Thucydides knows everything about everything, Part 1283. It’s not enough that he recorded eclipses of both sun and moon, without directly attributing them to divine action – okay, he does claim an increased number of eclipses as grounds for recognising the unprecedented greatness of the Peloponnesian War, but he also notes that the eclipse of 431 occurred in the moon’s first phase, implying a natural event. No, he has to have anticipated all our modern concerns as well:
Posts Tagged ‘Thucydides’
Eclipse
Posted in Musings, tagged eclipse, Thucydides on April 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Just An Illusion
Posted in Musings, tagged gAI, Thucydides on March 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Update from the Thucydiocy Bot: Ex-Twitter is now really, really boring. Yes, there are still a few people posting the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote to make the same old points about jacked librarians, and a fair amount of boilerplate ‘strong do what they want’ Realism, but there hasn’t been anything interesting – a decent argument, let alone a new misquotation – for six months or more. When someone posted the old image of three students in random graduation outfits, it actually created a little warm feeling, thinking of the old days when the Thucydides musattributions seemed never-ending. (more…)
Walk Like An Egyptian
Posted in Musings, tagged Abbé Pluche, Egypt, mythology, quotations, religion, Thucydides on January 11, 2024| 4 Comments »
I’ve been down another random research rabbit-hole this week, responding to someone posting on Twitter – for reasons I still haven’t entirely grasped – a quotation from the 1741 English translation of a 1739 book, Histoire du ciel considéré selon les idées des poètes, des philosophes et de Moïse, by a man called Abbé Pluche, famous for his subsequent nine-volume work of popular science, Spectacle de la nature, ou Entretiens sur les particularités de l’Histoire naturelle qui ont paru les plus propres à rendre les jeunes gens curieux et à leur former l’esprit (1740). I’ve read only the first volume of History of Heaven, which offers a comprehensive rationalising account of all Egyptian deities, and their Greek, Roman and other derivatives, as being originally just symbolic language to mark the passage of the seasons and the coming of the Nile flood. (more…)
2023 on The Sphinx
Posted in Musings, tagged blogging, classics, higher education, historiography, Melian Dialogue, music, politics, quotations, students, teaching, Thucydides on December 29, 2023| Leave a Comment »
There was an interesting article over the holiday period by the music writer Simon Reynolds, about why he still blogs, and I agreed with more or less every word:
I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved.
I did have a brief moment, back in January, of wondering whether I should be slightly more responsive to the preferences of my readers as far as post topics and themes were concerned (more…)
Days of Wine and Roses
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides, wine on December 9, 2023| 1 Comment »
Some discoveries are huge, significant, epoch-making – the sort of event that gets mythologised, dramatised, reimagined and turned into a Doctor Who Is Trying To Brainwash Our Children With Wokeness social media race row. Others are smaller, more specialised, of little wider interest, but still worth celebrating as the product of graft and flashes of inspiration. And then there are my intermittent investigations into Thucydides misquotations, which might get more attention if I presented them as a bit of performance art, fully inhabiting the character of an obsessive pedant with weird obsessions rather than just flirting with it. But the little rush of endorphins and sense of relieved satisfaction that I occasionally get from them is real. (more…)
Straight To Hell
Posted in Musings, tagged Henry Kissinger, Thucydides on November 30, 2023| Leave a Comment »
One of the trickier things about trying to research the contemporary reception of Thucydides is that Stuff Keeps Happening. If I’d finished my book by the original deadline, it would have been completely upstaged by COVID – I didn’t even have a chapter on the Plague of Athens in the original plan! And, while it’s not the reason why I still haven’t finished, I do feel a definite nervousness about how next year’s US presidential election might spark sudden interest in the oligarchic coup of 411.
This isn’t just a matter of books and their long production times; a piece has just appeared (a review of the new Cambridge Companion to Thucydides, ed. P. Low, as part of a general overview for non-specialists) that I wrote about six weeks ago – and I am now consumed with regret that I missed the opportunity of a short paragraph to the effect that ‘figures like Henry Kissinger regularly invoke Thucydides as support for their view of the world – there’s a quote regularly attributed to Thuc that is actually a young Kissinger badly paraphrasing him – but it’s clear from his work that Thucydides would have loathed the callous, blood-drenched bastard’. Alas. But I have been given an unlimited-free-to-read link to the review, if you can overlook its predictive failure: Here.
What A Difference A Day Makes…
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged research, Thucydides on November 17, 2023| 3 Comments »
…or at any rate a couple of days. On Monday, I gave a paper in a research seminar. A shambolic, dog’s breakfast, Frankenstein’s monster of a paper. A paper so bloody awful that the only reason I’m still walking around in public is that it was on the other side of the country – you can be sure that I’m not planning to attend any national conferences in the near future. If they charged admission for such things, there would have been riots to demand refunds, and I am still half-expecting to be sued for malicious time-wasting and/or psychological abuse. The fact that I was still bought dinner afterwards is clear evidence for my hosts’ wonderful tolerance and sense of duty. (more…)
Weak
Posted in Musings, tagged Melian Dialogue, Thucydides on October 22, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Justice is possible only when power is in balance. Otherwise the strong exact what they want and the weak simply suffer. (more…)
Little Lies
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides on October 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Contrary to my initial impression just under a week ago, there now does seem to have been a bit of a surge in Thucydides quotes/references on the Ex-Twitter. Not at all contrary to my initial impression, they do seem entirely boiler-plate; lots of vague references to the Melian Dialogue, a lot of context-less examples of that ‘Scholars and Warriors’ quote (which did, however, generate the amusing situation of someone arguing with the Thucydides Bot by citing the academic article by Morley on misquoting Thucydides), and the second stanza of W.H. Auden’s 1 September 1939 has now entered the chat. (more…)
Thucydideeses!
Posted in Musings, tagged Thucydides on October 11, 2023| 2 Comments »
Whatever you may think in general of the proliferation of Companions and Handbooks on ever more specific themes, there is no doubt that they are very well suited to handling authors who are complex and multi-faceted, either across their oeuvre (Xenophon’s remarkable track record of dabbling in every genre under the sun – surely at some point a box of stray papyri in Oxford is going to yield up a fragment of his lost tragedy Menelaus? – and inventing a few of his own), or within their single work (the inevitable Thucydides). Such authors really require a plethora of perspectives, a kaleidoscope of contexts, and the expertise of multiple disciplines. (more…)
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