Sphinx

What makes for a decent academic legacy? How should one want to be remembered, and by whom? Such a potentially morbid and self-regarding train of thought is not in fact prompted by the fact that I’ve now added a broken foot to the Long COVID, insomnia and constant general tiredness that are making me feel old and useless.

It is partly inspired by having to give advice to assessment-writing students about finding scholarship; not just “no, I’m not going to give you a number for how many modern publications you need to list”, but also “if you cite something from 1934, you do need to be confident that it’s worth citing”. It took me a while to twig why so many students were referencing obscure articles from fifty or more years ago in their work – when I consult something on JSTOR, I now realise, I’m totally focused on the something, and pay no attention at all to the sidebar of ‘if you enjoyed rbis article, you might also enjoy this random selection of other stuff with vaguely similar words in the title’. But clearly at least some students have taken this to be an authoritative recommendation, and – like the similarly expanding use of undergraduate dissertations from the US – potentially evidence that they’re doing their own research, which is obviously a good motive even if the results are problematic.

I do sometimes wonder whether I should just issue a blanket edict against this sort of thing; my current advice is equivocal, which might well serve to confuse things further. It’s not just that it’s good that they are trying to go beyond the module reading list, which is only ever a selection and is probably reflective of my preferences as much as of the subject; there might indeed be useful stuff in very old publications, and even, conceivably, in an American UG dissertation. The problem is that you already need to know a lot about the topic to be able to evaluate the possibilities of such usefulness, rather than heading straight there because the title apparently fits the assessment task more closely than the titles of more recent stuff.

Where I become really equivocal is in offering some sort of opinion on ‘how old is too old?’ – simply because whatever time limit I suggest immediately brings to mind things that I would then be excluding which really shouldn’t be excluded. Forty years? Seriously, you’re writing off Hopkins’ Conquerors and Slaves? Fifty years? Look, it’s not as if I would actually expect any of them to read Brunt’s Italian Manpower, but…

Which brings me back to the ‘legacy’ issue. It did occur to me that a thirty-year rule would, in the not too distant future, start ruling out my own publications. It is nice to see Metropolis and Hinterland still occasionally cited – but would readily accept that it now seems to be cited almost dutifully, as relevant but vague context, rather than because anyone is bothering to argue with it. As I tell my students, it’s not that old publications are necessarily wrong, they just become irrelevant, as the discussion moves on. After a certain point, I guess one is hoping to be rediscovered by the sort of eager graduate student who is reading everything of any possible relevance to their project, who then decides that Morley made one or two good points that have been unjustly neglected…

There is, perhaps, an alternative. The original idea for this blog post actually came over a year ago, after a student, during the seminar on Pylos and Sphacteria in my Thucydides course, suddenly asked “What’s Grundy’s Well?” In response to my entirely blank expression, he showed me the map included on p.715 of Hammond’s World Classics edition of Thucydides (‘after Rhodes, Thucydides History IV.I-V, 24’ it says), and there, right in the middle of Sphacteria, it is: Grundy’s Well. And so I had to do a bit of research.

‘Grundy’ is of course George Beardoe Grundy, 1861-1948, Oxford ancient historian specialising in military history and battlefield topography with a sideline in Saxon charters. Grundy’s first book, in 1894, had been a study of the topography of the battle of Plataea, and his second, on the Persian Wars, likewise included a substantial focus on the modern landscapes of key events and their relation to ancient descriptions; the importance of actual inspection is emphasised multiple times in his 1948 memoir, Fifty-Five Years at Oxford, which includes a powerful account of the dangers of malaria in many of the regions he visited including Sphacteria.

It’s therefore unsurprising that when he moved on to Thucydides with his 1911 book Thucydides and the History of his Age, his approach included the detailed surveying of places described in order to evaluate whether Thucydides’ account was trustworthy – including whether he may have visited the place, or relied on talking to Spartan captives in Athens, or just made it up (there is a long debate, helpfully summarised in Hornblower’s commentary, about whether Thucydides’ account of the geography of Pylos and Sphacteria, and hence of the military action, is basically fictitious).

Grundy explored the island of Sphacteria and identified a ‘well’, which he took to be the source of water which the Spartan soldiers relied upon when besieged (mentioned at 4.26 and 4.31), and tasted the water. A. Gomme’s historical commentary (published 1956) talks about the debates around the topography of Sphacteria, and refers to “the well identified by Grundy”, also citing another scholar who suggested that it was a cistern – a tank designed to collect rainwater – rather than a proper well. By the time Peter Rhodes published his text and commentary on Book IV in the 1980s, this had become “Grundy’s Well”, and I think the crucial step from “the well Grundy identified” to “Grundy’s Well” was taken by W.K. Pritchett, Studies in Greek Topography Vol. 1 (1965) – but I don’t have a copy and it’s not online, so haven’t got round to checking.

