Great Authors - Literature of Ancient Greece and Jerusalem - Thucydides and the Dawn of History

Well, thank you very much. I have to say this is an interesting experience of how I engage with you and read my text Simultaneously probably not anyway We live I would suggest in a Thucydidean world Even if we don't know how to pronounce it or even if we're not necessarily aware of it. It's a world where current events Constantly raise echoes of a war two and a half thousand years ago between city-states in Greece That was chronicled by a minor Athenian aristocrat who was sent into exile after a failed military expedition We don't know very much about Thucydides, although that hasn't stopped some of his readers both ancient and modern trying to fill in the gaps Trying to deduce from his text some sense of his personality his character and then reading that Interpretation back into the text. Oh, it seems to create an image of the man who understands the world At least the more dedicated readers of Thucydides succeeding this enterprise admirably and time and again find that as He tells the story of his own times or events that he had lived through experienced observed and asked eyewitnesses about At the same time he appears Again, and again to prefigure our own world Take for example The passage known as the Melian dialogue It's one of the most famous set pieces of Thucydides account In many cases, it's the only bit that many people actually read it's a confrontation between the imperialist arrogant Athenians and the representatives of the small neutral city of Milos The Athenians simply turn up and demand that the Melian surrender or be destroyed They come up with as in this extract a range of arguments as to why the Melians should surrender immediately Almost all of which come down to the basic idea That might is right that the strong dictates the strong exact the strong do what they feel like doing and The weak simply have to accept this Thucydides uses this dialogue as the Melians shift and squirm from one desperate plea to another in the hope of persuading the Athenians that Well, perhaps they shouldn't massacre them. Can't we just be friends? Can't we just get along? Thucydides uses this dialogue in order to develop an Insight into the different pathologies of power and powerlessness how the mighty Athenians think View the world around them and speak to those they regard as their deep inferiors how the Melians Attempt to reason with power Attempts to find their way out of an impossible situation And it's Thucydides development of these themes and a number of Phrases that he coins in order to capture this situation In order to reveal the dynamics of this kind of one-sided negotiation that time and again seems reminiscent of later confrontations between the strong and the weak Military confrontations for example, so probably just the most recent the activities of Russia in the Crimea any number of newspaper commentators immediately looked to the Melian dialogue as a clue to the mentality of the Russians and to some extent as a guide to the way that Ukraine was desperately trying to reason with its more powerful neighbor But it's not only military Confrontation where the Melian dialogue seems too many to speak to our times. There is economic Confrontation this first came up a couple of years ago in the Greek economic crisis the negotiations between the all-powerful European Union and the International Monetary Fund Were felt to be treating Greece as if it was Neos treating Greece as if in the end It's ideas. It's feelings the views of its people really didn't matter the strong creditors dictate The Greeks should suffer what they must One reason of course that this was a prominent theme in discussions is the fact that the then Greek finance minister Yannis van Farkas had in fact researched the Melian dialogue in his earlier academic career as an example of game theory as a way of understanding precisely the dynamics of the relationship between Two parties whose power is very unevenly balanced whether this provided any useful ideas whatsoever for Baru Farkas's attempt to Replay the Melian dialogue with the millions coming out ahead this time seems rather unclear but certainly At least he found a title for his book on the subject And the weak suffer what they must and indeed ideas from Thucydides Putting the question mark at the end of this statement Asking whether it is always and only the powerful International bodies who will dictate terms to the small countries and their helpless population This is something which Baru Farkas develops in at least a couple of the chapters at length And now of course we might think of another negotiation between the EU and a weaker partner So it has to be said the conduct of the United Kingdom in Brexit negotiations Suggests that they believe they are actually the Athenians I should say in the context of Brexit There was also last year following the referendum reference to another famous passage in Thucydides the Miscellanean debate where the Athenians first vote to massacre the entire Population of a rebellious city and then the next day change their minds and withdraw the order At least one German commentator argued that this showed Democracies could legitimately change their minds before they do something really stupid Urging the British governments to think of Mitalini and vote again Characters from Thucydides Seem to walk the corridors of power in our own times There's Cleo for example the populist braggart Utterly unscrupulous in rousing the mob through provocative rhetoric Recklessly stoking the possibilities of war even when peace seems possible There's Alcibiades the clownish boundlessly self-confident and entitled posh boy Convinced that his reckless and self-aggrandizing plan cannot possibly fail Let the Athenian owl There is Nicias the hapless leader trying to command an enterprise that he actually argued against Sinking ever deeper into despair and indecisiveness