Sphinx

It’s always going to be the case, I reassure myself, that when exploring the reception of a particular classical author or theme across the whole range of scholarship and other writing in a given period, you’re bound to miss loads of examples – at least until everything gets digitised and is easily searchable. All you can do is hope that new things coming to light don’t radically undermine what you’ve claimed, or, if they do, at least do it in an interesting way – and that it’s not utterly embarrassing that you didn’t find the reference in the first place. Beyond that, well, it’s one of the great advantages of having a blog that I can simply post an update to a previously published article (it would of course be even better if I could post a link on that article to the update), so I don’t have to feel too regretful that I wasn’t able to discuss this at the time…

Quick recap of one of the themes of my article on readings of Thucydides in WWI, ‘Legitimising war, defending peace’ (Classical Receptions Journal 10.4, 2018: link): it’s in this period that we find the origins of much of the later reception of Thucydides, especially the deployment of the Funeral Oration as a rally-cry to defend the state and readings of the Melian Dialogue in relation to a ‘realist’ attitude to inter-state politics. The latter theme is partly developed by German political and military theorists like Treitschke, but also by British authors denouncing the Germans for holding such attitudes – and that’s exactly where we can locate an anonymous article in The Spectator in the closing months of the war, ‘“Realpolitik” – the first and most approved specimen’ (19th October 1918).

German statesmen and political philosophers pride themselves upon being masters of Realpolitik. For them such abstract ideas as national honour, national probity, national good faith, do not exist. They are fantastic pieces of idealism with no sure foundation of reality, or, if they do exist, limitations of that sovereignty which is the essential of the State… The nearest approach you make towards a kindly sentiment is to remind the weaker Power of the terrible nature of the punishment that you are in a position to deal out to it, and to point out how much better its selfish interests will be served by submission than by foolishly calling the gods to witness to its helpless condition and virtuous intentions.

Such an attitude is of course nothing new – and the historical comparison highlights the “clumsiness and grossness” of German behaviour.

The Athenians who were the first exponents of Realpolitik did the thing not only much more gracefully but much more thoroughly and much better. When one reads an exposition of their principles and sees them put into practice, one’s blood simply runs cold, so inhuman, so brutal, so malignant are the principles laid down.

Thucydides’ account is “without qualification” “the most brilliant piece of political dialectic in all literature”; it’s supreme not just as history or politics but as drama, “an appeal to the sensations of pity and terror which is almost unbearable”, that Aristotle ought to have taken as an illustration of the function of tragedy (and I suddenly realise that I should perhaps have cited this in a research application I’ve just submitted, arguing the case for taking the dramatic qualities of the Melian Dialogue seriously…). “The naked horror is unassuaged…. a peep into the chamber of horrors of the human mind…”

The claim is not that the Germans are reading Thucydides, however – clearly they’re far too barbaric for that. Rather, it’s that Thucydides reveals the moral bankruptcy and self-defeating nature of such attitudes: “he recorded the facts, but he had clearly no sympathy with his fellow-countrymen”.

Thucydides provides no immediate and direct solution to quiet and steady the terrible emotions he has roused. But it is also true that if we take his book as a whole he proves to us that God is not always mocked. It is impossible to read the historian’s account of the final scenes of the tragedy at Syracuse without the thought arising in one’s mind that the Melians were well avenged in every trireme that sank in the harbour and in every prisoner sent to the quarries. Some day Belgium, Serbia, Poland and Alsace-Lorraine will find the same Justice, not poetic but real, in the doom and punishment of Prussian militarism and Prussian Realpolitik.

Hmm. What’s God got to do with it? Thucydides might ask. The fact that the Athenians were mostly wrong doesn’t mean the Melians were not also deluded; the Athenians, not supernatural forces, were primarily responsible for the Athenians’ disaster. There is perhaps a hint of recognition in the article that Melian claims can’t necessarily be taken at face value, orvat any rate that not all Melian-like claims should be taken seriously, insofar as it’s noted that a defeated Germany will no longer dismiss appeals to humanity and mercy: “now that Germany is the under-dog we shall have plenty of appeals to sentiment rather than to the realities and brutalities of international relations”. This is the claimed virtue of reading the “Melian Controversy” at this time – not to acknowledge that Britain and the Allies are now in the Athenian position, but to remind everyone that the Germans are really still amoral bastards (n.b. not the Spectator’s actual phrase, but their tone…) behind their “diplomatic camouflage”.

We can certainly contrast the Spectator’s rejection of hard-nosed, illusionless Realism with the enthusiastic adoption of similar ideas by later US theorists and pundits, but it’s less obvious that replacing it with belief in sacred national honour, probity and good faith is necessarily an improvement. We can equally well contrast this article with the project of liberal internationalists like Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern, who drew partly on a different reading of Thucydides in seeking to address, however naively, the underlying causes of inter-state conflict rather than simply promoting different motives for it.

This does emphasise the openness of Thucydides to many different readings, always driven by the conviction that this is clearly the only reasonable interpretation, and that Thucydides would have agreed with us, not them. And of course this is the reason why we do need to take the dramatic aspects seriously: it’s not just about the arousing of emotion, but the staging of debate and confrontation, where our sympathies may be torn, and where we can perhaps see how each side sees the other and is convinced of its own position, rather than remaining comfortably secure in our own assumptions. Under certain conditions, we may all become Athenians – or even Spectator writers.