Thucydides moral chaos

Thucydides? moral chaos PETER THONEMANN

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1454206.ece

Neville Morley

THUCYDIDES AND THE IDEA OF HISTORY 224pp. I. B. Tauris. Paperback, ￡15.99 (US $29). 978 1 84885 170 2

Geoffrey Hawthorn

THUCYDIDES ON POLITICS Back to the present

294pp. Cambridge University Press. Paperback, ￡19.99 (US $29). 978 1 107 61200 6

Published: 3 September 2014

In the long hot summer of 427 BC, a quarrel broke out in the small Greek island city of Corcyra (modern Corfu). The city was then allied to Athens, the democratic superpower of the eastern Mediterranean. A group of Corcyrean aristocrats launched an abortive coup, in the hope of handing the city over to Athens? rivals, the military oligarchy of Sparta. Corcyra fell into a savage civil war between pro-Athenian and pro-Spartan factions, ending (thanks to the arrival of an Athenian fleet) with complete victory for the democrats. For seven days, under the approving eye of an Athenian admiral, the pro-Athenian party systematically butchered their opponents. Fathers killed their own sons; men were dragged from the safety of the temples and slaughtered on the altars of the gods.

Corcyra was a minor theatre of operations in the long and messy Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), a generation-long struggle by Sparta and her allies to curb Athenian power in the Aegean. In strictly geopolitical terms, the vicious Corcyrean civil war changed nothing: the Corcyreans remained, as they had been previously, allies of the Athenians. But for the historian Thucydides, the charnel-house of Corcyra had a significance far beyond its immediate political or military context. This was only the first of a long series of civil wars to flare up on the fringes of the wider conflict

between Athens and Sparta. Both major powers were all too eager to pursue their interests through proxy wars in the cities of the Greek “third world”. “And so”, writes Thucydides,

“Many calamities befell the Greek cities through civil war – which happened then, and will happen again, for as long as human nature remains the same, with greater or lesser violence and varying only with the changing conditions in each state. In peace and prosperity, both states and individuals are better disposed, because they are not oppressed by inescapable wants; but war, snatching away the ease of everyday life, is a violent teacher, and assimilates most men?s tempers to the conditions around them.” Thucydides goes on to give a sombre and terrifying account of the “violent teachings” of civil war: moral chaos, the abuse of political language, the collapse of due legal process. Corcyra, insignificant though it was in the grand scheme of things, turns out to reveal certain dark and permanent truths about human nature. // (Part 1. 390 words) But what exactly are these truths? Thucydides does not say. Indeed, his analysis of the “meaning” of the Corcyrean civil war is so complex and allusive that one puzzled ancient reader felt compelled to draft his own summary of what he understood Thucydides? argument about human nature to be. His – certainly wrong-headed – analysis is preserved in all our medieval manuscripts of Thucydides:

“And with civic life at that time so cast into commotion, human nature, naturally prone as it is to injustice and law-breaking, cheerfully revealed itself to be powerless over its passions, too strong for justice, and hostile to all superiority.”

Whatever Thucydides meant to say about human nature, it was certainly not that: he did not believe in the innate viciousness of the human soul. But one can sympathize with this anonymous reader. At the very outset of his great History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides expressed his hope that his history “will be judged useful by all those seeking a clear understanding of events, both those that have already occurred and those which – human nature being what it is – will occur again,

some time in the future, in much the same ways”. If his history was to be a “possession for all time”, that was because it offered lessons for the future. But even intelligent ancient readers found it hard to see quite what those lessons might be. Was his aim to offer models for political leadership – how to do it (Pericles) and how not to do it (Cleon, Alcibiades)? Was he trying to establish iron laws of history, or, instead, to show the impossibility of formulating any such laws? Was his history an indictment of Athenian democratic government per se, or a lament at the subversion of Athenian democracy by unscrupulous orators?

