It’s Not Unusual

Thucydides may not be a wholly uncelebrated author, but it is rare that his name occurs in contexts outside politics and history – let alone in poetry or song; and so one of the rarer but not less important missions of this blog is to record such occurrences as do appear from time to time. In this case, in no less a publication than the Times Literary Supplement, by a poet that I’ve actually heard of previously, and furthermore someone who, though long since domiciled in the United States of America, offers clear European (specifically, Irish) antecedents. This calls for even more meticulous analysis than usual…

Litotes (Paul Muldoon)

TLS 2nd May 2025; at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/original-poems-literature/litotes-paul-muldoon

Though it wasn’t until 411 BC (1) he took up the oar
in the Peloponnesian War
against “man-loosening” (2) Lysander (3),

our hero was not unknown (4)
to Thucydides (5), who’d evenhandedly (6) intone
“What’s sauce for Aegeus is sauce for the gander.” (7)

Despite his background
being less than sound (8),
he nonetheless managed to drive a phaeton (9)

through the Spartan ranks
or, on more than one occasion, an oar-bank (10).
If his circumstances were quite often straitened (11)

he couldn’t say no
to manning up and having a go
at the slightest hint of an old school oligarchy. (12)

No scanty there, then?
Faced with the very same problem time and again
he would resort to being snide or snarky

and immediately made a dent
in it. It was no small accomplishment (13)
that he somehow managed to claim kin with Nestor (14)

and, since he was far
from the sharpest ray in the earthstar,
was quite likely an ancestor (15)

of the not exactly inspiring (16) Greek (17)
who would eke
out an existence in the precincts of the Abbey (18)

where he’d been married sword in hand, ye Gads,
turning out to be not half bad (19)
or, as Thucydides would have it, “None too shabby.” (20)

(1) This immediately raises interesting questions – not least given the reference to oligarchy in stanza 5, since 411 is most memorable for the short-lived oligarchic coup in Athens, which led to conflict between the 400 in the city and the Athenian fleet stationed at Samos. Did the title character – whom we might surmise to have been born around 431, the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, given that citizens became eligible for military service from 18 – join the navy before the temporary overthrow of the democracy, in which case he was probably in Samos, or afterwards?

(2) A literal translation of androlusios, a term found only in Thucydides (and only once there), suggesting Lysander’s role as liberator of the Greek cities under Athenian domination. Scholars have often suggested the emendation androkmhs, man-slaughtering, which is also found in Aeschylus.

(3) Of course, Lysander doesn’t actually appear in Thucydides’ text, as he did not come to prominence until 408, the period of the war covered by Xenophon’s Hellenica instead.

(4) ‘A hero not unknown’: Litotes is defined by litotes.

(5) He is not in fact mentioned by Thucydides.

(6) One of the most familiar commonplaces in Thucydidean commentary is to praise his lack of bias against either the Athenians who exiled him or the Spartans who defeated his home city.

(7) If Thucydides had indeed said this, it would raise the number of supposed jokes in his text to three. But he didn’t.

(8) A description reminiscent of Kleon, who was likewise looked down upon by aristocratic commentators who deplored his lack of class and decorum.

(9) Although the vehicle in question was named (originally in French) after the son of Helios who took over the driving of the sun-god’s chariot for a day with a certain lack of success that proved ultimately fatal, the Greeks did not develop any such open-topped carriage.

(10) Nor has any version of the phaéton since the late 18th century been amphibious.

(11) Litotes’ material circumstances are left somewhat ambiguous; was he periodically faced with food crisis or even malnutrition because of harvest failure, or is this the aristocratic sort of poverty that means you can’t afford to return invitations to dinner? See Theophrastus’ Characters for a series of vignettes of such characters.

(12) Was he for or against oligarchy? This seems to be left undetermined – perhaps echoing the career of Alcibiades.

(13) Litotes’ career is periodically marked by litotes.

(14) Curious, given that Nestor’s domain had been Pylos in the western Peloponnese, making him a Dorian; again, this suggests aristocratic origins, since old Athenian noble families had long-standing kinship ties with other Greeks (cf. Thucydides’ links to Thracian royalty), rather than the supposedly autochthonous and certainly very locally circumscribed social circles of ordinary Athenians.

(15) Plausibly, he was an ancestor of all of us, just as Adam Rutherford has noted that everyone with European ancestry is a direct descendent of Charlemagne.

(16) Litotes again. There’s a theme here.

(17) I have no idea who this is supposed to be. Who gets married sword in hand in church? Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham? The late Duke of Edinburgh?

(18) Westminster, Bath or Cluny? Or is this just setting up the rhyme in the final line?

(19) You guessed it…

(20) Oddly enough, Thucydides did not say this. But clearly the whole poem is a set-up for some humourless pedant to complain that “There’s no Litotes in Thucydides!”, whereupon it can be pointed out that Thucydides’ narrative regularly resorts to litotes; see for example 3.81.5, where the account of the stasis at Corcyra refers to ‘nothing that did not happen’ (cf. e.g. W.R. Connor, ’Scale matters: compression, expansion, and vividness in Thucydides’, in Balot, Forsdyke & Foster, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, p.216).

Update 7/5

Re (2): on reflection, it may not be completely obvious that the stuff about androlusios is completely made up. I expect this to start appearing in ChatGPT-generated essays within the next six months. The term in Aeschylus is genuine, however.

Re (20): worth noting how far Thucydides is presented here in his familiar role as someone whose pronouncements are to be taken very seriously, even if this is deployed for humourous effect.