Confused by an unprecedented situation, we need to look to the past for enlightenment and guidance. A superficial survey of historical epidemics both reveals the terrifying nightmare scenarios of possible social collapse that may be coming our way, and offers the reassurance that humanity has faced far worse than we currently face and nevertheless pulled through. We have the enormous advantages of modern science and epidemiology and social medicine in combatting this virus, and at the same time have learnt absolutely nothing.

The most spectacular previous outbreak of this virus was in the early 20th century, born out of the chaos and destruction of WW1; earlier examples — during the civil and religious conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the violence and widespread deprivation of the French Revolution — reinforce the importance of war and political upheaval in allowing such epidemics to break out. Today, it’s impossible to ignore the role of globalization and increased connectivity, so that the virus can spread faster further through society and across ever larger areas of the world. But it’s never a simple process; viral outbreaks are often a product of war, but they are also sometimes a cause of them, as seen most clearly at the beginning of 21st century when ruinous military interventions were driven by the infection of prominent US Neocons with the virus.

Hold on a minute, you cry. The comparison with the Spanish flu makes sense, but what’s all this about an outbreak at the start of the millennium? Isn’t the novel coronavirus novel?

Ah, but I’m talking about a different epidemic, caused by a pathogen that has returned time and again over the last five hundred years to bring misery and despair to humanity: Thucydides.

Yes, of course Thucydides is a virus, spreading rapidly along modern channels of communication, turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides. Trust me, for I too have contracted this terrible disease, as well as observing others suffering from it. One simply has to look at the exponential growth in “what Ancient Athens can tell us about coronavirus” articles over the last month. It’s the phenomenon known as secondary infection, with the virus seizing its opportunity with the ideal conditions for replication created by the present crisis. The curve doesn’t show any sign of flattening out; social distancing may help with Covid-19, but as we turn to the internet to relieve the monotony of isolation, we’re all the more susceptible to Thucyd-431.

Pathologies of Pestilence

Infection presents as a wide variety of symptoms in different patients, but with the obsessive repetition of the name “Thucydides” taken as diagnostic. Some specialists have posited the existence of distinct strains, hypothesizing that the variant Thucyd-431-IR manifests mainly as pronouncements on global politics (see for example the argument that Thucydides’ interest in the plague demonstrates that Realism must have something to contribute to the discussion of coronavirus, or the repetition of the usual Thucydides Trap nonsense), whereas the baseline Thucyd-431-C focuses more on analogies to other depictions in Greek literature, with relatively mild comorbidities relating to “ancient roots” and “western civilization”.

But we might equally well distinguish variants on the basis of their differential morbidity and outlook. In the more acute form, sufferers develop a dangerous fever and sense of impending doom, casting off all restraint in their Thucydides-based predictions of the imminent collapse of society, the death of democracy, and the undermining of traditional values and national self-confidence. Even the historical information that Athens happily pursued its war for the next 27 years despite plague mortality, and that the overthrow of democracy was actually short-lived, brings no relief to such cases; they simply moan listlessly that “those who do not learn from past diseases are doomed to see them repeated,” or alternatively babble that “what remains to be seen is how the rest of us will do at this exam. The people of ancient Athens failed…”

The milder form of infection leaves patients generally, if not unnaturally, calm and cold, with dry retching of empty reassurances that ancient plagues were so much worse, that the coronavirus is clearly no worse than seasonal flu, that we don’t know enough about it, and that the worse thing we can do is get all hysterical. In this condition, sufferers may be unable to bear the touch of the lightest economic and social constraint, and certainly they spread the virus further even if its effect on them is outwardly limited.

As has been observed in other plague accounts, there is a clear tendency to cast around for simple rationalizing explanations, such as a universal tendency to cast around for simple rationalizing explanations (even if this entails claiming that Thucydides unhesitatingly attributed the Athenian plague to Apollo), and to focus on the responsibility of leaders, their need for Periclean pronoia — and the likelihood that they too have been infected with Thucyd-431. “It is hard to believe that an unsettling question does not occasionally, just occasionally, nag at the back of the prime minister’s mind: what if the surest mirror held up to our future is indeed the ancient past?” “Mr Johnson will be painfully aware, as a classicist, about how people react to such events.” Perhaps this itself is a form of rationalization, inventing a wider socio-political imperative for their compulsive Thucydides-referencing.

