Let’s take it from the top again. Thucydides may have something useful to tell us about the current crisis in Greece, just as he may be able to contribute to discussions of Ukraine, the Middle East, Russia, UK and US politics and any other situation involving power, violence, negotiation and/or deliberation, because this was his intention: he aimed, in giving an account of the specific events of a particular war, to create something that would be “a possession for all time”, that would enable his readers to gain understanding of these specific events that could be applied to other situations. He grounded this aspiration partly in claims about the veracity of his account – we can feel confident in accepting his version of events – and partly in his belief in “the human thing” that means people tend to behave in similar ways in similar situations, and will do in future.
We can question Thucydides’ version of events, whether we because we suspect his motives or have doubts about his methods or the evidence at his disposal. We can debate at length what sort of understanding we can draw from his account, or what sort of understanding he intended us to derive from it: universal laws of human behaviour, or an expansion of our experience of the world, and all points in between. We can argue about whether his “human thing” is really adequate to make the events of 2500 years ago relevant to the present, when so much else has changed so dramatically. We can note the tendency for readers of Thucydides to end up with diametrically opposed ideas of what he is supposed to be trying to tell us, each of which is claimed as Thucydides’ real message, and the tendency for them to over-identify with him and his account – and we can wonder how far this is a direct consequence of his skill in making an account of specific events appear universal, in making an account written for fifth-century BCE members of the Greek elite speak to everyone. There is absolutely no reason why Thucydides’ work must apply to our own times, and plenty of reasons why we should be sceptical – but plenty of intelligent people have felt that it does, and there are grounds for thinking that they may not be completely wrong.
Thucydides is NOT relevant to the present crisis simply because he was Greek; the events he described are not analogous to current events simply because they involved Greeks. His claim to relevance is that he purports to tell us about humans in general; his work would be no more and no less persuasive in this respect if it was Chinese or Arabic or American. But for the vast majority of writers taking his name in vain at the moment, the underlying assumption appears to be that he speaks to us of an essential Greekness, expressed similarly in writers like Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus and the rest (interestingly, Aristotle seems to be keeping his head down at the moment; maybe because his explicit economic and political analysis is too obviously incompatible with the present, or maybe he just doesn’t have the popular reputation…); these ancient authors tell us what the Greeks really are, so either (it is claimed) they help explain what’s going on, or they indicate what the Greeks ought to be doing if they were proper Greeks (cf. Peter Jones’ claims about Hesiod and Solon). Is there some genetic predisposition for Greeks to let foxes gnaw at their intestines like the little Spartan boy (a story of which my grandmother was disturbingly fond), a tendency that is now elevated to the level of state finance? Current evocations of ancient Greek authors don’t really deviate from the underlying logic of such a claim.
This way of thinking is applied not only to texts, where there is at least a kind of argument to be made about long-standing cultural traditions if you really want to go there, but also to events. “Indeed, perhaps not much has changed in the past 2,500 years,” suggests Kabir Chibber, at the end of an article built around a summary of Josh Ober’s new book. “Greeks are still hiding their cash under the mattress in times of crisis and they are still facing hard choices imposed by foreign powers, as the island of Melos faced in 416 BC.” Oh FFS. It’s not just the implicit claim that Greeks are genetically programmed to hoard in times of crisis, and ought to be predisposed to creating dramatic economic growth because they (allegedly) did it before, it’s the implication that they also have some inherent tendency to get themselves oppressed by external forces. Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, Turks… Germans! It’s a pattern! A similar pattern of thought was revealed in the comment in a British radio interview by Alan Sommerstein that the situation reminded him of the way the people of Andros defied the demands of Themistocles for a contribution to the struggle against the Persians (Herodotus 8.111). Yes, it’s a nice little story – the Athenians say that they’re backed by the gods Persuasion and Necessity, and the Andrians retort that they’re lumbered with the deities Poverty and Helplessness – but it is no more than a nice little story. It doesn’t actually illuminate anything, but citing it does, I fear, subtly imply that the Greeks have a universal tendency to poverty and haplessness, not to mention stroppiness (reasonable or otherwise). With all due respect to my classical colleagues – and I don’t imagine I’d be turning down invitations to speak on the radio or write op ed pieces, in these days of Impact – I don’t think we’re actually helping. And that’s before we get to questions about whether classicists feel the suffering of the Greeks in a different way from other people…
