Sphinx

A User’s Guide to Thucydides Part 3

Is Thucydides more like a swimming pool – best to dive right in – or a mountain, where the key is careful preparation and planning, construction of base camp etc.? In both cases it can be a daunting prospect; the question, prompted by a discussion on the Twitter last night where someone planning a Thucydides reading group asked for suggestions on preparatory reading, is how best to get started.

Personally, I’d go for the swimming-pool approach, taking it as read that you can actually swim (i.e. have some experience in reading and engaging with texts). Yes, it’s a difficult and forbidding work, that seems to expect a high level of prior knowledge as well as demanding a lot from the reader – but actually that’s a major reason why you might do better just to immerse yourself straight away. You surely can’t have missed the fact that there are a lot of contradictory interpretations of Thucydides out there, each of them claiming to be the one true, correct interpretation. One reason is that this is a complex, ambiguous work that demands a lot from its readers and refuses to be tied down to simple, straightforward messages. The other is that many (most?) people come to it with a preconceived idea of what it’s about, find this confirmed in their reading, and then insist that their preconception is the only possible reading, despite the fact that clearly other readings are possible.

In other words, if you come to Thucydides with the prior knowledge (as promoted by any number of introductory IR courses) that he is a Realist (or indeed the First Realist), then that’s what you’re likely to find when you read him – or at least you’ll focus on the question of whether or not he’s a Realist, in whatever sense. If you think he’s a political theorist, you’ll tend to read him in those terms, or at least engage with the debate about whether is a theorist in modern terms; likewise if you conceive of him as some sort of historian. None of these readings is wholly wrong, but they are all at best partial and at worst anachronistic, making sense of Thucydides in modern terms – without necessarily warning you that this is what they’re doing – and emphasising some aspects over others.

Works of secondary scholarship, whether the introductory chapters found in most editions of Thucydides or entire books like those of Kagan or Connor, offer more detailed and nuanced accounts of his approach and the nature of the text – but they may be even more insidious, since they appear to be offering a rounded picture while inevitably they are privileging some aspects and certain readings. Kagan’s Thucydides is definitely Kaganesque; the Thucydides of Peter Rhodes in the Hammond translation is very Rhodesian, and the Thucydides of M.I. Finley in the Penguin edition, presented as a kind of pioneering social theorist, has clear elements of Finley about him. They’re all perfectly plausible – but until you’ve read some Thucydides yourself, you’re in no position to judge their plausibility or develop alternative interpretations.

Of course, if you dive straight in you’re going to miss some stuff, and plenty of things will be more or less puzzling (though there’s no guarantee that preparatory reading will always help, since various things in Thucydides’ work remain more or less puzzling to people who’ve spent decades studying the thing). However, you’ll be in a position to develop your own sense of what he’s doing and how he presents his material – and why he does it like that, rather than following someone else’s lead.

This isn’t at all a new idea; the whole point of the original Naval War College curriculum was that students should immerse themselves in an unfamiliar world without any preconceptions, as training in how to engage with complexity and ambiguity. Coming to Thucydides with the prior conception that he’s a realist, or a neocon, or an anti-democrat, or whatever, does away with complexity and ambiguity from the start.

The NWC approach was all about using Thucydides as a means to an end, rather that reading Thucydides as an end in itself – but I think there’s a good case to be made that this echoes Thucydides’ own intentions for his work. It becomes a ‘possession for ever’ if we draw wider lessons from the account of events, rather than seeing the narrative as an end in itself; and, since the wider lessons are never explicitly stated, I’d argue that it is the very process of reading and making sense of the work that teaches us things, and so anything that closes down or limits our reading is problematic. Jump in, see what you make of it – and start arguing with other people about what they make of it. That’s why the reading group approach is so good.

Yes, I’m aware of the paradoxical element of proposing that you should avoid being influenced by other readings of Thucydides on the basis of my own reading of Thucydides…

Further Reading

At some point you may want to consult modern discussions of Thucydides, either to help explain confusing details in what you’re reading, or to put it all in context. The following are the things that come to mind as recommendations…

Historical Information This is one area where The Landmark Thucydides, ed. R. Strassler, is really useful, with lots of maps and contextual information – but with the downside that the Crawley translation it’s based on is really problematic. The Hammond translation for OUP has very good notes on names, events, puzzling points etc., which is one reason I recommend it highly; other editions are less informative. More detailed discussion of historical points and issues can be found in the multi-volume Historical Commentary on Thucydides by A.W. Gomme et al. (1945-81), and in S. Hornblower’s more recent Commentary on Thucydides (1991-2008), but with the caution that in both cases you’ll need to have the specific reference (book and chapter, if not lines) to be able to look up what you want, and they are written primarily for those reading a Greek text (and hence able to read ancient Greek), so sometimes not at all helpful for those who aren’t.

Historical Background The two big accounts of the Peloponnesian War are G.E.M. de Ste Croix’s The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972) and Donald Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War (various editions). I do mean ‘big’, and personally, unless you’re proposing to embark on serious academic research in this field, I’d be inclined to stick to Thucydides – not least because he is by far the most important source for events, and so historical accounts consist largely of a mixture of paraphrase, exegesis and critique of what he has to say. You would probably be better off with a broader, more accessible history of the period (and wouldn’t necessarily have to read all of it), such as Robin Osborne’s Classical Greece 500-323 BC (Oxford, 2000).

Interpretations of Thucydides For its combination of scholarship and insight, I still swear by W.R. Connor’s Thucydides (Princeton, 1987) – it offers a take from the classics and ancient history perspective, rather than political theory or strategy, but in a very accessible manner. A more detailed account of Thucydides’ approach to history can be found in Emily Greenwood’s Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London, 2006); I think it’s a brilliant book, but perhaps a bit too specialised for casual readers. Donald Kagan is a big name in this field (if not necessarily one of the greatest ancient historians of the twentieth century, as has been suggested in some of the push-back against the ‘Thucydides Trap’ theory) and his Thucydides: the reinvention of history (New York, 2010) offers a summary of the interpretation that he develops at greater length in his Peloponnesian War. Finally, I really like Geoffrey Hawthorn’s Thucydides on Politics: back to the present (Cambridge, 2014), which offers a reading of the entire work; complex and occasionally tendentious, developing a distinctive interpretation without necessarily telling you what it’s doing – a bit like the original…

Online Seminar Finally, since I think it’s important for any reader of Thucydides to be conscious of how many different interpretations are possible and how arguable they all are, it’s well worth looking at the online discussion organised by Zenpundit last year, which offers a wealth of posts and comments on different aspects of the book, and a whole load of other resources.