It all comes back to Thucydides; however trivial and pointless these effusions may be, they all serve to bolster his supposed authority, as the man who lived through the disease — and supposedly nursed other sufferers rather than simply observing them (cf. 2.48), which is a new addition to the personal legend — and recorded it meticulously. “Soberly empirical, dispassionately secular… It’s Thucydides…that we need just now.” You might as well start licking a well-used library copy of The Landmark Thucydides and then shake hands with random strangers.

Explanations

Some have suggested that the Thucydides virus may not actually be a real disease, given its multifarious and contradictory symptoms, and may instead be a literary construction for political or polemical purposes. If that were the case, though, it would be possible to identify a genuinely coherent and useful element within at least some of these interminable claims to learn lessons from the Athenian plague. This can hardly be on the medical side, given the simple fact that we actually understand how epidemics work (claims that Thucydides understood infection, supported by unhelpfully modernizing translations of key terms, notwithstanding), and when even historians of the flu epidemic of a century ago argue that history has no lessons to offer. We could focus instead on whether his account of the social and psychological consequences of epidemics might be worth exploring in depth; but that would require proper discussion of the nature and continuity of his idea of “human thing,” the differences between ancient and modern social institutions, and the basic theoretical problems of drawing analogies between past and present, none of which is even faintly visible in any of the patients discussed above.

Could it all be a conspiracy, or at least individual opportunism and mercenary intent, aiming to profit from the current crisis? It’s not impossible in some cases — I have no idea what the going rate is for an article in The Atlantic or The Sunday Times — but you don’t get any recompense for writing for The Conversation, or giving hour-long podcast interviews for that matter. Paid in exposure? It makes far more sense to see the proliferation of Thucydides hot takes as the effects of a particularly cunning virus, tricking its hosts into the internet equivalent of sneezing violently and repeatedly in a crowded subway.

Neville Morley, Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter, is making use of his current social isolation to develop an effective Thucyd-431 treatment based on a genetically-engineered non-lethal Thucydides substitute.

10 Inspirational Quotes by Thucydides

Thucydides Is a Virus was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Thucydides continues to be the ancient author for the early twenty-first century, widely cited as an authority on US-China relations, inter-state relations in general, the rise of populism and the crisis of democracy — and getting two unexpected boosts this summer, first from the inclusion of a “Thucydides” quote in Wonder Woman, and second from the news that he’s now the must-read author in the White House, even with the current revolving-door approach to personnel.

Predictably, the connection between most of these references and allusions and the “real” Thucydides is loose at best. Rather than another piece on misreading and misappropriation — I don’t see much reason to modify the argument offered in my Eidolon article from last year, “Why Thucydides?” — the aim of this “syllabus” is to give you links to the most important examples of how people are reading Thucydides in relation to contemporary politics and the most interesting and perceptive discussions, together with some minimal commentary to help contextualize them.

I’ve marked the things that I think are most essential for understanding the theme with an asterisk — there’s an awful lot of stuff here, and this is just a selection. However, it’s also worth noting from the beginning that this is a very homogeneous discussion, with a lot of Serious White Male Commentators reflecting seriously on The Pressing Issues of the Day. For all my belief that Thucydides can usefully be read through a feminist lens, as someone who seeks to expose and deconstruct the aggressive masculine logic of war and politics, the vast majority of his modern admirers are all too happy to assimilate him to that logic, and treat him without hestitation as a fellow Serious White Male Commentator.

Rather, as the great Nicole Loraux remarked, “Thucydide n’est pas un collègue…”

The “Thucydidean Moment” of 2017: Thucydides in the White House

*Michael Crowley kicks off the discussion of “Why everyone in the White House is reading Greek history” in Politico

“It’s all about the realism,” claims a Foreign Affairs review essay by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins on a new book on realism

I argue that there are several different Thucydideses in play here

*There’s good news, and bad news, argues International Relations professor Dan Drezner

Steve Bannon’s desktop password was “Sparta,” and the far right have long been obsessed with Thermopylae

Bannon’s grasp of Thucydides is predictably shaky, argues Osita Nwanevu at Slate; a Financial Times blogger is likewise unimpressed

Victor Davis Hanson offers his view of why Thucydides is the perfect author for the current regime

The Proximate Cause: the rise of ‘Thucydides’s Trap’

Harvard International Relations academic Graham Allison’s 2012 Financial Times article ($), and a New York Times article the following year, sketched out the idea that Thucydides is a key text for understanding US-China relations and the dangers of an escalating conflict.

