Neville Morley's Blog, page 59

WWPD?

Do classicists and ancient historians have a particular relationship with Europe or special reasons to fear a British exit from the European Union, compared with other academic disciples? I’ve been asked this question in relation to the newly-founded Classicists for Europe, which aims to add our voice to the campaign for the UK to STAY, and my answer would be: basically, no. We may perhaps be more likely than some to feel an affinity to Europe, given that most of us work on material from other European countries in close collaboration with continental colleagues, while the cultural inheritance of classical antiquity clearly transcends national claims or identities. But even if this gives us a slightly different outlook from historians of early modern England or analytical philosophers, it’s clearly about Europe rather than the EU; when it comes to the latter, our fears are those of researchers, teachers and students in all the other sciences – the threats to mobility, funding and infrastructure, the consequences of prolonged instability and uncertainty – and so the message of the campaign is ‘Us Too!’ rather than ‘We’re Special!’

Indeed, I imagine that we have a better idea than most of the problems and tensions inherent in the ideas of Europe and its allegedly common cultural traditions, not least the uses to which such claims were put in legitimising European imperialism. We are more rather than less aware of the gap, if not the gulf, between ancient and modern, and hence the complexity of trying to bring these two worlds into dialogue with one another. Of course Pericles would have voted for Brexit; so too would Aeschylus, Plato, Demosthenes, Hesiod and probably Odysseus and Achilles as well. But the next step in the analysis – unless your aim is polemic rather than understanding – is not to declare that therefore we too must take up arms to defend freedom and democracy from vast hordes of foreign bureaucrats, because classical Greece.

Rather, we need to think about the underlying differences: not just between ancient and modern ideas of freedom and democracy (cf. recent discussions by scholars like Wilfried Nippel and Paul Cartledge), but also in terms of scale. The communities for which (some) ancient Greeks were prepared to die in struggles against other such communities counted their populations in thousands, not millions; the autonomy for which they fought was that of Hove (actually) refusing to cooperate with Brighton, or Castle Cary being at daggers drawn with Bruton. And even in this radically simpler, less integrated world, such communities were vulnerable to larger and more powerful forces, and so frequently had to band together or perish.

We live in societies where identity is more obviously invented and imagined rather than the apparently natural product of regular face-to-face interaction with the same group of fellow-citizens – which doesn’t mean it isn’t real or important, but does show that it’s malleable. People learnt (or were induced) to shift their allegiances in response to a world in which the absolute independence of Edgbaston no longer made sense, and this new regional or national identity came to feel natural instead – but that doesn’t make it eternal. Meanwhile, the forces that threaten us are still vaster and more powerful than they were in the period of the development of nationalism; clinging to British or English particularism makes a lot less sense in the face of Amazon or climate change, just as Athenian or Melian particularism was incapable of standing up to Macedon or Rome.

If we’re going to look for models or inspiration in antiquity at all, then it’s important to remember that there’s a variety to choose from – Greek microexclusivity is not the only option. It’s rare that I have a good word to say about Cicero, but his idea of the two patriae – that one can become fully Roman without thereby ceasing to be fully a member of one’s community of birth – has a lot going for it. Part of the success of the Roman Empire was the way in which, at least in theory, it abandoned exclusivity based on birth in the Greek manner to accept as citizens those who wanted to become Roman, and permitted ‘nested’ identities. In such a model, being English or British doesn’t necessitate ceasing to be Lancastrian; feeling European doesn’t imply a rejection of national identity. Some cosmopolitans are actually quite rooted…

The real argument is not whether Pericles or Cicero is a better model for us today; the obvious answer is neither. What Would Pericles Do? Provoke a gratuitous and ultimately disastrous confrontation with France and then die at an inconvenient moment… Of course these analogies carry some rhetorical and persuasive force nevertheless, or people like Boris Johnson wouldn’t evoke them, but their main analytical utility lies in thinking through the contrast, using them as a place to stand from which to contemplate our own situation.

Classicists for the EU. Because we believe in engaging with the present, and making pragmatic decisions for an uncertain future, rather than getting stuck in an imaginary, idealised past… Please ‘like’ the Facebook page, or contact me directly if you’d like to sign up to the campaign.

Melos Through The Looking Glass

The Melian Dialogue, with its fascinating insights into the dynamics of power imbalances and issues of might versus right, is one of the best-known episodes in Thucydides’ account, and continues to be drawn upon as a source of insight into contemporary events. Few people know that this is, strictly speaking, the second Melian Dialogue. Just over seventy-five years earlier, in 481, in the middle of the Persian Wars, a delegation from Melos had arrived in Athens and demanded to speak to representatives of the Greek alliance against Persia. In the standard version of Thucydides’ text, this event is mentioned only in passing, as it appears to have had no lasting consequences; however, one manuscript variant includes a more extensive account of the ensuing discussions, with some surprising echoes of the later episode – some of which may help explain the brusque response of the Athenians to certain Melian arguments in 416.

