This blog is likely to be rather quiet over the next month, as I have to get my head down and finish my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History and so won’t have time to write extended essays on here, and no one else ever seems to contribute anything. However, I couldn’t resist sharing the latest example of the place of Thucydides in contemporary popular culture: the Thucydides class Federation starship:
This has at least some sort of formal status within the universe of Star Trek and its licensed products, though my impression is that it derives from a role-playing game rather than any of the series or films. Apparently (I quote) the Thucydides was conceived as the Federation’s first timeship in response to the rising number of temporal refugees discovered to be traveling through time by the Department of Temporal Investigations; they were very small, maneuverable ships designed to travel to other time periods and recover people and items that could possibly contaminate a timeline. All of which seems very appropriate; after all, calling such vessels the Herodotus class would presumably entail traveling back in time and grabbing a random selection of people and things that looked interesting; the Tacitus class would go back to make sarcastic remarks about people, and so forth.
I am now waiting with bated breath to see what this post does to my blog statistics; am I now going to attract a lot of annoyed Star Trek fans to argue about the limits of the canon, or a lot of even more annoyed Tacitus scholars..?
Sphinx 