Sphinx

Things happen out in the world, and someone, somewhere, then tweets a bit of Thucydides. (I’m aware that my perspective on this is skewed, because I actively monitor it, but it does happen). Over the last week, two different events have prompted such a response. The murders at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, brought this thoughtful post from the ever-interesting Sententiae Antiquae, quoting 7.29-30 on the massacre of schoolboys in Mycalessus by a gang of Thracian merceneries who’d been let go by the Athenians. As SA notes, when we think about this passage in relation to school shootings in the US, it is the differences between the situations that seem most productive and disturbing.

This passage is affecting and Thucydides’ Greek is really powerful here. But when compared to the situation of school shootings in the United States, it is more troubling. For Thucydides, the Thracians have been sent home by the Athenians and are at best only quasi-civilized… So this murderous rampage is performed by a people, marked judgmentally as barbarians, in a time of war. (Yes, we try to “other” the murderers by marking them as insane or disturbed in some way.) More importantly, even in a narrative about one of the greatest wars of all times (from Thucydides’ perspective) the murder of children is seen as an (1) unexpected calamity for the (2) whole civic entity. Can we honestly say our acts of violence are unexpected when they happen with such frequency?

The massacre at Mycalessus is a notable atrocity in a long war full of atrocities; the Parkland murders are just one more instance in an enduring peace full of such atrocities. With 1300 children dying every year in the US from gunshot wounds, “maybe we should rethink what atrocity and ‘war’ is”. Meanwhile, various people on the Twitter have been quoting that moronic pseudo-Thucydides “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” quote in defence of unrestricted gun ownership and, apparently, in support of the view that what’s really needed to solve the problem is armed teachers. The fact that I study people who cite Thucydides does not mean that I like them; quite the opposite…

The second evocation of Thucydides occurred in an even more problematic context: the revelation of unethical, abusive behaviour by certain Oxfam aid workers in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake – or, to be more precise, the debate about the tweet by Mary Beard about that issue, including her remark that “I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone.” One apparently obvious example, raised by one of Mary’s supporters rather than herself: Thucydides’ account of the plague at Athens (2.47-54), and especially passages like this:

It was the plague that first led to other forms of lawlessness in the city too. People were emboldened to indulge themselves in ways they would previously have concealed, since they saw the rapid change in fortune both for those who were well off and died suddenly and for those who originally had nothing but in a moment got possession of the property of these others. They therefore resolved to exploit these opportunites for enjoyment quickly, regarding their lives and their property as equally ephemeral. No one was eager to add to their own hardships for supposedly fine objectives, since they were uncertain whether they would die before achieving them. Whatever gave immediate pleasure or in any way facilitated it became the standard of what was good and useful. Neither fear of the gods nor law of many was any restraint: they judged it made no difference whether or not they showed them respect, seeing that everyone died just the same… (2.53.1-4)

One of the central concerns of Thucydides’ work is trauma and its consequences (see for example much of Cliff Orwin’s readings on violence and the depiction of physical fragility and vulnerability) – and there’s a case, as I’ve recently argued, that we may also need to understand Thucydides himself as traumatised. The plague narrative is one of the most important examples of this, showing the collapse of social norms and solidarity under intolerable pressure.

But, as with the evocation of the Mycalessus massacre in the context of the Parkland school murders, the evocation of the Athenian plague in the context of a modern disaster zone tends to emphasise the critical differences more than the superficial similarities. Thucydides’ account applies to those whose lives have actually been devastated by plague, and could certainly be extended to those who have endured earthquake or flood or some other catastrophe. It is less obviously applicable to those who come in from outside afterwards; who may indeed find the experience deeply traumatic, but who have also received training precisely in how to cope in such situations, and who have protocols and a support structure, and better access to food and shelter and medical care, and the possibility of getting out if it all gets too much.

Thucydides’ world did not contain aid workers – nor did his account of the Athenian plague have to contend with the issues of race, empire and the rhetoric of ‘civilisation’ that are unavoidable in any instance of western humanitarianism in former colonies. What he does offer is a sequence of examples of the abuse of power and the appalling consequences for the less powerful; and I find it all too easy to imagine how he would have depicted such abusers, who take advantage of the chaos of the situation to indulge their own appetites and lust for power while dressing up their actions in high-minded rhetoric – because that is exactly what we find in his account of the civil war in Corcyra in the following book…

Update 21/2: a further reference to Thucydides in relation to the first topic in a piece for the Washington Post by Matthew Sears on Ancient Greek approaches to arms control, noting the the Spartan obsession with holding on to their weapons (that stupid Molon Labe slogan beloved of the alt-right and fuelled by the ghastly 300) was intimately connected to their paranoid fear of the people they were violently oppressing, and also Thucydides’ point that carrying weapons in peacetime is a mark of barbarism… https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/02/21/what-the-ancient-greeks-can-teach-us-about-gun-control/?utm_term=.41d2192ceb52