Neville Morley's Blog, page 57

An Englishman in Berlin

Where would you want to be when the world ends? I’ve had that phrase running around inside my head for the last couple of weeks, convinced that it must be the tagline for a film that I’ve never actually seen – but I can’t actually find it anywhere on the internet. Which is a shame, because what I wanted to do was start with that and then say, well, of course it isn’t the end of the world – although given everything that’s happened in the last month it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that history is trying to cram in as much as possible having realised that the deadline is rather closer than expected – but only Brexit, but it’s still a valid question. Where would you want to be when your country’s decided to go for self-immolation while jumping off a cliff?

Somewhere Else, obviously, and it definitely felt like a relief that just a couple of days after the Referendum I was heading over here for six weeks as part of my Einstein Visiting Fellow role (and with a fairly erratic internet connection, so unable to spend every waking minute reading the latest news reports and commentaries). Still, Berlin isn’t ideal from this perspective; I have had to talk about Brexit with pretty well everyone I’ve met, not just colleagues and friends – and how does one explain Johnson?

And there are plenty of other reminders. This morning I was renewing my library card with the Staats Bibliothek, and couldn’t help seeing the complication regulations relating to people from ourside the EU. It won’t be impossible for me in future, just slightly more awkward – and implying  earlier awkwardness in having to get the visa that I’ll need for the registration (unless the fact that I already have a card means that I can carry on renewing it indefinitely without them noticing…). I then start to wonder about other things that will become more awkward: renting, bank account, even the ease of having this sort of research fellowship.

It’s not that I feel more foreign – no one is ever going to mistake my very anglicised German for a native speaker, however much I love Kindl Weisse mit Waldmeistersirup and Berliner Klopse*, even if these days everyone seems happy to stick to German rather than trying to help me out – but my existing foreignness suddenly feels like much more of an issue that it has for years. It is far, far worse for EU friends and colleagues with jobs in the UK, wondering about their futures and having in some cases to face actual abuse, but certainly the fact that half the country has said loudly that it Doesn’t Want Their Type Around Here. People here couldn’t be nicer – but I still get a faint hint of the same chill wind of alienation…

*But not Currywurst. Never Currywurst. Currywurst is an abomination. If you’ve decided that a curried sausage is a good idea, it needs to be a proper curried sausage, containing curry spices, not a basic Bockwurst with slightly spiced tomato ketchup. My sausage-making experiments continue…

“Yes, We Are All Individuals”

There’s a very interesting article up on Eidolon* by Lisl Walsh called Giving It Up in the Classroom, about navigating questions of authority in teaching classics: the authority of existing interpretations and scholarly consensus that manifestly needs to be analysed and criticised (indeed, this is our core task in teaching students, even if they think our job is to convey a fixed body of essential information and then test them on their ability to regurgitate it), and the authority of the teacher. The crux of the problem that Walsh addresses is the relationship between the two: the risk that, in developing a critique of the former and emphasising the openness and ambiguity of historical and literary interpretation, the teacher undermines her own authority, with adverse consequences for student motivation and learning, and thereby for course evaluations, career prospects etc.

I am very conscious that my take on this theme comes from an extremely privileged position: as a white, middle-aged male with a clear, BBC English voice, a head of grey hair and a tweed jacket, my authority has not been openly questioned in a classroom for many years, however much I drop hints that intelligent dissent is actually a route to improved marks. It probably doesn’t help that I was re-watching Life of Brian the night before last, so Walsh’s article summoned up echoes of “tell us how to develop our own individual take on the subject, O master” – it’s perfectly possible that my attempts at encouraging the interrogation of authority are constantly undermined by my embodiment of it. I really don’t face the dilemma that she does: “how does a person occupying a non-authoritative body teach a bunch of authoritarians living in a racist, sexist, ableist society what a responsible postmodern approach to Greco-Roman antiquity looks like?”

One of my initial thoughts was that the various teaching techniques Walsh suggests – decentring authority, empowering students as knowledge-producers and monitors, and moving towards a consent-based classroom – represent a means of working around rather than confronting the problem of students’ assumptions about authority and how to ascribe it. On reflection, I don’t think this is untrue; there must be a risk that the teacher using these new methods gets improved evaluations because students are scoring for stereotypically feminine qualities like being helpful, supportive and friendly (cf. recent studies on the different things that male and female students praise in male and female teachers), while the conventional image of academic authority as male (white, middle-aged, tweed-jacket-wearing) remains fully in place. But it’s probably beside the point, or at least secondary to the key outcomes of (i) greater success in teaching students to adopt a more critical and self-aware approach to antiquity and (ii) improved evaluations without the teacher having to resort to self-policing to present as a more conventional academic authority.