Meanwhile, the New York Sun had an entire editorial entitled ‘Time to Try Thucydides’. Since it starts with a reference to the Harvard Lampoon, I had vague hopes that someone might finally have decided to parody the whole Thucydides-quoting enterprise, but apparently not. The article seeks to support a call for a return to the drachma, on the grounds that fiat money with no link to bullion is always undesirable (sorry, what was the date again??), with references to Herodotus and Thucydides: the former because he “wrote of the Lydian king Croesus, who was so rich in gold, and saw the Greeks as possessing a capacity for discernment in knowing what to accept and reject from other nations” (???!!!!??!!???) and the latter because he owned gold mines and so “understood the importance of specie and sound money”. The rise of Greece wasn’t based on fiat scrip, but on proper silver coinage. Indeed, the developing Euro crisis has led to a rush to invest in gold coins. Greek temples were used to store wealth, and even the gold statue of Athene in the Parthenon could, in an emergency, be melted down to make coins. “In Book 2, Thucydides offers an accounting of these reserves, going so far as to list the weight of gold in plates on the statue of the goddess. This is the book in which Thucydides remarks that ‘military successes were generally gained by a wise policy and command of money.'”
It’s like a mirror image of the anecdote from early nineteenth-century Prussia, cited by the great German intellectual history Reinhart Koselleck, that I’ve discussed in some of my academic publications: a clever young secretary to the Prussian chancellor headed off an unwise financial proposal with the line “Yes, minister, but do you not remember what Thucydides said about the evils of paper money in Athens?” – the minister, being unwilling to admit ignorance of this completely spurious claim, backed down. The New York Sun puts forward Thucydides in support of a monetary system based on bullion as if there had been an alternative which Thucydides was implicitly rejecting. What can one say? The name of Thucydides carries authority, that can be used to support any old nonsense.
This is really getting silly; it probably is time to post a link to my old ‘Thucydides is a virus that turns people into drooling zombies spouting gibberish’ blog. Of course it’s isn’t just Thucydides – plenty of other classical references are being bandied about – but he does have an accumulated reputation as a writer of authority, insight and relevance that seems to lead to him being referenced more often, and more often by writers who wouldn’t otherwise engage with the classical beyond gratuitous evocations of ‘Greek tragedy’. Could we be heading towards Peak Thucydides, when his over-use in deeply unproductive and problematic ways leads to a change in practice, and perhaps even to wholesale divestment? Or, as I fear, will the amount of publicity generated over the last few months for his supposed usefulness lead to still wider deployment in future discussions? Given that the new book from recently-resigned Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis (“the Flamboyant”, or indeed #MinisterForAwesome) is titled And The Weak Suffer What They Must? – and since he’s now going to have time to finish it – I very much fear the latter…
[Update: over on Twitter, @MigeruBlogger asked whether we’re seeing the development of a new “Thucydides law” for classicists, analogous to Godwin’s law. To be fair, it really isn’t the classicists who are doing most of this – but increasingly we do seem to be in a situation where “in any discussion of contemporary global power relations, the probably of someone making an inane Thucydides reference approaches 1…”]
[Update: courtesy of the great @henryfarrell, a possible label for this phenomenon: Thucydiocy. I so wish I’d thought of that first – though I prefer my spelling of it to his…]
[Update: since I mentioned the Chibber piece above, summarising/mangling Ober, this seems an appropriate place to note that Ober himself has now joined in with a piece on ‘Ancient Greece’s Answer to the Financial Crisis’. I may write about this at greater length at some point, but the obvious question is: why bring ancient Greece into this? Ober’s extremely interesting and provocative book works by applying to classical Greece a series of ideas drawn from political science and economics, as a means of explaining his core problem, the dramatic expansion of urbanisation and economic activity between the 9th and 5th centuries BCE. Now, one might easily apply those same ideas (e.g. the role of different sorts of institutions, the importance of collective buy-in, the operations of democracy) to modern Greece, and indeed plenty of people have, without the need to invoke classical Greece – unless, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, this is to become yet another example of bashing the Greeks through reference to the greatness of their ancestors (though to be fair to Ober, he also sets about bashing the Troika as well…]
Sphinx 
To say nothing of the Minotaur…I assumed this was slang for backbench conservatives, but there you are.
