Let’s assume that Brexit goes ahead in some form – a depressing thought, but serious people suggest that there simply isn’t time between now and the end of March to set up a second referendum even if the will was already there to do it, so the only hope would be an extension of the Article 50 period, if the will was there to ask for that. Let’s take the further giant imaginative leap and assume that Brexit turns out to be less than wonderful for most people and for the country as a whole. What might we expect – a revival of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ of courage and grit in the face of adversity? Seems unlikely, however much imaginary nostalgia for those days may be underpinning the “of course we can go it alone” project, given that it was all a myth and propaganda exercise in the first place. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘rhetoric’
Backlash
Posted in Musings, tagged Brexit, Mytilene Debate, rhetoric, Sicilian Debate, Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson on August 1, 2018| 2 Comments »
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…)
Irregular Verbs
Posted in Musings, tagged Corcyra, immigration, politics, rhetoric, Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson on November 8, 2017| 4 Comments »
We appear to have reached a tipping point, where future historians of this period – not necessarily human – will simply refuse to believe what they find in their sources on the grounds of plausibility. Just as with the Julio-Claudians, we can discuss the discourse of polemic and invective, and the values and cultural assumptions it reveals, but not the historical reality that lies somewhere behind it; we cannot study Boris Johnson as a real historical individual, but only the image of him as cartoonish buffoon constructed by hostile sources… (more…)
The Centre Cannot Hold?
Posted in Musings, tagged Corcyra, factionalism, rhetoric, Thucydides on August 14, 2017| Leave a Comment »
That radical “a plague on all your houses” centrist Thucydides is muttering “I told you so” to himself again…
Factionalism and polarisation became facts of political life, and places that were affected later rather than sooner, hearing what was happening elsewhere, went to ever greater extremes in identifying new grievances and new accusations against their opponents. The usual valuation of words and actions was changed. What was once seen as reckless aggression now appeared as the loyalty one owed to fellow campaigners, while forethought and hesitation became cowardly equivocation; calls for moderation meant you lacked decency, while seeing different sides of the question was a sign of secret sympathies with the enemy. (3.82.3-4)
Evil Losers
Posted in Musings, tagged Donald Trump, Pericles, rhetoric, terrorism, Thucydides on May 24, 2017| 3 Comments »
Whom would you rather have make a speech about the death of one of your loved ones, Donald Trump or Pericles? For Simon Schama over on the Twitter yesterday, there’s no contest: “Grief obliges eloquence or silence. Pericles. Lincoln. Then ‘evil losers'”. It’s certainly true that there’s no contest when it comes to eloquence and rhetorical skill, or even basic grammar – but the differences aren’t so stark when it comes to the ends of such speeches. For Trump, the deaths of children, teenagers and their older relatives in Manchester are fuel for his confused, ill-directed crusade against ‘radical Islwmic terrorism’, fuelling suspicion of Muslims in general. For Pericles, the deaths of Athenian soldiers were weaponised to urge the survivors to sacrifice themselves for the city as well, with the grief of their families waved away. The issue with Schama’s contrast isn’t that Pericles lost the war or was responsible for starting it, as various people responded to him; it’s that the contrast isn’t as stark as he implies. As for his “Thucydides would block you and so will I”, nice line, but would the man willing to face up to the full ghastliness of human weakness and violence really filter reality like that?
Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse the sub-tweet, I feel ever more disturbed by the sorts of people who choose to incorporate Thucydides into their Twitter identity, and the violent right-wing views many of them seem to hold – and what this says about the modern image of Thucydides, if not necessarily the work itself…
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 »
The Death of Meaning
Posted in Musings, tagged Brexit, Corcyra, Donald Trump, politics, populism, rhetoric, Thucydides on November 4, 2016| 2 Comments »
Words had to change their meanings in response to events. Mindless aggression became courage. Forethought and hesitation became cowardice. Moderation was unmanliness. Seeing different sides of the question was a sign of an ivory-tower academic ‘expert’. Real men said what they thought, the more extreme the better, and anyone who objected was not to be trusted. If an opponent said something reasonable, this had to be condemned as criminal nonsense. Cheating the system was a sign of cleverness, while honesty and integrity were condemned as simple-mindedness. Law and morality were an unacceptable restraint on the Will of The People.
(Thucydides 3.82.4-5, adapted)
In Thucydides We Trust?
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged Donald Trump, historiography, rhetoric, Thucydides on September 26, 2016| 2 Comments »
Why do we trust historians? How far is it (as I’m sure most people, or at least most historians, would claim) solely a matter of evaluating their data, the quality of their interpretations and their adherence to professional norms, and how far do other factors play a role? I was in Hamburg last week, for the biennial Deutsche Historikertag, which is always an interesting conference in part because they seek to focus on a specific theme, without insisting that everyone should conform to this. This year it was ‘Glauben’, and I co-organised a panel with my regular collaborator Christian Wendt from Berlin on ‘Die Glaubwuerdigkeit des Historikers’, with a particular focus (inevitably) on Thucydides and the ways that he becomes an ‘authority’ in modern discourse. If anyone’s interested, there’s a short report on the session from Deutschlandfunk as part of a programme on the Historikertag generally, here, from about five minutes in.
The majority of ‘academic’ readings of Thucydides – and I should stress that I’m talking about those which take him as some kind of authority, whether on facts or method or theory, not philological studies – seem to depend on some degree of recognition of him as ‘one of us’, a colleague with shared professional values even if he also displays a number of idiosyncratic habits. (more…)
UK Classicists for Better Use of Classical Analogies (oh, and also Britain in Europe)
Posted in Musings, tagged Boris Johnson, classics, EU Referendum, Europe, Marathon, rhetoric on May 10, 2016| 2 Comments »
Has Boris Johnson ever given a speech without throwing in a classical reference or two? It’s part of the brand, clearly – and always reminds me of Josh Ober’s classic study of Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Ober noted the surprising readiness of wealthy Athenians, especially those who’ve chosen an active role in public life, to parade their wealth and their difference from the mass of the citizens, even when faced with the task of winning over several hundred jurors drawn from the ordinary population. The ancient equivalent of a modern British politician taking off his jacket and tie, rolling up his sleeves and dropping a few aitches is conspicuous by its absence. (more…)
Sphinx 