My other reaction was a stab of envy at the freedom that teachers outside the highly regulated UK system seem to have in organising their courses. The idea of allowing a class to debate and decide upon how the course should be assessed is simply inconceivable in a world where everything has to be specified and approved months or years in advance, and giving the students freedom to shape the course content is problematic when the exam paper has to be written when classes have barely started. Of course there is some scope for flexibility in other areas, such as non-assessed presentations – but there is flexibility precisely because such activities are not regarded as important (because they don’t feed into the degree results directly), and most students seem to have internalised the idea that only marks, and things that have a direct bearing on marks, really count.

Indeed, my experience (and Walsh’s article has really brought this into focus) is that students get ever warier of choice and freedom when they think it might matter; they really want to be able to leave things to higher authority. The obvious example for me is the first assessment exercise in the course I’ve taught for years on Approaches to Ancient History, where students have to write an analysis of a journal article: free choice of article, free choice of what they choose to analyse. This is not enormously popular; I took a poll this year, and an clear majority of students voted that in future there should be a set choice of three or four articles; not my problem as I’m moving universities and no longer teaching the course, but that is striking.

Indeed, I now feel as if all the advice I offered about how to choose an appropriate article may have been counter-productive, as it emphasises the ways this exercise might go wrong (all true; it is difficult to analyse an article that doesn’t actually have an argument, and taking something from 1951 is generally a bad idea) and makes the stakes of their choice obvious – better to be assigned something that is definitely the right sort of thing by someone who knows what is needed. Whenever I suggested that credit would be given for well-chosen articles and interesting approaches, it just highlighted the existence of articles that would be bad choices, and approaches that would be boring. I almost feel that they regard this as a trick or a trap: it’s not true (they think) that there is no single correct way of doing things, as I claim, but rather there is a correct way that I’m refusing to reveal to them.

I should of course emphasise that Not All Students – but it’s still reminiscent of the Garfield cartoon where, as the Caped Avenger, he liberates animals from a pet shop who don’t actually want to be freed. The way forward – or so it seems to me after reading Walsh’s article – is to focus students’ attention on the structures and institutions of knowledge as well as on the processes of constituting academic authority, helping them to recognise them as artificial, contingent and problematic – even if, in the short term, they can work to the advantage of at least some people.

 

*Oh yes, great opening. There’s always something interesting up on Eidolon – and I don’t say that solely because I’ve got a piece appearing there in the near future…

ISN’T THIS EXCITING!!!!!!!

There’s a powerful passage in Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History where he talks about the appalling experience of looking at the past: the display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the rule of Unreason, the evil, vice and ruin that has afflicted every society humans have ever tried to build – and the temptation to find a way in which this won’t affect us so much:

We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life — the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of “wrecks confusedly hurled.”

Hegel doesn’t endorse such an attitude – but to some extent simply offers an alternative route to the same goal, explaining and justifying all the miseries of history as the working through of a necessary process. I’ve found myself thinking of this passage twice in the last couple of days, firstly in relation to Uwe Walter’s observations, in his discussion of the Mytilene Debate and how this might offer a way back from Brexit, about the excitement experienced (if only momentarily) by historians at the spectacle of a truly momentous event, a single decisive decision rather than the usual compromise, muddling through and can-kicking. Then this morning there was a striking phrase in David Graeber’s commentary on the current travails of the Labour Party and the democratising aims of Momentum: “I cannot help find it a fascinating historical experiment.” In both cases these are honest reactions, not in the least intended to belittle the actual experience of being caught up in these events or their possible consequences – but still, I can’t help feeling like one of the people on the sinking ship, as the crew squabble amongst themselves about who gets to wear the big hat and whether the charts can be trusted, while being coolly observed from the shore…

Any Translation You Like (So Long As It’s Crawley)

How do people acquire their knowledge of Thucydides? It’s now well-established, I think, that academic readings (in whichever discipline) are far from the whole story; there are many different ways in which someone might encounter his name and (purported) ideas, from computer games to quotations on Twitter to Bob Dylan’s unreliable memoirs to newspaper articles and even to references in BBC radio comedy programmes, which is one reason why this blog collects and discusses examples of such Thucydideana at every opportunity (and I really must get round to recording a music podcast with songs that quote or reference Thucydides…).

