Sphinx

Can’t quite believe that it’s been a month since the Thucydides Our Contemporary? conference in Bristol – though it has been one of those sorts of months. This does create a certain problem for the enterprise of blogging on all the different papers. As time has passed, so what particular persons said in their papers has become hard for me to remember exactly; I shall therefore discuss the remaining papers in terms of the themes that happen to interest me most – which is what’s ended up in my notes –  while at the same time trying, as far as possible, to give the general purport of what was actually said. Which is really a bit unfair to all those speakers whom I haven’t got round to discussing until now, but the good news is that they’re all contributors to the forthcoming Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides – so if you just hang on until 2014 or thereabouts, you can read what they actually said…

One of the constantly recurring themes in the reception history of Thucydides is its lumpiness; since the Renaissance, someone somewhere has always been reading or citing Thucydides and finding it useful and important, but the context of reception shifts between countries and disciplines, and the conception of why Thucydides is useful and important changes every time. One obvious example is the chasm between US and European versions of International Relations, surveyed by Edward Keene (Oxford); in the former, Thucydides is ubiquitous to the point where people write articles about why IR scholars should stop citing him, whereas in the latter he’s barely mentioned. This is curious, given that, as Keene argued, a key figure in the introduction of Thucydides to the debate was the British historian Arnold J.Toynbee, in whose account of the cycle of the rise and fall of civilisations the Peloponnesian War marked the crescendo of Hellenic civilisation in the same way as, he feared, the mid-20th century marked the crescendo of the West. Toynbee may have been equally discredited among historians through his speculative narrative and religious interpretative framework as among IR specialists through his support for the League of Nations, but the idea that Thucydides is a text made for challenging times and above all the modern world is a meme that has stuck, at least in the US.

One wonders whether it’s the influence of its IR tradition or of Toynbee that has played the greater role in establishing Thucydides as a prominent figure in modern US political discourse. This is a topic that Liz Sawyer (Oxford) has previously studied though examining references in speeches in Congress; on this occasion she looked instead at the vastly smaller role Thucydides plays in UK politics  – 11 quotes in the last two decades, rather than 90. Most of these occurred in discussions of the ill-fated draft Constitution for Europe, whose Preface (by Giscard d’Estaing) quoted from II.37. Speakers from across the political spectrum derided his inclusion, which Liz argued shows the “stickiness” of the classics – they are almost invariably associated in Britain with elitism and pomposity, and labelled as irrelevant. In contrast to the many ‘classics in translation’ courses in the US, which present ancient authors as timeless and universal treasures, classical texts in the UK are still considered the preserve of those with knowledge of the ancient languages, and thus of the traditional elite. Thucydides becomes ‘a classical author’ rather than ‘a great historian’ or ‘a realist’, and that defines him as irrelevant to the present. Once again, I can’t help thinking that I may be pursuing this research project in the wrong country; on the other side of the Atlantic, there may be think-tanks and foundations that would be delighted to listen to my claims about the contuing importance of Thucydides, and pay lots more money to keep the project going…

Jon Hesk (St Andrews) echoed some of these themes in his survey of Thucydides in 20th- and 21st-century historiography, and his dethroning as the model historian. Jon emphasised above all the role of external context in shaping reception. F.M.Cornford’s reading of Thucydidean ‘mythography’ was influenced by the Boar war – as he realised later – and W.R.Connor’s postmodern Thucydides by the Cold War; changing ideas of ‘science’ and its relevance to historical understanding and practice lead to a reappraisal of Thucydides’ methodology, as in C.N.Cochrane’s Thucydides and the Science of History – though without impressing many other historians. For Marshall Sahlins, Thucydidean failings define anthropological history – though of course Sahlins wants to appropriate the authority of Thucydides even as he reinterprets it, rather than rejecting him altogether.

Thucydides retains his power, even as he means something completely different to historians than to he does political theorists, to Americans and to Europeans. Somehow he carries on feeling like our contemporary, however much the times or the circumstances change.