*This was followed by a longer version in 2015 in The Atlantic, pulling together arguments he had been making for a while in a popular, easily tweetable form. This is the piece that has been most often referenced, at least until the book was published this year.

The website for Allison’s “Thucydides’s Trap” project offers more detail on the case studies supposedly proving Thucydides’ ideas about the risks of conflict when a ‘rising’ power confronts a ‘ruling’ power

This can also be seen in the wider context of Allison’s project with his Harvard colleague, historian Niall Ferguson, to develop applied history and their manifesto for a Presidential Council of Historians

Thucydides tells us that the next World War will start in the South China Sea, claim numerous newspaper articles in the light of Allison’s idea

China dismisses the idea on a regular basis.

Dan Drezner wonders why they even bothered

Gideon Rachman evokes Allison’s thesis ($) in a wider discussion of US-China relations

Seth N. Jaffe offers a bit more emphasis on the Thucydides side

Allison’s book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? hits the shelves in 2017, with cover puffs from Henry Kissinger, Joe Biden, and retired general David Petraeus.

Some of the reviews so far: Arthur Waldron rejects it on the authority of Donald Kagan while Ian Buruma is equally critical but more measured, focusing mainly on Allison’s account of China. Other reviewers have been more positive but still largely dissenting from the pessimistic view that war is more likely than not (e.g. Max Hastings in The Times ($); a longer analysis from the Lowry Institute; the Economist focuses particularly on the role of nuclear weapons in making modern conflicts less likely to escalate) — but they all accept Allison’s take on Thucydides at face value.

*A couple of useful discussions from the War on the Rocks blog, with Seth N. Jaffe and Eric Robinson

Some podcasts and recorded discussions: Allison and Petraeus, a round table at the Kennedy School at Harvard, a talk from Allison at Google, Allison and Ferguson, and Allison and Kissinger.

*Best of the lot is the “Thucydides Cage Match” from Deep State Radio, with Allison coming up against Kori Schake, as there’s actually a bit of argument for a change.

Background 1: The International Relations Tradition

Allison’s idea hasn’t come out of nowhere; since the Second World War, Thucydides has been regularly evoked as an authority figure in International Relations theory, especially associated with realism and neorealism.

General surveys of the history of reception within International Relations in Lowell F. Gustafson, ed., Thucydides’ Theory of International Relations: A Lasting Possession and Christine Lee & Neville Morley, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, especially chapters by Keene, Johnson and Ruback, with copious bibliography.

Some of the best of the specialized studies: Laurie M. Johnson, Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism; Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity; Richard Ned Lebow & Barry S. Strauss, eds., Hegemonic Rivalry: from Thucydides to the Nuclear Age; Peter J. Ahrensdorf, “Thucydides’ Realist Critique of Realism”; Richard Ned Lebow, “Thucydides the Constructivist”; Jonathon Monten, “Thucydides and Modern Realism.”

*David A. Welch argues for “Why International Relations theorists should stop reading Thucydides,” although he concludes that they’ll all carry on reading Thucydides regardless.

This is predominantly a US phenomenon, but Australia and New Zealand also buy into this tradition, with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull’s well-known admiration for Thucydides and New Zealand diplomat Vangelis Vitalis’ analysis of global politics.

Background 2: the military tradition

Another reason why many people in the White House are familiar with Thucydides is that there are so many generals, former and serving, who will have encountered him as part of their higher-level training in the war colleges.

General introduction to teaching Thucydides within Professional Military Education from 2007, with Prof. Karl Walling from the US Naval War College (which pioneered it)

Academic history and analysis: A. Stradis, “Thucydides in the War College,” in C. Lee & N. Morley, eds., Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides.

A 2016 debate over how Thucydides should be taught in the war colleges

Reflections on the continuing relevance of Thucydides from serving and former officers at The Strategy Bridge blog here and here

Thucydides features on the reading list put together by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster

Background 3: The Neocons

This isn’t the first time that Thucydides has been a favored text in the White House; he was “the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs,” according to Irving Kristol, and under George W. Bush various Thucydides fans seized the opportunity to promote his claims.