And actually you could argue that Thucydides characters are a bit more realistic and sympathetic than some of our current caricatures of politicians, but certainly for readers of Thucydides Current events seem like a prompt or an echo time and again Thucydides appears to have Anticipated our problems our crises in the South China Seas, for example Thucydides is a name that is dropped time and again the idea of the Thucydides trap that in analyzing the causes of the war between the Athenians and the Spartans Thucydides had Identified a pattern that recurs in history that whenever Arising power an ambitious new power comes up against the established power Tensions are inevitable war becomes ever more likely Graham Allison a international relations theorist from Harvard has coined this idea this phrase and Presented it as the first statement of a fundamental truth of international relations He finds a series of later examples which seem to echo the pattern And he seeks to warn the United States government about the dangers He suggests that war is a much greater possibility Than people appear to be contemplating The tensions between the United States and China needs to be carved Because of the risks if they are not it's for this reason that the story came out this summer that people in the White House are reading Thucydides and reading Allison's version of Thucydides he is a name at the highest levels now I Have to say I have slightly ambivalent feelings about this on the one hand. Yes yet more material for the reception of Thucydides On the other hand I'm not entirely convinced that reading Thucydides is always a good idea Least of all in this context clearly. There is a risk that if the theory says war is likely The response is not to calm tensions, but to prepare hostilities Making them ever more likely I Also have a personal objection that Allison has been promoting the alleged Thucydides quote in the recent Wonder Woman film That peace is only an armistice in an endless war now. This is not Thucydides This is one of a fairly large number of entirely Spurious quotes that get his name attached to them Nevertheless recent publicity for Allison's book has made much of stills from Wonder Woman and this connection Above all however, it's Thucydides picture of political crisis of the internal breakdown of social cohesion the breakdown of relationships between different groups that seems Alarmingly prescient above all in his picture of what's known as stasis civil war within the city-state of Corsair The way that people increasingly Own loyalty to their own fraction rather than to the entire community the escalation of rhetoric the breakdown of trust the breakdown of agreed meaning of shared values The eternal power of rhetoric to Manipulate people and in Athens as in other cities during this period the eventual breakdown of the entire political system in so far as Thucydides picture of populism and faction and the fragmentation of society Rings true in so far as our world starts to appear Thucydidean It's not a very encouraging picture indeed, it brings to mind a Poem inspired by and drawing on Thucydides W.H. Auden's 1st of September 1939 Written only very shortly after that date where Auden looks at the state of the world admittedly from the fairly safe distance of New York and Despairs But also notes that this is nothing new, but this is not a new observation the third stanza on the right Exiled Thucydides knew all that a speech can say all about democracy Thucydides already recognized the dangers of populism of fascism of rhetoric and so forth but We must suffer them all again We could say indeed we must suffer them all again again But this is an important reminder That to the readers of Thucydides over the centuries since his work was Rediscovered in Europe in the Renaissance to the readers of Thucydides actually the world always looks Thucydidean our time is not in any way exceptional in this regard To go back to the example of civil war in Corsair Which can look like our own problems with post-truth post-democracy factionalism and so forth Well to the great original translator of Thucydides Lorenzo Balla in the 15th century This looks just like his own time. This is the warring Italian city-states for the theologian David Petraeus in the late 16th century Corsair shows his own time. It shows the wars of religion the struggles within the church the struggles within different states but in the book on the French Revolution Corsair provides a series of phrases and images a template for identifying what he sees as the dangers of populism and Extremism and likewise George Grote writing in the early 19th century Looking back at both Thucydides and recent events for Grote too Thucydides has Described the breakdown of a society in ways, which is clearly applicable to modern revolutions There are other examples we can come through to the early 20th century Where both German and British writers looked back to Thucydides account to understand the outbreak of the First World War and also to make use of other passages in his work to Encourage their own citizens of the rightness of the cause to encourage them to sign up for war service and so forth Order in the Second World War we've already seen in the Cold War Thucydides is taken to be the perfect expression of a bipolar world of what happens in the confrontation of two great powers Athens and Sparta the United States and the Soviet Union Actually, the match is not entirely consistent There are versions in which the United States identifies with Sparta rather than Athens but certainly as a template for understanding the state of the world and the state of international relations Thucydides is taken to have shown the way that this great power Confrontation reaches down into the smaller states caught in the crossfire but then With the end of the Cold War in 1989 Thucydides is not forgotten on the other hand He is seen as the perfect analyst of a multipolar