior academic to put together a proposal – then Arjan and I would really like to hear from you; we have a few plans of our own for sessions focused on one or more of the really important books that have been published in our field in the last year or so, but it’s always the variety of themes and debates that makes this such a worthwhile and stimulating occasion, and that depends on you…

From the Archives: Political Economy and Classical Antiquity

I’ve been making a few changes to the blog recently – adding the Twitter feed, reordering some of the widgets, expanding the biographical information and the like – as a result of an interesting conversation a few months ago with a couple of people on Twitter (@lizgloyn and @EllieMackin, as I recall; apologies if I’ve forgotten others) about online presence. My move to Exeter this summer brought it home to me that this blog, plus my Twitter feed, represents my professional activities online at least as much as any official institutional profile (especially when I’m still struggling with the publications database). I’ve never trusted academiadotedu, so felt smugly reassured when their commercial orientation became more obvious this year – but that does bring to mind the things that this blog currently doesn’t do, that might be useful for some visitors.

So, over the next month or so I’m planning to expand the ‘About this Blog’ section to operate as more of an online cv – information about recent and forthcoming papers, for example. More importantly, it’s an opportunity to make available some of my older papers (old enough that I’m less likely to feel the hot breath of publishers’ lawyers on the back of my neck), if I think there’s still something worth reading in them, especially those published in hard-to-obtain edited collections. After all, the chances of anyone wanting to publish my Collected Papers are low to non-existent, and this does offer me the chance for a bit of self-indulgent reminiscing…

The bad news is that I now find that I don’t actually have decent copies of some of this older material, so this is likely to be a longer process than expected – but here’s the first: my first venture into ‘classical reception’ (or at least my very non-literary version of it), looking at C18-19 debates about what we’d now call ‘the ancient economy’. The starting-point was my work on Marx’s account of antiquity (which has partly appeared in another journal article and in sections of the Antiquity and Modernity book, and partly will feature in the book on Marx and Antiquity that I’m attempting to write, honest): it was clear not only that Marx’s engagement with antiquity was bound up with his debates with contemporary and earlier political economists – historical evidence raising doubts about their universalising claims – but also that some of those political economists had themselves been engaged in debates around the nature and dynamics of the ancient economy.

This wasn’t a field in which either classical reception people or historians of ideas had been especially active – the main exception being the work of Donald Winch, whose Riches and Poverty book became central to this project – so I just had to do the spadework myself. And, yes, it’s just the start of my long-standing polemics about the fact that social scientists often know a lot more about ancient history than we ancient historians know about social science…

Neville Morley, ‘Political Economy and Classical Antiquity’, originally published in Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998): 95-114: political-economy-and-classical-antiquity

In (Partial) Defence of Arron Banks

I should say from the beginning that this is not the sort of defence of Arron Banks that’s likely to carry much weight with any hypothetical future popular tribunal considering charges of willful destruction of the prosperity and well-being of the British people. Further, my immediate reaction to his original “True the Roman Empire was effectively destroyed by immigration” tweet was a typical kneejerk academic one – something along the lines of “yes, why don’t we revive Tenney Frank’s ‘Race Mixture in the Roman Empire’ while we’re at it?” – followed by an attempt at getting #BanksHistory trending on Twitter, and I don’t think that was entirely wrong. At the same time, there is something about the way that the battlelines in Banks versus Beard ended up being neatly drawn between ‘ignorant right-wing billionaire combining memories of schoolboy history and Gladiator with current ideological prejudices’ and ‘heroic authoritative Professor just fighting for Truth’ that makes me feel a little uncomfortable.*

 Now, as far as historical claims are concerned I’m more with Beard than Banks: there’s no denying that an influx of people from outside the empire – albeit a minuscule number in comparison to the empire’s existing population – was a problem for the Roman state, but this was one of numerous problems rather than in any sense the sole cause of the supposed ‘fall’ (which is of course an even more contested concept). Certainly the contemporary  resonances that Banks clearly intended to be picked up from his remark – migration will bring about the collapse of our entire civilisation – are completely spurious.