To be fair to Varoufakis, he does like his classical allusions, but he also has some intelligent things to say about them – his reading of the Melian Dialogue in terms of game theory is genuinely interesting. Not sure how far he will pursue this in the new book, or instead resort to cheap rhetoric.
Thanks for the link to Kabir Chibber’s article drawing on Ober. I didn’t realise it was possible to misrepresent a book so drastically in such a short space.
Actually, it occurs to me that Thucydides does have something relevant to say about the current crisis – the invasion of Sicily and the reopening of the war, and the catastrophic consequence, is an illustration we can learn from about the extent to which people who have it extraordinarily good – like the EU – can engage in senseless acts of political self-harm (in this case by driving Greece out of the Euro).
Although the argument with Sicily is more about how far this was obviously a bad idea at the time. Donald Kagan, for example, suggests that the Syracusan expedition had the potential for success; in other words, the Athenians weren’t necessarily wrong in making this decision, it just didn’t go according to plan. I’d follow the majority view in seeing this as another case where Thucydides emphasises the tendency for people to over-estimate their power and under-estimate risks, and get carried away by emotion, leading to disaster. Neither Sicily nor the current Greek crisis involves “senseless political self-harm”, exactly, but rather miscalculations and decisions based on excessive confidence in one’s knowledge of the likely consequences…
Haven’t read Kagan there – my only knowledge of what he argues is second hand. I have read other Kagan. I have not been impressed. From what you say, and other reports that I have read (consistent with the other stuff that I have read), Kagan’s is a pretty amoral realist argument (Kagan’s amoral macho d**k-e*d arguments are endemic in certain foreign policy circles, and consistently through history, when those circles have come anywhere close to the levers of power, it has resulted in political self-harm).
One reading of Th. is that Athens lost the war because it had lost any moral right to win it (this is an argument that is strongly implicit in Ober, by the way). Seems to me that the attack on Sicily (not to mention the attack on Melos, irrespective of various caveats about the fine political detail of the situation) were obvious acts of political self-harm: there was a peace, the Athenians were obviously nicer people than the Spartans, Athens had economic growth on its side, all it needed was patience. Sparta knew this, Pericles knew this, and the Athenian populus, in fairly quick retrospect when it was too late, realised that he was right.
Actually, let me put that a bit less obliquely. Kagan’s argument is essentially irrelevant. The attacks on Melos and on Sicily were wrong, whether they could be justified in terms of amoral calculation or not, because successful or not, the the mere fact that there were initiated did serious damage to the Athenian polity/empire broadly construed ,as a space in which humans could flourish. Thus they represented political self harm. The fact that as a result Athens lost the war only made it worse.
I think I’ve managed to confuse myself about how far we’re discussing the internal logic of Thucydides’ presentation of events, and how far we’re talking about the ‘real world’ of actual events, past and present. In the former, absolutely: Thucydides presents the Melian Dialogue as, among other things, clear proof of how far the Athenians have been carried away by arrogance and ambition, abandoning any idea of justice but focusing solely on their calculation of expediency (which, he shows, is often completely off-target). The Sicilian expedition is then simply the logical consequence of such an attitude. Athens has in a sense already lost in moral terms – and I should say that I’m not actually so sure that the Athenians are ‘nicer’ than the Spartans, or that we’re supposed to think that they are. No one comes out of this well…
Things are more complicated once we try to step out of Thucydides’ world. I think this is basically Kagan’s line: the Athenians *could* have won, and established the Greater Athenian Empire, in which case all this stuff about them losing their moral character would be irrelevant, if you buy into the Realist line that it’s only power that matters (and of course there are frequent attempts to claim that Thucydides shares that perspective). If you don’t believe that only power matters (leaving aside the question of what Th believed), then you’re not going to accept this line of argument – but it does then become a matter of competing paradigms.