It is one of the great merits of Neville Morley?s Thucydides and the Idea of History to have shown quite how varied a set of “lessons” people have chosen to draw from Thucydides? work. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians took Thucydides as a model for his diligence, his secularism, and his supposedly critical attitude towards his sources (much exaggerated, it is now thought). Thomas Hobbes particularly admired his “elocution” or style and arrangement of material, by which “the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept”. The Reformation theologian David Chytraeus thought that the Corcyrean civil war “shows the clear image of our modern revolutions and internal struggles in the Church”, while for the early Victorian historian George Grote, the Corcyra episode was “especially applicable . . . to France between 1789 and 1799”. // (Part 2. 438 words)

Perhaps the most delightful of all Thucydidean homilies is to be found in Samuel Bloomfield?s dedication of his 1829 translation of Thucydides to the Duke of Wellington:

“The political lessons to be learned from this important History (suited alike to every age) are well known to be of the profoundest kind; the chief purpose of it being, practically to illustrate the evils of unbalanced democracy, and to show the necessity of that happily attempered admixture of aristocracy and democracy, which, however it might float in the imaginations of ancient theorists, was never actually embodied but in the British Constitution, whose preservation we owe to Your Grace?s military successes.”

Charles Dickens?s Mr Podsnap could not have put it better.

The chief focus of Thucydides and the Idea of History is on Thucydides as a model for history-writing between, roughly, 1500 and 1950. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of Thucydidean reception (rhetoric; partiality; usefulness). Morley?s ambition is impressive, but one cannot help but wish that he had not spread himself quite so thin. As Morley vaults back and forth between Jean Bodin (1530–96) and R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), the reader is left with little sense of the very different intellectual and cultural contexts of the writers concerned. At times, the volume comes to resemble a scrapbook of interesting things that people have said about Thucydides over the centuries (“Georg Friedrich Creuzer emphasised . . . Hermann Ulrici reported on . . . Wilhelm Wachsmuth had emphasised . . .”).

By the turn of the twentieth century, Thucydides? chief interests – politics and war – had lost their privileged place in European historiography. At the same time, Thucydides? reputation as the ne plus ultra of responsible history-writing began a slow but steady decline. Perhaps, as Morley suggests, this is simply because many of the lessons of Thucydides? history had now “been fully absorbed into the modern conception of historiography: history as a critical discipline, engaged with reality, offering a useful and value-free account of the past”. Instead, the second half of the twentieth century saw Thucydides? migration from the Humanities faculty into the Social Sciences division, where he has been welcomed with open arms by political scientists and sociologists of all stripes – Geoffrey Hawthorn among them. // (Part 3. 375 words)

Hawthorn?s Thucydides on Politics is an idiosyncratic book, mostly in a good way. The author, a former professor of international politics at Cambridge, belongs to a generation of British sociologists (Garry Runciman, Alan Macfarlane, Michael Mann) for whom intellectual omnivorousness is something of a badge of honour. “I am not a donkey,” said Max Weber once, “and I don?t have a field.” Hawthorn is not a donkey either. Over the past forty-five years, he has written about the sociology of fertility,

counterfactuals in history, East Asian and Yugoslav politics – and now, unexpectedly, has turned his attention to Thucydides.

It takes some time for the nature of Hawthorn?s interest in Thucydides to become clear. The greater part of Thucydides on Politics takes the form of an annotated summary of the contents of Thucydides? History, spiced with some well-chosen modern parallels; I didn?t know that Ken Livingstone, reflecting on his own speechifying, had compared himself to “Pericles, mayor of Athens”. But a distinctive Hawthornian vision of Thucydides does gradually emerge. For Hawthorn, Thucydides was a man with a profound (and justified) suspicion of sociological generalities of all casts. “If ?ideology? connotes a clear and coherent set of beliefs about how human affairs should more generally be, he does not reveal one.” His few explicit normative judgements on historical causes and effects “do not do him justice and one can regret that he set them down”. Although Thucydides expected the events of the Peloponnesian war to happen again, “some time in the future, in much the same ways”, this does not mean that he believed in historical laws – far from it.

“He may instead have meant that events would continue to move in unexpected ways and that those involved in them would continue to be as wise, foolish, surprised, delighted, frightened and cast down as those in his own story; that the more enduring happenings as well as the “unaccountable contingencies of human life” are at once too numerous, too varied and too contradictory to be subsumed in any but the blandest of inclusive characterisations and general explanations.”