ATH: This isn’t really the best time – you know, major military threat from the East, refugees from Ionia, economic crisis, that sort of thing – but we’re always willing to talk to our allies. What can we do for you?

MEL: We want to leave the alliance. You jack-booted bureaucratic imperialists.

ATH: Okay… What exactly is the problem?

MEL: You take all our money and then order us around.

ATH: Well, every state pays a proportionate contribution to the defence of Greece against the Persian threat, and we reach collective decisions about strategy that we’re all expected to obey.

MEL: Just like we said. What do we get out of it? And don’t give us any of that nonsense about preserving peace or protecting workers’ rights or supporting scientific research. We don’t care about your values and ideals.

ATH: All right, if you insist on framing this purely in terms of expediency, would you not accept that there are benefits for all of us from solidarity and collective action?

MEL: What benefit is there for us in being your slaves?

ATH: But you’re not… Mutual support and security? Pooling of resources? The powerful are always going to try to do exactly what they want; the weak need to band together to become strong.

MEL: Are you suggesting that we’re too small and weak? Are you? Melos is Great. Melos is Strong and Uniquely Inventive and the Envy of the Aegean. We’re not being dictated to by a bunch of rootless cosmopolitan owl-huggers.*

ATH: All right, what about a looser form of alliance, in which you don’t have to do anything you really don’t want to do, so long as it doesn’t damage the rest of us?

MEL: Tyranny! Dictatorship! We might as well be in Persia!

ATH: Have you really thought this through? The risks in what you propose to do are considerable…

MEL: PROJECT FEAR!!!

ATH: You are going to need allies.

MEL: Everyone will want to be our friends once we’re free from your tyranny. Including you. Because we’re better than everyone else. And the gods will be on our side.

ATH: Hope is always a good thing, but if it’s all you’ve got…

MEL: It’s all we need – that, and our freedom from this imperialistic alliance of independent sovereign states that is oppressing us! Melians never shall be slaves! It’s time to take back control!

[At this point the manuscript breaks off…]

* Word otherwise found only in fragment of Aristophanes. Presumed sexual reference.

“Oh Yes It Is.” “Oh No It Isn’t.”

There was an interesting interview in Saturday’s Grauniad with the translator Michael Hofmann, that I rather wish I had seen before doing the final revisions to the latest iteration of my adaptation of the Melian Dialogue (just published in Disclaimer magazine). Of course, my piece isn’t a translation in the conventional sense, but an attempt at a distillation, trying to capture and intensify the essense of the original.* This means I don’t have quite the same fear (experienced by most translators, but bullishly dismissed by Hofmann) of criticism for introducing anachronistic language – that’s actually part of the point, and I would *love* to hear the Melian Dialogue converted into a rap battle or similar contemporary idiom (any classically-inclined MCs out there, feel free to get in touch…). But the hubris of the enterprise, claiming to have got to the heart of Thucydides’ text and its intentions, does find echoes in Hofmann’s discussion of his own work – however much I set up alibis with phrases like “after Thucydides”. Even the implication that there is no definitive reading, that this dramatic interlude is designed to provoke identification – not necessarily with one side or the other, but with the situation and its complexities – and discussion on that basis, is a bold, if not entirely original, statement. But when the title of Yanis Varoufakis’ new book (And the Weak Suffer What They Must?**) explicitly draws on the traditional reading, and reviewers have latched onto this as a crucial insight into world affairs, a different way of thinking about Thucydides’ potential relevance to the present seems worthwhile.

*Yes, I’m aware of the risk that this paring down will eventually result in a two-sentence version; “Because I said so.”/”Not fair!”, perhaps, or, in a more Douglas Adams mode, “Resistance is useless!”/”But there’s so much more to life.” Anything so long as it remains a dialogue and debate, where we can weigh up the merits of the claims of either side, rather than a one-liner that insists on a single interpretation. Come to think of it, one might read the conventional Realist appropriation of the Melian Dialogue as itself an expression of the Athenian view: “The strong disseminate their reading across the media, and the classicists just have to put up with it.” “But what happens to nuance and ambiguity?” “That’s the way the world is.” I assume someone must have noticed this…

**My copy has arrived; thoughts on Varoufakis’ latest engagement with Thucydides (for previous iterations see my blogpost last year) to follow once I have had time to read it.

There Is No Alternative

There’s an interesting piece in Aeon magazine this week about mainstream economics, the title of which gives a fairly broad hint about what’s coming: The New Astrology. Both systems of knowledge, Alan Jay Levinovitz argues, are actually pseudoscience; they adopt the trappings of genuine empirical science (astrology’s elaborate calculations and specialised terminology, economics’ “mathiness” and formal models) but ultimate represent failed intellectual models which are incapable of producing reliable predictions – which is their main claim to authority, and the main justification for the substantial rewards enjoyed by those practitioners who receive official blessing. Some (well-established, tenured) economists will admit that the empirical basis of their claims is sometimes problematic, and that the failure to anticipate the 2008 crash was indeed troubling – but the basic model of what is considered valid economic analysis persists.