My concern is rather with the authorisation of such claims, and here Banks does have a point: “You don’t have a monopoly on history”. There are other reputable historians who put a different, more Banks-friendly spin on events – Peter Heather’s vision of violent conquest, for example, isn’t quite the same as blaming mass migration, but it’s a lot closer to it than the mainstream story of long-term, largely peaceful transition and gradual fragmentation – and history as a discipline is founded on the questioning of authority, the back-and-forth between different interpretations, the fact that the evidence can always be understood in different ways and fitted into different narratives etc.

Now, this is a point with some worrying associations: the fact that reputable academic historians disagree is regularly used as grounds for legitimising marginal views as being equally valid and/or for rejecting the mainstream view altogether (see e.g. most things written about pyramids and mysterious lost ancient civilisations, the Holocaust denialists, and for a scientific comparison the climate change denialists). But it’s still a valid point. It doesn’t reduce history to a mere matter of opinion – as Beard has rightly noted in a subsequent blog, “in order to have an interpretation worth listening to, you do actually have to know something” – but it does mean that there is always scope for debate about the evidence and its interpretation, and that the word of a Cambridge professor isn’t the end of the argument simply because she’s a Cambridge professor.

Mary herself makes no such claim, but it does seem to be implicit in the statements of some of her supporters and in the reporting of the argument: how dare this silly little man stick to his opinion and try to argue back when Mary Beard has told him that he’s wrong?

Obviously Twitter is a terrible place to try to have a serious discussion about historical evidence and its interpretation, except between people who share an enormous amount of common knowledge and understanding, are engaging with the same questions at the same level of analysis, and so can see not just what the other is saying but also what is being implied and taken for granted.Beard versus Heather, say, might be illuminating; Beard versus Banks isn’t, or at least not as a historical debate. The issue is that they’re not just in different leagues in historical terms but are playing by different sets of rules, and probably not even playing the same game.

This isn’t just a matter of one isolated Twitter spat, as that would scarcely be worth spilling ink over. One wider issue is that this sort of thing is always a possibility in encounters between academic historians and the general public; unless the authority of the historian is accepted without question (as of course it often is), things can rapidly degenerate into a dialogue of the deaf, because the topic may be the same but the discourse is completely different. (This is the other side of my regular complaint about television history programmes, that ‘accessibility’ is achieved by taking out all the nuance, uncertainty, ambiguity and debate). I always think of the autodidact character in Angus Wilson’s brilliant Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, quoting from his out-of-date encyclopedia, even to the point of celebrating Piltdown Man as a great archaeological discovery.

But at least in these situations there is the possibility of a constructive conversation, of the historian being able to explain why things are more complicated and why this matters, with some respect for their interlocutor. On Twitter, that’s an awful lot harder, even when the issue is a simple one (e.g. No, Thucydides didn’t say that, here’s the actual source). Beard again:

Twitter is ideal for mono-causes (it was all immigration, wasn’t it?), not fitted at all for complexity…  When it comes to deconstructing the idea of ‘borders’ and ‘barbarians’, and exploring the ‘Romanness’ of some of those who it became convenient to brand ‘foreign’, indeed the major differences in those apparent polarities between now and then, then I am beaten if it has to be half a sentence.

Remarks of 140 characters too easily sound like dogmatic assertions or a condescending put-downs, even when that isn’t intended. Nuance disappears, whether because it’s next to impossible to do that in 140 characters or because a longer more complex sentence strung out over a series of tweets is even harder to follow.

And that’s assuming that people even want to engage constructively. I assume someone must have studied the way people receive (in the technical literary sense) tweets, but my guess is that the predominant factors in engagement and response are largely instinctive, based on humour, key words and phrases, conformity to existing prejudices and name recognition factor – whether the celebrity of the person tweeting, or the status of the person they refer to (Thucydides again).