world In which it is not just about the confrontation of the great powers It is about the complicated interrelations of many different states big and small There is a remarkable degree to which Interpretations of Thucydides change Without Thucydides ever actually being abandoned as the great authority who has foreseen later events And it persists quotes from Pericles funeral oration recur particularly in American political dialogue I completely forgot to put it on the PowerPoint, but there's a quite an entertaining rap version of Pericles funeral oration which was recited in the United States Senate after 9-11 Again, the idea that this was somehow the most apposite past text to reference in the present How do we understand this tendency this, you know, generation after generation Recognizing their own times in Thucydides Calling on Thucydides to explain or at least to elaborate upon the events of their own times One way of thinking about this is to say that Thucydides has miraculously identified universal truths of political behavior that transcend all historical change That human beings and states simply continue to behave in exactly the same way That Thucydides had identified this way and therefore everything he says will simply repeat itself in other words a relatively minor squabble in a corner of the Mediterranean Nevertheless is the microcosm of all human history that Thucydides pretty well claims that it is an alternative perspective and this isn't necessarily a contradiction of the first Alternative perspective is that Thucydides has managed to write his work in such a way As to persuade readers to keep looking for parallels and to feel that when they find them and of course if you've got any amount of Thucydides' enormous book To take their examples from and you've got the entirety of world events in your own time to match them up It's fairly easy to come up with parallels And then that serves as confirmation that persuades people that yes Thucydides has Identified something that echoes in their own time Now Thucydides does make such a claim as you can see in this passage He certainly aspires to speak to the future he certainly argues that having a true Understanding of the past that someone who reads his account of events in the war between the Athenians and the Spartans Will as a result have an understanding of events in the present and events that are still to come His work is intended to be useful. It's not the study of the past as an end in itself It's the study of the past so that we can Understand the way the world works Thomas Hobbes Producer of the first great English translation of Thucydides Identifies this very clearly and extends it to history in general that Thucydides has put down a marker For what historians should attempt to do History should instruct men and enable them by knowledge of actions past to bear themselves Prudently in the present and providently towards the future But the key question is how Thucydides may think that studying his work will teach us important things, but there is a question as to why We should believe that and there's a question perhaps a still more difficult question about what? Exactly we are supposed Now there are quite different traditions in Understanding what Thucydides purpose was and how we should evaluate it on the one hand, there is the tradition which sees him as a historian or indeed as the historian I've been slightly evasive about calling Thucydides a historian or calling his work a history Because those are not words that he himself used But modern historians have had very little hesitation in claiming Thucydides as either the second Inventor of history coming after Herodotus, but in important ways completing developing and Getting rid of various undesirable bits of Herodotus Or indeed the claim that Herodotus doesn't really count at all and it is Thucydides who has established history as it should be Thucydides is taken at least by many in the 19th century Not only to have begun the tradition of historiography but in many respects to have perfected it to have identified the basic rules and Principles and indeed the moral calling of the historian in a way, which is eternally valid As you might expect these historical readers very often have quite different Ideas about what they think Thucydides is attempting to teach us about the practice of historiography but Certainly, that is the claim But what we can learn is not so much the content of Thucydides account as what it tells us about methodology it tells us how to be historians with a very ill-defined sense that Better knowledge of the past is a good thing But there is at least one other major tradition of reading Thucydides and that is not as a historian But as a political theorist or a political thinker as someone who set out to identify the underlying principles of human life human behavior the relations between states and so forth he is treated here as the founder of a certain approach to Normative social science He is sometimes in being put forward as the founder of specific schools of thought above all the tradition of realism in international relations where Thucydides is held Really without question to have been the first realist and above all in the Melian dialogue to have set out some of the basic principles of realism That states are rational actors that we can identify their basic motivations And that the world is essentially an anarchic place in which it is indeed the powerful who dictate terms Now both of these traditions both the social scientific and the historical tradition involve very Partial readings of Thucydides. They cherry-pick the sections which make most sense to their perspective and There is also a very clear tendency to treat Thucydides as a colleague Perhaps a slightly primitive colleague But nevertheless as someone who shares a whole series of assumptions about methodology practice and disciplinary identity Particularly in the case of the political