Sphinx

What’s the key lesson of the Melian Dialogue? The dominant tradition has been some sort of variant on Crude Realism, from the perspective of the would-be superior power: justice only between equals, we the strong have the right to dictate and you the weak must comply, and forget all this nonsense about hope. The usual response, from those who reject such a worldview and/or, perhaps more significantly, aren’t in any position to pursue it, is to question and reject the Athenian logic, by detaching it from the authority of Thucydides and pointing to the consequences of their attitude. But of course it is also possible to be one of the Weak and nevertheless accept the logic of the Strong; like the prisoner in Life of Brian who praises the Romans for their strict approach to crime and punishment, or the cow at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there are those who fully accept the right of others to dictate terms and exact obedience.

Or at least there’s one, as I discovered in a paper from Hans Kopp at a workshop yesterday in London on Thucydides Global. Danish socialist politician and classical scholar Hartvig Frisch recommended the Melian Dialogue as essential reading in the schools of all small nations, as a guide to the nature of the world in which they found themselves; arguably this was the motive for his quietism after the Nazi takeover, when he simply turned to classical scholarship and offered no support for the resistance at all; and it certainly informed his arguments at the inaugural meeting of the United Nations when he returned to politics after the war, opposing equal rights for all states and promoting the power of the Security Council and its permanent members’ veto. There was quite a good contemporary cartoon, of which I’m afraid I didn’t get the best of pictures, but you should be able to make out Frisch denouncing the Nazis, then seeing actual Nazis and hastily taking refuge in a book entitled Hellas…

It is examples like these that make one wonder whether it would be better if people simply stopped reading Thucydides and trying to draw lessons from him; several papers at the workshop more or less suggested this, whether Michael Llewellyn Smith on Venizelos (which offered the fascinating news that the authoritarian regime in Greece led by John Metataxas sought to expunge the Funeral Oration from all Greek schoolbooks, for fear of its subversive potential), Liz Sawyer on the Great Books tradition and ‘Western Civilisation’ in the US, or Christian Wendt on the Thucydides Trap. The partial counterbalance came partly from me, talking about the potential usefulness of the game version of the Melian Dialogue, and more particularly a fascinating account of the Greek dramatisation of the first part of Thucydides, Lessons of War, from its writer John Lignadis – including plenty of video clips so we could at last see how it was staged.

A key theme in many of these discussions, crystallised in Peter Meineck’s contribution to the concluding round table, was the role of identification and involvement. The obvious reason for staging rather than just reading the Melian Dialogue is the possibility of arousing the audience’s sympathies and emotions, especially for the Melians, rather than treating it all as a bloodless intellectual exercise; and one of the things I’d like to do with the game is start gathering data about how people respond to the decisions they’re asked to make – including questions about how they feel about being in the position of Athenians or Melians. While Thucydides continues to generate new possibilities for academic analysis, one of the reasons for this is the capacity of his text to excite engagement and identification beyond the academy – hence, a continuing supply of new receptions.

That being said, probably the most crucial question from the audience was about absence: given its setting, where is Thucydides in Assassins’ Creed Odyssey? My current hypotheses is that he is either an absent presence – i.e. the whole thing is written against him (which is why you have to hang out with Herodotus the whole time) – or that he is all-pervasive, the air that the game breathes or the underlying system according to which its world operates. Anyone out there researched this? Because otherwise I fear I’m going to have to devote some serious time resources to getting to the bottom of this – time that could arguably be better spent pondering the ideas raised in the workshop…