Sphinx

The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must…

A familiar line, but context and performance are everything. How do you picture the speaker? A calm, rational, ruthless dictator? A super-villain with a death ray? This is the sort of thing such figures tend to claim – which doesn’t mean that we necessarily accept it at face value. What about a fallen tyrant, a Lear or a Nero, still asserting such arrogance as their world falls apart around them? What if a super-hero was the speaker? (Echoes of Miller’s Batman or Alex Ross’s far superior Kingdom Come). What if it was a woman – whether downtrodden or triumphant? The line becomes less of a statement about the world, and more of a statement about the person speaking…

Of course, when we encounter this line in contemporary debates about politics, war or international relations, it’s presented in far less ambiguous – or interesting – terms. The standard version is the kind of schematic account of the origins of ‘Realism’ found in introductory textbooks, but just in the last week there have been two prominent examples in the British media, Nick Cohen citing “Thucydides’s warning” in a column on Brexit in the Observer, and just this morning Margaret Macmillan in her Reith Lecture on ‘Managing the Unmanageable’ on BBC Radio 4 (8’23”). Most often, as in both these cases, the line is ascribed to Thucydides himself, as his own belief or theory; on the rarer occasions when it’s attributed to the Athenians in his Melian Dialogue, it’s taken for granted that Thucydides shared their view.

For many, the authority of Thucydides – the man who saw the world as it really is, as Friedrich Nietzsche claimed; in Auden’s words, “exiled Thucydides knew” – gives weight and authority to this statement of the Realist perspective: the world is anarchic and pitiless, there is justice only between equals, and otherwise it’s the rule of the stronger. In characterising this as a warning, Cohen doesn’t adopt the celebratory tone of certain Neoconservatives – but he takes it as a statement of truth that modern nations forget at their peril. Macmillan doesn’t endorse the claim – rather, she contrasts it with later attempts at justifying war rather than simply taking it for granted – but she shows no sign of questioning its attribution to Thucydides.

Such readings ignore the complexity of Thucydides’ account: that not only are these words that he puts into the mouths of characters in his account rather than his own, but that the narrative context immediately places them under question – the Athenians act according to their claim, in the belief that they are superior and therefore can do what they want without fear, and directly as a consequence they march into catastrophe. This is far from an endorsement: Thucydides seems rather to be suggesting that reality is not so subservient to the will of the strong as the strong tend to assume, and/or that belief in one’s own strength is not the same as certainty that one is the strongest. The Melian Dialogue is concerned less with the nature and workings of the world than with the nature and consequences of people’s beliefs about the world and the actions that result; it’s about the pathologies of power and aggression, not a justification of them.

But pathologies not only of power and aggression, but also of weakness, stubbornness and self-delusion. It’s not just about the Athenians. All too often, half the Dialogue is simply ignored or forgotten – but the Melians have as much to say as their opponents, from a very different perspective, and they are not simply the innocent victims of Athenian aggression but equally deluded and compelled by their beliefs and assumptions. It’s a dialogue – and there is no reason to suppose that Thucydides intends us to identify with one side rather than the other (except for our own prior assumptions and loyalties). Two different perspectives on the world are set out in debate with one another, probing one another’s weaknesses and seeking the decisive counter-argument – and we readers see how neither can actually persuade the other, even though the result is tragic and destructive for both (on slightly different timescales).

The Melian Dialogue is not a philosophical dialogue like those offered by Plato; there is no guiding intelligence drawing the others through the thickets of complexity and ambiguity towards true understanding, but rather the confrontation of incompatible beliefs and attitudes, presented by people who are swayed by emotions and motivated by self-interest rather than wholly in the service of reason. We can’t take their words at face value, as philosophical propositions; each speaker is trying to manipulate the other, each speaker inadvertently reveals their hidden thoughts and assumptions while criticising those of their opponent, and often their words carry layers of meaning and association.

Quite simply, this is drama, with a close connection to Attic tragedy – and our reading of Thucydides would benefit from taking these dramatic qualities more seriously. We should not be trying to turn this into a single theory or proposition, to be attributed to Thucydides, or even into an abstract exchange of views; it’s a matter of life and death, of dog-eat-dog survival, of overwhelming emotions and the clash of heartfelt values (including the rejection of values in favour of the material). As its audience, we should be moved, shaken, shocked, disturbed; our sympathies should be torn.

Reading the words on the page offers us the opportunity to explore these conflicts and confrontations in our own mind, weighing up different interpretations. But for many it may be difficult to shake off prior assumptions about what the Dialogue is ‘about’ – and so we also need to explore new ways of staging it, beyond the static, ‘straight’ approach that’s been used on the few attempts so far (especially John Barton’s The War That Still Goes On, discussed by Lorna Hardwick in ‘Thucydidean Concepts’ in A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides). Imagining different settings, different ways of conceiving of the characters; placing less emphasis on the text, and more on gesture and movement (I am now envisaging a Melian Ballet…); deploying video for multiple perspectives – well, I’m not a theatrical director, so my imagination is limited by things that I’ve seen on stage in the past, but I am seriously interested in trying to pursue this with people who do actually know what they’re doing…