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. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘historiography’
English Civil War (Remastered)
Posted in Musings, tagged Brexit, historiography, Julius Caesar, Thucydides on April 20, 2021| 2 Comments »
Poetic Licence
Posted in Musings, tagged historiography, poetry, witchcraft on June 24, 2019| 2 Comments »
One of the interesting dynamics of Twitter is the way that it encourages imitation and development: predictive text games, variations on memes, daft hashtags etc, not all of which are designed to get you to reveal personal information that can then be applied to hacking your bank account. It’s one of the more joyful aspects of a platform that can at times be very depressing.
I think this explains why I sometimes have a similar response to things on Twitter that aren’t actually posted to provoke imitation (more…)
Time Bandits
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged Edward Mendelson, historiography, philosophy, Thucydides on October 30, 2018| 2 Comments »
Thucydides is The Most Fabulous Author In The World. I don’t mean this as a compliment, but rather as an evocation of Terry Gilliam’s wonderful film Time Bandits, in which a motley band of dwarves and an 11-year-old boy called Kevin – you know, it has only just occurred to me, thirty-seven years later, that this is a snarky Hobbit reference – embark on a quest to find The Most Fabulous Object In The World, concealed in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness (which of course demonstrates its desirability). The two key attributes of this Object are, firstly, that everyone sees it differently, as suits their own conception of Fabulousness, and, secondly, that the whole set-up is a trap. (more…)
Tight Fit
Posted in Musings, tagged Athens, Herodotus, historiography, science, Sparta on September 17, 2018| 3 Comments »
If I ever want to write a distillation of the political wisdom and insights of Thucydides that will get noticed by serious newspapers and sold in proper bookshops, it’s clear that I’m going to have to develop an eye-catching binary distinction with which to make sense of the entire world, the equivalent of the Nowheres and the Somewheres, or the Tight and Loose cultures distinguished by a social psychology study that claims to “provide a consistent way of understanding differences observed from antiquity to the present day, in everything from international relations to relations in our homes.” Hmm. The Thucydides and the Thucydidose? The Thucydiscerning and the Thucydiots? The people who believe in reductionist binary distinctions with universal validity, and everybody else? (more…)
The Uncertainty Principle
Posted in Musings, tagged historiography, Michael Frayn, rhetoric, Thucydides, Werner Heisenberg on February 19, 2018| 1 Comment »
The physicist Werner Heisenberg opens Der Teil und das Ganze (1969; published in English as Physics and Beyond in 1971), his personal account of the development of atomic physics in the first half of the twentieth century, with a citation from Thucydides; 1.22.1, to be precise (more…)
Why Thucydides Hated Medieval History
Posted in Musings, tagged Herodotus, historiography, Thucydides on January 28, 2018| 2 Comments »
There’s a very peculiar article in today’s Observer, picking up on the predictably gormless comments earlier this week from Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Select Committee on Education, about medieval history being fine for those who want to pay for such a luxury but undeserving of public support. To be precise, most of the article is great, as it’s based around eminently sensible comments from medieval historians like Miri Rubin and John Arnold, but the opening paragraphs are really odd.
Historians have been ridiculed since Herodotus, the “father of history”, was mocked by his Athenian contemporary, Thucydides, as a mere storyteller. So it was with some weariness that medieval historians took to their keyboards last week to respond to the latest slur against their discipline.
Robert Halfon, who chairs the Commons select committee on education, is no Thucydides, but he echoed complaints down the ages when he singled out medieval historians as undeserving of public funding.
Okay… (more…)
Diversitas et Multiculturalismus
Posted in Musings, tagged classics, historiography, racism, Roman Britain on August 2, 2017| 49 Comments »
This isn’t the Summer of Love; it may be the Summer of Bad-Tempered Arguments About Classics and Racism. Over in the US, Sarah Bond‘s articles on the ‘white-washing’ of classical statues – that is, why do we think of them in terms of gleaming white marble when they were actually painted? – have provoked a furious backlash from the far right, including death threats.* In the UK, an alt-right blogger objected to the fact that a BBC educational cartoon on life in Roman Britain included black people – “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” – and was carefully schooled by @MikeStuchbery_, Matthew Nicholls from Reading, Mary Beard and others – with the result that Mary, at least, now seems to be spending six hours a day responding to people on Twitter about this.
What is surprising about these two arguments is that the substantive issues – ancient statues were painted, the Roman Empire (including Britain) was ethnically diverse – are such old hat. (more…)
Chimes at Midnight
Posted in Musings, tagged blogging, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, historiography on March 10, 2017| Leave a Comment »
We must be old. We cannot choose but be old. We have heard the chimes at midnight at the the end of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme music – twenty years ago? It was a simpler time, when one girl (albeit with supernatural strength) and her friends could avert the apocalypse, time and again, because the apocalypse was a bunch of demons trying to open a gateway to hell, or the mayor of a small town trying to turn himself into a demon, not an entire global system of doom. Even as the threats became more powerful and apparently unstoppable – deranged hellgods, a rogue military experiment, sexually frustrated adolescent boys – they remained identifiable, nameable, and ultimately susceptible to the judicious application of violence. If only… (more…)
Rome: Open City? (Reprint Project)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged historiography, Keith Hopkins, migration, rhetoric on February 24, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Another installment in my long-term project to make available copies of old chapters and articles, when I have a spare moment. This one is prompted by another exchange with Will Pooley at Bristol, who asked on the Twitter about modern historians using the dialogue form, whether invented or found. My immediate thought was Keith Hopkins’ A World Full Of Gods, which (if you don’t know it) experiments with a variety of unexpected literary forms to capture different aspects of religions in the ancient world and the numerous historiographical issues involved in trying to study and represent them. As I think I’ve remarked on here before, I’m not convinced that many of Hopkins’ experiments actually work properly – the professional exponents of science fiction do time travel stories rather better, for example – but it’s amazing that it was done at all, and a great shame that this aspect was largely passed over by reviewers as quickly as possible with an air of great embarrassment. (more…)
Art and Artlessness (Reprint Project)
Posted in Publications, tagged economic history, historiography, Keith Hopkins, rhetoric, Richard Duncan-Jones on January 26, 2017| Leave a Comment »