So, people are already conditioned to respond more positively to some tweets than others – and I would imagine that convoluted academic thoughts grab the attention of a rather more select audience than confident assertions. Moreover, when it comes to the more engaged partisans, each side already has its instinctive sense of why the other isn’t a credible opponent for their champion – Beard is a typical liberal ivory tower elitist with no understanding of what real people think, Banks is parroting half-remembered school lessons from the distant unenlightened past for ideological purposes.

Is it, as Tom Holland suggested, a great thing that Roman history and its contemporary relevance is being widely discussed? I’m really not sure. It’s great for writers on ancient topics who want to publish non-academic pieces on why Trump is the new Cleon/Caligula/Nero/Whatever, but, as I’ve argued previously, I am now seriously sceptical as to whether such takes offer any contribution at all to understanding. If Banks now tones down his assertions about #WhyRomanHistoryMeansWeShouldSupportMyPolitics, that’s a victory for historical values – but if so, it’s been won at a high cost in terms of time (especially Beard’s time) and heightened emotions. Still, we wouldn’t be proper historians if we didn’t keep trying – just so long as we keep in mind that even Arron Banks is sometimes right about certain things.

*Of course, every time I think of the condescending way that some of Banks’ supporters referred to “Mrs Beard”, let alone the repulsive “you’re next for the guillotine, traitor!” rhetoric, I feel less certain as to whether a bit of meta-commentary is really what’s required here…

When It Changed

How long was the Twentieth Century? If you spend most of your time studying classical antiquity, that may sound like a trick question, but since Eric Hobsbawm published Age of Extremes: the short twentieth century in 1994, the idea that the 19th Century persisted until the shattering of the European political order in 1914 (not a new idea, of course; it’s found in Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern, for a start) and the 21st Century began in 1989 with the collapse of Soviet communism has been widely recognised as a useful discussion point, if not as a definitive reading. There’s been a flurry of debate on this issue in the last week, with blogs on the topic from Brad DeLong and Branko Milanovic, plus multi-faceted exchange on the Twitter.*

DeLong starts with the question of whether the economic history of the 20th century is better organised around the ‘short’ (1914-1989) or ‘long’ (1870-2012) version, arguing for the latter on the basis of jumps in Total Factor Productivity and on the demographic transition; as he notes, the case for the short C20 is founded on (a) the idea that the crucial part of the Industrial Revolution had long since taken place and (b) the dominance of Marxism-Leninism and ideological struggle (which is of course Hobsbawm’s main focus). Milanovic’s response is essentially to re-assert the characterisation of the twentieth century in terms of the struggle between capitalism and an alternative political-economic philosophy, which naturally leads him back to Hobsbawm. As both note, what’s really driving this difference of opinion is a different choice of subject matter – in brief, if you want to write economic history in terms of productivity and demography, Hobsbawm’s framework makes very little sense because it’s about something else – but also with a certain hint that some approaches are more significant than others, at least when it comes to characterising the Twentieth Century as a period.

Querying periodisation is of course like shooting fish in a barrel for historians; drawing arbitrary lines in time, and then asserting that the period between two such lines is in some sense distinctive and homogeneous, is always silly. But it also seems to be inevitable. As DeLong noted on Twitter, we’re story-telling apes, making sense of the world through a rocess of selection, simplification, juxtaposition and connection of individual bits of data to create something that seems to convey understanding. What’s interesting, then, is not that we tell such stories about the past and impose some sort of external framework on events (while believing that this narrative structure is inherent to them), but what these stories and frameworks say about us.