This links neatly to some of the issues that ancient economic historians have been discussing over the last couple of months in response to the Ober v. Vlassopoulos debate, and which came up in the impromptu round table discussion we had at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia last week: for example, the continuing validity of Ian Morris’ distinction between ‘soft’ humanities (“yes, but it’s more complicated than that”, always emphasising difference and context) and ‘hard’ social sciences, in terms of the kinds of knowledge they (claim to) produce, the inclination of different individuals to one approach or the other on the basis of their temperament and/or aspirations, the relative authority and perceived relevance of the different approaches in the wider world (i.e. why economists get paid a lot more than historians).

The article did bring to my mind one aspect that perhaps hasn’t been emphasised so much: the nature of the object of analysis. One of the points that Levinovitz makes about astrology and about ‘calendrics’ – the mathematical study of the realm of divinity in early Imperial China – is that they produced elaborate, sophisticated systems for charting the movement of heavenly bodies (despite assuming heliocentrism) that were perfectly capable of producing accurate predictions of future astronomical events. The problem was the assumption that these movements had a direct effect on human affairs, and hence that astrological calculations could predict important events and should determine the choice and timing of actions. Levinovitz wants to draw an analogy with the attempts of economists at analysing and predicting the market – reasonably reliable short-term predictions, very bad at anticipating big unexpected events – but manifestly these are quite different kinds of system. The astrologers were observing a relatively simple system with a small number of interacting variables – which was not in the least bit affected by their observation of it; the economists are attempting to treat a highly complex system with countless millions of interacting variables (even if we assume that individuals are basically self-interested utility maximisers immune to Keynes’ ‘animal spirits’, which is dubious except for model-building purposes) as if it is a Newtonian model of the solar system – and ignoring the extent to which their observations and theory-building then affect the behaviour of the system.

This is of course where the other social sciences, and the humanities, can make their claim to contribute constructively to the discussion: the macroeconomic models are bright, shiny and streamlined, but if they’re constructed on the basis of faulty or unrealistic microeconomic assumptions they will fall apart and fail to do their job – so our ability to understand and appreciate complexity, variability, uncertainty, the whole messy ‘human thing’, needs to come into play. True – but, as the Levinovitz article led me to think this morning, perhaps absurdly optimistic.

In the first place, the ability of economists to influence the object of their analysis could, from their perspective, be seen not as a bug but as a feature; astrologers can’t change the course of heavenly bodies to suit their needs better, but economists can aspire to altering the workings of the market through its institutions so that it better conforms to their models – in which case, there will be no need for the softer social sciences and humanities to complicate everything unnecessarily. And secondly, there is the political imperative (at least in the West) to believe (or profess to believe) in a regular, predictable market mechanism and in the authority of its interpreters, as an alibi for both action and inaction: There Is No Alternative. Events like the threatened closure of the Port Talbot steelworks are placed in the same conceptual category as solar eclipses – in terms of their fateful inexorability, at any rate, if not necessarily their predictability. You can’t fight against a mechanistic universe; you can only try to make yourself more flexible and resilient, to conform to the workings of the system rather than resisting.

Calendrics offered the sort of knowledge that Chinese rulers wanted; it bolstered their authority by ensuring that their rule was in accordance with the workings of the heavens. The modern political class seeks the same legitimation, and so continues to keep economists at its right hand and reward them lavishly. To blame the economists for their pseudoscientific claims is to pick the wrong target.

Ludi academicorum

The Berliner Antike-Kolleg has recently put out a call for volunteers, both for participants and for organisers, for an Altertumswissenschaft-Slam! (or, as they more prosaically put it, an altertumswissenschaftlichen Science Slam. Why is there always this science envy..?). Sounds great fun – though probably something more for Young People, or at least more extrovertedly enthusiastic people, or at any rate people who remember to include the occasional joke in their presentations – and it did lead me to wonder about other possible competitive academic events, not least because today I was doing the ‘impromptu 10-minute response to three conference papers not previously seen’ thing at the European Social Science History Conference in Valencia. Freshly-squeezed Valencia oranges, superb seafood, the wackiest craft beer you will find (Beer with rosemary and rosemary honey! Beer with sea water!), and a lot of ancient Roman network theory; wish you were here…