One crucial influence on his reception – and this is true of many academic readings as much as of popular ones – is translation: assuming that most anglophone readers are relying on translation, which translation is it, how does this shape their understanding, and why is it so often Richard Bloody Crawley? (As Mary Beard has observed of his translation, the more readable and memorable it is – and Crawley does coin some memorable phrases – the less likely it is to be accurate or authentic). After all, there are plenty of other translations out there of much higher quality, offering different advantages and disadvantages: Hammond, Warner, Lattimore, Mynott, to say nothing of the older ones (Hobbes, Smith, Jowett) and the various new ones rumoured to be in preparation.

Part of the answer is The Landmark Thucydides, offering a modified version of Crawley, which has the enormous advantages of a nice friendly cover and lots of really excellent supporting material, maps etc., plus widespread availability. It feels as if you’re getting a lot more for your money than ‘just’ the text; purely subjective opinion, but if this had been available when I first had to read Thucydides as a teenager (learning Greek but also interested in wargaming, history etc.), it’s the one I’d have gone for, and I can easily imagine the appeal to a wide range of potential readers – if they have the money.

That may be an important point, and I’m slightly embarrassed that it took me a while to think of it (about six months ago, but I haven’t had time to work on this until now); because it’s not just a matter of £15-20 for the Landmark rather than £5 for Hammond, but also the potential competition from much cheaper electronic versions. After all, if you’re the sort of person who has a Kindle or other eBook reader, how likely are you to spend substantial amounts of money on one of these editions if you’re just a casual browser who’s heard something about Thucydides and wants to dip your toe in the water, when Amazon offers a load of much cheaper options?

A quick search on the Amazon website threw up ten cheap electronic versions of Thucydides in the first couple of pages; since these are the ones, I imagine, that a standard normal punter will encounter first, this analysis is focused on them. Top of the list: Richard Crawley, completely free, currently at #4,028 in the list of Free Books on Kindle. Second up is the Color Illustrated edition (ca. #60,000 in Paid-For Kindle list), clearly a contender for most staggeringly inappropriate cover picture ever (see below), which purports to offer the Rex Warner Penguin Classics translation – but is actually Crawley.* Of the next eight, I wasn’t able to check one as my Kindle isn’t working properly here in Berlin (and I’m also reluctant to spend actual money on any of these), one had the Jowett translation (and wants £1.40 for it, despite the fact that the Perseus online version is free and much easier to search; ca. #110,000), and the other six were Crawley. It’s obvious that these editions are not selling huge quantities – the majority hang out in the #1,200,000-#1,500,000 places, but have jumped up and down quite substantially in the course of the three hours I’ve spent working on this on and off, suggesting that in this neck of the woods a single purchase can make a huge difference to the placing. But evidently people are buying them…

Basic conclusion: Crawley rules, followed by the Henry Lord Havell paraphrase version, Stories from Thucydides (free, around #23,500 in the Free Kindle list), which also gets incorporated into a couple of the editions of Crawley. The positive view of this is that Crawley is indeed accessible, in language and in price, so this helps broaden the reach of Thucydides beyond the academy. The bad news? Well, partly that depends on one’s view of Crawley’s translation and how far it is actively misleading – but at any rate, no one is going to learn how to spell ‘Peloponnesian’ correctly…

*I assume the Warner translation is still in copyright, so Penguin would come down on them like a ton of bricks if they actually copied it – one major reason why Crawley is so popular for this sort of reprint, of course – but this looks like actionable mis-selling…

Erase and Rewind?

In the aftermath of the onset of BRAGNARÖK, a number of people have been talking somewhat wistfully of the Mytilene Debate in Thucydides (3.36-48), when the Athenians changed their minds about massacring the entire population of a rebellious allied city. I think the first reference I saw to Mytilene on Twitter was from Angie Hobbs (@drangiehobbs) on 25th June (given how rapidly events are developing at the moment, I think it’s important to keep the chronology clear…), offering it as an exemplum rather than an anology, but in recent days there’s been a blog post by Caitlin Harris, an MA student at Swansea (https://projects.swan.ac.uk/ancient-world/?p=386), arguing that it would be fundamentally undemocratic to deny people the right to vote again with a different perspective; a letter in the Grauniad from one Shoshana Goldhill in Cambridge (now there’s a famous classical surname…) arguing that it shows the ability for democracy to self-correct its own excesses; and a substantial article in the Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung from Uwe Walter (Professor of Ancient History at Bielefeld, for anyone who doesn’t know his work), ‘Man müsste bloß wieder zurückrudern’, drawing on the work of Egon Flaig to explore in detail the circumstances of the second Mytilene debate and concluding by wondering whether the fateful Article 50 trireme that’s been dispatched will be over-hauled by a new Parliament, a courageous government or the obdurate Scots.

