Sphinx

There’s been a minor flurry of references to Thucydides in the context of the BBC’s bizarre decision to give Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech the historical monument treatment. It’s an interesting variant on the argument put forward by opponents of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and similar campaigns to protect the legacies of racism and imperialism, that something can be simultaneously incredibly important for historical understanding (and so must be preserved) and yet absolutely separate from contemporary concerns (and so shouldn’t be attacked). The claim is that Powell’s speech matters because of its role in history (so celebrating it now has nothing to do with contemporary politics, honest, and we’re going to be really critical of it), and yet the only reason anyone pays any attention to the racist pronouncements of a failed politician is the persistence of such racism as an undercurrent in British society ever since, with the increasing tendency of mainstream political parties to treat it not as a problem and source of shame but as Very Real Concerns that Should Be Addressed. A healthy, modern society would be one in which Powell’s speech was of purely historical concern – in which case this anniversary would be of interest only to a tiny number of specialists. Ours clearly isn’t – but that doesn’t mean the BBC should be pandering to such tendencies.

Anyway, Thucydides. Powell had been a classicist in his earlier career – hence the pseudo-Vergilian reference in the speech – his work including the revised critical edition of Thucydides in the Oxford Classical Texts. There’s no consistent pattern in comments so far, with some offering this information in a critical “he was a great scholar, but…” tone, or a melancholic “if only he’d stuck to Classics” manner. But there are already some offering it as justification for commemorating the speech and taking its ideas seriously: he was a serious intellectual therefore we should be thinking about what he had to say. Classical knowledge as a claim to general authority and insight; classical knowledge as an alibi, since it’s not about the racism or the present politics but the timeless wisdom of the ancients, and the thoughts of someone who had contemplated such things. I haven’t yet seen any direct claims that Thucydides justifies or legitimises hostility to immigration and foreigners – but since Victor Davis Hanson has already been doing that on the other side of the Atlantic, it can only be a matter of time…

Update 16/4: I’ve done a variant on this post, with added promotion of the book ‘cos they asked me to, for the Polity Press blog: http://politybooks.com/classics-why-it-matters/