Why centuries? I would speculate that part of the reason is the shift from understanding the past in terms of the regnal periods of monarchs or dynasties (‘the Elizabethan Age’; ‘the Victorian Era’), as a move to a more egalitarian (or at least less overtly Great Man orientated) view of history and a recognition that many important aspects of historical change are not driven by the choices of individual rulers. We can see this the way that Gibbon’s account of the (allegedly) most fortunate period in history, “the period which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus”, has changed its label from ‘the Age of the Antonines’ to the Second Century. Gibbon had already indicated that this happy interlude needed to be understood in terms of fortuitous circumstances rather than attributed solely to the conscious virtue of rules, but later versions, even as they retain his overall perspective, place increasing emphasis on systematic explanations – with the stability of the Second Century doomed to be shattered not by the moral failings of Caracalla but by the Antonine Plague and the Third Century Crisis.

A focus on centuries as discrete chunks of historical development is of course entirely artificial and arbitrary – but that may be precisely its attraction. A century is longer than a normal lifespan, but a short enough period of time to be humanly comprehensible, as we’re conscious of events before our birth (our parents’ and grandparents’ histories) and can imaginatively project forward at least a decade or do beyond our own anticipated demise.The accepted chronological framework allows the coordination of all these different individual stories – though we may suspect that most people, other perhaps than professional historians, think of their own life and times more often in terms of decades rather than centuries, except around the turn of them.

Where this becomes trickier, from the point of view of historical understanding, is the subtle shift from centuries as a framework within which we locate events and developments and relate them to one another to centuries as a means of conceptualising and even explaining historical developments. Defining the 20th Century – long, short or conventional – in terms of, say, the struggle between capitalism and communism, privileges certain sorts of historical development. Further, it implies that they are the driving force behind events more generally, smuggling in interpretation in the guise of chronological arrangement, so that, when that process ends or is significantly transformed, everything else is assumed to change. A ‘pure’ century, 1900-2000, is too obviously a human construct for this to be terribly convincing; but if the period is shortened slightly or extended a little, it can appear more plausibly as the span of a ‘real’ development – that nevertheless just happens to gravitate towards the start and end points of a chronological century.

Unless you do assume that one strand of historical development – changes in productivity, or technology, or ideology – is determinative of all the others, then there’s no particular reason to assume that everything will change according to the same chronological pattern (indeed, a Braudelian approach would imply the precise opposite). The argument is not so much that Hobsbawm was wrong to think of the rise and fall of the communism-capitalism struggle as running from 1914ish to 1989ish, as that he’s wrong to pick on that as the defining theme of this entire chunk of time. If we focus on economic development, as DeLong does, then we need a different framework. If we focus on imperialism and decolonisation, as was raised in the Twitter, then we need a different framework. Ditto technology, or environmental change, or whatever. Obviously these all overlap and influence one another, in complex ways, and that’s the focus for historical investigation. What seems to be revealed in these debates is the wish for there to be a simple answer, for all the processes to line up neatly and hence, presumably, to make manifest their prime mover or determinative event.

In William Gibson’s Count Zero, the idea of When It Changed makes sense because there was such an event – but of course the point of the story was that its effects, let alone its cause, were neither immediate nor immediately obvious, and were in the first instance confined to cyberspace. The consequences of, say, 1989 took decades to become apparent – and it was equally striking how much less difference it made than had initially been anticipated. Our desire for narrative coherence wants moments like this to offer a definitive ending, or at least a new chapter; history goes on resisting such simplification.

*And isn’t this great? A combination of C18 pamphlets and the sort of erudite conversations one always imagined to take place at Oxbridge high tables and in fin-de-siècle Viennese coffee houses, in which anyone can join in. The key problem is now the temptation to stay up well beyond one’s bedtime to keep talking, while knowing that for US-based interlocutors the evening is just getting started; hence this blog instead.

Europa Delenda Est

In yesterday’s Grauniad, Martin Kettle turned to the Roman Republic for an anti-Brexit blueprint:

Those of us with only a smattering of knowledge about the ancient world know one thing about Cato the Elder. During Rome’s long wars against Hannibal, Cato ended every speech in the senate with the same words: “Carthage must be destroyed.”