Obviously some discretion needs to be exercised – the equivalent of the IOC deciding that bridge doesn’t qualify for the Olympics, but without the bribes that led them to include football and tennis instead. So, endurance events are excluded on the basis that they are (a) very boring for the spectactors and (b) too easy; no ‘longest overrun of 20-minute slot despite numerous warnings from increasingly frantic but excessively polite chair’, and no ‘longest self-interested peroration in guise of on-topic question’. We should rather be rewarding speed, agility and precision. Most interesting theoretical critique (>30″). Most devastating rejoinder (ditto). [Incidentally, we’re going to need weight classes, so ECRs don’t get matched against professors, or at least not until later rounds]. Neatest sidestep of potential awkwardness. Most courteous dismissal of idiocy. And obviously a whole set of separate events for the Twitter field…

 

Once More With Feeling

I’ve spent the last couple of days in a fourteenth-century castle just outside Hildesheim, now the Kulturcampus of the university, at a colloquium organised by Roland Oetjen of Kiel to bring together ancient economic historians and economists with an interest in the ancient world. I originally proposed to give a paper on ‘The time of the ancient economy’, squashing together Braudelian conceptions of the speeds of historical change, patterns of intra- and inter-annual change in the environment, and Kondratieff economic cycles to see what would happen – but, predictably enough, ran out of time to do any actual work on this. Instead I offered a variant on an existing draft piece on Varro, frugality and Roman economic thought that I really, really am close to writing up for publication, honest (just in case any of the editors is reading this); which in various respects probably fitted the occasion better, but does deprive me of the opportunity to construct the opening of this post around the notion of repetitive cycles in ancient economic historiography…

I’ve discussed before the peculiar dynamics of the field of ancient economic history, which resemble nothing so much as Chapter 3 of Winnie-the-Pooh, as what looks like an ever-developing debate – “Look! A new contribution that will transform our understanding!” – turns out to be Pooh and Piglet walking in circles. Two different sets of issues – what the ancient world was like, and what theoretical tools and concepts are appropriate for studying it – constantly overlap, intersect and get confused with one another – and in the light of Oetjen’s paper on Friday on Hellenistic euergetism, I’m now inclined to isolate a third strand of rhetoric, how one should talk about the ancient economy, as he sought to deploy a rational choice model without most of the scary terminology that tends to put many historians’ backs up – but which also makes it clear what the argument is. Yet another possibility for people to end up talking at cross purposes and not recognising the actual basis of their disagreement.

Adding economists to the mix risks multiplying the opportunities for misunderstanding. As implied by Ian Morris’ ‘Hard Surfaces’ article of 2001, which remains an essential touchstone for understanding the whole enterprise, the difference between the disciplines consists not only in their means (employing economic theory or not) but also their ends, and arguably their sensibilities. To offer a couple of ideal types, which various papers at the colloquium quite neatly illustrated: even a more soc-sci-orientated historian takes up rational choice theory or New Institutional Economics or the like as a tool that may prove useful but which has to be handled carefully for fear of making a complete mess and injuring oneself and others – something like a chainsaw; for the economist, they’re more like a pair of spectacles, that most of the time you don’t notice, or need to notice, that you’re wearing.

Thus Oetjen on rational choice approaches to euergetism, or Marcus Sehlmeyer (Rostock) on the idea of coding different societies for their relative level of collective action, presented their papers explicitly as thought experiments, and were clearly prepared at a moment’s notice to switch to the conventional “but obviously in reality it’s much more complicated” rhetoric of historicism. For Carl Hampus Lyttkens (Lund) on rational choice approaches to graphe paranomon, Athanassios Pitsoulis (Hildesheim) on Byzantine debasements and iconoclasm as fiscal policy, or George Tridimas (Ulster) on a public choice analysis of ostracism (interesting, incidentally, how often the focus seems to be on Greece, or classical Athens, rather than Rome), the basic premises of the theory are not in question; uncertainty is located in its specific application and/or the limited evidence available for testing it.

Given that a key theme in my own paper was questioning the usefulness of the rational choice model as a basis for understanding Roman economic thought and behaviour, I was expecting much more push-back than I actually got. I can think of plenty of possible reasons for this: I was speaking in English, it was first thing in the morning and the cafe didn’t open until midday so no decent coffee, they were all very polite, pleasant people, and I grounded this turn to a more sociological understanding of human motivation with a wave to behavioural and experimental economics rather than to substantivist anthropology; in other words, the right sort of dissent from the mainstream.

But it did reinforce my sense than many economists, while they clearly know that e.g. the rational utility-maximiser is a simplifying assumption for the sake of understanding the relationship between other key variables, don’t always appear to know this, or at any rate to feel it with the intensity that historians do. As I said above, we’re dealing with different sensibilities; the historians cleave instinctively to difference and detail, the economists to similarity and generalisation, and neither really ‘gets’ the other. Hence the persistent impression among historians that economists actually believe that humans are rational utility maximisers with clearly defined preferences and complete information, or at at least that this could be a slippery slope to such a belief if it isn’t loudly hedged about with qualifications, and the incomprehension among economists as to why the historians are getting so worked up about this innocuous theoretical assumption.

