Sphinx

Everyone in the world has forgotten Thucydides. Everyone except Jill…

Suppose that the text of Thucydides never made it out of Constantinople before it was sacked; no Latin translation by Lorenzo Valla, no French translation by Claude de Seyssel, no English version from Thomas Hobbes, just a few passing mentions in authors like Cicero that don’t really convey much about what the work must have been like. No elevation of him as the model critical historian by nineteenth-century Germans; no quotes from the Funeral Oration on war memorials or in speeches; no Henry Kissinger, no Neorealism, no Neocons. Iraq remains uninvaded – or, alternatively, everyone is surprised when the invasion goes badly, as no one has been offering dire warnings based on the Sicilian Expedition. People find a different idea for explaining the relationship between the United States and China, without any difficulty.

But one young graduate student of international relations remembers, and starts to incorporate ideas from the Mytilenean Debate, the Melian Dialogue and other parts of the work into her own articles. People are astonished; where have these devastating insights into power, politics and war come from? Things look so different through a Thucydidean lens. She is rapidly elevated in the world of punditry, offered ever more lucrative book deals and consultancies, as the great powers realise that they must hastily convert their vast peace-keeping and humanitarian missions into war machines before the inevitable conflict. Only her former grad school flatmate, a poor Classicist who has been working on the text of Lucian’s How To Write History, knows the truth; will love, not war, conquer all..?

No, I am not Richard Curtis nor was meant to be, and this seems likely to be an even worse film than the original sounds (though probably with a better soundtrack). But it’s an interesting counterfactual nevertheless. The premise of Imagine is of course that the genius of the Beatles’ songs will shine through whoever plays them; is the same true of Thucydides’ work, or (as I frequently suspect) does most of his modern influence rest on the accumulated authority of his name, the reputation for hard-headed insight that precedes him, so that a statement with his name attached immediately carries more weight even if it’s basically saying things we already know or think? Would anyone be impressed by the ‘Thucydides Trap’ (whether or not they get the antagonists the right way round) if it didn’t come with his imprimatur?

This isn’t to question the power of Thucydides’ text and the experience of delving into its complexity and ambiguity, testing our experiences and assumptions against the detail of his account; it’s the attempts at turning this experience into one or more snappy principles – and not ‘the world is complicated and we’re not very good at understanding it’, but ‘this is how the world works’ that is problematic. To have the desired impact, our hypothetical pundit would need either to attribute Thucydides’ alleged insights to a different authority figure (The Socrates Syndrome! Cicero’s Choice!), or (better) to reconstruct the entire text, or at any rate some key episodes, from memory, and then try to get people to engage with them.

Imagine no Thucydides; it’s easy if you try. It’s not a text that makes people bellicose or cynical, it’s a text that bellicose and cynical people may invoke as justification for their existing plans and assumptions, and they could find others. The remake of the Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, in which a glamorous Classicist and her nerdy yet handsome research assistant have to uncover the clues buried in Thucydides’ text to track down the treasures of the Parthenon that Pericles had buried rather than sold or melted down to finance the war is looking much more promising…