“Brexit must be stopped” is unlikely to last as long as Cato’s catchphrase has managed to. But it focuses the mind. Those who think Brexit must be stopped are not the majority. But they have a case and a cause, and they are right. So how might stoppage be achieved?

Be clear whom you need to be talking to, play the long game and keep chipping away (“Remember Cato”); “the prize is immense – and Hannibal was not defeated in a day.”

Classical Allusion Fail Klaxon! Wrong Punic War; by the time Cato embarked on his relentless campaign to wipe Carthage off the face of the earth, Hannibal had been dead for decades. Moreover, while Kettle’s point about keeping up the pressure on public opinion may have some validity, the ends to which Cato dedicated his efforts suggest a different comparison might be more appropriate.

Carthage had been soundly defeated, and was no longer any sort threat to Rome, but Cato’s ideological obsession led to him to keep banging on about it; at first to reactions of bemusement and exasperated head-shaking, but gradually the drip of poisonous propaganda did its work and the discourse shifted, resulting in a completely unnecessary war that destroyed Carthage but also (according to many contemporary commentators) irretrievably discredited and damaged Rome itself.

Remind you of anything? We could even see Cato’s party trick with the Libyan fig (“DON’T GIVE A FIG? If a piece of fruit can make it to Rome in three days, how soon before we’re overrun by bloodthirsty barbarian rapists?”) as analogous to Johnson’s stream of fruit-based lies about the European Union and its alleged threat to British bananas – it may have seemed like a joke at the time, but too late we realised how the core of the idea had become embedded in public discourse. Carthage will always be a threat; the EU is the enemy of our sovereignty and prosperity. And so this is where we find ourselves…

Events, Events, Events

The legend of the great Fernand Braudel, one of my historiographical heroes, is that he completed his doctoral dissertation in his head while sitting in a prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War, and that in the course of his captivity the core thesis was turned upside down: from a conventional study of the Mediterranean policy of Phillip II of Spain, to the now-familiar revolutionary vision of how the Mediterranean – its environment, its climate, its underlying structures – shaped and limited the reign of Phillip in ways of which he was barely conscious.

There is both a pessimistic and an optimistic reading of this story. Pessimistically, the thesis reflects Braudel’s sense of powerlessness – the strict limits on his autonomy translating into a wider vision of the ‘limits of the possible’ that constrain all human life – and also the peculiar time of the internment camp, the dominance of small-scale everyday repetitions combined with the open-ended, unknowable duration of captivity (as J.G. Ballard confirmed from his own wartime experience in Shanghai, internment gives one an unusual relation to and consciousness of time). Optimistically, it relativises the triumph of the Nazis, and limits it to the ephemeral world of mere events; their victory is at best short-term, whatever their claims; the earth endures. Adolf Hitler and the Aryan Empire couldn’t conquer the blue sky…

My thoughts about Braudel this week have tended towards the depressing conclusion that we’re currently getting the worst of both worlds, the fuzzy end of the lollipop of his vision of history. There’s no doubt that we’re being overwhelmed by events, which command our attention and distract us from a proper understanding of what’s really going on; we’re caught up in l’histoire évenémentielle and its larger-than-life personalities in precisely the way that Braudel warned against, because it’s bright and colourful and dramatic, and corresponds to the pace at which we live our own lives. Trying to take the longer view may not bring much comfort – as it tends to accentuate our sense of our powerlessness to affect what’s happening – but it normally promises at least the consolations of understanding, and perhaps a degree of serenity.

However, the path of the optimistic Braudel seems to be closed to us. Of course Trump, Brexit, Le Pen and the rest are ephemeral from the perspective of la longue durée. Of course the earth will endure despite their victories. But reflecting on this theme brings home the fact that the earth may nevertheless feel the consequences of their triumph in a way the Nazis could never have dreamed of, at least at the timescale of centuries and millennia if not millions of years.* Perhaps there was never a big hope of halting global warming and other consequences of human activity over the past two centuries, but now there seems to be next to none; the possibility looms of the USA rejecting the Paris agreement altogether, and certainly there’s little sign of many Western countries (let alone the UK, obsessed with the impenetrable mystery of Brexit for the foreseeable future) devoting the necessary resources and ingenuity to the nightmarish problem that confronts us.