*****

This mutual incomprehension can be seen very clearly in the developing argument between Josh Ober and Kostas Vlassopoulos, following the latter’s intemperate review of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton 2015) in BMCR. Ober sets out his intentions clearly in the Preface: to understand the origins and sustainability of the present, exceptional conditions of modernity, characterised by democracy and growth or at any rate the expectation that democracy and growth are the norm, through a comparative study of an earlier instance of such exceptional conditions, namely classical Greece. His express intent to bring past and present into conjunction is founded on an explicit rejection of historicist and humanistic approaches – which also provides the justification for his employment of modern social scientific ideas, above all rational choice theory and New Institutional Economics, in his interpretation of Greek history:

The strong version of the historicist argument rejects quantification and focuses on the contextual specificity of the societies in question and their cultural products. Historicists embrace the idea that comparative analysis highlights differences by showing how desperately foreign each society is when viewed from the perspective of the other. Comparison of similarities, on this argument, yields only false analogies. The historicist approach is, however, incomplete insofar as patterns of human behaviour are fundamentally similar across societies widely separated in time and space. Social science (like natural science) is predicated on the possibility of determining regularities that underpin apparently diverse phenomena. The goal of much contemporary social science is to infer the causes of observed social, political and economic phenomena, based on parsimonious “micro-foundations” – minimal and at least potentially testable assumptions about the motivations of collective and human action under specifiable conditions.

That final sentence is doing an awful lot of work; one might reasonably question whether the assumptions of mainstream economics and political science are really so “minimal”, given their claims to capture the essence of human motivation, and given that, when they are tested (rather than just potentially testable) for the populations of contemporary capitalist societies, the results rarely match the assumptions in a straightforward manner. Further, as with the economists I mentioned above, in practice Ober seems to slip all too easily from making such simplifying assumptions for the sake of developing a model of Greek political and economic development to offering an account in which the Greeks simply are rational, freedom-loving entrepreneurs – or modern-day Californians, as Richard Seaford has suggested in his own review of the book in The Literary Review. Rather like Oetjen’s paper, the rhetoric of Ober’s book is that of a conventional historical account rather than a social-scientific thought experiment, running the risk that readers might be misled about the status of its claims.

This is certainly one of the aspects of the book that Vlassopoulos objects to: Ober’s Greece, he argues, is bizarrely untainted by slavery, exploitation, hierarchy, debt and perennial civil war, but offers a rosy picture of technological advances, economic growth and individual freedom that is not remotely justified by the evidence, which is inadequate for any attempt at quantification. “This kind of ‘common-sense’ modernist interpretation was the stock-in-trade of twentieth-century scholarship, until Finley convinced most ancient historians to think explicitly about their assumptions and base them on the existing sources.” That’s a slightly odd way of characterising modern historiographical developments; the problem with a historian like Rostovtzeff, from a Finleyite perspective, was that he actually had lots of evidence but interpreted it unthinkingly through a modernising lens. Ober is manifestly not such a ‘common sense’ positivist – but he is assigned to that camp because his account of classical Greece parallels some of the conclusions of the modernisers, even though he grounds it in a completely different (and much more sophisticated) style of argument. In something of a parallel move, I find myself sharing a fair number of Vlassopoulos’ objections to Ober’s substantive account, while completely disagreeing with the grounding of his argument, especially when it comes to the conclusion. Vlassopoulos writes:

If there is value in a social science approach to ancient history (and I am personally deeply sceptical about it, for reasons that there is no space to explore here), this will have to be proved through careful analysis. Such an analysis should start from serious engagement with comparative history, rather than employ ahistorical caricatures; it should explore how to link economic growth with culture and political institutions, not through simplistic reduction, but by creating frameworks that can accommodate the diversity and contradictions of real life; it should take into account the totality of phenomena, rather than obliterate whatever does not suit the agenda; it should examine how to apply an analytic framework to the dynamic complexity required by historical narratives; and, importantly, it must consider carefully how this framework can illuminate the existing sources and be documented through them, rather than generate pseudo-scientific data to fit a preconceived agenda.

In other words, a social-scientific approach to history is acceptable only if it is thoroughly historicised, and stripped of every element of social science. This is a little odd. The underlying drive of social science, as Ober characterised it in his Preface, to seek to identify and understand regularities within apparently diverse phenomena, has likewise been the aim of theoretically-informed ancient history for the last half century, even if not all such historians would put it in quite those terms; debate has focused on the nature of those regularities, whether they’re context-specific or not, and what concepts and terminology should be employed to investigate them.