William Charles on why neoconservatives love Thucydides

Donald Kagan & Frederick W. Kagan, While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today; Donald Kagan, Thucydides: the Reinvention of History, with Mary Beard’s NYRB review

Victor Davis Hanson, An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism and A War Like No Other: how the Athenians and Spartans fought the Peloponnesian War, savagely critiqued as an apology for the invasion of Iraq in The American Conservative

Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American decline and the politics of deflection, Chapter 2 on Kagan and the idealization of Athens.

John A. Bloxham, Thucydides and US Foreign Policy Debates after the Cold War, Chapter 3.

Some other Kagans, still pushing a similar line of argument in 2016

An Alternative View: Thucydides and Populism

Various people see parallels between Donald Trump, Cleon, and Athenian populism (with a mixture of Thucydides and Aristophanes).

Peter Jones on Donald Trump and Cleon for The Spectator; *Elizabeth Markovits on Trump, Cleon, and “telling it like it is” for the Washington Post; Sean Braswell for Ozy; Chris Mackie for The Conversation; James Romm for The New Yorker; Glen Bowersock for NYRB; Michael Weinman for Public Seminar…

And, finally, some of my thoughts on why this may not be entirely helpful.

Broader Context: Other Aspects of the Modern Reception of Thucydides

Recorded lecture: Neville Morley, “Thucydides in the Modern World”

Katherine Harloe & Neville Morley, eds., Thucydides in the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to Today.

Christine Lee & Neville Morley, eds., Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides.

And that Wonder Woman quote..?

Yes, Graham Allison and his publicity team are trying to use it to push Destined for War, and inevitably it’s nonsense.

Neville Morley is Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of books on both ancient economic history and classical reception, including Antiquity and Modernity and Thucydides and the Idea of History, and blogs at thesphinxblog.com.

Why Thucydides?

Thucydides and Contemporary Politics: A Syllabus was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Emperor Claudius was notorious for his inconsistency and emotional instability; “sometimes ill-advised and hasty, occasionally capricious and like a lunatic,” as the biographer Suetonius put it. Manipulated by family members and close advisers who knew how to play on his vanity to enrich themselves and further their own interests, Claudius built projects “that were grandiose rather than necessary” and made populist gestures like a crack-down on aliens usurping the privileges of citizenship. “Cruel and bloodthirsty by temperament,” he didn’t hesitate to call for the use of torture in interrogations. His cowardice and suspicion caused him to see enemies everywhere. He had no regard for decorum or tradition in his dealings with anyone: “In his speech and his actions he often showed such great insensitivity that he was thought neither to realize nor to care to whom or with whom or at what time or in what place he was speaking.”

Recognize anyone? We’ve had Trump as Caesar, Augustus, Caligula, Nero and Commodus (and Caracalla, but only on Twitter). Cherry-picking autocratic anecdotes from Suetonius, the Historia Augusta, and elsewhere to portray him as an elderly, irascible tyrant seems no more dubious or unhelpful than cherry-picking them to portray him as a younger, unbalanced tyrant. But also no less dubious and unhelpful…

Why are so many people responding to current events with Roman analogies? The much-cited fact that the Founders knew their ancient history and drew on Republican ideas in designing the United States Constitution is scarcely an explanation, unless you buy the implausible idea that the country is destined to follow exactly the same historical trajectory as its ancient model. I suppose one might take comfort in the fact that this is a change from comparisons with the Nazis — but with a strong suspicion that the evocation of Roman emperors is basically a Hitler analogy for people who are far too sophisticated and self-aware to make Hitler analogies.

We classicists have an understandable tendency not to look a gift horse in the mouth when the wider culture takes an unexpected interest in our subject. We think that people would find our material fascinating and illuminating, if only they’d take the trouble to investigate it. So, while we may get annoyed at some of the more ridiculous misconceptions, appropriations, and inherited absurdities being peddled by journalists and popular historians, we’re most likely to see this development as something to celebrate: if not an opportunity to get ourselves a bit of publicity as well, then at least a chance for our discipline to step into the limelight and attract new students. Surely we want people to be talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans?

