Sphinx

The list of topics on which Thucydides is believed to have something useful to say never gets any shorter; last week, an online columnist on economic matters for the Daily Telegraph, who’s been consistently critical of the German stance towards Greece, posted a large chunk of the Melian Dialogue (what else?) with the words “I have nothing further to add. Draw your own conclusions.” (weblink; many thanks to Dan Tompkins for this).

My initial reaction to the idea that Thucydides might be a useful authority on sovereign debt and the problems of the Eurozone was faint incredulity. For all the protestations of Wilhelm Roscher, the nineteenth-century ‘Thucydides of political economy’, that he had learnt as much about economic matters from him as from any modern theorist, there is simply nothing in the History that remotely resembles economic thought; Roscher is right to claim that ‘in all eight books of his work, as far as I can see there is no error of political economy to be found’ – because nothing at all is said on the subject. It’s like the anecdote. recorded by Reinhart Koselleck, in which the Prussian minister for finance is persuaded to change his policy with this line: ‘Privy Councillor, do you not remember that Thucydides tells of the evils that followed from the circulation of too much paper money in Athens?’ Only the most deluded believer in Thucydides’ absolute authority, whose knowledge of the actual text was shaky in the extreme, would fall for it.But of course the Melian Dialogue is not being invoked as a piece of economic analysis, but as a clear-eyed, illusionless political judgement: ‘the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must’ (yes, of course it’s the Crawley translation). It’s offered as a piece of timeless wisdom, and to judge by the comments under the line it’s accepted as such by most readers, just as it’s become a truism of much International Relations theory. However, the fact that it’s a decontextualised cliche doesn’t mean that it’s without interest. Unlike the IR Realists, for example, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard doesn’t present this passage as a statement of the way the world actually is – to quote Voldemort, who’s either been reading Thucydides or a lot of Kenneth Waltz, “there is no right or wrong, only power and those too weak to seek it”. Rather, the Melian Dialogue is presented in moralising terms, as exemplifying the arrogance of the powerful and their dismissive treatment of those weaker than themselves; and this is a poor strategy because, as history goes on to show, Athenian arrogance backfired disastrously, the Melians retook their island (or rather were resettled there by the Spartans), and this marked the moment of Athenian overreach and the beginning of their decline.

It’s a neat rhetoric move; in this context, how can we not see Germany and the Troika in the arrogant demands of the Athenians, and hence sympathise with the poor Greeks in the guise of the Melians, presented with a no-win scenario? Meanwhile, the whole situation is covertly reframed as a political and moral problem, a powerful state seeking to bully a less powerful one, rather than as a complex economic problem in which none of the options are especially good for anyone. We might wonder whether the evocation of Thucydides is also a sublimial reminder of the glorious intellectual contribution of Greece, able to foresee the disastrous consequences of EU policy in a way that the bullies in Berlin and Brussels cannot. Well, I’m convinced; much easier to understand than all that credit defalt swap nonsense. My only question would be who gets to play Sparta in this scenario, but thankfully one of the BTL commentators has got there first: China, of course…