For Hawthorn, then, Thucydides is basically Ernest Gellner in a chiton. Thucydides, like Gellner, was sceptical about grand theories of all kinds; he believed neither in “structures” nor in “rational choice”, and did not write in order to explain anything, “unless one wants in some loose sense to say that he is ?explaining? the inherent uncertainties of politics and war”. Thucydides was, in fact, the original anti-sociologist – and for precisely this reason, Hawthorn urges, is more relevant today than ever before. // (Part 4. 426 words)

Thucydides on Politics is best understood in the light of a notorious earlier work by Hawthorn – one to which, with typical perversity, he nowhere refers in the present volume. In Enlightenment and Despair: A history of social theory (second edition, 1987), Hawthorn argued that the whole project of Western sociology, from Montesquieu to Habermas, “has failed in the face of the facts”. The aim of social theory, from start to finish, has been “to answer the question of how to ground an ethical argument”. In our post-enlightenment world, lacking confidence in either pure reason or religious dogma, sociologists of both Marxist and liberal convictions have sought alternative “laws of motion” in society itself. But, Hawthorn asserts, the world “is not, if ever it was, governed by social forces; it is governed by governments”. Any search for human universals and intellectual closure is doomed to failure. History, in the last instance, is shaped by politics; politics is shaped by passions as well as interests; and passions are not reducible to sociology.

Thucydides on Politics argues that we should have listened to Thucydides all along. Thucydides was, in Hawthorn?s reading, the first writer to appreciate that intellectual closure is a mirage. For Thucydides, as for Hawthorn, practical politics decides the fates of nations, and political actors are subject to all “the limits of mind and body, the fallibilities of character and agency, the force of habit, the unforeseen and unforeseeable, and other people”. In the very last sentence of the book, Hawthorn concedes that “if my own approach to political understanding were to have a name, realism would be it”. If so, it is a realism rather closer to that of Michael Oakeshott than to Henry Kissinger?s.

Is all this persuasive? It is true that Thucydides nowhere explicitly states what the lessons we are to draw from the Peloponnesian War might be; but that is hardly a warrant for claiming that the events of his history “may have seemed to him to signify nothing beyond themselves”. And much though Hawthorn might wish it otherwise, Thucydides does offer us substantial chunks of generalizing social analysis: in his so-called Archaeology, the rigorously materialist reconstruction of early Greek history which opens the history; in his final, considered judgements on the reasons for Athens?

defeat; and in his terrifying moral pathology of civil war at Corcyra. // (Part 5. 390 words)

Hawthorn slides over the first of these (“a level of explanation that Thucydides was not again to approach”) and dismisses the second as “unsatisfactory” and “made in haste”. But this will not do. One cannot first decide what an author ought to be saying, and then dismiss every passage where he says something different as “not doing him justice”. As with many of Morley?s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians, Hawthorn?s Thucydides has something of the air of concealed intellectual autobiography about him.

It is telling that Hawthorn?s favourite book of Thucydides? History is the unfinished eighth. Thucydides? account of the first years of the “Ionian War” (413–411 BC) includes no speeches, and little sustained authorial analysis; there are more narrative loose ends, and the text ultimately breaks off in the middle of a sentence. For Hawthorn, this book is “Thucydides? most sustained and compelling exposition of practical politics”: although political stupidity and bad decision-making are everywhere in evidence, Thucydides takes few opportunities to theorize about their significance. This is, of course, exactly as Geoffrey Hawthorn would wish it. But one cannot help wondering whether his praise for this “more fluid” style of narrative makes a virtue out of incompleteness. One would not praise Schubert?s Eighth for its innovative two-movement structure.

All that said, Thucydides on Politics is the most original and thought-provoking book on Thucydides to appear in the past fifteen years. For boldness and clarity of argument, it cannot be too highly recommended. However, it does raise the question why – as Neville Morley himself remarks – so much of the most exciting and innovative recent work on Thucydides has come from outside the discipline of Classics. Since at least the 1940s, ancient historians? interest in Thucydides has been on the wane; academic monographs on Thucydides now tend to be written by literary critics, concerned with Thucydides as literature, rather than by historians engaging with him as history. At the same time, there has been a remarkable surge of

enthusiasm for Thucydides among sociologists, students of International Relations, and even anthropologists. Maybe ancient historians are not so interested in “human nature” as they used to be; maybe Thucydides? musings on democracy, inter-state relations and public morality are simply more congenial to those committed to the discovery (or falsification) of normative truths about our social world. Either way, it is hard to think of an ancient author who, at the start of the third millennium, lives on in such dark and terrible splendour. // (Part 6. 411 words)

Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman History at Wadham College, Oxford.

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