I’m not so certain — and not only because they may not be the sort of people we would actually welcome as lovers of the Classics (if the gift horse turns out to be a Trojan one…). We need to think about the image of the ancient world that is being projected, and its implications for our understanding of the present, rather than assuming that all publicity is good publicity. We need to think about what, if anything, this is doing to the image of our discipline — including the possibility that it is actively damaging to all but a few of us. Finally, we need to take a step back and try to think about this moment of politicized Romanitas in a wider context. How will this period look to the serious reception scholars and historians of ideas of the future — assuming that in a century or so there are still some around to take an interest?

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just of their own free will; not under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and handed down. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

In the opening section of his 1852 essay “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Karl Marx developed — almost in passing — a theory of reception and the appropriation of the past. He identified a human tendency to “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes” to present their own times and actions in “time-honored clothing and borrowed language.” The past that was summoned back to life in this way was not necessarily classical — Martin Luther, he noted, “masked himself as the Apostle Paul” in his campaign against the established Church — but in the case of modern France, it was Rome that had provided the models: the Republic for the leading figures of the Revolution, and the Empire for Napoleon.

This was not, of course, an actual revival of the values and virtues of ancient Rome, but the reenactment of an inherited tradition. It was not a sham, nor was it, in Marx’s view, an attempt to escape from the present into an imagined past. Rather, he saw these borrowed costumes and slogans as a genuine source of inspiration for those who adopted them, a means of creating something new using the old language:

In the classically austere traditions of the Roman republic, its gladiators found the ideals and the images, the self-deceptions that they needed … to keep their enthusiasm on the high plane of the great historical tragedy.

The men of the French Revolution needed a model of heroism, a precedent for their struggle to defeat monarchy and establish a new order. As Marx noted, it is precisely at such moments of crisis that people need reassurance that what they are attempting is possible, because it’s been done in the past. The evocation and appropriation of Roman ideals and images could in this way be creative and dynamic: glorifying the new struggles rather than parodying the old, and finding once more the true spirit of revolution.

We can look at the American Revolution and the foundation of the United States through a similar lens: the ghosts of ancient Rome watched over the cradle of this young Republic too, providing a template for its institutions and political vocabulary. Can we understand our own times and their sudden fondness for Roman analogies in the same way? The historical incoherence and fictional nature of these ancient images are harder to ignore than they once were; the anachronism is all too obvious. Perhaps the keyboard warriors of the alt-right draw genuine inspiration and self-confidence as well as silly pseudonyms from their kitsch fantasies of Roman heroism, presenting their prejudiced screeds as a revival of Republican virtue, and maybe even believing it themselves — but this adolescent toga party atmosphere doesn’t carry weight with anyone else.

However, it’s the fact that liberals and leftists also seem happy to dress up current developments as a sword-and-sandal epic that is most puzzling. At best, it’s a way of mocking Trump and his behavior as the epitome of imperial decadence, an apparently harmless in-joke for those with a bit of classical knowledge. Perhaps it’s also a way of expressing fantasies of his downfall, humiliation and murder without losing the moral high ground to those who actually advocate political violence.

But thinking about our situation in this way locks us into the most conventional sort of Great Man theory of history, according to which events are shaped by the decisions, actions, and pathologies of a few larger-than-life individuals. It’s a conception of historical development that suits the cheerleaders for American Renewal, with their suggestion that the answer to the world’s problems is someone fearless and decisive enough to face up to the paper tigers of globalization, liberalism, and international norms. But it has nothing to offer anyone who sees the world in more complex or democratic terms.

It’s difficult not to be reminded of Tacitus’ comments in the Annals on the writing of history under autocracy: the way that it becomes increasingly focused on the most trivial actions and pronouncements of the autocrat, a monotonous litany of “cruel orders, unremitting accusations, treacherous friendships, innocent men ruined,” because that is perceived as the most useful and relevant knowledge. By adopting the same perspective, we reduce ourselves to the position of the senatorial elite, horrified but fascinated by the outrageous behavior of the ruler and the cheers of the mob, struggling to interpret the smoke and mirrors of the imperial court.

