Clifford Orwin (Toronto) opened his plenary lecture at the Thucydides our Contemporary? conference with the question of what it might mean to consider Thucydides as a contemporary, or at least as a writer with contemporary relevance. To make him familiar is to make him irrelevant, simply a means of legitimating present approaches through a spurious appeal to classical authority. He is not a sympathiser but an antagonist, someone whose ideas are always useful because he always stands outside his and every other era (a reading that of course echoes Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely knowledge”, a means of standing outside the present in one’s imagination in order to examine and criticise it).
Orwin then focused on the theme indicated by his title,’The Political Role of the Human Body in Thucydides’. Thucydides has little to say about bodily suffering – his characters generally endure hardship, war and even injury and death with little comment – except when it is extreme, above all in his accounts of the Plague at Athens and the civil war at Corcyra. This is in contrast to a long tradition of concern with suffering in political thought; Thucydides, however, pays attention only when the body screams. This could simply be relegated to the rag-bag of evidence for the general superiority in physical as well as mental qualities of the Greeks, particularly popular in the late eighteenth century, but in Thucydides, Orwin argued, it is a consciously-worked them. Pericles’ funeral oration in the first half of Book II offers a vision of bodily transcendence; Pericles calls on the Athenians to pay no attention to the possibility of suffering or death so long as they are serving the city, and in contrast to the limited afterlife of the soul in Homer (it survives the body only as a shadow) he offers everlasting glory and remembrance.
Insofar as they believe these exhortations and promises, citizens’ bodies become a resource for the polity that can be exploited to the point of exhaustion; the Athenians will simply keep fighting. But Thucydides’ narrative undermines such aspirations by moving immediately to the Plague, where the experience of disease and death leads to the abandonment of social and cultural norms and the near-collapse of Athenian society; it becomes clear that most people pursue honour for future advantage, not for posthumous glory, because the fear of immediate death leads them to abandon such things. Contra Pericles’ claims, bodily suffering actually strips the Athenians of their virtues. The stasis at Corcyra likewise shows the limits of transcendence of the body or of absolute submission of the citizen to the city: in normal times, people generally set limits on their behaviour, but it is clear that they are cautious rather than decent.
Orwin’s lecture concentrated on the exposition of Thucydides’ account, rather than drawing out its implications – about the fragility of social order, for example, and the limitations of the ideals of citizenship when confronted with harsh reality. One might offer a less pessimistic, or at least less absolute, reading: Thucydides undoubtedly problematises the relationship between city and citizen and emphasises the impossibility of wholly transcending the body, but at the same time he depicts the resilience of the Athenians despite their bodily suffering – after the Plague, and even after the disaster in Sicily, they keep fighting, and something must be motivating this. Is it simply their restless nature as depicted by the Corinthians and others, or an overweening lust for power, or a genuine commitment to the ideals presented by Pericles? Any of these would serve to show that, while complete transcendence of the body is impossible, bodily suffering does not constitute an absolute barrier either. Between the extremes of Periclean ideals and the misery of plague or civil war, we find the more normal attempts at balancing the physical and the ideal, the community and the individual.
This does raise questions about the use of passages from the Funeral Oration in war memorials (including the new Bomber Command memorial in London), for precisely the purpose of justifying deaths and physical suffering through reference to communal benefit and the promise of eternal remembrance. Such quotations, in other words, echo precisely the rhetorical approach of Pericles, and can be seen as equally problematic; the reality of what such suffering entails is erased even as the sacrifice is commemorated. Thucydides, we may suspect, would have been more comfortable with the relentless physicality and rejection of transcendent ideals in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – and, given that he was certainly an influence on one of Heller’s later books, perhaps that depiction of the absurdity, tragedy and sheer misery of war is another legacy of Thucydides’ account.
Sphinx 
I am rather bothered by the form of words on the Bomber Command Memorial, “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it”. I am not sure whose translation this is, but it looks like something written for Roosevelt or Eisenhower to say. Googling gives me a reference to “Homage to Greece, 1943”, and this might or might not be “Homage to Greece: letters from eminent persons in the United States and Canada assembled for presentation to His Majesty George, king of the Hellenes, on the occasion of his visit to Columbia University, June 17, 1942”.
