A country divided; politics becoming ever more partisan and extreme; increasingly violent rhetoric, with knee-jerk defence of your own side and a refusal to accept the slightest possibility that your opponents – now branded as ‘enemies’ or ‘traitors’ – might be speaking or acting in good faith. Not (only) Britain in 2019, or 1930s Germany, but ancient Greece. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress | Tagged Brexit, Corcyra, Dominic Cummings, politics, Thucydides | 1 Comment »
One of the new courses I’m doing this year – new to me, rather than to the curriculum – is the big survey course on Greek History: 160 first-and second-year students, forty hours of lectures (plus seminars, which are delegated to minions – I’m equally glad not to be doing an extra six hours every fortnight or even every week and sad not to see this side of the students’ development), starting in the Bronze Age and finishing somewhere yet-to-be-precisely-determined around the expansion of Rome into the eastern Mediterranean. No, the title of this post isn’t actually commenting on my knowledge of archaic Greece and the rise of the hoplite, to pick one of many possible examples – but it could be; I have been learning a lot over the last couple of months, refreshing some very out-of-date knowledge, and this is certainly one of the major reasons why this blog has been quiet of late… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged games, Greek History, Sparta, teaching | Leave a Comment »
As my regular reader (hi, Trev!) will have noticed, this blog has been rather quiet of late, as I’ve been struggling to keep my head above All The Things, but I cannot miss the opportunity to add another entry to the small but striking archive of Thucydides Poetry – not least because I’ll probably forget it almost immediately if I don’t. This one is especially interesting, as it hints at a whole tradition of post-WWII classical reception in Poland of which I knew more or less nothing; I would be rushing off to write emails to colleagues in Poland to ask more, except that they are high on the list of people whose deadlines I have missed… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged poetry, Poland, Thucydides, Zbigniew Herbert | Leave a Comment »
Not many posts at the moment as I’m struggling to keep on top of the teaching prep with two new modules this term, plus having to catch train before 7 am on both Thursdays and Fridays which then leaves me staring blankly into space by lunchtime. BUT! I am still capable now and again of stringing together a series of thoughts on the Twitter, which quite possibly get a bigger audience there, but if I copy them onto here I will at least have a record…
In the Melian Dialogue (Choose Your Own Adventure version), the discussion eventually ends up going in circles. There’s actually no limit on how long this can continue, but it’s pretty obvious after a while that talking has reached its limit. Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged Brexit, Melian Dialogue, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
Somewhere on my ever-expanding list of ‘Things it would be really cool to try if I wasn’t already deep into time/energy/sleep deficit’ is the idea of a video series called Thucydides Explains It All, in which the incomparable wisdom of Thucydides would be applied to the analysis of contemporary issues – not just vacuous speculation about China, but things that actually matter to people. Case in point, which is why I thought of this again yesterday: the Rooney-Vardy bust-up. It was the rise of a new generation of WAGs, and the fear of media obsolescence this aroused in the established influencers, that made conflict inevitable… My wife suggested that I ought to buy a false beard and present these videos as Thucydides; I would much rather hire the brilliant animators who did the ‘Heavyweight Champion Historian’ video, so if anyone out there has lots of money and fancies sponsoring this project… Continue Reading »
Posted in Musings | Tagged history, Thucydides, Thucydides trap | 1 Comment »
I have sometimes reflected that my epitaph should probably be ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ – especially when, as seems all too likely, I perish from a surfeit of missed deadlines. What I’ve always thought of as a boundless intellectual curiosity, able to get excited by and imagine my own contribution to any number of different projects, could equally well be described as a butterfly mind or a puppy-like lack of discrimination, randomly chasing cars and shiny things. The net result is the same, an excessive ‘to do’ list and regular bursts of apology-writing when the time and energy just run out.
Which isn’t to say that the original ideas weren’t good Continue Reading »
Posted in Events, Research in Progress | Tagged Impact, Melian Dialogue, theatre, Thucydides | Leave a Comment »