There are, I can imagine, far worse ways to be commemorated; the Hammond translation is likely to remain in print for years to come (it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t checked whether the relevant map in the Landmark Thucydides also includes the well), and the specific debate to which this was a contribution is also unlikely to vanish completely so long as people read Thucydides and worry about his accuracy in different areas (okay, if the political theorists appropriate him completely, maybe not). I wonder if there is a plaque to mark the spot.

Of course, it’s probably not enough to get anyone reading Grundy’s publications again – and, speaking as someone who has read his two books on Thucydides, to be honest they’re not missing a huge amount. (In its time, however, the first volume was both successful and quite radical, at least for Oxford; Grundy noted in his memoir that he was regarded by some as “an impudent heretic”, and that a friend who was one of the Electors told him that the book had cost him the Professorship of Ancient History; he consoled himself with the sales figures, two-fifths of which had been in Germany where reviews were critical but serious). With one very obvious exception: the hilarious poem with which he opened his final book, Thucydides and the History of his Age Volume II (1948), which I quoted at length in the Preface to my own book on T and the Idea of History. To give just the final stanza:

A work undying was his aim.

He to an endless future spake.

He has made good the proudest claim

That ever writer dared to make.

But in fact Grundy’s academic career included at least one other Easter Egg, so to speak; another thing you would not generally expect from an Oxford ancient historian and which only a few are likely to stumble across. In 1917, he published an essay that represents a genuinely original attempt at presenting ‘political psychology’ as a historical rather than philosophical enterprise. It was inspired by a powerful sense of how far the leaders on all sides in the run-up to war had made decisions based on entirely mistaken conceptions of how other people, en masse, would react; they assumed that theories based on their own situation would be universal – thus, a nation dominated by fear would assume that others would be equally susceptible to it – rather than recognising variation between different peoples and times.

There’s a handy summary of the article by one Floyd W. Rudmin at https://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/RudminGrundyBio6.pdf, and it’s also mentioned by Ben Earley in The Thucydidean Turn, in his discussion of Alfred Zimmern. A little surprisingly, Ben doesn’t mention the extent to which Grundy’s conception of political psychology drew on Thucydides. This is pretty clear from his opening account of the classical roots of the approach, noting that the Sophists and Plato had recognised the importance of knowledge for political life, and continuing:

Thucydides, one of the greatest thinkers of all times, seems to have held that the actions of men in masses might be calculable by those who knew the history of the past, or, at any rate, that there was a tendency for different bodies of men to act in similar ways in similar circumstances at different times…

He makes it clear that the essential cause of the resemblance lies in human nature itself, and is thus psychological. In the composition of his work he spent most pains on the speeches, that feature of his history in which he depicts the psychological background of the course of the events he has set himself to narrate, and in them he seeks to trace to their sources those springs of emotion which lead men to actions which affect the history of the human race…

The value of history lies from his point of view in the possibilities it affords of forming a judgment of the probabilities of the action of masses of men in certain types of circumstances. The historian must not confine himself to mere narrative, but must be an interpreter of the average soul of humanity. (157)

Most of the article, admittedly, is a general rant about state education, arguing that the German example doesn’t discredit the idea (any more than science is discredited by burglars being able to use a blow-pipe; no, me neither) but simply shows that it needs to be put to better ends. It then moves on to emphasise the differences between Western Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, this time emphasising how far Western countries had naively assumed that the latter were constitutional monarchies on the lines of themselves.

Basically, it’s an incoherent mess. But you might say that it’s surprising that it’s done at all. And there is something quite attractive in the thought that perhaps, in a century or more’s time, someone might browse through a few of these blog posts or one of my more obscure articles and think, well, I wasn’t expecting that.

Assuming that Morley’s Law of Thucydidean Misquotation hasn’t in fact been enshrined as one of the cardinal principles of the New Internet, obviously. Or that they haven’t named a variety of broad bean after me.

G.B. Grundy (1917) ‘Political psychology: A science which has yet to be created’, in The Nineteenth Century And After, vol.81 iss.479, pp. 155-170.

https://archive.org/details/sim_twentieth-century_1917-01_81_479/page/156/mode/2up