Sphinx

Victor Davis Hanson is at it again… “It’s fun to celebrate Sparta, but let’s look deeper,” he declares in The National Review. “There are so many lessons we can learn from the Greco-Roman city-state, especially from those who ran it.” So far so boilerplate – I’m not sure whether he’s directly responding to recent articles by Myke Cole and Nick Burns in The New Republic. Then it gets weird: “The main ideology of Sparta was that all men should be educated as scholars… Homer wrote that the culture wars are never ended. However, so long as our educational system leaves millions of young men without the basic technical know-how to wage war, the cult of arms continues to roam the Earth…”

Okay, it’s not actually VDH, but an AI-generated article from https://grover.allenai.org/ (h/t to Shawn Graham @electricarchaeo for the link to this), and I’ve carefully selected and edited sentences which are vaguely plausible rather than the ones which are manifestly nonsense (Homer is actually dated to the 9th century AD, there’s a long riff on Edmond of Macedon – though even there, we’re offered some rather VDH phrases: “Edmond’s name, as a naval captain (and I say this as an admiral) also means ‘warrior’…”). You give the system a media outlet, a date, an author and a title, and it generates an article; on the basis of my initial experiments, some are instantly recognisable as machine-generated gibberish, but some, if you don’t already have a fair amount of background knowledge, offer a combination of the sort of detail, confident assertion and polemical generalisation that is all too familiar from actual published articles – and potentially just as convincing.

The intended function of the model is to detect machine-generated stories, as it’s familiar with its own habits and traits in building articles on the basis of publicly-available news. But one can easily imagine other purposes to which it could be put (besides puerile sniggering…). For example, it offers a way round the paradox that those of us with a research interest in contemporary appropriations of classical antiquity would prefer not to have to read (and provide outrage clicks and advertising revenue to) the most egregious examples of it. Rather as the Pharos website reads ghastly alt-right blog posts so we don’t have to, the Grover machine can generate e.g. Peter Jones’ Spectator columns for us to get pleasurably annoyed about without having to read the real thing. Why is Boris Johnson the new Pericles?

Boris is no Demosthenes. His performance is not creating an epiphany but is chasing people. It is inspiring the few; it is devastating the many. What he is doing is profoundly impressive: he is going across the whole country, giving people a palpable boost. He gives us a real example of what can be done by a Government in a single performance. David Cameron could never manage it. He had to make it look like what it was not.

This is…not entirely implausible if you don’t read it too carefully.

But I am also inclined to treat the Grover machine as a handy equivalent of Ozymandias’ scanning of all the world’s media in Watchmen, a means of discerning themes and trends that may not yet be visible to human eyes. There can be disturbing truth in machine-generated gibberish. What does The Atlantic think Thucydides can tell us about contemporary politics, for example?

While political historians in recent years have identified two main ways in which politics has become more complex over the last hundred years—anti-intellectualism and the fragmentation of the nation—the figures of Thucydides, Socrates, and Plato may be the most central to our understanding of modern politics. They are central to understanding what, precisely, is happening now in Washington. But not to understanding modern politics.

In her recent book The Deadliest Warrior: Thucydides and America’s Transformation, The New York Times reporter Jennifer Rubin makes a strong case that the question of Thucydides is more significant in American politics than it deserves to be. While more is known about the two Athenian kings, “his record and his almost hidden legacy remain woefully neglected in modern American politics,” she says.

In fairness, the problem is bigger than Thucydides. The American system has undergone constant and longstanding transformations, just as it has in Athens. They may have changed, but they have remained constant: The democratic state has evolved, adapted to the moralistic Protestant ethic that prevailed in the ancient world, and in time evolved into the liberal, economic, and democratic democracy that prevails today. But historically, the flaws of democracy are far more extreme than the undemocratic venoms of democracy, and the relationship between ancient Athens and Athens-like societies in America has been contentious to say the least.

Thucydides first encountered this debate when he went to Athens in the early 300s B.C. and encountered a democracy nearly unrecognizable from the Athens of the previous century. Democracy, as it is known today, had evolved from the henhouse to the market place, from the burning sea to the Amazon rain forest. At the same time, the most valuable public resource in the country—the Cycladic islands—had radically changed over the previous five centuries: High tide brought the sea into the islands, leaving only the lowest sandbars, and high winds lashed the volcanic terraces. The ingredients of the new Athenian democracy were all present: Democracy required armed strength, markets, development, and a freewheeling mind.

Thucydides encounters these elements in the first two chapters of his epic History of the Peloponnesian War, which focuses on his 28-year-long visit to Athens. But it is the last two chapters of the book—three years after he has left—that capture the essence of the modern American political world. The problem with contemporary politics is not its complications but its complexity. Politicians speak to one another in abstract terms, view the world through a much more polarized prism, and treat the electorate as often indifferent or even contemptuous.

The people seem not to like either party or one of its ideas, and they have a weakness for leaders whose honesty and integrity seem to be lacking. Democracy has meant more harm than good.

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Times offers a much more detailed range of historical comparisons:

WITH the Greek-speaking nations of Europe at war for nearly two centuries and two world wars on their horizons, Thucydides examines what he sees as the basic causes of these conflicts and examines how humanity must deal with them.

This is first and foremost about two modern dramas that preoccupied Thucydides during his lifetime: Greece’s war with Sparta and the Peloponnesian war that swept across the area, including Northern Italy, over 300 years later. We follow his family, contemporaries and friends, who also tell tales of the violence of war in Sparta, the mayhem of Athens and even what happened to our Queen Elizabeth at the Battle of Hastings, and finally the simple notion of the battle, its causes and consequences. Thucydides’s son reveals how Sparta convinced itself that its brotherhood with Homer was incompatible with external enemies it could negotiate with; Thucydides reluctantly watched from the sidelines in Athens while his wife, sister and daughter were conscripted to the Athenian army in the Peloponnesian War.