As with many historical analogies (see Donna Zuckerberg’s excellent recent piece on in Eidolon, ‘Make Comparisons Great Again’, on classical readings of Trump), such references are alluring (“I’ve got an analogy! Classics is relevant!”) and sometimes comforting (certainly in the case of Mytilene; less so with Trump, except insofar as they offer reassurance that Classics is relevant), but at best often under-analysed, and sometimes little more than partisan rhetoric. They are predicated on the assumption that the Leave vote was a mistake (I wholeheartedly agree, but not on the basis of an analogy with ancient Greece), and that this is sufficiently obvious to all that the decision needs to be reconsidered; Mytilene shows, they argue, that democracies can and should change their minds, without any fear that this would somehow be undemocratic. Leaving aside the obvious problem that the Athenians were voting to devastate another city rather than themselves (except insofar as Mytilene threatened to be another example of the hubris that would eventually bring nemesis down upon them) whereas Britain threatens other states only as an accidental by-product of its own self-mutilation, most of these references fall into the familiar trap of assuming that Athenian democracy was basically more or less the same thing as ours.

Put like that (with echoes of Paul Cartledge’s recent arguments on this theme), it’s obvious – and I’m sure all the people referencing Mytilene would immediately respond “yes, of course we know that”. But once you recognise this, what does the Mytilene episode actually have to offer us in the present situation? Other than the wish to erase and rewind, it simply isn’t a very good analogy. Firstly, the Athenians had this sort of decisive, winner-takes-all popular vote all the time, as Mary Beard has recently observed. How far they were any good at them is another question (see Thucydides passim), but they went into such a decision with their eyes open about the possible consequences, including for themselves and their families (and, it’s fair to say, the possible consequences were substantially easier to grasp in a vastly simpler world). We are acculturated to a political system which (as Cartledge argues) the Athenians would have regarded as basically oligarchic, and all our institutions, political culture and instincts are orientated towards this – and, while the events of the last week constitute a thorough indictment of the quality, integrity, competence and decision-making capabilities of those oligarchs, let alone their motives, it isn’t obvious that more popular referendums would be any sort of improvement.

Secondly – and arguably as a consequence of the centrality of such popular votes in the Athenian system – the Athenians regularly changed their minds, or at least considered changing them, without worrying about whether this was somehow undemocratic. Mytilene is just one example; worth recalling that the debate about the Sicilian Expedition in Thucydides’ account was in a sense the second, as Nicias seized the opportunity in a debate about the practical aspects of an invasion that had already been agreed to reopen the whole question of whether this was a terribly good idea – yes, figures like Cleon and Alcibiades could always argue that the will of the people had already been expressed, as a means of trying to shore up their core support, but there was no suggestion that a second vote should not be held. But this doesn’t help us, precisely because such popular votes are not normal for us, hence no pre-existing institutions or practices to help make sense of them or manage their consequences, hence unmistakable tendency to fetishise the result as the True and Irrevocable Voice of the People. In a sense, the Athenians knew full well that the People changed their mind regularly (Cleon points this out in his Mytilene Debate speech precisely as a means of trying to shame them into sticking to their guns), whereas, because normally our People gets to speak every five years, it is easier (and for many, much more convenient) to believe that its views are constant and must be respected regardless of any other circumstances.

Walter identifies this contrast in a slightly different sense: the Referendum result is to be celebrated and cherished by historians as ‘heroic’ (a ‘magisch-irritierende Moment’), since it offered at least the brief illusion of a decisive historical shift and a new beginning, precisely because it appears both unequivocal and irrevocable, unlike the election results that are always complex and nuanced, and can always be reversed in the next election. There seems to be a nostalgia here for simpler, more exciting times, when political history was a matter of individual actions and decisions having immediate effect, in contrast to the sluggish and impersonal complexity of the present, which I wouldn’t sign up to for a moment – but it does make the point that our politics is not like that. We don’t make decisions like this; and when we try to, it puts the world out of kilter.

