Sphinx

Thucydides doesn’t mention the fact that a statue of the Athenian tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, occupied a prominent position in the agora; almost certainly he didn’t have to, as this would be well known to his readers, but in any case he had a bigger and more important target: the story that the statue was intended to commemorate. “People accept the traditions that they hear quite uncritically, even when it relates to their own country,” he remarked caustically (1.20) – though perhaps he should have said especially when it relates to their own country, in the light of his observation a little further on (1.22) that accounts of the same event might vary “depending on individual loyalties”. Athenians – at any rate the democratically-inclined majority – knew what their past was all about, without any need for inconvenient historical fact, and they would surely have been outraged at any proposal that the statue should be removed because the real story behind it wasn’t quite as straightforwardly noble and democratic as they believed.

This is one of those points where we modern readers might feel somewhat nervous about Thucydides’ political views; he was at best sceptical of democracy in practice, and arguably much more hostile to it in theory as well, and the claim of a member of the educated elite to be offering disinterested Truth in place of the ignorance of the masses is one we’d generally regard with suspicion. It’s difficult not to read this choice of example to illustrate the failure of most people to treat the past critically as a political dog whistle. Moreover, in the context of current debates about the rights and wrongs of enharbouring honorific statues, it’s pretty likely that Thucydides would have considered Edward Colston and Cecil Rhodes to be precisely the sorts of people deserving of commemoration for their euergetism, with the ownership, exploitation and killing of other people being taken for granted as part of aristocratic life.

But the gulf between our values and those of C5 BCE Athens doesn’t mean we can learn nothing from this account of historiography. Thucydides makes a bold claim for the utility of true knowledge of the past, that is reinforced, a considerable time later in the narrative, by the negative example of how Athenians’ false beliefs about the tyrannicides contributed to their confused over-reaction to the vandalism of other statues, the hermai, with the conviction that this could only be the work of people determined to overthrow the settled order of society.

And, most interestingly, we can also consider Thucydides’ reflections on the power of physical remains: the likelihood that Athens would be seen as vastly more powerful than it really was, and Sparta vastly less powerful, if you were to judge solely on the basis of the buildings and monuments of the two cities. Athens celebrated itself, and sought to impress others; in a similar manner, one could say, honorific statues sought (and seek) to establish the greatness of the subject, imposing a single conception of their life and works on posterity; if you trusted just in the statue of Colston (and its original inscription) you would believe that he was a great and generous man beloved by all the people of Bristol. Toppling and enharbouring the statue isn’t “destroying history”; it’s a means of creating a space for the real story, or at least the full story,