In both episodes, Thucydides reflects on the core truths about war and empire, a point that connects these conflicts.

Every Spartan had to build his own military as far away as possible from Spartan camp. Indeed, Thucydides and a number of contemporaries viewed, with increasing incredulity, the escalating empire builders (Spartans) who set sail not only to the Mediterranean but right through England and beyond for the soldiers and treasure they required to expand their holdings.

The parallel that Thucydides draws between Sparta’s war against Athens and the Islamic conquest is striking. But in fact it is far more than that.

Thucydides sees the conflict between Athens and Sparta, and later the Greek-ness and foreignness of Rome, with reference to the struggles for imperial survival in all three cases. In all three cases, the struggle for key strategic resources has destroyed the empire, but sometimes not for long: Athens, Sparta and Rome are all no more.

Thucydides sees this clash of world-views in view of a very basic concept: diversity. In his day, Athens played a key role in the rebuilding of Sparta in 203BC. But as Athens readied for the fight that it had initiated, Thucydides in a moment of supreme self-confidence founded his empire – which, as it had started out, and the Aegean port it dominated, Rome never did. The clash of civilisations that started out as an Athenian-Spartan conflict reached boiling point when Priam, the king of Aelia Capitolina, struck at the heart of Athens in 221BC. Athens had dangled before its own people the prospect of peace. And it had dangled the prospect of its military occupation of Aelia Capitolina in exchange for political concessions to the invaders. These trade-offs were best avoided. The Athenians could not win. And their subsequent empire ended after 67BC, not the 44 years that Thucydides recorded in his Life of Heraclitus. Thucydides saw the English conquest of Scotland from the civil war that began with the victory of William of Orange against Robert the Bruce, when the object of the invasion was strategic advantage over France and England through London.

Thucydides’s finest work is here for the first time and his perspective on the darkest chapter of our history should be taken very seriously in a world in which the after-effects of war and conflict, as well as disasters, continue to do so. Thucydides makes his commentary on Sparta’s victory very clear, though a little less serious in the final episode when he ends the lesson with a tale that demonstrates the historical applicability of the Periclesist line of thought.

Yes, this is very very silly, and I really need to get on with some proper work – but is it entirely unreasonable to think that the machine has identified some significant points: a persistent concern with identity, imperialism and the struggle for resources, the notion of universal themes – and at the very least, the completely different take on what might be important in Thucydides’ work from the Atlantic take? And at the very least, the coining of ‘Periclesist’ may be all too prophetic; it’s not quite a neologism – but the only hit on Google is August Gottlieb Meissner’s 1791 book on Alcibiades, so this does suggest that the AI has already grasped the journalistic technique of inventing isms…

MUST STOP DOING THIS but I couldn’t resist checking what the Financial Times take might be…

No one has been more widely studied in economics and therefore sought to learn from, than Thucydides. The physician, historian and writer on social upheaval was a key adviser to the Athenian citizens of 480BC who analysed and rebuked the actions of the Peloponnesian senate.

His writing was not only a definitive success, turning out to be correct in every case in which he made a prediction, but he also developed a variety of economic concepts. His claim to fame was a wasschloss — an economic terminology — that has since become a well-established model for monetary analysis.

But what many scholars have ignored are the implications of his political study for today. There has been much recent attention on what turned out to be one of Thucydides’ most profound insights: that every society’s political system could be found similar to the Athenian senate, and that they can be reversible.

To his contemporaries, Thucydides plainly had in mind the immediate consequences of the Peloponnesian civil war that started in 451BC and engulfed Athens in a period of violence that lasted for three years. Yet the longer-term implication was that every society’s political system — democracy, monarchy, dictatorship, etc — could be modified, reversed or even reversed once again.

His timing, as well as the notion that each system is conservative and is liable to change in a risky way in the longer term, provides a useful lesson for politicians, their advisers and readers alike.

The conservatives were in the majority in Athens, but, after the Peloponnesian civil war, they eventually came to agree with the liberals on the priority of restoring democracy.

The conservatives won the most seats in the election, but when a quorum of 300 legislators was required to change the constitution, they could not find that number. The senate was reconvened and a special constitution was produced, which dealt with citizenship, property ownership and control, and the municipal regulation of wages.

It represented a compromise between the populist left, generally thought of as democratic and impatient with the slow pace of democratic change, and the committed conservative legislature. It was harder to get it through the country’s first parliament than to prevent it, but it did finally pass.

It did so because, unlike, say, democratic governments, it had to be approved by the assembly’s entire membership and this made politicians eager to act.

Such same ground rules applied even after all of this was done. All Greek states had a basic non-republican right to impose taxes and everyone was ready to do it.

And indeed the Peloponnesian senate was actually increasingly resigned to the idea that taxes would be raised in the future, as the economy took on new features that required the introduction of a number of new taxes to shore up taxation.

So, in 450BC, even after huge fresh and hard taxes had been introduced to bolster the capital stock and a wealth tax had been levied on a huge proportion of all land, the legislature approved yet another tax, the first petrol tax, which was eventually resumed after 36 years.

More than 40 years after the first petrol tax was introduced in 48BC, the Athenian senate again raised the petrol tax by 50 per cent on July 28.This is part of the pattern that must worry us — to reform our political system to meet the new needs and demands of the times, some adjustment of taxation has to take place — and, quite often, this happens without the decision maker having to raise any taxes at all.

This meant that the republic must be profoundly conservative in its principles, doctrines and institutions for the rest of its life.