tradition. There's a drive to identify precepts and laws Even when it's quite difficult to find Thucydides actually stating any There's a certain tendency for example to take something like the Melian dialogue and the words spoken by the Athenians as If these are the views of Thucydides himself and that these are intended to be True statements about the world in other words the line for strong do what they can the weak suffer what they must However, that's translated is taken to be Thucydides view and a lesson that we should all learn Where the historical response would be this is a character in Thucydides account This is you know, he's putting words into people's mouths Not for us to believe those words and write them down as true principles, but rather for us to see this is how excessively powerful arrogant states start to think But historians for all their insistence on me. Well, it was different. It was more complicated We have to be suspicious of any attempt at trans historical generalization The historians are equally misreading Thucydides or at least reading Thucydides quite partially They generally skim over the fact That he invents such speeches that he puts words into the mouths of characters Which he quite openly admits he did not necessarily hear he makes people say what he feels it was Appropriate for them to say which is quite clearly not typical modern historical behavior In both cases these traditions place a great deal of weight on this idea that Thucydides speaks not only to the past but also to the present and future But they do understand it very differently and generally each one offers a story that May be persuasive at least within that particular discipline But which obscures the full complexity of Thucydides ideas its multifaceted nature And above all which offers a relatively straightforward message Which just happens to chime with their own traditions of practice What Could we make of Thucydides? If we try to step beyond these sort of disciplinary perspectives One thing that's very clear particularly in his opening So to speak theoretical and methodological statements in book one Is this fundamental emphasis on truth and knowledge and on the consequences of the absence of truth? the absence of knowledge Accuracy matters. It's perhaps Thucydides or a highest goal is to offer At least what he believed was a true account of what happened He notes that seeing the past clearly Is never a purely scholarly matter. It's something that is always political That having a true knowledge of the past is essential for deliberative politics And we see countless examples through his account where The Athenians mostly but also at times the Spartans and other peoples are shown to have a faulty understanding of their own situation of their own past of their own prospect and to make bad decisions as a result But we also see in Thucydides account The way that knowledge becomes politicized we have speakers coming forward to suggest The truth is not a simple matter as Thucydides tries to suggest it is it is not a simple matter of carefully and impartially Analyzing the evidence of weighing the words of different speakers against one another But rather truth is something which can be of the moments truth is situational This is certainly the sort of perspective. We're offered by a speaker like Cleo Whose skill is in making? certain things appear as truth for the sake of Persuading the Athenian assembly to follow his lead Thucydides great theme one could say is The fact that people are not very good at this sort of thinking Again and again, he offers us examples of What we could call cognitive failure and its consequences If we're going to call Thucydides a realist and there's a case for doing that then It's not in his doctrines about interstate Relations so much as his general perspective on the world This is rather what we find in Friedrich Nietzsche's account of Thucydides set up in contrast to Plato Thucydides here is presented as someone who sees the world as it is Who sees reason in reality? despite all of the temptations to look away All of the temptations to take a more optimistic or idealistic view of things Thucydides realism is a sensibility that is largely free from illusion and self-perception Which looks at humans not in a cynical manner, but in a rather sad Lamenting but realistic way to see how often and in how many different ways people fail to think fail to examine Their own beliefs and as a result fail to engage adequately or successfully with the world around them this One might say is the human thing Thucydides claim as to why his account is going to teach people is Because events tend to repeat themselves because of the human thing cataton and troponin Now sometimes that is translated as because of human nature the idea that human beings are basically predictable beings governed by laws The Greek is rather fuzzier and it seems rather to be this is what people are like people tend to Miscalculate they fall prey to optimism. They fall prey to pessimism. They fall prey to all number of emotions They make Mistakes not necessarily the same mistake, but very similar mistakes again and again in different Societies in different eras. This is what Thucydides seeks to help us recognize in multiple ways He doesn't claim that discovering the truth is easy But he does insist on its absolute necessity on the need to avoid easy answers the need to question traditions and assumptions And then we should also consider the means by which Thucydides seeks to convey this lesson to his readers In one way we could read this almost as a work of political psychology But it certainly isn't political psychology as would be recognized today Its methodology is entirely different. I return again to Thomas Hobbes Who captures this fact really sort of quite perceptively? Thucydides never digresses to read a lecture moral or political He doesn't offer precepts. He doesn't offer laws He doesn't tell people What