It is, I think, the absolutist tendency of this critique that bothers me most: Ober’s specific brand of social science is taken to represent the entire enterprise, and hence his alleged historical failings are taken to condemn it. Further, in his evocation of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Wilamowitz’s review of it as parallel to his own situation, Vlassopoulos seems to ascribe to Ober’s book a degree of radicalism and iconoclasm that, with all due respect, doesn’t appear to be remotely warranted. From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece is pretty conventional, echoing the series of publications over the last fifteen years or so applying New Institutional Economics to ancient history; what’s distinctive about it is the book-length treatment bringing together economic, political and social developments, rather than the usual format (as at Hildesheim) of individual studies of specific institutions in these terms. This is no Zukunftshistoriographie, and nor is it the kind of threat to conventional ancient history that such a comparison implies. Another Woozle has joined the first two? No, we’re just following the same old debate round in a circle again.

*****

It was Karl Marx – and Vlassopoulos’ emphasis on the themes of slavery and exploitation suggests that this may be an appropriate name to invoke at this point – who observed that one can of course describe pre-modern economies in the language of modern political economy, but never innocently, always with the effect of erasing difference and naturalising present-day assumptions and conditions. This is obviously true, and there are plenty of grounds on which might suspect Ober’s book of pursuing (even if inadvertently) such an ideological project – but the same is true of Marxism, with the exception that it is supposedly more open about the political and present-orientated dimensions of all accounts of the past. Especially when studying a topic like the ancient economy, anachronism is wholly unavoidable; it is simply a question of where we strike the balance between similarity and difference, context and generalisation – and there is no single correct answer to that question, but a range of different possibilities that will inevitably yield different perspectives on the past. Until this is recognised and accepted within the study of ancient society, the debate will continue to trudge fruitlessly along the same old circular path.

 

Fear and Loathing in Melos

One major reason for the versatility of Thucydides’ account as a source of insight into the present, as noted before, is its lack of specificity. That is to say, we’re presented with a detailed, multi-faceted account of specific historical events, having been primed to expect that we’ll spot resemblances and analogies with later events and our own situation – but without any authorial direction as to what resemblances and analogies we should expect to see. As Hobbes observed,  Thucydides doesn’t teach a lesson but simply makes us spectators of events, free to draw our own conclusions (but encouraged to do so). His work is not so much a mirror as a Rorschach blot; you see universal principles of inter-state relations that speak to tensions between the USA and China, I see a complex meditation on uncertainty and anticipation that is (as Simon Schama has been astute enough to observe recently) perfectly suited to a well-paid consultancy with the insurance industry.

Consider the different ways in which the nature of the relationship at the heart of the Melian Dialogue can be characterised.* One prominent tradition of interpretation understands it as a confrontation between a true and a false account of reality: the Athenians describe things as they really are in the world, while the Melians – if they’re considered at all – stand for naive idealism, believing in the existence and effectiveness of imaginary things like justice and hope. Another reading sees their relationship in terms of unequal power, with the characteristic stances and attitudes of each side a reflection and/or product of their relative capacity to influence events. The first approach sees the Athenians as Right, even if perhaps Repulsive, and the Melians as Wrong even if possibly Wromantic; the second has no doubts about either the wrongness or the repulsiveness of the Athenians, while being very uncertain about whether the Melians get it right either.

Back in Germany, en route to a conference in Hildesheim, I inevitably find myself once again reflecting  on current discussions of Brexit and the European referendum. It’s tempting in this context to re-calibrate the Dialogue as a means of thinking about styles of argument and responses to uncertainty – setting aside the question of whether these different attitudes reflect different levels of support or expectations of success. In these terms, the Remain campaign is firmly in the Athenian camp: the certainty of Athenian victory in any conflict with a tiny state like Melos is analogous to the security of sticking with the status quo in relations with Europe, with arguments pointing to the inevitability of disaster if any other course of action is followed. The Leave camp echoes the Melians in seizing upon any grounds whatsoever for questioning these claims of inevitability – the course of events is never certain, no power or institution lasts forever, the Commonwealth and the rest of the world will come to Britain’s aid – and highlighting the values of patriotism and independence that ought to trump dismal calculations of material advantage.

The Melian Dialogue thus offers any number of suitable lines for Remain – “Hope, danger’s comforter” heading the list, followed by scepticism about choosing national suicide in the name of ‘honour’ – but with the obvious risk of appearing thoroughly Repulsive and alienating those who mistrust such utilitarian, business-orientated calculations. The Athenians’ arguments are deeply unattractive unless you already subscribe to their premises and have some hope of benefitting from their dominance – of course rootless cosmopolitans like me favour close ties with Europe, as does international capital, but what of the ordinary citizen? The Melians were not offered a good choice, and arguably that increased the chances of them deciding, what the hell, let’s piss off the arrogant bastards.