In other words, the Mytilene analogies are founded on wishful/wistful thinking, a longing for the world to be different: for a world where heroic individuals and their actions still count, or for a world where the mechanisms exist to reverse an undesired event without any fuss (“Activate the Omega 13!”). Frankly, if we’re going to wish for anything, it should be the graphe paranomon, the Athenian legal procedure brought against someone for introducing a proposal contrary to the existing laws, which effectively offered an opportunity to review and even rescind decisions make by the assembly (and to suspend them while the matter was resolved), and to punish the perpetrator if found guilty. Gove, Johnson, Leadsom, Farage, Stuart, Hoey, Dacre, Murdoch et al, you have lied to the people and corrupted the laws of the state, and we’re coming to get you.

And a pony. We don’t live in this world, we live in a very different world where the normal rules of politics have been set aside – but superficial analogies with ancient Athens are not any sort of substitute or solution for our familiar practices, however broken and inadequate, especially if their starting assumption is to make the world simpler than it really is. Thucydides’ account of Mytilene is not a lesson in what is actually possible, except in the most trivial sense; it’s a case study in political rhetoric and manipulation, that we’ve missed the chance to learn from this time around but desperately need for the future.

[edited 11:53 2/7/16 to clarify that Angie Hobbs’ tweet offered Mytilene as an exemplum rather than an analogy – which could lead us into a broader discussion on Reinhart Kosselleck’s views on the decline of exemplarity in the modern world, but actually it was just a brief tweet that I wanted to acknowledge as the first – as far as I know – to have brought Mytilene into the discussion…]

Starter for Ten (Thucydides Edition)

There is a world in which the following would be a sure-fire hit… A panel of respected and yet suitably media-friendly academics: ancient historian, International Relations theorist, U.S. Naval War College person, Straussian. John Oliver as host controls the ever-spinning Wheel of Bewildering Succession of Events. It stops randomly on a moment – US Election! Brexit! European Economic Meltdown! Labour Party Crisis! Syria! Swift/Hiddleston! – and the panelists take it in turns* to show how a particular passage of Thucydides illuminates the situation. The key point is that each passage can be played only once, so no repetitive invocation of ‘The strong do what they want, the weak suffer what they must” as if the Melian Dialogue is the only thing Thucydides wrote**; you need to make a strategic choice whether to play one of the familiar passages as early as possible for low points, or hang back and risk someone else grabbing it first.

This does need a suitable name… I’m currently inclined to go with the meme and call it The Thucydides Trap – but only if there can be an actual Trap, depositing players in a tank full of mutated sea bass or sending them into exile for ten years for doing something egregious like misattributing quotations, e.g. the ‘Justice will not come to Athens…’ thing, or invading Iraq.

I think this would work. In the meantime, I’m getting ready for a panel discussion on ‘Die Aktualität von Thukydides’ as part of the FU Berlin’s International Week (see https://www.topoi.org/event/35076/), and having now redrafted my notes at least seven times in last two days in the light of changing events, the idea of just being presented with a topic to talk about holds some appeal…

*Quickest to the buzzer would be unfair on the Straussians, most of whom seem to be somewhat elderly.

**For obvious reasons, Realists and Neorealists don’t win this game very often…

Fear and Loathing in Berlin

I must confess to having thrown in the odd Weimar comparison in the last week, and Godwin’s Law be damned: when members of parliament are assassinated by right-wing radicals on the street, let alone when society shows every sign of polarisation while moderate politics empties itself out and the extremes start to meet round the other side, it’s difficult to avoid such a feeling. But the aim of this post is not to develop the point, but to advertise as loudly as I can the fact that – as someone helpfully pointed out on Twitter – Volker Kutscher’s first Weimar Berlin Krimi, Der nasse Fisch, is now available in English translation as Berlin Babylon (http://sandstonepress.com/books/babylon-berlin). Go buy it in enormous numbers!

I think I’ve complained on here before about the scandalous neglect of the rich tradition of German detective novels, whereas every Scandinavian with a typewriter and a dose of Kierkegaardian angst gets a five-novel deal and a TV series. Kutscher is neither the best nor my favourite – that’s Ulrich Ritzel, and some day I will find time to complete my translation of his brilliant The Black Edges of the Embers, about the legacy of the Rote Armee Fraktion and far-right terrorism, which is so much better than the perfectly decent later novels that are the only ones ever available in English – but he’s still pretty damned good. Lots of historical detail about police work in the late 1920s, lots of historically appropriate crimes, shedloads of atmosphere (cabarets, gangsters, street urchins, jazz, cocaine, silent cinema) that hovers just on the right side of cliche, all seasoned with just the right amount of reference to major historical events in the background.