lessons they should be drawing from his work? It's the great frustration in trying to read him as a theorist who? uncovers the underlying principles and structures of human society that He almost goes out of his way to make as few statements as possible Beyond his detailed description of what actually happens Thucydides does not attempt to teach a specific lesson Rather he places his readers in the heart of events. He gives them the vicarious experience They are left to go through To see the events to consider how things might have turned out differently To hear the different speeches the different arguments we stand in the Assembly of Athens and hear the wonderful cunning manipulative rhetoric of different politicians and feel how their arguments can seem persuasive The million dialogue we can see how in the important respects both sides are wrong both sides are Failing to understand their own situation. They're failing to be sort of sufficiently Sort of cognizant of their own biases the Athenians have the pathology of power the millions the pathology of weakness We watch this almost like a tragedy. It's one of the points where it's clear Thucydides has drawn from the tragic theater of his own age in the miscellanean debate We experience the drama of the Athenians doing the wrong thing and then the arguments which might or might not Lead them to change their minds But which also raise questions. It's not a simple good versus bad argument We can read these arguments and see that actually the arguments of claim That the Athenians should stick to their guns and teach the mitsubishi Miscellaneous lesson Actually carry some weight. They are not clearly wrong It depends on our perspective and our point of view In other words reading through Thucydides all the different episodes many of them presented in really quite subtly different ways We are educated in the Complexity of the world we see the power of different perspectives the power of rhetoric The power of tradition and assumptions the many different ways in which people reach Decisions and the many ways in which those decisions can be wrong So in this perspective there's a case to be made that everyone should simply read Thucydides Not with a preconceived idea of what they will find there not with the idea that Thucydides teaches us realism or Thucydides teaches us how to be historians But simply as far as possible to come to the text and see what happens This was actually the tradition of reading Thucydides in the United States Naval War College When he was originally introduced Partly and this is back in the 1970s He's introduced partly as a way of talking about Vietnam without mentioning Vietnam but above all as a way of introducing naval officers to complexity and ambiguity to introduce them to complex situations where there might be no right answer where there are certainly competing perspectives and simply Send them away read Thucydides come back and talk about it This is the pure encounter with Thucydides but It's not Necessarily the most popular or even successful way of doing things There are others not least because Thucydides has this unpronounceable name and the book is about to itch its thick There is the possibility of drawing on so to speak the spirit of Thucydides and incorporating this into new forms of art a Range of 20th century fiction Looks back to Thucydides in different ways Draws on his power draws on some of his ideas There's the voice of the narrator his scrupulous recording of events in Albert Camus' La Peste It becomes clear at the very end how far the narrator has been based on a version of Thucydides and of Thucydides Precepts of trying simply to set out the truth. There's also the fact simply Exploring the dissolution of a society under stress Through the depiction of a plague is taken directly out of Thucydides account of the plague in Athens the Austrian novelist Peter Hanzke Looks to Thucydides technique the ways in which he narrates events over time the changing pace and texture of events in The novel Kindergeschichte, which is you're reading the passage in the middle is Hanzke talking about how he went about writing that novel and the various other short pieces and then there's the poet and writer and Carson who in a number of different pieces has juxtaposed Thucydides and Virginia Woolf in ways, which are sometimes Recognizable and sometimes not even if you know both writers well Putting them together to explore images of war explore different ways of Representing conflict and thinking about the conflict Sometimes Thucydides represents the masculine approach compared with Woolf's feminine approach sometimes he is there as so to speak the rational historian rather than the feeling writer and Sometimes it's not clear that there is such a obvious polarity But it is taking Thucydides partly the real Thucydides so to speak of his text and partly the inherited image of Thucydides Taking that turning it into something new which nevertheless clearly draws upon and continues some of his important themes There are also examples and it's fun in terms of the world of music there are examples where the influence of Thucydides is rather more in the background not so much explicit quotation as something of the mood So we have Bob Dylan's account in his first volume of his memoirs of how he encountered Thucydides among many others and felt that Most other writers pale in Comparison, it's like nothing has changed from his time to mine another reader of Thucydides who? Immediately feels that Thucydides is somehow Anticipating his own era now the fact that The Thucydides books Dylan claims to have read do not as far as anyone has been able to establish There is still a reading of Thucydides here An idea which certainly is of his later songs seems to come through Particularly the album infidels the song blind William tell at least in its spirit is discernibly Thucydidean or indeed we could look to the Nietzschean soundscapes of