Greetings to anyone who’s found their way to this blog as a result of the discussion of Thucydides on Radio 4’s In Our Time this week; for anyone who missed it, listen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050bcf1. It was great fun; yes, we could have done with another hour or so to tease out all the issues, not least so that I could dispute some aspects of Paul Cartledge’s account of Thucydides’ take on politics, but I think we managed to pack quite a lot in. Paul, who’s done the programme loads of times, offered Katherine Harloe and me the advice to forget about the radio audience and just concentrate on the conversation between Melvyn Bragg and the three of us, and that worked – apart from the moment when I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten to tell my parents about the programme, and that my mother might be one of the people listening, rather more surprised and considerably more annoyed than the average…
If you are a new visitor to this blog, it’s probably worth my noting a couple of things: (i) it isn’t exactly an academic blog, but it is somewhat high-brow at times, not to say pretentious, and some of the posts are really of interest just to people working in higher education; just skip those; (ii) I blog on whatever interests me, including historical theory and ancient economic history, rather than just Thucydides, so just skip things that don’t interest you; (iii) I do tend to take a certain amount of knowledge for granted, e.g. I’m not going to spend time explaining what the Melian Dialogue is – but I do have plans to write a quick User’s Guide to Thucydides for anyone who’s now curious about his work but doesn’t know where to start, so watch this space…
Sphinx 