It’s ages since there’s been an episode of Poetry Corner here – mainly because, oddly enough, Thucydides doesn’t inspire an enormous amount of poetry. But there is not none, and every so often a new poet draws on the same powerful images of conflict and the crisis of civilisation that inspired W.H. Auden in 1 September 1939. Thucydides is, as ever, the dark prophet who anticipated our fate, not least in his terrifying account of civil war and social breakdown in Corcyra.
A storm had brewed over Corfu Isle
Thunder roared with the sounds of revolt
Moods had fashioned this weather a while,
All that was needed was a bit of a jolt.
Thus begins Thucydides’ Corruption, by Ryan Khurana, published today in Devolution Review. The reference to Corfu (as Corcyra is of course known today) and the pervasive themes of escalating conflict and violence make it clear that this is a riff on 3.82-3 – Thucydides’ account of the corruption of society – rather than an accusation against the historian himself. Whereas most modern readings of this episode focus on political partisanship and factionalism, Khurana focuses instead on inter-generational conflicts, with the young proclaiming war on the ‘aged and wise’ and all their works, threatening to destroy all traditional culture through an obsession with material concerns.
“Leave the dead unburied!
Leave our thoughts unwritten!
Leave the girls unmarried!
For with prosperity we are smitten!”
Is Khurana, ventriloquising Thucydides, standing with the comfortable baby boomers against the angry youth of today? It’s difficult to see the former as the noble repositories of culture, indifferent to prosperity and the material. Rather, this is the conflict of historical ages, the materialistic modern period being rebuked by classical wisdom and virtue (compare his earlier essay on the tyranny of economic rationality). It doesn’t end well; as the world comes crashing down regardless, the words of Deuteronomy 8.3 are evoked.
No hearts were full, no stomach content,
For off this alone, man’s soul was not meant.
Sphinx 
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