The central character, Gereon Rath, is an almost total Arschloch, albeit with the obligatory complex family background rooted in the First World War and an earlier blotting of copybook in Köln which arguably explains a bit of this; he lies, cheats on his on-off girlfriend Charlie, snorts cocaine, gets into hock with gangsters, falsifies evidence and regularly bunks off duty because of hangovers. Almost every other character, apart from an assortment of aristocratic Nazi sympathisers, is more sympathetic – including people, like some of Rath’s superiors, whom he sees as stupid and unpleasant but we see as basically decent and honest.

But this is part of the drama of the series – or at least this is what I tell myself to keep reading at certain moments. His creator clearly also thinks he’s an Arschloch, but with a core of decency and commitment to justice (not necessarily always the law). The point is that we know what is really happening in the background and where it’s leading, and so we know that either Rath will be finally corrupted – never a committed Nazi, but one of those who were too compromised and weak and/or too ambitious and self-centred not to go along with things – or this will end tragically sooner or later. Kutscher is never sadistic towards his characters (unlike certain Scandinavians) – but he’s never sparing of their faults or inclined to offer a sentimental view of the world.

One of the major themes of German culture over the last sixty-odd years has been the question of complicity and responsibility, and of course this is reflected in detective fiction. RItzel’s main characters are in the Chandler mode: dogged and decent, seeking to pin responsibility where it belongs, frustrated by the system that would prefer to shove certain crimes and memories under the carpet. The drama lies above all in the plot, the slow revelation of shameful secrets and the links between past and present – almost always, a recent crime turns out to have deep roots. Kutscher’s crimes are centred in the present of 1930s Berlin, and are often almost trivial, a trigger for Rath’s flaws to undermine him yet again rather than the centre of the story; we have a sense that events, rather than the political system, are closing in on him – and that the ultimate questions of guilt and responsibility will focus on him, not on the criminals.

To put it another way: Kutscher’s books get steadily better as the looming nightmare comes closer, and not just because his style matures – which is why you need to buy Berlin Babylon, to make sure that the rest get translated (and maybe even pave the way for Ritzel…). My fear is that they will feel too close to home at the moment; far from prompting a warm feeling of smug superiority that we Britons would never have succumbed to such extremism and popularism, the splintering of society and impotence of the state in the face of popular anger may feel alarmingly familiar. Detective fiction that is the precise opposite of comforting escapism…

History and Hope

I had been planning to write about the debate in Athens in 415 about the proposed attack on Syracuse. Though there is one remarkable contrast between the two situations – whereas Nicias’ sensible older men were faced with the aggression and ignorance of Alcibiades’ pumped-up youths, in our time the pragmatism of the young is confronted with the reckless, après moi le deluge nostalgia of the old – there are significant parallels in the rhetoric used to argue for and against driving the city off a cliff. Nicias urges caution and common sense, and constantly has to defend himself against insinuations of cowardice, self-interest and talking down Athens; it’s a manifestly weak argument in the face of Alcibiades’ boundless self-confidence, optimism, disparagement of foreigners – the Sicilians are weak and disunited, and “most likely they will be happy to make separate agreements with us when we make attractive proposals to them” – and appeals to the true nature of Athens. Indeed, given Dominic Cummings’ well-known predilection for Thucydides, one might wonder how far the Leave campaign is directly drawing upon motifs from his speeches.

Even on Thursday morning, however, I found myself haunted by other sections of the work. The UKIP ‘Breaking Point’ poster fits perfectly the model of the escalating extremism of rhetoric, the twisting of words and meanings in pursuit of factional ends, depicted in the account of social breakdown in Corcyra. The murder of Jo Cox feels less like a further step on the path of polarisation than the appalling manifestation of fault-lines that have, we can now see, been growing for years – and, no, you don’t get to point to evidence that the killer was mentally disturbed as a means of waving away any link to far-right politics unless you’re prepared to do the same for mentally-disturbed killers claiming to act in the name of Islam. In any case, as various commentators have observed, even mentally ill killers have motives, shaped by the culture around them. The sole ground for optimism is that we’re not yet at the point where mainstream political discourse celebrates her death as justified in terms of the interests of the opposing party, as happened in Corcyra and has happened in other societies in a similar state of crisis.

