Unreliable Memoirs

I had completely forgotten – it’s well over thirty years since I read it – that the second volume of Spike Milligan’s war memoirs, Rommel? Gunner Who?, opens like this (thanks to @riversidewings on the Twitter for the reference):

I have described nothing but what I saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry. Thucydides. Peloponnesian War.

I’ve just jazzed mine up a little. Milligan. World War II.

It’s the Jowett translation, interestingly, rather than the more popular and widespread Crawley. I do wonder whether this might be a legacy of Milligan’s school education, but have too much else on to try trawling through biographies; I am also resisting the temptation to work through every episode of The Goon Show looking for echoes of the Melian Dialogue…

For the moment, it’s simply worth noting that Milligan here buys wholeheartedly into the 19th-Century view of Thucydides as the perfectly accurate and objective historian, the model for all proper accounts of past events. Milligan doesn’t repudiate this ideal – and for the most part he just describes what he experienced himself, rather than attempting wider enquiries; but Thucydides also disavowed entertainment as the purpose of his writing, whereas Milligan is more than happy to jazz things up a bit (and one wonders whether, although he doesn’t quote that line on Thucydides, this is evidence that he had indeed read it).

Contemporary references to Thucydides in the context of memoirs and popular accounts – seen most recently in discussions of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury version of the Trump White House – tend to stress instead the issue of making speakers say what was appropriate for them to say, i.e. emphasising questions of reliability and representation (no mention of Thucydides in relation to Bob Woodward’s Fear as yet, but since it isn’t published until next week…). Thucydides as Milligan, in a sense, as somrone who has jazzed things up a bit, albeit for polemical purposes as much as for entertainment…