Back in 2003 I marched against the imminent invasion of Iraq with a home-made banner saying “Historical Analogies Are The Last Refuge Of Those Who Have Lost The Argument”, protesting in my own small and deeply pretentious way against the mobilisation of the rhetoric of ‘Saddam is Hitler, we mustn’t repeat the mistakes of Appeasement’ that was helping to drive the Blair/Bush crusade. Extensive engagement over the last eight years or so with readings of Thucydides have done nothing to reduce my suspicion of these kinds of crude, self-serving comparisons, despite the fact that Thucydides makes the strongest case for seeking to learn from the past in exactly this way – this is an issue that one cannot help but consider at length. There is a persistent habit among devoted readers of Thucydides of recognising oneself and/or one’s times in his account, especially in times of crisis – as well as a persistent tradition of claiming his authority to legitimise and publicise one’s own theories of global politics – cf. the Thucydides Trap thing with regard to China.
And there are times – especially times of crisis – when it is easy to see why these habits persist, and hard to resist joining in. Perhaps I too have simply spent too much time with Thucydides, unconsciously imbibing the idea that his work must have transhistorical significance, but there seem to be so many parallels between current Russian rhetoric and the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue (and, still more, between many analyses of Russian attitudes and the imperial logic of Melos and the Mytilene debate), and between the developing situation in Ukraine and Crimea and the collapse of civil society in Corcyra, under the simultaneous pressure of internal conflicts and external interference. I’m surprised that, at least on the basis of a quick internet search, no one has yet jumped on this bandwagon, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time. If I had the leisure, I might be tempted to work through some of the possible parallels in more detail myself.
The crucial question is of course what such putative analogies actually achieve, beyond bolstering the claims about Thucydides’ prescience and insight (and/or his literary skill in presenting episodes in such a way that readers persistently project their own concerns and experiences into them). Assume that the analogy has some validity: what does it then tell us? Basically, that this is not going to end well. Imperial power and its habit of interpreting ‘justice’ through its own interests has a tendency to over-reach itself – but over years and decades, and that’s not a lot of help for the people who get trampled in the meantime. It’s easy for social bonds to collapse under pressure and for society to fall apart around its various fault-lines, especially if outside powers are also energetically meddling – it’s extremely hard to put things back together again. This is where we find the grounds for seeing Thucydides’ account as realistic in the sense of a deep-seated pessimism, or tragic, showing people’s tendency to tear themselves apart.
Thucydides’ world is fragile and uncertain, human plans are more or less invariably founded on inadequate understanding and excessive optimism, and things basically go wrong. This isn’t exactly news – except that, thinking back to the Stop the War protests, it’s also clear that political elites of all nations and ideologies are prone to the opposite view, that this time it’s different and that they do know what they’re doing. We may not need Thucydides’ message, except as a sort of comfort that someone else has come to the same conclusions about the world; that doesn’t mean that his message is not needed.
Sphinx 
Coincidentally, I’ve been re-reading some Thomas Arnold, in preparation for the paper I’m giving on Friday on ‘The Modernity of Thucydides’ as part of a conference at the Warburg Institute on The Afterlife of Herodotus and Thucydides, and came across this passage, which now looks rather prescient in relation to the Orange Revolution, the so-called Arab Spring and the like: “Spring is ever a critical period, and the fairest promise of blossom on the healthiest tree may be cut off by one of the sudden frosts or storms so incident to that changeful season. In the political spring also there are peculiar dangers internal and external, which in too large a proportion of instances have never allowed the blossom to ripen.”
In 2003 I was approached on College Green by a 6th form history student at Bristol Cathedral School. He asked did I mind answering some questions about the impending invasion of Iraq by the US/UK military. His last questions was: if the choice is invasion not diplomacy how long did I think the war would last? He simply would not accept that once military force is unleashed that is an unanswerable question. He had to have a neat and tidy answer: a time limit. It made me reflect on the 2 world wars of the 20thC and how it was popularly supposed in both that the wars would end in a few months.
One of the things that T. gets nicely is that formal peace treaties don’t necessarily mark the end of a war in reality – he treats the hostilities on either side of the Peace of Nicias as parts of a single ongoing war, an idea which various people in late C20 have found persuasive, talking of the 1914-45 conflict rather than two different World Wars.
When you read Thucydides, Neville, do you read him in English and then refer to the Greek if something pricks your interest, or do you go straight to the Greek? Or in some other way?
It depends on what exactly I’m investigating. The last time I read the work all the way through was in English, as it was with a reading group involving various people without Greek, but I kept the text and commentary handy to refer to in case of interesting translation questions. Probably in most cases I’d work from English and check Greek on specific points, but for some passages I now know the basic line of argument so well that I’d go to the original straight away. Of course it does make a difference that I’m so often thinking about reception issues, with modern writers who largely relied on translations rather than going to the original themselves; if I was focused more on Thucydides himself, I’d almost certainly spend more time with the Greek than I currently do.
I suppose now I must ask (!) which translations you use, to what ends in each case, and what in general you make of them – I appreciate this may be a topic for another blogpost/you may already have dealt with it, in which case I’d appreciate re-direction.
I think you will all enjoy Lom (2015), a new translation of Thucydides which I hope to make available online.
Since it appeared last year, I’ve been making a lot of use of Jeremy Mynott’s new translation for the Cambridge series on key texts in the history of political thought, as to my mind it finds a good balance between clarity and accuracy – there’s always the problem with Thucydides (as you’ll certainly have found in doing your own translation) that some of his sentences require so much unpacking and interpretation to make sense of them that it’s easy to get a long way away from the original Greek. Mynott’s Thucydides isn’t too easy or familiar; it forces the reader to think things through, in a way that I believe is true to Th’s original intent, and it’s the one I’d now recommend to students. I do still make use of Warner, simply because it’s the version I grew up with and so I find it easy to navigate.
Have you read Mynott’s interesting piece on translating Thucydides in the last issue of Arion?
Weirdly I appear to have an even later issue of Arion, (21.2) but not the previous one to hand. I will seek it out with interest. Mynott’s work is commendable, and as you say, quite refreshing in its unfamiliarity – far better than Hammond’s effort I feel, which adds little to the conversation. The influence of G. Hawthorn on Mynott is there for all to see, which seems on balance to be a good thing. Rex is splendid and pliable, but thank goodness for M.I. Finley’s revisions (admittedly it would be unusual to find anyone using a pre-1972 version now, but woe betide them should they make such an attempt).