Sphinx

It’s the most chocolaty time of the year, so it seems like an appropriate time to get round to writing about the latest addition to my incredible small but interesting collection of Thucydideana: a chocolate card!

Köln-based chocolate manufacturer Gebrüder Stollwerck turns out to have been one of the most innovative enterprises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1887 it introduced the world’s first chocolate bar vending machine, thousands of which soon appeared across Germany and in New York railway stations. In the early 1900s it also became a leading manufacturer of cinematography and phonographs, including one which played chocolate records. And way back in 1840, long before the cigarette card (c.1875) or the Panini football sticker (1960), the firm’s founder came up with the idea of including a collectible picture with every bar of chocolate, with special albums for preserving the whole series appearing a few decades later.

Thucydides dates from 1908, and the collection ‘Helden des Geistes und vom Schwert (Heroes of the Spirit and the Sword). It’s a copious category: heroes of myth (classical, Nordic and Germanic), of ancient, medieval and modern history, and of Geist and Kultur, including scientists, inventers, philosophers and authors. Thucydides featured as one of the Beruhmte Dramatiker und Historiker (Group 411), along with the three Attic tragedians, Herodotus and Thucydides.

There are two things I really like about this card, besides the whole back story. The first is the information on the back of the card (repeated in the album, so it could still be read after the card had been stuck in).

In historiography, Thucydides represents a high point that it never attained again in antiquity and in the modern period was only recently reached. He was indeed not a full-blooded Athenian, but fully absorbed its elements of education, and became statesman and general. Because in this role he was unable to present the capture of Amphipolis by the Spartan general Brasidas, he was banished, and as a result had the leisure to write the history of the Peloponnesian War. After a twenty-year exile he was allowed to return to Athens. He died when, in the eighth book of his work, he had reached the year 411. His work is of monumental greatness. The unostentatious construction and close control are exemplary. He depicts not only the war, but in the introduction also the development of Greece from the earliest times.

Mostly that’s boilerplate stuff, but it’s handy to have such an explicit statement of the ‘not matched until modernity’ judgement. It is interesting to speculate about the implications of some of the less usual elements. Why present his ‘schlichte Anlage und strenge Geschlossenheit’ rather than any other aspect of his work? Why is it so important that he also discussed the early development of Greece? Why so much emphasis on the fact that he was a half-blood but nevertheless absorbed Athenian education fully – this isn’t a theme that I recall from any 19th-century academic discussions?

What I really love is the picture. The expression is priceless: THUCYDIDES IS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU, AND WITH HUMANITY GENERALLY. Maybe the artist has just been given the biography on the back of the card, and has gone with the two themes of military strength (look at that right arm) and anger. It’s good to have a style that is something more than bland neoclassicism (Stollwerck seem to have gone quite heavily for modern, almost expressionistic artists for some of their cards). Above all, there is a sense of the artist taking the familiar ancient portraits of Thucydides as a starting point, rather than as the be all and end all.

I originally thought of writing this whole post about modern depictions of Thucydides and what they suggest about how he is imagined or valued. But it’s clear from a quick survey that most of them simply reproduce one or other ancient portrait bust (not the mosaic depictions, oddly enough, and that’s an interesting question in itself) – and that immediately raised the thought that these, too, are basically imaginary – I don’t think we have anything remotely contemporary, but I need to check – and opens up a whole can of worms about which I know very little. More research is needed; maybe no one has written about ancient Thucydides portraits, but surely someone has written about ancient portraits of Homer, which would be an interesting comparison.

This may end up as a long blog post, or maybe even a proper article – just when I think I’m getting to the natural end of my Thucydides researches, he pulls me back in again… For the moment, just enjoy the thought that, once upon a time, your Christmas chocolate bar might have come with an ancient Greek historian glaring at you…