Whatever you may think in general of the proliferation of Companions and Handbooks on ever more specific themes, there is no doubt that they are very well suited to handling authors who are complex and multi-faceted, either across their oeuvre (Xenophon’s remarkable track record of dabbling in every genre under the sun – surely at some point a box of stray papyri in Oxford is going to yield up a fragment of his lost tragedy Menelaus? – and inventing a few of his own), or within their single work (the inevitable Thucydides). Such authors really require a plethora of perspectives, a kaleidoscope of contexts, and the expertise of multiple disciplines.
That’s not to say that the individual synthetic account has no place – or I wouldn’t be trying to write one – but inevitably such accounts simplify and unify, even if they try not to. Even a book that expressly argues that, say, Thucydides is a profoundly elusive and deliberately ambiguous author and any strong claim about his work, let alone about him, is basically an imaginative construct, is clearly occluding all the interpretations that say, no, actually it’s all totally straightforward, stop reading your postmodern nonsense into a foundational historical text.
But this does highlight a problem with actually-existing Companions, at least when it comes to Thucydides [note to self: check ones on e.g. Xenophon and Tacitus before posting confident but unfounded assertions]: they deal with multifariousness by multiplying perspectives – but they rarely bring them into confrontation with one another, except implicitly. The big exception that comes to mind is Walter Scheidel’s Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, where the editor clearly looked at the then-current state of debate on the extent and nature of trade, concluded that whichever of four or five obvious specialists he choose to write that chapter would infuriate the rest of them, and so asked all of them to write something shorter.
This is, more or less, what we need when it comes to Thucydides: not a chapter on ‘T and his sources’ by a mainstream ancient historian and a chapter on ‘T and the rhetoric of historiography’ by a classicist, but chapters on ‘T as historian(?)’ by both of them; not a chapter on ‘T and the invention of history’ by a classicist and a chapter on ‘T and political theory’ by a political theorist – let alone the Oxford Handbook of T approach, with a whole section by classicists on the classical stuff and an entirely separate section almost entirely by political theorists on the political stuff – but two contending chapters on ‘The nature of T’s project’ with completely contradictory assumptions and conclusions. Thucydides Celebrity Deathmatch! Two interpretative approaches enter, one interpretative approach leaves! Emily Greenwood versus the Spectre of Strauss! Mighty Kinch Hoekstra versus Zombie Donald Kagan!
I really must stop thinking up new projects until I’ve made some progress with the current To Do list…
I’ve seen many Italian conference volumes that include the debate following the presentation of a paper. Most of these are clearly adapted (eg they include footnotes), but they’re often illuminating on the state of the debate at that moment. I wonder whether it would be possible for companions to include a carefully curated version of that. Then students could act out the debate between Realist and Constructivist readings of Thucydides in class! They’d love that.
I think the problem is that Companion chapters already attempt/aspire to offer a ‘state of the debate’ account, so the discussion would either be bland or rapidly degenerate into minutiae. As a response to papers advancing a clear position it’s a great approach.