There’s a strong case to be made that the most active field of engagement with the classical past and its legacy outside the creative arts, and certainly the area where this engagement has the greatest potential for real world impact, is military education, especially in the United States. Several ancient authors have long been included within the canon of military and strategic studies: Thucydides above all, but also Homer, Xenophon and Caesar (and the candidate for Secretary of Defense, retired Marine Corps General James Mattis, is a devotee of Marcus Aurelius). Works on ancient warfare, largely based on these texts, regularly feature in lists of recommended reading: Donald Kagan on the Peloponnesian War, Victor Davis Hanson on the Western Way of War. This clearly derives from the importance of historical studies in the curricula of various military education establishments, most famously the US Naval War College with its use of Thucydides as a foundational text, and the way that this reading then regularly features in the public remarks of senior military officers.*
Recently – this is an impression rather than a scientific survey – this tendency seems to have increased; not just the proliferation of ‘Thucydides trap’ articles in response to the latest development in US-China relations (not least because the military seem to have rather less time for that idea than journalists), but a growing number of serving and retired military personnel reflecting on the importance of classical figures and texts, and a widening of the scope of that discussion. Just in the last fortnight, a single website focused on strategy, national security and military affairs, The Strategy Bridge, has offered the thoughts of an Australian army officer on Thucydides’ continuing importance and two discussions by US officers on military ethics (part of a series), one evoking Archimedes, Thucydides, Plato and Augustine, and the other focused on Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s De Officiis.
I had two immediate reactions to these pieces, especially the Plato/Cicero one this morning.** The first was to wonder about causes. Is it simply that sites like The Strategy Bridge now exist to offer an accessible outlet for such articles by professionals, whereas in the past there were few publication options besides proper academic journals, hence a long-standing tradition of reflection on the relevance of ancient texts for contemporary warfare and strategy is now becoming visible? Or is there a real turn towards the classical past as a source of insight, as a new phenomenon – and, if so, how far does this reflect a crisis of Enlightenment analysis and values, such that they are no longer felt to be adequate? It’s certainly the case that the ‘philosopher king’ model offered by Plato and Cicero works much better, or at least raises fewer problems, in the context of the hierarchical military rather than in wider society – but I still feel a little nervous at the appeal to ‘timeless’ ancient ethical values, leap-frogging the debates of the 17th-19th centuries that put that alleged timelessness under scrutiny. Plus, slavery: extracting timeless values that still work today from ancient ethics does imply either a selective reading of the past (that isn’t properly acknowledged) or the introduction of some very questionable assumptions into the present.
There’s a definite risk of both idealisation and decontextualisation in these readings, and that then leads to my second question: what’s the role of academic research in classical studies in these discussions? It should be stressed that, especially compared to the vast majority of brief and trite invocations of Thucydides and other ancient writers in mainstream publications, these pieces are clearly based on extensive reading, with careful referencing. However, this referencing falls firmly into the category of ‘provide a source for this statement’ rather than ‘show engagement with current debates about interpretation’ – and the works referenced are for the most part both general and conventional (Gilchrist’s heavy reliance on Kagan for his account of Thucydides is the obvious example).
The end result is that, if I were marking these as student essays, I could happily write “discuss” or “it’s more complex than that” at least once every paragraph. Obvious objection: these aren’t written as student essays, let alone as academic papers, so such scholarly pedantry isn’t appropriate. Yes and no; I fully acknowledge the different demands of writing for a non-specialist audience – but there is no hint here of an awareness that texts may be interpreted in different ways and may indeed be the focus for fierce argument, although clearly that has implications for any attempt at making use of them for the present. The rhetoric is not ‘here is my personal reading of Thucydides’, acknowledging a degree of decontextualisation, but rather ‘this is what Thucydides says’, invoking the ancient author’s authority to ground more general claims; much more powerful, but also more problematic if ‘what Thucydides says’ is actually a matter of debate.
I am definitely not arguing for the innate and automatic superiority of academic readings, which can indeed render themselves stale and unproductive through constant insistence that everything is contingent, historicised and undetermined. I do share the view that some ancient texts are powerful and thought-provoking, and can offer us knowledge and understanding relevant to the present – and, most importantly, that discerning such useful knowledge and understanding can’t be left to the academics, but needs to be based on extensive engagement with those actually practising in the relevant field of activity.***
So, the more military officers who read and reflect on ancient texts the better, up to a point – but it would be good to see more acknowledgement that, like the world, the means by which we make sense of the world (including texts) are complex and ambiguous. This has always been the attraction for me of the USNWC approach, focused on engagement with the whole work rather than isolated extracts, and with opening up questions rather than instilling a specific interpretation. A simplistic reading of Thucydides is, in itself, just slightly dull; a simplistic reading of Thucydides that is then applied to the real world is potentially dangerous.
The usual reading of the William Butler quote (more commonly misattributed to Thucydides) – “the nation that divides its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools” – is that the scholar-warrior and the warrior-scholar should be single individuals, hence the emphasis on military education. But Achilles scarcely has time to become a true scholar or philosopher, as opposed to a thoughtful and well read one, without the risk of reducing his effectiveness as a warrior (and a fortiori this applies to the scholars). We could read this line instead not as a complaint against specialisation, but rather as a plea for dialogue instead of division: the danger is not that warriors are not scholars, but that warriors don’t pay any attention to scholars, and vice versa.
*See e.g. Dempsey on Thucydides, Powell’s love of the pseudo-Thucydides “Of all manifestations of power…” quote, and Mattis at length:
Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face NOTHING new under the sun. For all the “4th Generation of War” intellectuals running around today saying that the nature of war has fundamentally changed, the tactics are wholly new, etc, I must respectfully say… “Not really”: Alex the Great would not be in the least bit perplexed by the enemy that we face right now in Iraq, and our leaders going into this fight do their troops a disservice by not studying (studying, vice just reading) the men who have gone before us. We have been fighting on this planet for 5000 years and we should take advantage of their experience.