My concern is that the words seem to be a considerable expansion on the second part of the phrase in Thucydides II.43, “judging flourishing freedom and freedom courage”. The sense of the words, and what comes next about the dangers of conflict, do require us to read this as an assertion that courage is the ground of freedom. But the precise assertion in the Memorial’s version – “You must have courage if you are to be sure of retaining freedom”, as opposed to “You must have courage if you are to have freedom at all”, or “If you have courage you are bound to have freedom (but you might be bound to have it by some other route), or simply “If you have courage you will probably have freedom”, or any other variant – seems to me to go beyond what Pericles is reported to have said.
My concern is a nitpicking one, admittedly petty in the context of what Bomber Command did: we should not go round misreporting historical characters, or amending the most ancient reports we have of them.
Yes, the more I look at this quote the more dubious it looks. I’ve recently done a study of the use of quotations and alleged quotations from Thucydides, and among the key conclusions are (i) there’s an extremely important role for translators in popularising certain quotations, even if – or especially – if the translation is dramatic but extremely loose; (ii) most people using the quotes haven’t read Thucydides, but are quoting other people who’ve probably got the line from a book of quotations. The line that Colin Powell was so fond of, “of all manifestations of power restraint impresses men most”, falls into the latter category, and of course isn’t to be found in Thucydides at all. But accurate rendition of Thucydides’ text is more or less irrelevant to the power of alleged quotations from Thucydides.
I haven’t looked at this particular quotation, so I don’t know which translation it’s from – or whether it is genuine at all, as you’re right that it’s a *very* loose version of II.43. The “happiness depends on freedom, and freedom on courage” version is much more popular, especially in the US (though often with the “therefore don’t shrink from perils of war” follow-up either omitted or rewritten – but there is a tradition of using the Bomber Command version, especially in New Zealand for some reason, so I’d be slightly surprised if the visit of the King of Greece to the US was its origin.
Addendum, thanks to the invaluable efforts of Ben Earley: the quote, either in this form or in a longer version, appears on a significant number of ANZAC memorials, especially at Gallipoli. Apparently it appears in a collection of war poetry by Laurence Binyon, published in 1917, and since Binyon had studied classics at Oxford maybe it’s his own translation…
“Each one, man by man. Each has won a glorious grave – not that sepulchre of earth wherein they lie, but the living tomb of everlasting remembrance wherein their glory is enshrined. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of heroes. Monuments may rise and tablets be set up to them in their own land, but on far-off shores there is an abiding memorial that no pen or chisel has traced; it is graven not on stone or brass, but on the living hearts of humanity. Take these men for your example. Like them, remember that prosperity can be only for the free, that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.”
Correction: it’s definitely not Binyon. Latest theory is that it’s from a translation just of the Funeral Oration published in 1916 by Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, later to be the first ever professor of International Relations in the world (at Aberystwyth, of all places). Waiting to get hold of a copy to check.
No, it’s not Zimmern either. Latest theory is that it may be a classically-educated Canadian lawyer called J. Murray Clark; at any rate he used it in a 1921 lecture, and a couple of years later it appeared on the Soldiers’ Tower, a war memorial at the University of Toronto, of which Mr Clark was an alumnus. Waiting for some confirmation that he was involved in the planning of the memorial, which may then prove to be the starting-point of a whole tradition. Of course, he may have got it from somewhere else, rather than doing the translation himself, but it isn’t in any of the translations I’ve checked.
Interesting to note that the popularrity of the Funeral Oration really takes off in the later years of WWI; before that, it’s frequently omitted even from collections of key passages in Thucydides, but during the conflict there are at least two publications of the Oration on its own, as an example to the soldiers.
Wow, this is an exciting pursuit! I am sorry not to have the expertise to make any useful contribution.
I am struck by what you say about when the Funeral Oration became popular. My thought when I first read the Oration was that one has to read it in order to understand the cult of Great War memorials. I think the tradition of memorials that recorded all of the dead, of all ranks, by name where known, was quite small-scale until then.
I know of a few in Germany after the 1870 Franco-Prussian War (and there’s one in Niederbayern that also lists the dead from the war between Bavaria and Prussia a few years’ earlier, possibly making a subtle point about Prussian militarism along the lines of “it wasn’t our fault, we tried to stop them”). But I am clearly going to have to read the scholarly literature on war memorials to see if they say anything about Thucydides.