One of the new courses I’m doing this year – new to me, rather than to the curriculum – is the big survey course on Greek History: 160 first-and second-year students, forty hours of lectures (plus seminars, which are delegated to minions – I’m equally glad not to be doing an extra six hours every fortnight or even every week and sad not to see this side of the students’ development), starting in the Bronze Age and finishing somewhere yet-to-be-precisely-determined around the expansion of Rome into the eastern Mediterranean. No, the title of this post isn’t actually commenting on my knowledge of archaic Greece and the rise of the hoplite, to pick one of many possible examples – but it could be; I have been learning a lot over the last couple of months, refreshing some very out-of-date knowledge, and this is certainly one of the major reasons why this blog has been quiet of late… (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Sparta’
I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue
Posted in Musings, tagged games, Greek History, Sparta, teaching on November 8, 2019| 1 Comment »
Thermopylae on Thames
Posted in Musings, tagged Boris Johnson, Brexit, classical reception, Sparta on March 28, 2019| 2 Comments »
The great advantage of classicists getting involved in the analysis of contemporary political rhetoric, given that it seems to be full of classical references at the moment (Johnson going on about Punic terms, the die-hard fanatics of the E”R”G – yes, the lunatic fringe’s lunatic fringe – going under the name of the Spartans, a Tory MP called David Jones citing chunks of Tacitus, including Latin, in a meeting of the influential 1922 Committee) is that they’re highly sensitive to nuance, allusion, and the history of reception of different figures, ideas and phrases. The disadvantage of classicists getting involved is that they’re highly sensitive to nuance, allusion etc etc. In other words: it’s not that these references are imaginary, but perhaps they aren’t as important as we tend to think they are. Or at least not as important to others, including those who made them in the first place, as they are to us, seeing classical antiquity yet again being besmirched by its appropriation by people with distasteful and dangerous politics. (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…)
Some Guys From Spart
Posted in Musings, tagged 300, alt-right, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frank Miller, Generation Identity, Sparta on May 8, 2018| 3 Comments »
“The best are those who are raised in the severest school.” To the best of my knowledge, my grandmother never read Thucydides (whence that quote comes; Archidamus at 1.84), or Herodotus, or Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, or any of the other ancient accounts of Sparta and its values, but she didn’t have to; she could draw on a substantial popular tradition of images of Spartan life and attitudes, including her favourite admonitory story of the Spartan boy and the fox. As a child I was never sure what the lesson was supposed to be – don’t get caught? if you get caught, never confess? – but in retrospect I think it was more a kind of mood music: big boys don’t cry, that’s just a scratch, a family of starving Bangladeshis could live on that for a week (on failing to eat one’s crusts), and in my day we’d have been sent to bed without any supper for less than that. The Spartans tell you why you shouldn’t ever have more than one slice of cake. (more…)
Questions of Character
Posted in Musings, tagged Athen, China, Sparta, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, USA on February 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »
A further thought on the Thucydides Trap idea, that’s just a bit too long to develop properly on Twitter… Insofar as Thucydides actually holds such a conception, it’s firmly rooted in the specific historical situation of the confrontation and competing interests of Athens and Sparta, including the distinctive characters of those two states. That is, it’s the restless, energetic, ambitious nature of the Athenians (as set out by the Corinthians in the debate at Sparta in Book 1) that both explains why they have risen to a position of power and makes the current situation volatile; it’s the slow, cautious, conservative and risk-averse nature of the Spartans that has allowed the Athenian rise. The “truest cause” of the war can’t be reduced to the bare dynamics of the confrontation – established power versus rising power – alone; but of course that’s precisely what the ‘Thucydides Trap’ does, setting up historical analogies and making predictions on the basis solely of abstract structural similarities.
If we bring ‘national character’ back in, as a way of talking about general tendencies in foreign policy and how different states will behave in a given situation – and keeping in mind the Thucydidean point that it’s never absolutely uniform or fixed – then the great potential US-China confrontation looks somewhat different. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘rising power’ that looks less Athenian than China: slow, steady, cautious, risk-averse. Meanwhile, the US certainly has its cautious, risk-averse phases, especially when it comes to dealing with other major powers – but it also has a track record of reckless military aggression that couldn’t be less Spartan. Arguably this makes the situation more volatile, depending on the regime in power, but it certainly directs attention towards the ‘established’ power as the likely source of trouble, whereas a lot of the articles discussing the South China Sea as the crucible of WWIII seem to accept US hegemony as legitimate because already existing, and every Chinese action as gratuitously aggressive because they’re the rising power – they must be the pushy ambitious ones, as they’re playing the Athenians…
Sphinx 