From an email exchange in 2003: http://www.strifeblog.org/2013/05/07/with-rifle-and-bibliography-general-mattis-on-professional-reading/
**Leaving aside my usual regretful muttering that British military education isn’t more interested in this sort of thing, as I’d love the opportunity to explore the potential usefulness of Thucydides in this context.
***Cue my usual regretful muttering etc.
[Update 16/12: and here’s another post on Thucydides on The Strategy Bridge – a return to the old question of the causes of the Peloponnesian War, but this time taking in historians like Hodkinson and Cartledge as well as the sophisticated reading of Ned Lebow. Not by a military officer this time, which may account for the different style and range of reference.]
Sphinx 
I think it’s fine to raise the bar on “The Strategy Bridge” from “offer an accessible outlet” for non-academics to “show engagement with current debates” – as long as the academics are willing to be engaged with a knowledgeable but non-academic audience.
Your remarks on de-contextualization go right to the hinge of this issue. it’s possible that persons whose practical everyday concern is war and who take war as a given “get” Homer and Thucydides with an immediacy that’s not available to the pacific. Much of the ancient (and medieval!) world may have accepted and integrated violence as a means to an end in a way that our world (or at least some of the elites within it) do not. Is that the true context of Thucydides and so is a citizen-general more naturally a better reader of Thucydides than I am?
Great post.
I should say, in case it wasn’t clear, that The Strategy Bridge publishes pieces by established academics as well; my point was rather that, until things like this were established, academics still had places they could publish their thoughts (albeit in different formats) whereas serving military with wider ideas didn’t have such obvious opportunities. Rather in the way that I couldn’t publish, and so wouldn’t have written, this sort of piece before blogs were invented…
Yes, decontextualisation (and historicisation) is key. It’s always a balance between similarity and difference, and I think there is a reasonable claim that some elements of war and its consequences are human universals, which would support the idea that those with military experience might have special insight into some aspects of e.g. Thucydides’ work (and of course this has also grounded claims that Thucydides was an especially trustworthy historian because he had experience as a general). Trickier if that argument is used as basis for arguing that any reading by a military figure is therefore incontrovertible, and/or that readings by those without such experience are therefore invalid. Trickier still if the reading depends on assuming that there are no significant differences between ancient and modern, which I did feel was a prevalent assumption in the Plato/Cicero article – well, that plus taking those writers’ own claims about themselves at face value.
Correction accepted on ‘Strategy Bridge’ – i was using it in service of a more general point. but if it exemplifies the desideratum of that point, so much the better.
But let me recast my second thought above in more general terms. The intended point there was not so much about “generals” understanding Thucydides in particular as a certain type of reader understanding the ancient world because they get that world’s relationship to violence. I don’t believe that this is the case (I would hate to think that Victor Hansen gets the last word) but your post reminded me that it is possible. Tough-mindedness has its claim to realism.
In case anyone thinks I am on the ‘tough-minded” side, here’s my idea of a good reading of Homer. Apologies for any offence to the copyright gods…
Louise Gluck – The Triumph of Achilles
In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.
Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted–
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?
In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
I would likewise hate to give Hanson the last word, and his claims about human nature are dodgy in the extreme, but I think there certainly is a case that we mustn’t *forget* the violent and nasty side of classical culture, even when beguiled by the beauty of its art (this is a very Nietzschean point), and those with military experience are probably less likely to fall into such a trap. Though perhaps prone to fall into others; as I noted above, the article on Plato and Cicero manages to ignore slavery entirely, even when it’s directly relevant to the argument.
Thanks – this is a really interesting post. I’m in the process of looking at a possible ‘classical turn in response to crisis’ in the political commentariat, looking at blogs and organisations/think tanks/campaign groups as well as more traditional forms of publication. One piece that I’ve found helpful as a starting point in theorising such a turn is a chapter in an edited volume on the role of the polis in later discussions: Ruprecht, L.A. (2001), ‘Why the Greeks’, in J.P. Arnason and P. Murphy (eds.), Agon, logos, polis: the Greek achievement and its aftermath (Stuttgart: Steiner), 29-55.
I wonder whether the class-based complexities of classical reception play out in Sandhurst in a similar way to Westminster?
I think the class dynamics at Sandhurst are that it used to be taken for granted that officers would come with full background in history, classics etc. so military education would focus on stuff they didn’t get at e.g. Eton, whereas US military education was from the beginning more explicitly egalitarian and hence didn’t take any such background for granted; and by the time it could no longer be taken for granted that officers would know such things, curriculum was set more or less in stone, with prevalent instrumentalist/technical focus. Moreover, as my former PhD student Andreas Stradis argued in his dissertation, in the US – especially post-Vietnam – senior officers were trained to interact with government on equal footing and to employ same discourse, and so background in history etc. considered important, whereas British military seems to maintain much clearer divide from civil government, hence less demand for common terms of reference – and in any case, as you note, classical references come with class baggage in UK so it’s not as if politicians and civil servants are employing such a discourse either.
I don’t think it’s my imagination that there seems to have been a dramatic turn towards the classical just in the last couple of years; search for eternal verities and True Values at a time when faith in rationality, liberalism, even democracy seems to be failing? I wonder how this plays with the ‘no more experts’ crowd: classical ideas felt to be common property and accessible to everyone, not monopolised by metropolitan elites, in a way that e.g. Kantian philosophy is definitely not?