Of course, we’re far enough away from the center of power that our views as individuals are of little concern to the ruler, limiting both the risks and the opportunities presented by the new order, compared to the position of the elite under the Principate. We’re still in the early days of a rapidly changing situation — shortly after I first wrote that last sentence, Trump started threatening to defund UC Berkeley — and the more that the regime starts to interest itself in universities and colleges, the more US-based classicists will be faced with questions of sycophancy, opportunism, and compromise.

But in that case, it’s all the more important to have a clear understanding of the situation, rather than implicitly attributing everything to the pathology of the Emperor and generating conspiracy theories about the intentions of individual courtiers. To do that is an admission of defeat, a loss of belief in any alternative, an intellectual abdication of agency.

The focus of Marx’s essay was not on the French Revolution or the reign of Napoleon I, but on the successor regime of Napoleon III, established after a coup d’état in 1851. In Marx’s view, this period manifested as a caricature of the earlier regime. The French people found themselves forced back into a defunct epoch, directionless, assailed by all the old dates, names, and edicts, a parody of earlier glories. Images of the past now became a trap, an impediment to real understanding or change: “The nation feels like the mad Englishman in Bedlam, who thinks he is living in the time of the old Pharaohs and daily bewails the hard labor he has to perform in the Ethiopian gold mines.” He is imprisoned, true enough — but has no grasp of the reality of his situation, and so no hope of any escape or relief.

In a similar manner, we risk deluding ourselves, or at least limiting our perspective, by our choice of historical analogies. Perhaps through mere force of habit, we resort to antiquated conceptions of autocrats and their power; the inherited belief that these inherited images can help us make sense of the world. This enables us to depict the tyrant in lurid anecdotes, with the effect of magnifying his power and disguising its true nature. The implication is that if we want a way out, we face a stark choice between capitulation and assassination.

There are plenty of ways in which the study of the Roman Principate could be useful and illuminating, that are obscured by an excessive focus on the individual autocrat. If we take a structural view of the system, rather than fetishizing the different personalities and their excessive behaviors, we can then explore interesting issues around the relationship between theoretical and effective power under autocracy, the limits of knowledge and control, the necessity of delegation and hence the constant obsession with trust and loyalty, the dependence on popular acclamation, the forms of rhetoric and coercion, and so forth.

The present regime is not the Roman Principate reborn; far too many things have changed for that to be remotely plausible. But first-century Rome and present-day Washington can be seen as comparable systems in certain important respects, so that historical understanding of the ancient example may suggest possible interpretations of present developments, or at least raise useful questions. This is only plausible if we move beyond colorful anecdotes and glib polemical analogies to develop an explicit comparative analysis, in collaboration (or at the very least dialogue) with those studying similar developments in other contexts.

Being a good classicist under a bad emperor is not only a matter of opposing attempts at appropriating what’s left of the classical legacy for dubious ends — that’s a largely self-interested enterprise, protecting our discipline from such associations. It is also a matter of recognizing the risks of complicity, when we introduce eye-catching but vacuous analogies to the general confusion and uncertainty. As Marx suggested, we need to strip off all superstition about the past, including the instinctive belief that every classical echo is interesting and productive.

Neville Morley is Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of books on both ancient economic history and classical reception, including Antiquity and Modernity and Thucydides and the Idea of History, and blogs at thesphinxblog.com.

Why Thucydides?

What Can Karl Marx Tell Us About Comparing Donald Trump to Roman Emperors? was originally published in EIDOLON on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The War That Never Ends. The War That Still Goes On. The titles John Barton has used for his staging of extracts from Thucydides (with some additions from Plato), in 1991 and then in 2006, are disturbingly and despairingly perceptive.

The title of the original productions in 1965 and 1967 was simply “The Peloponnesian War.” But the Peloponnesian War has never ended — in the sense that 2500 years of subsequent history can seem like a mere repetition of its cardinal events, occurring over and over again in more or less the same form. People and their societies remain hidebound by ‘the human thing’, a propensity to irrationality and violence, and so the nightmare continues. But still more we see the persistent influence of the chronicler and analyst of that war, the man who has persuaded us to think of history in these terms. The War still goes on because we still read Thucydides.