From the perspective of the referendum debate, the most fatal error the Leave campaign could make would be to follow the Athenians’ opening moves in the Dialogue, in refusing to engage with anything other than pragmatic arguments: we’re not going to worry about whether the European project has lost touch with its founding ideals or claim that it’s a worthwhile political and cultural project, let’s just focus on the economic risks of leaving. Project Fear may be perfectly correct, and yet be a terrible argument. That isn’t to say that Thucydides’ Athenians could have won the Melians over if they had recognised their very real concerns about the loss of independence and acknowledged that the Delian League did have something of a democratic deficit – but the one thing we do know is that the Athenians won this battle but lost the war. Fear, as had been observed earlier in Thucydides’ account, is not the only motive that drives people’s decisions…

*I’m especially interested in this issue at the moment as I continue to develop ideas about how to use the Dialogue as a basis for promoting discussion around issues of power in all kinds of different contexts…

Poetry Corner 3

Approximately 97% of the time, the Tweetdeck column that monitors references to Thucydides churns through the same old quotations, some more or less accurate (interminable misspelled variations on the “secret of happiness is freedom” line) and some not (poor old William Butler continues to be robbed of credit for his “Scholars and Warriors” aphorism), plus intermittent bursts of the bloody Thucydides Trap whenever a new article on the South China Sea appears. But every so often it produces something entertaining or interesting; infuriated rants from students who’ve been told to read Thucydides, the occasional new quote (there’s one from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, favourite book of Anthony Powell, that I need to check to see if he’s made it up) and occasional Other Stuff. Including (drum roll) a new Thucydides poem!

ODE TO THUCYDIDES

Peloponesian War in ‘History’ was writ in part,

Before untimely passing, shot an arrow in its heart,

‘Round early fourth century, B.C.E.

“A blending of interests of the many & the few”,

None pursue own interest outside their purview,

Moderation applied, all can be free.

-Valerie Lynn Stephens

According to her author page, Ms Stephens is currently working on  “Odes To The Greats: A Philosophy Lesson In Verse”, and offers a series of short poems on a wide range of Greek philosophers – clearly counting Thucydides among their number. I – or rather the Thucydiocy Bot – have suggested that changed the third line to “‘Round late fifth century, B.C.E.” would still scan as well as the current version, with the added advantage of being more accurate. The second stanza is clearly ventriloquising Pericles’ Funeral Oration in its optimistic reading of Athenian democracy – the claim to “moderation” proving to be thoroughly ironic in the course of later developments, unless ascribed to Thucydides’ own beliefs in opposition to the factionalism and extremism displayed by all sides…

Your Hxtory

Devastated to discover this morning that, according to Buzzfeed’s ‘Which 90s Indie Band Are You?’ Quiz, I am Belle & Sebastian, for whose music I feel a deep, unqualified and undoubtedly irrational loathing. I think I may have selected one too many answers related to books… Obviously I really wanted to be the Make-Up, or Sleater-Kinney, or at the very least Pulp. And it’s in that spirit of political provocation that this blog is celebrating International Women’s Day by banning ‘history’. At least in this post – if someone can lend me a magic bit of code to change the spelling automatically everywhere else, I’d be very grateful – it’s ‘hxtory’ all the way.

I’ve always been very fond of the “history = his story” line. No, of course it’s not etymologically correct, but when did we all buy into the fallacy that Greek origins are absolutely determinative of present meanings? For all intents and purposes, at least until a couple of decades ago, the supposedly neutral ‘enquiry’ (istorie) into the past just happened, quite by accident and not in the least bit reflecting the patriarchal nature of dominant culture, to focus on kings, battles, politics, industrial production etc. If a bit of guerilla etymology can help us recognise that and reflect on our practices and assumptions, then that’s all to the good. Besides, istorie is much too Herodotean; I want to be Professor of Ancient Suggraphe.

Failing that, Professor of Ancient Hxtory, as allegedly – it’s reported in The Daily Beast, so probably we shouldn’t believe a word of it – activists in Western Washington University have proposed going beyond the replacement of History with Herstory, putting forward a fully inclusive alternative. Actually they’re arguing for Hxstory, which I object to not on etymological grounds – though the idea that the discipline is all about ‘story’ is mildly annoying, and much too Herodotean again – but aesthetics: ‘hicks-story’ has far too many sibillants…

The New Catiline?

Donald Trump is Cleon (brash, populist, unscrupulous, dangerous). Or Alcibiades (rich, ambitious, unscrupulous, dangerous). He’s the Paphlagonian in Aristophanes’ Knights, or the Sausage-Seller, or both (vulgar, greedy demagogues). Danielle Allen has suggested a switch into the Homeric mode, urging Jeb Bush to step up as Achilles to Rubio’s Patroclus, making Trump… Hector (the enemy who must be slain)? Agamemnon? With Mitt Romney stepping into the fight as Menelaus, or Philoctetes. The great thing about Homer is the sheer number of larger-than-life characters on offer for such comparisons. I can’t believe – nothing came up on Google – that no one has yet done Trump as Thersites, for the torrent of bile and resentment fuelling his candidacy. Maybe that risks making him seem too much like the man of the people he claims to be…