It’s possible to see the idea of the Anthropocene as a partial refutation of Braudel’s ideas, with humanity now having the power – however unconsciously and accidentally – to transform its environment rather than always being at its mercy, leaving him in the position of Phillip II, unable to comprehend the real forces at play. Still more, the last few decades – as people have come to recognise the dangers of the situation – seem like the revenge of  l’histoire évenémentielle, as time and again short-term events have confounded efforts to respond to the crisis. Braudel will of course have the last laugh, as the limits of the possible re-assert themselves, and the costs of defying climate change and its consequences become ever more unmanageable for the vast majority of humanity. The idea that, for most people across most of human history, existence was a matter of regular repetition of more or less predictable rhythms and cycles within a more or less predictable environment will come to seem even more of a lost paradise as we enter times of change that will put the upheavals of modernity and industrialisation in their proper context…

* Given that, at least on this reality, they never harnessed the terrifying power of the infovores to carve the face of Hitler into the moon…

 

Vicarious Virtue

The seminar text for my Roman History course over the last fortnight has been the opening of the third book of Varro’s Rerum Rusticarum, the convoluted argument about the nature of the ‘true’ villa and the disputed legitimacy of pastio villatica. It’s a great passage for opening up questions about the nature of the work – the unexpected use of dialogue in a supposedly practical handbook of agriculture, as a means of raising problematic ethical and political questions (ancient sock puppets!) without necessarily trying to resolve them – and about how Roman aristocrats thought about the world at the end of the first century BCE; in particular, how one negotiates tensions between inherited values (the ‘farmers are the best citizens and soldiers’ ideology offered by e.g. Cato, harking back to exemplary early Romans like Cincinnatus) and the realities of a globalised economy in which money pervades every area of society and politics. Pastio villatica – the raising of bees, birds, snails, dormice, game etc. in the vicinity of the villa – is good insofar as it’s productive (rather than the purely consumptive villas where the wealthy relax and show off their wealth), but it’s bad insofar as it’s intimately bound to the development of luxurious tastes in the city, founded on the corrupting influx of wealth from the acquisition of empire – and hence involves precisely the sort of risky pursuit of profit that Cato had condemned in merchants and money-lenders.

This fascinating debate (assuming that farming is inherently virtuous, how far can we push the definition of farming?) rests on another ideological shift, which had clearly already taken place by the time of Cato: the way in which the virtues associated with agriculture were transferred to the person who owns the land being cultivated, even if they don’t do any of the actual work but leave it all to the slaves. Farming is good – but this comes to be understood in terms of ‘how one orders the estate to be managed’ rather than anything to do with labour. The thinking may be that the results of production accrue to the owner, therefore the moral associations should do as well – since slaves cannot legally own anything (their product belongs to their owner) and are sub-human therefore incapable of virtue. The point is that Cato and Varro take this entirely for granted, while expending considerable effort on the question of farming versus other forms of activity and on the scope of ‘proper farming’.

This was emphasised in an interesting way this week by a post from Brad DeLong on Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the United States as an agrarian republic, founded on the same Cincinnatan ideals that first-century Roman sources ascribed to their ancestors. Jefferson’s ideas were deeply rooted in the Roman discourse around the corrupting effects of empire, luxury and urbanism. It’s not clear to me how far Jefferson was aware of contemporary critiques of the whole luxury-as-corruption debate, discussed by scholars like Berry and Winch*, or how conscious he was of the mythical nature of these Roman accounts of their virtuous ancestors (of which, certainly if you follow the argument of someone like Leah Kronenberg on Varro, the Romans themselves were very well aware) – but clearly that doesn’t matter, given the power of the narrative of ‘farming means freedom’ versus ‘trade means corruption means despotism’.