If anything, the specter of Thucydides has loomed larger in political discussions over the last few years than it ever has before. The Melian Dialogue is the go-to analogy for any situation where two parties in a conflict have different levels of power: it’s been applied to Russia’s confrontation with Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, to the struggle between Greece, Germany and the European Union (the title of former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ latest book: And The Weak Suffer What They Must?), and to the ongoing wars in and around Syria. The polarization of political cultures across the western democracies, with the increasing extremism of rhetoric and threatened or actual violence, regularly summons up comparisons with the civil war at Corcyra; the rise of popularism brings mention of Cleon and Alcibiades. Any new development in the South China Sea, and more or less any discussion of US-China relations, encourages discussion of “The Thucydides Trap,” Graham Allison’s idea that the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War offers a template for “power transition theory” and hence reveals the serious risks of war between the Rising Power and the Established Power — or not. Most recently, the British vote to leave the European Union has prompted references to the Melian Dialogue (EU as tyrannical empire), the Sicilian Expedition (emotional and irrational decision-making leading to disaster), Cleon and Alcibiades (various leading politicians in the Leave campaign), and Mytilene (the hope that the decision can somehow be reversed) — as well as setting up Thucydides as the standard-bearer for a return to Truth in politics.

Why Thucydides? There is, after all, a persuasive argument for not bothering with any ancient writers in considering the present, except for rhetorical purposes; we are surely now well aware of the gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, in Reinhart Koselleck’s terms, of the vast differences between ancient and modern, that undermined the idea of exemplarity and historia magistra vitae (“history as the teacher of life”) back in the nineteenth century.

Consider the different circumstances under which contemporary politics take place: hugely greater numbers of people, powerful forms of mass communication, higher levels of education, and radically different conceptions of freedom, rights, law, and so forth. Or the context of international relations: their scale (global, rather than just a tiny corner of the Mediterranean) and the level of integration of world systems, the speed of travel and communication, the development (however patchy) of international institutions, and above all the existence of nuclear weapons. All of these factors suggest that a 2,500-year-old text is unlikely to have purchase on most aspects of contemporary reality.

Even if we develop a means of overcoming these arguments about historical change and difference, by positing an underlying universal “human nature” or eternal ahistorical laws of inter-state relations — why Thucydides? Why not Aristotle, who offers explicit and would-be universal theories of states and political behavior? Aristotle’s disparagement of historiography as relating only “what Alcibiades did and what he suffered,” focusing solely on the individual case and not on general transferable principles, might be considered unfair by historians. But that is what Thucydides offers: an account of the events and leading individuals of a particular war.

Moreover, Thucydides’ work is long, complicated, and forbidding (even in translations that strive to make it accessible), and often rather boring — admittedly characteristics that could also be ascribed to Aristotle as well. But why should any such author be widely cited today? Classicists are of course predisposed to believe in the relevance and importance of the authors we treasure — but the fact that this view is manifestly not widely shared beyond the discipline, and certainly not in the worlds of ‘proper’ politics and policy-making, ought to give us pause when we encounter an exception.

The answer I suspect many devotees of Thucydides would give is that his work is painfully relevant to contemporary issues and events. I can’t claim to be immune to this tendency; it is difficult not to be reminded of Thucydides’ account of factionalism and extremism in Corcyra when viewing contemporary UK and US political discourse, or of the appalling logic of the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue when considering a situation in which one party holds power over another. But we need to push this inquiry further: if his work, or key episodes in it, are relevant, why is that the case? Is it a quality in the events themselves, that they do indeed echo or repeat those of two and a half thousand years ago — or is it a feature of our interpretation of events, a predilection to understand the world through Thucydides?

The text itself primes us to read it in this manner. In the opening sections of Book 1, Thucydides establishes his authority, emphasising the reliability of his account (not least by disparaging the accounts of others and noting the tendency of most people to believe the first thing they hear — his readers will of course know better). To a modern audience, this looks like the birth of critical historiography: skeptical, rationalizing, impartial. When Thucydides then makes his claim about the usefulness of his account, we are inclined to take it seriously: not to accept it at face value, but to keep it in mind as a possibility. That, one might suggest, is the real “Thucydides trap.” When we are told to look for parallels between past events and present circumstances, we often find them.

Of course, different readers find different things. Consider the example of the Corcyrean stasis: at different times, this has been perceived as an exact parallel to warring Italian city states in the Renaissance, the wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the French Revolution and Orwell’s 1984. Thucydides’ method creates the conditions for confirmation bias: primed to expect parallels and analogies, we latch onto features of a particular episode that echo our present experiences and ignore those that don’t — and we focus on those episodes that strike a chord with the present at this specific moment, untroubled by the fact that most of his account, most of the time, says nothing at all to us about our lives.