Roman analogies are just as popular. Trump is one of the Gracchi (populist demagogues). Trump is Crassus (rich, ambitious). Trump is Caesar, dragging the Republic into civil war because of his personal ambitions (expect Middle Eastern entanglements). Or maybe Antony, with Cruz or Rubio as Lepidus (doomed) and Clinton as Octavian, seizing power by taking advantage of the divisions and failures of rivals despite lack of obvious talent. Or Trump as Catiline, bidding for power in the traditional manner but willing to resort to violent insurrection and overthrow the system if thwarted. Which would put Clinton in the Cicero role, figurehead of the establishment, playing up the threat to support her own ambitions, setting herself up as the voice of totae civitates foederatae Americae. Meanwhile, Republicans look for a virtuous Cincinnatus to lay down his plough and save them…

No, of course these comparisons aren’t consistent. Indeed, they tend to become sillier if you try to make them too consistent with the historical evidence: if Trump is Caesar, then who’s Cleopatra, or Spartacus..? The key question to ask is not whether the analogy is plausible, but what work it’s doing as a rhetorical move. Martin Wolf claims that it’s natural to think of such analogies, which may be true – but it’s never wholly innocent. Most of these classical Trumpisms are simply ways of presenting him as a vulgar demagogue, with the implication of dire consequences if he gets his hands on power – the insinuation of a fascist threat without falling foul of Godwin’s Law. Vote Trump, and you’ll be retreating from a disastrous attack on Syracuse before you know it. Sulk in your tent, Jeb, and you’ll regret it when Rubio gets killed by the delegates.

The more interesting approaches are those, like Wolf’s article, which take Trump to be a symptom as much as an agent: his rise to prominence shows how far the system is falling apart as well as threatening to break it completely (or, laying the groundwork for catastrophe in a decade or so, if we follow the Catiline analogy). This works best with Rome: not just because of the historical influence of Roman examples on the institutions of the United States (which is the argument often put forward for taking the analogy seriously) but also because of actual structural parallels between the two systems and their situations: a self-serving oligarchy suddenly finding that its usual means of control aren’t working properly, a systematic inability to do anything to solve the growing problems of society at large, massive inequality and cultural fragmentation, a ferocious competition for power and prestige that involves ever greater amounts of money and polarising political rhetoric… Not just Trump, but most of the other Republican contenders, and Sanders, fit the mould of the popularis pretty well, while Wolf’s idea of “pluto-populism” works as a fair description of Rome in the late Republic – except for the absence of political parties and the incoherence of any idea of “right wing” ideas within Roman discourse.

That absence is not insignificant. The problem with all these analogies – the thing that the use of analogy seeks to make you forget by elevating the contemporary situation to the level of compelling historical drama – is how much they leave out, smoothing over all the fundamental differences between now and then. America is not the New Rome, as Vaclav Smil argued plausibly (if in a rather literally-minded way), and this is equally true if the comparison is with the late Republic rather than the Decline And Fall And We’re All Doomed period that has been in vogue over the last couple of decades. The past can reveal possibilities, but never destinies.

Historical analogies work rather like war memorials: they invoke the past as a spur to action, while ushering complexity and ambiguity out of sight. I’m as horrified by the possibility, however faint, of a Trump presidency as most if not all the people likely to be reading this blog, but I also can’t help feeling uneasy at the way that these dramatic evocations of Great Scary Demagogues of History are also serving to distract attention away from the deficiencies of what well-meaning moderates and liberals would be working to save. Clinton is so obviously the Lesser Evil that the actual evilness of her candidacy – closeness to the old plutocracy and all – tends to disappear from view.

Catiline must be stopped. Cleon and Alcibiades are always dangerous. Caesarism is always a scarcy threat to liberty. Although… Perhaps the spectre of a modern analogue to the Augustan Revolution, bringing an end to the civil wars and ushering in peace and prosperity is not such a bad thing in the eyes of those more concerned with their personal circumstances, their marginalisation in a system that is ever more dominated by the wealth, than with an abstract idea of libertas which was only ever properly meaningful for the rich. The scariest thing I’ve read this week relates not to Trump’s ambitions or rhetoric, but to the possible reasons why he’s gathering support: the rise of American authoritarianism. In other words, Trump really is just a symptom, and presenting him as a pantomime historical villain is to misdiagnose the situation, just as understanding the collapse of the Roman Republican system in terms of larger-than-life personalities is to misunderstand what happened.

[Quick update: I should stress that Danielle’s resort to Homeric analogies is wholly self-aware and clearly ironic; it’s a means of presenting an argument grounded in analysis of the current situation, rather than a substitute for such an argument. Not at all sure this applies to all the others…]

[Further update: Tom Holland reminds me that he’s been comparing Trump to the Emperor Nero since last summer: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/07/is-donald-trump-the-modern-nero.html]

[D. Franklin has reminded me of the piece by Robert Kagan which starts by comparing the Republican Party to Oedipus, trying to discover the cause of the plague (Trump) which, it turns out, he has brought down on Thebes himself…]