Godspeed you black Emperor where even without words A certain Thucydidean perspective is discernible But we might also think and if we are convinced that Thucydides has something important to offer the present we can think about presenting it in new and more accessible way Because the one thing Thucydides is not is accessible even the loosest translation Struggles to make his sentences anything longer than a paragraph or so and Always with the risk that the original meaning is lost the translators interpretation becomes ever more dominant Even the name Thucydides if we could give him another name, it would be easier It's not easily spellable it's not Necessarily memorable Now of course making Thucydides Accessible is in a lot of ways a very un Thucydidean project He actually takes a certain amount of pride in the possibility that many readers will fail to understand What he's doing? He notes the possibility of disappointment That he has not written his work as a bit of entertainment But rather as a work for the ages. I guess actually he goes out of his way To tell some people that he doesn't actually want them as readers Partly of course as a way of persuading those who do persevere that they are getting something special but certainly every aspect of Thucydides work is written for an elite audience it is Difficult and intentionally so He would have hated soundbite culture So the irony that some of the most prominent appearances of Thucydides today are in these quotations or often misquotations Distributed around Twitter is Will most certainly horrify him That is almost the exact opposite of what he appears to be trying to teach people On the other hand in pursuing a project to Try to make Thucydides an accessible text I would take heart at least from his willingness to experiment with literary forms himself He is not a conventional writer I mentioned the inclusion of speeches now He's not the only ancient historian to include speeches But it's long been recognized that his speeches are not like those of other historians They are a long way from the historical truth of what was probably said But they work in the service of Higher understanding the speeches are part of the ways in which Thucydides leads his readers towards The experiences and lessons he wants them to learn The fact that he includes the Melian dialogue again is even further away from any conventional form of historical writing He is concerned with Writing as a means of developing understanding When he dismisses those writers who are producing a performance piece for the moment He's not dismissing the use of literary skill He's dismissing their motives that they write only for the moment rather than for posterity So With Thucydides and I think in any attempt to follow the spirit of Thucydides It's not art for art's sake or art for entertainment's sake But it can be art in the service of understanding Even if potentially it's the art of apparent artlessness Thucydides as an author disappearing at least as an obvious presence in his work So just to take the Melian dialogue for an example, we might take our cue from Varoufakis and other Pioneers in game theory who read it as a form of game theory and indeed turn it into a game You can indeed play the Athenian side of the Melian dialogue as a choose-your-own adventure At some point there will be a Melian version though I still need to work out whether there is any universe at all in which the Melians could actually win by any definition But that's part of the point turning this into a game opens up more explicitly the counterfactual Possibilities the fact that some things could have been different With Thucydides we are given just one version which Heads towards the inevitable conclusion where the Melians decides to fight and get destroyed By considering this as a game with forking paths, we can at least explore How far other possibilities might have existed in what circumstances? In what possible worlds might things have turned out differently? Could different arguments have been put forward? Could different decisions have been made? It's a way of exploring the issues of power of Justice of the different kinds of arguments that could be put forward It's also a way of exploring our own assumptions. You can play the Athenians as an Athenian So ruthlessly destroying the Melians if they stand in your way You can play the Athenians as a 21st century humanist You end up with some quite different results We can perform the Melian dialogue in one way or another and again performance sets up different Expectations it may not change the conclusion But it can put The basic drama of this negotiation of this confrontation Into new contexts we can think about the media dialogue not solely as the confrontation of two states We can think of the many other contexts in which confrontation can take place the many different situations of an imbalance of power and the different attitudes of those with power and those without Or we can simply try to think of other ways of shaking people out of some of their assumptions of juxtaposing Thucydides texts with other words emergence or objects which At least potentially put them into a different light Raise questions get people thinking Thucydides name carries authority we have at least five to six hundred years worth of people claiming him as The man who understands the world Not everybody. He's always a rather Refined taste but those who admire Thucydides have a tendency to become slightly obsessive Worshippers of Thucydides He is the man who knows the man who understands the reality of the world Even if we feel that the world is bewildering and complex There's too much happening the unexpected keeps occurring. It is comforting to feel that perhaps Thucydides understands But Thucydides is not the man with the answers He's not the man of a neat tweetable thesis about the dynamics of human history He's the embodiment of the cry of the academic that actually it's more