Thucydides gets to say “I told you so” – but that’s not much consolation. It is at times like this that the limits of history become painfully apparent. Thucydides promised that, if we read and think about his account, we will be able to make sense of present and future developments, because in important ways they will follow the same patterns as past events. He never promised that we’d be able to prevent or change them. Rather, we get to watch things unfold like a slow-motion car crash, with a horrible sense that we know what’s going to happen next. We acquire a deeper knowledge of ‘the human thing’, our species’ capacity for self-delusion and miscalculation, our propensity to surrender to emotion, our limited ability to grasp the reality of our situation let alone anticipate future events, and our susceptibility to manipulation by the less scrupulous.

At dark moments, this seems like a fact of human existence: history as recurrent nightmare, demonstrating the pointlessness of expecting anything else. Hope gets a bad press in Thucydides. It’s barely distinguishable from delusion, a refusal to face the facts of the situation or deal with them rationally – because we’re all sick of experts. But the opposite of such hope is not despair, but knowledge and understanding, which may never be sufficient, but is always necessary.

There is one clear reason why Thucydides offered us a complex account of different events rather than a set of clear principles and laws of human behaviour: it demonstrates the complexity of things. Events have multiple causes, people have complicated and sometimes contradictory motives, insignificant or chance occurrences can have dramatic effects. We can discern regularities and repetitions – but also see how these play out differently. In other words, history is not fixed or determined. The future is not preordained.

History can tell us where we are and how we got here – if we’re prepared to accept this, rather than holding on to more comforting myths about our nobility and the betrayals and perfidity of others, or indulging in trite analogies for partisan purposes. It can give us a sense of where we might be headed, limited by the fact that its database covers only what has actually happened in the past, not the full range of possibilities. On its own, it offers the limited consolation of understanding, which may lead to despair or at least a pessimistic quietism; but as a basis for political action it can help us save ourselves.

We can see why the Athenians voted to attack Syracuse; we can see that they could have decided differently; we can recognise the parallels with our own situation, and try to act. History is rarely consoling; it can be energising. We see what needs to be done.

The Big Wheel

And now the end is near…   I’m not going to say that I’m unaccustomed to public speaking, as that’s manifestly untrue, and actually I think that I’m reasonably good at it – but I am not good at it when it concerns myself, especially at the tail end of a synapse-frying exam board, and especially when it hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to do such a thing, and so my response to a farewell presentation from Bristol colleagues was an inarticulate and embarrassed “thank you”, trying to hide behind the lemon tree they’d bought me. So, this is a chance to make up for that, and to articulate what I should have said…

It would require a superhuman effort to spend twenty-odd years in a department and not have some of its ethos and outlook rub off on you, but the imprint of Bristol Classics on my research and general outlook is much deeper than that. In part this must be because the department has had such a strong and distinctive character; fiercely intellectual and theoretical, always willing to question received wisdom and scholarly convention – even at the expense, once upon a time, of developing a rather unfair reputation for being nasty to invited speakers in the research seminar.

This offered an environment that was both bracing and supportive – in the sense that there were no preconceptions about what topics were worth studying or what approaches were appropriate, just encouragement to push arguments to their limits without fear of failure or worries about disciplinary boundaries. My interests in historical theory and the influence of antiquity in the modern world were already in place when I arrived over twenty years ago – and probably played a role in my getting the job – but it seems unlikely that I would have felt free to develop them to such an extent anywhere else.

I have had the privilege of working with wonderful and stimulating colleagues, both academic and administrative – it feels invidious to single out individuals – and wonderful, stimulating, infuriating and lovely students (ditto, only more so; you’re all my favourite). I have had the opportunity to shape an entire ancient history curriculum according to my own dogmatic preferences (and would rather not hear about what they’re going to do with it now I’m out of the way), and to develop my unexpected predilection for bureaucracy at faculty and university level.

Abiding memories of twenty years in Bristol? The hills; in my previous job I cycled twelve miles a day, to and from work, up and down some pretty substantial Welsh landscape, but I took one look at St Michael’s Hill and put the bike in storage. Numerous cafes, bars and restaurants: the Depot (don’t bother looking for it, it’s not there any more), the Muset, Rocinantes, the Iguana, Mocha Mocha, Bordeaux Quay and above all the Highbury Vaults (even after the Smiles brewery was closed down). Conferences at Burwalls, with its spectacular views up and down the Avon Gorge. Less positively, Hawthorns sandwiches, which meant that the phrase ‘lunch provided’ on a meeting agenda became a threat rather than an inducement. More will doubtless flood back over the next few months, as the reality of leaving starts to sink in.