As DeLong’s summary makes clear, Jefferson not only followed the Roman discourse, he also seems to have absorbed its assumptions about the transfer of virtue from the labourer to the one who directs that the labour should be performed:

Jefferson did not set his hand to the plough. And his family’s plantations were arenas of vice and domination to a degree that far surpass the corrupt London of George III Hanover. Jefferson did, however, free those of his slaves who were descended from himself.

This works, we may surmise, because of the existence of other possibilities. In a hypothetical pure agrarian society, the question of whether the man who has his slaves cultivate the land is as virtuous as the man who cultivates the land himself might be a pressing issue. But by the time any Roman bothers to worry about such things (or at least to write about them), there exist the real and disturbing alternatives of trade or money-lending (or worse) as sources of revenue for the elite; compared with them, different aspects of agriculture are quietly conflated, and disputes focus on policing the boundaries of what is and isn’t proper farming (Varro Book 1: is it farming if your land has a clay pit, or if you set up a tavern on it?). Likewise, Jefferson’s vision depends on the contrast with urban commercialism and imperialism, so that all land-related activities are considered virtuous, and these virtues accrue to those who ultimately benefit from those activities.

*And also in a small way me, in article on ‘Political economy and classical antiquity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59.1 (1998).

Spitting Image

The Thucydiocy Bot (@Thucydiocy) continues its tireless work to combat misattributed, distorted and downright invented ‘Thucydides’ quotations on the Internet; touched by the people who offer heartfelt thanks for its corrections, irritated by those who insist on the veracity of their version even in the face of actual evidence, and driven to distraction by the gentleman who regularly tweets a legitimate quotation from the Funeral Oration with the tagline ‘Stop Socialism’, as if this was remotely Pericles’ intended meaning. Most depressing, however, is the fact that the same ones appear again and again – especially around Veterans’ Day, when that bloody William F. Butler ‘The nation that divides its scholars from its warriors…’ turns up all over the place…

Just in the last month, however, a marginally different version has appeared (at least, I haven’t found it before 1st November, on the basis of skimming back through the last two months, but it may be older): same quote, but this time with a picture:

The very first tweet of this I’ve identified was produced by an ‘internet marketer’ and advocate of ‘freedom lifestyle’ called Terry Loomis, who hasn’t yet responded to my query is to whether he actually created it; maybe it’s an exercise in internet marketing and meme creation. I was curious about the image, and so played with Google Image Search for the first time ever. It appears on the website of the Jackson Hole American Legion, in Jackson WY, in relation to their offer of college scholarships for students from Jackson and Teton County, and it appears three timeson the website of an educational establishment in Bucharest. At least one of these must have borrowed it from elsewhere, if not both…

Anyone out there have any more information?

 

http://www.jhamericanlegion.org/services.html

Brexit Paradoxes 2

Today’s headlines suggest the discovery of a new fragment from the philosophical works of Zeno of Elea (as discussed here a couple of months ago), perhaps from an ancient commentary on Aristotle’s Politics:

On the impossibility of making policy. For in order to pursue a course of action – setting aside any of that voting nonsense – the state must have a plan for that action. But first it must plan for the development and discussion of that plan, and before that there must be a plan for the planning, and so forth.

This may help to explain a passing remark (in italics in the quote below) on Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, which has previously puzzled commentators:

Hence it does not follow that a thing is not in motion in a given time, just because it is not in motion in any instant of that time. Nor that there is an absence of thought, simply because there is no appearance of thought at any given moment. Honestly. Well, you never know.

Into Darkness

The next generation of politicians, all as mediocre as one another, and competing with one another for primacy with little concern for the good of the state, abdicated the control of affairs to the whims of the people. They concentrated on their personal intrigues and ambitions instead of exercising any sort of leadership; they undermined any influence they might have had overseas, and plunged their own societies into factional conflict.

(Thucydides 2.65, very loosely adapted)