Until recently, Thucydides has never been a truly popular writer —his work is too difficult and complex (which is part of his appeal for those who do chose to become his acolytes). But there is a long tradition of important intellectual figures praising his insights and seeking to deploy them. Since antiquity, but certainly since the Renaissance, a powerful image of Thucydides as guide, authority and model has become established. It’s an image that has changed over time, as new conceptions of intellectual authority have developed and Thucydides has been reinterpreted accordingly. It’s an image that is often contradictory; most obviously in our era, where he is represented in modern disciplinary terms as a quintessential humanist historian, as a pioneering figure of normative social science, and as a Straussian political philosopher (among other guises).

Far from canceling each other out or undermining Thucydides’ standing, these contradictions seem almost to enhance his authority. Readers in political science insist he is one of them, rather than a detail-obsessed historian, in his drive to identify the underlying laws of human behavior — but they happily co-opt his reputation among historians for critical analysis and veracity to support their readings. Historians reject the simplistic, ahistorical interpretations offered by International Relations theorists — but still cite them as evidence of Thucydides’ significance. The existence of incompatible conceptions of his work acts as a spur to push arguments about what he really meant further, not to question their premise. Even the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, arguing against what he saw as the pernicious influence of Thucydides’ reductivism and denial of culture, then set about re-writing him in a more congenial form, co-opting him into the anthropological tradition, rather than, say, resorting to Herodotus instead.

Thucydides becomes a repository for whatever intellectual values his readers hold sacred. Although the proliferation of quotations (genuine or spurious) and passing references on Twitter and in newspaper op eds elicits a knee-jerk “actually it’s a lot more complex and sophisticated than that” response, that rarely leads anyone to reconsider their own appropriation of his authority or its application to the present. We follow Thucydides’ instructions on how we should read and understand him — reassured by the fact that Serious People have done the same — and we discover that it works. Viewing the world through a Thucydidean lens confirms that the world is as he described it.

That worries me. My main research interest in this field is the history of reception, the different ways in which Thucydides has been understood in the modern world. I don’t have much at stake in arguments about whether or not the social science approach is a betrayal of the ‘real’ Thucydides and what his text really means; rather, it represents an interesting reading of a text that is surprisingly open to a variety of very different interpretations and seems to draw its readers down similar paths. The question of how readings of Thucydides have shaped how social sciences uses and thinks about the past is much more important to me than whether in some (any) sense those readings are “correct.”

So every Thucydides reference, every analogy with Melos or Corcyra or Cleon, is just another bit of data as far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless… I do believe that Thucydides can be useful, but not like this.

Thucydides’ account offers (whether or not it was his intent) a representation of the world as complex and unpredictable, of society as fragile and under threat, of human beings as complicated and prone to emotion, and of deliberation and decision-making as difficult — all of which are perhaps even more the case today than they were in fifth-century BCE Greece. Reading his text is, and should be, a constant challenge; an exercise in thinking through ambiguity and uncertainty. It is a tool (by no means the only available tool) for developing the intellectual capabilities we need today more than ever.

But almost every invocation of episodes and ideas from his work makes the opposite move: simplifying the world, reducing variation to a single principle, erasing historical difference. This can be rhetorically persuasive and powerful, but it’s rarely helpful.

Moreover, a world in which Thucydides feels relevant and prescient is, almost by definition, an unhappy, insecure world, where things seem to be falling apart and out of control. “Exiled Thucydides knew…,” W.H. Auden claimed in September 1, 1939. The idea that nothing has changed in two and a half thousand years, that we must simply endure the same cycle of pain and grief, is profoundly depressing — but at least this holds out the hope that the cycle can be understood, that it is not just random chaos or “one damned thing after another.”

This is perhaps the most significant answer to the question, “Why Thucydides?” We want to believe that someone understands what is happening.

Neville Morley has taught ancient history at the University of Bristol for more than twenty years, and is shortly moving to the University of Exeter; he’s also Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of books on both ancient economic history and classical reception, including Antiquity and Modernity and Thucydides and the Idea of History, and blogs at thesphinxblog.com.

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