Appears to me that we are in most parts in essential agreement. I don’t see why we should pay any attention to Kagan, who is (in the Aristotelian sense, and almost certainly also in his own preferred realist sense – ‘possibilities are what superiors impose and the weak acquiesce to’ / ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’) a politically incompetent w****r.
If we take an Aristotelian view of politics as the science of how society should be arranged to promote flourishing of the broad population, then Athens was as far as I’m concerned indisputably ‘nicer’ than Sparta (how could you see this as not the case? – Here we disagree, or more precisely I find your claim incomprehensible: certainly, given how unpleasant Sparta was, the minimal claim is surely indisputable). Athens was not perfect, but by premodern standards it was more or less as good as it could get and there is no reason to think that it would not have gotten better. Their losing their moral compass was a catastrophe.
And, as I forgot to mention, that is a reasonable reading of Thucydides.
Yes, I’m not sure why I keep mentioning Kagan so much, other than as a reflex whenever Sicily comes up, as he is pretty well the only person who seems to think that it *could* have worked (and his reasoning there is clearly driven by contemporary political agenda…
Re Athens v Sparta: this goes back to whether we’re talking about the world-view of Thucydides’ account, or in wider terms relevant to ourselves. With the latter, absolutely; for all its numerous faults (slaves, women, imperialism), Athens still offers an inspiring picture of power in the hands of the people, social values that we could reasonably call liberal etc., whereas Sparta is terrifying, totalitarian etc.
But clearly those are judgements based on our values and preferences, rather than objective historical facts, and in my view Thucydides’ perspective is more nuanced (not least because he is substantially less democratic and liberal than we are, hence more sceptical of various Athenian characteristics and more positive about aspects of Spartan character). Does that make sense?
We are probably at this point running up against the limits of my closely informed opinions about what Thucydides may have thought. All that you write is certainly true, and Th. was an Aristo and his sympathy with the Athenian brand of democracy (which today even deranged extremist liberals – such as myself – might regard as a bit OTT) had, as Aristo sympathy always had, had its limits, limits about which, given the happy fact that the man himself is two and half thousand years dead, we can dispute forever without final resolution.
But, above, you wrote:
Thucydides presents the Melian Dialogue as, among other things, clear
proof of how far the Athenians have been carried away by arrogance and
ambition, abandoning any idea of justice but focusing solely on their
calculation of expediency (which, he shows, is often completely off-target).
I’m happy to agree on that. My original point was only that politics never changes, and that you could say the same about the (mostly German-driven) EU attitude to Greece at the moment (n.b. I happen to live in Germany).
Yes, for all my complaints about the lazy use of the Melian Dialogue in discussions of the current Greek crisis, it is alarmingly applicable: discounting any sort of concern about justice or human suffering, taking an absolutely hard line regardless of consequences and regardless of reputation, just to demonstrate strength… I actually *don’t* think that most states behave like this, contrary to what Realist readers of Thucydides claim, but the current German government is doing a very good imitation of it. I spend a lot of time in Germany (I’m in Berlin at the moment) – and honestly didn’t expect them to be this extreme.
Also, wanted to say thank you for your contributions; it really makes a change to have people engaging on here…
You’re welcome. It’s always enjoyable to discuss.
Aaand now we’re back, with a spot of Thucydides in the introductory remarks from Jon Snow in Channel 4 News (UK), 13/7/15: “The strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept. So wrote Thucydides, or so I’m told, on the negotiations between Athens and a weaker neighbour. Two and a half thousand years later…” Well, fair play to his researchers, they haven’t gone for the usual Crawley translation, though as usual the words are attributed to Thucydides himself rather than his characters.