Greetings to anyone who’s found their way to this blog as a result of the discussion of Thucydides on Radio 4’s In Our Time this week; for anyone who missed it, listen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050bcf1. It was great fun; yes, we could have done with another hour or so to tease out all the issues, not least so that I could dispute some aspects of Paul Cartledge’s account of Thucydides’ take on politics, but I think we managed to pack quite a lot in. Paul, who’s done the programme loads of times, offered Katherine Harloe and me the advice to forget about the radio audience and just concentrate on the conversation between Melvyn Bragg and the three of us, and that worked – apart from the moment when I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to tell my parents about the programme, and that my mother might be one of the people listening, rather more surprised and considerably more annoyed than the average…
If you are a new visitor to this blog, it’s probably worth my noting a couple of things: (i) it isn’t exactly an academic blog, but it is somewhat high-brow at times, not to say pretentious, and some of the posts are really of interest just to people working in higher education; just skip those; (ii) I blog on whatever interests me, including historical theory and ancient economic history, rather than just Thucydides, so just skip things that don’t interest you; (iii) I do tend to take a certain amount of knowledge for granted, e.g. I’m not going to spend time explaining what the Melian Dialogue is – but I do have plans to write a quick User’s Guide to Thucydides for anyone who’s now curious about his work but doesn’t know where to start, so watch this space…
Sphinx 
I very much enjoyed the programme, which I thought was a good general introduction to Thucydides. It was a shame that at the start Melvyn Bragg read (part of) the opening sentence of Thucydides from Crawley’s translation rather than from a more recent (and accurate) one, especially as Crawley says Thucydides ‘wrote the history’, whereas the subsequent discussion pointed out that he doesn’t use that term. No doubt time constraints prevented more discussion of the nature of the speeches – someone’s comment that ‘he says he made them up’ (a simplistic formulation which sadly has appeared more than once in print) went unchallenged. And with regard to the supplementary (unbroadcast) material, I do wish Paul Cartledge would stop trotting out the tired old point that Thucydides excluded women and wrote ‘His-story’ – this argument (which assumes that Thucydides, who avowedly was writing the history of a particular war, should have interlarded it with more or less extraneous material lilke Herodotus, or have written a general political and cultural survey of 5th-century Greece like a modern historian) has long passed its shelf life. But all in all, and given the pressures of time, I found this excellent.
Yes, there’s an awful lot more that could be said about the speeches – they do seem problematic to many modern historians, but equally there have been some interesting attempts at explaining how they are actually crucial for developing T’s overall interpretation – and I like the argument of Arnold Toynbee that it is only convention that makes us think that direct speech is bad and unhistorical and indirect speech is perfectly acceptable and unproblematic. Likewise, while T. does focus on war and traditional politics, that doesn’t seem to me to be a problem unless (as, admittedly, some have claimed) you think that therefore history should only ever be about war and traditional politics. I do think a serious case could be made for T as a feminist text, critiquing aggressive masculine modes of thought and behaviour, even if he doesn’t talk about women much…
It was a very stimulating discussion, that spurred several thoughts. I find that I disagree with Paul Cartledge about Thucydides’ creation of the single Peloponnesian War – I think it’s implicit in the Lysistrata that the war they want rid of has been going on for more than just a few years, so I think Thucydides reflects a general perception of the war beginning in 431.
I also wonder if, when we say “he might have adjusted his view of the Persians had he continued the work”, we may be giving Thucydides too much credit. Perhaps he would be like those modern historians who still write as if Cimon’s victory at the Eurymedon neutralized the Persian threat forever, and rendered the Delian League unnecessary. (Which is, in my view, nonsense.)
But what came out most was how much Thucydides is the antithesis of how modern historians go about their work. He is the arch-positivist – he firmly believes that there is a Truth to be extracted from the witnesses he has consulted, and that he is the one to provide that to us. Hence he does not show us how he has reached his conclusions – why would he need to?
And finally, the way into understanding Thucydides’ style for me came when I started reading Joyce’s Ulysses. I feel that both of them are trying to find a way of expressing in language the exact meaning, with the exact nuances and connotations, that they want to convey, and the convolutions of their style are down to that. Both fail, of course – indeed, in their attempt to find exactitude, they both end up obscuring rather than revealing.
Thanks for this, Tony. I must admit I sometimes feel that the only interesting thing about the whole ‘was it really a single war?’ thing is the way this was taken up by Raymond Aron to describe 1914-1945 as a unity…
I like the Joyce comparison, though I’m not sure if I completely agree – mainly because I’m not sure if I agree that Joyce failed in a drive for exactitude in quite the way you suggest. Or maybe I’m getting confused by your reference to T as a positivist, with which I definitely disagree. I think he’s aware that it is *his* truththat he’s presenting – but also wholly convinced that it’s superior to anyone else’s.
I think I’ve mentioned before that one striking literary analogue is Georges Perec, a writer who is well aware of the rhetorical power of piling up incidental details for some purposes, but is equally willing to switch style and approach at a moment’s notice. Especially in ‘La Vie Mode d’Emploi’, it’s clear that reality is best represented through unmistakable artfulness – but still convinces as real.
With regard to Tony’s comment, personally I think it far too sweeping to say that Thucydides ‘fails’ in the use of his style. Of course, it is difficult and can result in obscurity (though sometimes that may be due to our trying to read too much, or too little, into his words), but its very complexity forces one to study and analyse carefully exactly what Thucydides is saying and trying to convey.
Perhaps bizarrely, I was reminded of Thucydides’ style when I recently visited Harrison’s marine chronometers at Greenwich – beautiful in their intricacy, full of subordinate components working with (and sometimes against) each other to achieve the desired result, and sometimes overcomplicated, but always fascinating.