But above all it has been about colleagues and students. I don’t remotely feel that I merit presents or even thanks; I just hope that I have done as much for the department and its people as they’ve done for me.

Into Darkness…

A stranger appears in the city. He is awkward and sometimes distant in social interaction, and appears to regard many well-established customs and traditions with curiosity or even irony – but most people are happy to attribute this to the vaguely defined ‘foreign connections’ that are also offered as the explanation of his considerable wealth. That’s enough to win him acceptance in the upper levels of society, even to the point that he is assigned to lead an important mission in the war that the city has been waging for some years. His performance in this role is best described as diffident or hesitant – a former subordinate reports his habit in crisis situations of muttering the phrase proton prostagma, and then generally opting for inaction – and it is wholly unsuccessful. Banished from the city, over the next twenty years he visits many different parts of the region, appearing unexpectedly at every major crisis point in the war, taking notes and talking to people before vanishing just as mysteriously. At the end he returns to the city, remaining long enough to hand over a manuscript – “I have compiled your war,” he is supposed to have said. “Use it well.” – before disappearing from this planet for the final time.

Of course Thucydides was an alien. Generations of his readers have been struck by a sense of the distance between his sensibility and that of his contemporaries; they have seen him as a modern before modernity, and developed elaborate theories of cyclical historical development and/or individual genius to show how this could be possible, rather than grasping the obvious explanation. His language is strange, full of words and phrases that are found nowhere else in Ancient Greek; his sentences are complex, idiosyncratic and disconcerting, not always conforming to Earth logic. He is detached, analytical, impartial and restrained; this does not reflect an absence of emotion, but rather the rigorous control practised by a species all too aware of the destructive power of the passions – as Arnold Toynbee perceptively observed, his deep feelings are just occasionally discernible in the quivering tension of his words. His careful observation and evaluation of ‘the human thing’ is not that of the disinterested pathologist but of a committed – albeit often bewildered or disappointed – friend of humanity.

*****

Captain’s Log, Stardate 2764.8: The Enterprise is experiencing a range of subspace anomalies that manifest as screaming ghosts, terrifying visions and a pervasive sense of despair. Mr Spock has diagnosed a temporal anomaly. His concern is not that civilisation may be destroyed, but that this has already happened, and our civilising mission, as well as the entire Federation, is merely a fiction generated in a kinder, more optimistic phase of human history.

“Events are never self-contained, captain. There is always a long chain of antecedents and contributing factors, so that changing a single event may have little or no effect on the overall course of historical development. Nevertheless, all the data suggests that the year 2016 may be a particularly crucial moment in Earth’s history. The global economy is on the brink of another crisis, as inequality and indebtedness rise to unsustainable levels. Processes of global warming and environmental degradation are reaching the point of no return. And yet the people of the United States of America are on the point of choosing a path of isolationism, paranoia, hatred and aggression, while the United Kingdom is considering a self-destructive course of detaching itself from ties with Europe, driven by similar fears and prejudice against foreigners; in both cases, legitimate grievances are being exploited by unscrupulous politicians for their own ends. The plausible outcome is the weakening or even dissolution of the structures and institutions of international cooperation, just when they are most needed.”

“When you’re down by sixteen points in the final quarter with five minutes to play, you don’t drive the team bus off a cliff because you don’t like being told what to do by road signs,” interjected McCoy.

“Thank you, doctor. As you know, the Prime Directive forbids us from interfering in the development of a civilisation, even our own. But what I believe we can do is assist the human race in understanding itself and in recognising what it actually already knows. You humans are prone to let your emotions overrule reason, to overestimate your advantages and abilities, to misunderstand situations and jump to conclusions, and to rely on blind optimism rather than realism. If I tell you this directly, you reject the idea angrily, which confirms the hypothesis but is unproductive in practical terms. I shall instead seek to draw attention to certain paradigmatic historical events, introducing these into the cultural tradition at the moment when an interest in the past first develops, with a clear indication that these events are worth thinking about. Readers will reach the necessary conclusions through their own efforts, and so be far more likely to accept and act upon them.”

“But why you, Spock? Wouldn’t it be better to convey a message to humanity through someone who can, well, speak human?”

“I do not think so. I am of course half human, but this task requires someone who can maintain a sufficient detachment from events to convey their significance, writing not a performance piece for a particular moment but a source of wisdom that will still be read two and a half thousand years later…”

First Officer’s Log, Stardate 2823.1: I have compiled the war of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians…