Sphinx

There’s a long-standing tradition of setting up a contrast between Thucydides and other classical historians, usually to make a point about the ‘true’ nature of historiography. Most commonly, the foil is Herodotus, in a zero-sum game where only one can be the real Founder of History: T as critical, objective, sober, realistic etc. versus some bloke who just wrote down a load of tall tales he picked up in bars down by the Halicarnassus docks, or H as the broad-minded anthropologist of cultural difference versus a narrow, reductivist and chauvinist view of human beings (shout-out to the late great Marshall Sahlins). But there are other possibilities; in the sixteenth century, for example, T might be set against Tacitus on political grounds, for his praise of the enlightened rule of Pericles as opposed to the dangerous hostility to monarchy evident in the Roman, while nineteenth-century critical historians frequently bolstered T’s reputation as one of them by giving Livy a good kicking as the epitome of aimless chronicling of events.

I don’t recall any particular tendency to set up a Thucydides – Julius Caesar cage fight – they’re more likely to be bracketed together as men who wrote from positions of real expertise and experience (there are collections of Military Quotations, for example, that refuse to cite anyone who never fought in war, and they love the pair of them). You can, however, always count on Brexit to bring a new spin on some old habits of thought, and the announcement earlier this month that a putative Museum of Brexit has been awarded charity status and can begin fundraising included this gem from one of its trustees, arguing that it would be a proper historical endeavour, honest:

We made an early decision that the project needed to be approached in a balanced way that reflects the views and arguments on both sides of the divide – or rather, on multiple sides, as the dynamics are far more complicated than simply binary. Once people see that we are endeavouring to be more Thucydidean than Caesarian in our approach to history, we are confident we will get wide engagement and that in turn will be reflected in the range of material we can display.

Yeeeesss…. Thucydides as the epitome of impartiality, objectivity, showing both sides etc.; so far, so boilerplate (and leaving aside what an actual Thucydides would have made of the events as an illuminating demonstration of ‘the human thing’ in action). I’m more interested in the choice of Caesar as the contrast, and what it is that they are seeking or claiming to avoid. History written by the victor, presumably; history figured as the triumph of a single heroic individual (tough luck, Johnson and Farage, you are the mere figureheads of a collective effort); a history of civil war and internal conflict resulting in the rise of autocracy.

I’m guessing, to be honest, because whereas the modern image of Thucydidean historiography is well established, I don’t get the same sense of Caesarian historiography, beyond the cliches of Latin lessons in Molesworth. ‘Caesarian’ surely summons up ideas of surgically-aided birth for most people (though normally spelt with an ‘e’ in the UK) – the first couple of pages of Google results have nothing else until you get to some adverts for ‘Caesarian legionaries’ metal figurines, while ‘Caesarian history’ seems to be exclusively gynaecological. It is almost as if they started, consciously or not, with the question of how one should write about a society tearing itself apart through the ambition of a few ruthless individuals, and then decided which approach to imitate.

It remains to be seen whether they will also eschew the implicit Romanocentrism of Caesar’s account in favour of Thucydides’ style as the ‘man without a nation’ (which I think is a reasonable updating of apolitēs…).