Sphinx

I’ve just discovered this blog post lurking in my ‘Drafts’ file, having apparently been created in mid-March; I can’t remember why I never got round to finishing it – unlike another post I started back in the autumn, which perhaps needs to wait for an appropriate moment – but that’s probably revealing in itself. Anyway, in a number of ways this unfinished discussion connects to what I was planning to write this morning, so I’ll post it here and then add current thoughts underneath…

If what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If what you have is a copy of Thucydides, everything looks like the Melian Dialogue.

Sometimes, this is a great advantage: Thucydides offers a way – definitely not the only way – of seeing new connections between things, and asking new questions through a process of comparison and contrast. This was the way things turned out at Queen Elizabeth School, Crediton, yesterday [that is, way back in March], where Lynette Mitchell and I were running our first pilot session with Hattie Andrews from The Politics Project; the students had great fun playing what’s become known as the Peg Game – basically, the Peloponnesian War considered as Rock, Paper, Scissors – which then led perfectly into consideration of different examples of unequal power relationships, setting things up for next week’s exploration of the Melian Dilemma choose-your-own-adventure game. The only thing we could have asked for was an extra twenty minutes for discussion.

There were also some remarkable bits of strategic ingenuity and innovation within the simple rules of the game: the student who worked out that the way not to lose was not to play, and so declared himself Switzerland; the various budding imperialists who focused on avoiding rivals of similar strength while hoovering up the small fry; and the future World Empress who subjugated a few such smaller players and then sent them out to conquer others on her behalf. All of which offered yet more material for debate about how power can and should be used, and how the powerful tend to behave.

The reason this works is that it treats Thucydides not as a hammer but as a crowbar: it doesn’t nail things shut by providing The Answer about how the world works, but opens them up so they can be examined. It’s the polar opposite of the annoying habit of ascribing any vague statement about power to Thucydides, as if that instantly confers legitimacy (or indeed sense). Case in point: various people on the Twitter claiming this week [in March] that Trump’s latest incoherent babbling is referencing the Melian Dialogue:

Yeah… The claim of Sebastian Gorka that Trump can intuit Thucydidean insights without actually reading any seems to carry more weight than that interpretation. Or, indeed, the hilarious assertion of Victor Davis Hanson, in his new book The Case for Trump, that Trump’s relentless focus on success and esteem as the only measure of value, and hence the only thing anyone should care, about echoes Thucydides’ distinction between prophasis and aitia – pay no attention to what people claim, but only to the real motives.

This involves the usual underlying two-step of Thucydides’ contemporary image: content/sensibility and authority/insight, each reinforcing the other, and attaching oneself to Thucydidean sentiments is naturally taken to imply Thucydidean authority. There’s a certain echo of Sir Humphrey Appleby: “Government isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about order against chaos.” Thucydides as lawful evil, as Stefano Frullini, @saxeusque, presented him around this time: https://twitter.com/saxeusque/status/1105515539621916672?s=21

In other respects, Hanson’s take is rather odd, given his overall – much-derided – claim that Trump is a kind of Homeric or tragic hero. Thucydides appears twice more in Hanson’s book, plus as an opening epigraph. He’s mentioned in passing as one of the many Athenian writers who “dreamed of a better route to consensual government than radical democracy” – yes, we see what you did there, VDH, and the use of ‘consensual’ to describe attempts at doing without the active consent of the governed is a neat trick. Trump and his “middle-class populism” are presented as nothing new – but as part of the noble tradition of Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and of course Thucydides (and in subsequent paragraphs Achilles, Ajax, Augustus, Martin Luther, Dirty Harry, and The Wild Bunch).

Secondly, he acknowledges that critics have compared Trump to a classical demagogue, including Cleon, “the bete noire of the aristocratic Thucydides’ masterful history” – but then seeks to turn this into a positive, refiguring Cleon as a model of rhetorical power and directness, as “those who cannot speak to a crowd cannot become demagogues”. This could have been predicted from the opening of the work, where Hanson, without the slightest trace of irony, quotes Cleon’s claim that “ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows”, normally offered as a populist attack on elites. Is Hanson really claiming that the superhumanly gifted Trump is ‘ordinary’? Or quietly admitting that Trump’s great gifts may not entirely suit him to managing public affairs? One would guess that the “ordinary men” are the voters who ignored the sneering of those superior liberals to elect Trump, but it’s not entirely clear.

