Sphinx

Somewhere on my ever-expanding list of ‘Things it would be really cool to try if I wasn’t already deep into time/energy/sleep deficit’ is the idea of a video series called Thucydides Explains It All, in which the incomparable wisdom of Thucydides would be applied to the analysis of contemporary issues – not just vacuous speculation about China, but things that actually matter to people. Case in point, which is why I thought of this again yesterday: the Rooney-Vardy bust-up. It was the rise of a new generation of WAGs, and the fear of media obsolescence this aroused in the established influencers, that made conflict inevitable… My wife suggested that I ought to buy a false beard and present these videos as Thucydides; I would much rather hire the brilliant animators who did the ‘Heavyweight Champion Historian’ video, so if anyone out there has lots of money and fancies sponsoring this project…

There would be a serious point to the enterprise: not in fact demonstrating the idea that Thucydides can explain everything, but highlighting the emptiness of most attempts at making him do that. Critical analysis by a range of experts hasn’t made the Thucydides Trap go away; maybe now we need recourse to pointing at it and laughing. It highlights admirably the problem with claims about ‘practical history’ and the deployment of analogies; it is laughably easy to represent situations and events in ways that make them resemble one another, and then claim, disingenuously, that you didn’t invent parallels but simply recognised them in reality. Bayern München and Red Bull Leipzig: Thucydides Trap. Snapchat and Instagram: Thucydides Trap. The entire history of hip hop: ever-repeating cycles of Thucydides Trap.

Now, I’m writing this at half past three in the morning, as the cats have decided to exact their revenge for my frequent absences over the last couple of weeks, leaving them alone with nothing but enormous piles of food, toys, one another and Radio 4 for company. Yes, maybe they’ve joined the legions annoyed beyond measure by the Today programme… So, yes, it’s possible that I am having dark thoughts about the pointlessness of my research into Thucydidean reception over the last few years; it’s all just a bit trivial really.

But actually I continue to find the construction of Thucydides as an authoritative figure fascinating (while emphasising that he’s not the only one; cf. this fascinating blog by Helen King on the way Hippocrates has become a medical guru for the internet age); illustrated, among other things, by the sheer pleasure I get from teaching my Thucydides course to final-year students again, and the fact that in Week 3 I’m already failing to keep up with the schedule because there’s so much to talk about. And I continue to believe that, read in a better way, Thucydides can help us think usefully about contemporary political issues, or I wouldn’t have signed up to write a book on the subject (though if the cats keep this sort of behaviour up, I am never going to be capable of writing more than a few disjointed paragraphs ever again).

There has to be a workable compromise position somewhere between preserving Thucydides as a complex, expensive-classical-education-only work to be name-dropped rather than explained, and rendering Thucydides down into a slogan that can be applied to more or less any situation without it actually illuminating anything. In the case of Rooney/Vardy, it’s a matter of going beyond the trite “conflict was inevitable” reading to explore the intersection of contingent personal relations and broader trends, including the changing media landscape that creates the conditions within which this conflict has played out – a quick sketch of changing tabloid behaviour, the rise of social media and the impact of money in Premier League football as the equivalent of the Archaeology in establishing key themes and an incipient socio-historical theory…