The next chapter presents two Americas in terms of Athens v Sparta, the sophisticated coastal elites versus the rough unlettered rural folk, again explicitly evoking Thucydides. Hanson presents himself as the mediator, who lives among the real people but knows his way around the world of the city – and so his choice to side with the ‘Spartans’ is based on full knowledge and understanding, not the ignorance of knowing nothing different (a fault of the clever Californian and Beltway elites as well). He is the modern Thucydides, seeing events from both sides with scrupulous objectivity, and ultimately favouring the stability of Sparta; a man who stays out of politics and does not seek power but recognises, even as he recoils from, the charisma and power of a Cleon, despising and desiring at the same time his rough anti-aristocratic manliness. Cleon’s methods are not those of Thucydides’ class, but they promise to have the desired effect on the corrupt status quo, which is simultaneously too democratic and anti-populist…

***

Which brings us to the present, as, whatever conclusion I had in mind for this piece back in March, what I did actually wrote down does connect to what I was talking about, in a slightly rambling manner, in ‘Remaking Thucydides’ at the Institute of Classical Studies reception seminar yesterday (audio and PowerPoint slides here). In brief, what’s the proper relationship between the critical study of the modern reception of Thucydides, of which Hanson’s book offers one example of very many cases, the critique of such receptions on different grounds – and one’s own ‘remaking’ of his work for present purposes, as in our project with schools?

It’s easy enough to note how far Hanson’s references imply a reading of Thucydides in which he can be presented as a purveyor of pithy political wisdom, combined with Thucydides as the reliable purveyor of historical data that can then be reinterpreted, and with a powerful image of Thucydides as a particular kind of writer and authority. The question of the grounds for criticising this reception is trickier; a matter, I think, of drawing out the work that this evocation of Thucydides is doing, and identifying the goal of the enterprise, rather than allowing Hanson to imply that this is all a natural and inevitable conclusion. It seems wise to avoid arguments that this is in itself a ‘misuse’ or illegitimate appropriation of ‘the real’ Thucydides – however much it seeks to claim that it is the only reasonable reading.

As I’ve commented before, the world of Thucydidean reception is a paradoxical world in which a long, complex and ambiguous text is reduced to simplistic sound bites, and in which detailed accounts of the causes and consequences of specific historical events are read as timeless, universal principles. Is it actually any different to take the Melian Dialogue, turn it into games and interactive activities, and encourage students to draw analogies with their own experience?

Well, that’s something I am continuing to think about, not least because I am conscious of how far my insistence on reading Thucydides as a text that’s all about raising questions and provoking debate is no less founded on subjective interpretation and imaginative projection than the usual Realist or neocon versions. Perhaps I can claim some credit for not seeking to draw on Thucydides’ authority – there is no expectation in this project that anyone should have heard of him or that they should accept ideas simply because of the association – but rather drawing inspiration from his work (both the ideas and the literary experiments) as a means of developing something useful that doesn’t overtly depend on Thucydides at all.

One of the interesting challenges of the ICS talk – which probably explains the lack of focus – is that it’s the first time I’ve sought to think about how the project does relate to these broader questions of reception and appropriation. Conceivably, I was given an easier time in the discussion than I deserve; one might reasonably complain that my drastic re-engineering of the Melian Dialogue is no more credible, let alone authentic, just because it’s mine, and is just as much a politically-motivated travesty as all the stuff I regularly criticise. Perhaps, as was raised in discussion, the problem is really with the persistent conception that Thucydides is not just another literary artefact to be reworked at will, but something that demands more respect. After all, there are still people who get furious about modern productions of Shakespeare…

As I was planning to say in my conclusion, but ran out of time: I began my research into Thucydidean reception with more or less no convictions about ‘the real Thucydides’ or the true meaning of his work – and have somehow ended up with both a powerful sense of its susceptibility to multiple contradictory interpretations and a powerful belief in what one might call its spirit. I can sidestep this with the cliche ‘good to think with’, without having to commit to the position that this was intentional or that this is how Thucydides intended to make us think as a result of reading his work – but if I’m totally honest, I do partly believe that.

Lawful Evil? I think one could make a better case for Lawful Neutral – but maybe even Chaotic Good, opening up questions and problems in the belief that people will be able to start sorting themselves out if only they can break free from ingrained assumptions and patterns of thought…