Once Again for Thucydides

Some Thucydides resources I’ve come across.

First, I’ve been having another look at Peter Handke’s Once Again for Thucydides, which consists of a series of ‘micro-epics’ in which the Austrian writer (following the technique of Thucydides) with painstaking precision, anchored to time and place, observes the minutiae of human and natural life and ascribes epic meaning to them. These are intense pieces, parts of a travel journal taking in the Balkans, Spain and Japan, which invite you to (literally) see the world differently, more vividly, with the eyes of a painter, a good painter dedicated to detail and the pursuit of essence. (Read some of the 17 pieces here).

The classical historian Neville Morley has written this essay on the influence of Thucydides on Handke, which I haven’t been able to access fully, but the abstract reads:

‘Noch einmal für Thukydides, a collection of prose pieces by the Austrian writer Peter Handke, invites reflection on the history of his engagement with this classical author. In Kindergeschichte [Child Story], he draws on a reading of Thucydides as a war narrative in order to solve the problems he experienced in telling the story of the relationship between a father and daughter, interpreting the History of the Peloponnesian War as an account not of violence but of decisive moments and the developing characters of two peoples. In this book as elsewhere, Handke is commonly read as repudiating all history in favour of myth and mysticism, but in fact he draws upon Thucydides’ approach to history as a means of describing, understanding and exorcizing the past. This theme is pursued further in Noch einmal, where he also combines critique and homage in an exploration of Thucydides’ style and the theme of ‘realism’ (and its limits) in the depiction of events. His reading of Thucydides differs significantly from the prevailing modern traditions of reception; and, unlike those who revere the ancient author solely as an analyst and critic, Handke explores what it might mean to write as a modern Thucydides.’

On the unveiling of a monument in London to RAF Bomber Command, Morley also had this piece published on Thucydides. It pays particular attention to Pericles’ funeral speech (i.e. the speech the Athenian statesman gave on the internment of those Athenian soldiers who fell in the early part of the war against Sparta). Morley describes the funeral speech as a ‘masterpiece of rhetoric’ deployed down the years to justify the sacrifices demanded of a population at war. It is striking, Morley says ‘how far the oration subordinates individuals to the collective good’ and how Pericles’ sentiments ‘reflect a thoroughly un-modern conception of the relationship between the citizen and his community. One might suppose that, at least within the portion of the ideological spectrum that is suspicious of state power, they would raise doubts about Pericles’ political tendencies.’

Morley adds:

‘the oration is extremely (and deliberately) vague about the actual machinery of the Athenian state. Its grand statements about the power of the people, equality before the law, and emphasis on ability rather than class can be co-opted by any nation that chooses to call itself a democracy.’

Now, anyone who’s read my post on Robin Lane Fox’s analysis of Pericles’ funeral speech – which Lane Fox says projects a laudable balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility – and my presentation (and critique) of the even more penetrating interpretation of the oration put forward by Cornelius Castoriadis – in which the Greek philosopher portrays Pericles as describing an entwined city and citizenry that aims to create human beings living with beauty, living with wisdom and loving the common good – will realise that Morley’s depiction of the speech as patriotic tub-thumping or a rationale for totalitarianism is banal, superficial and inept, utterly failing to grasp the power of Pericles’ oration and what it reveals about Athens, its state, citizens and democracy.

Finally, the video above is a BBC production from 1991 of John Barton’s The War that Never Ends, an adaptation/dramatisation of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, with some Plato thrown in. It is quite good.

Homer against realpolitik. On JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins

JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins is an excellent account, elegantly written, of the first 10 years of the Peloponnesian war (431-421 BC), which questions Thucydides’ renowned assertion that the ‘truest cause of the war between Athens and Sparta was the growing greatness of the Athenians and the fear that this inspired, which compelled the Lacedaemonians to go to war’.

Thucydides’ ‘realpolitik’ Lendon points out, has informed analyses of conflict for centuries and has held particular sway over modern American strategists and international relations gurus.

However, Lendon believes that in order to understand the causes and conduct of the Peloponnesian war it is necessary to go beyond ‘realist’ doctrines and insist on the centrality of Homeric values to the motivations of fifth century Greeks – with the emphasis on rank, honour, prestige, competitiveness, vengeance and shaming.

Reasserting Homer not only presents us with a more compelling portrait of classical Greek culture, self-perception and psychology, but also provides us with a valuable paradigm for appreciating the motivations behind all wars and conflict.

Wars are often fought, if we follow Lendon (and Homer), not for pragmatic reasons, in struggles over power, resources or conflicting interests, but for the sake of reputation, national self-esteem, pride and out of wrath and revenge, the latter for perceived injustices that may have been inflicted decades or even centuries ago.

Furthermore, by rescuing the Peloponnesian war from ‘realist’American scholars, who regard the conflict as a ‘power struggle’ between democratic Athens and totalitarian Sparta – and want, in the process, to identify dynamic, open American society with Athens and depict its enemies as embodying grim and stolid Sparta – Lendon asks us to reconsider the modern tendency to extol the virtues of Athens and denigrate or caricature the Lacedaemonian way of life.

For Lendon, the Peloponnesian war was a conflict the Spartans were reluctant to fight and sought to resolve at every opportunity, while charges of war-mongering, brutality, hubris and arrogance stick more to Athens. The noblest and most sympathetic character of the period was not the paradigmatically democratic Athenian leader Pericles but the moderate king of Sparta, Archidamus.

Above is a podcast of JE Lendon in conversation with Bill Buschel (http://billbuschel.wordpress.com/) regarding Song of Wrath. The show was first broadcast on Hellenic Public Radio in New York in 2011.

And for more discussion emanating from Song of Wrath, go here.

Thermopylae, the Persian invasions and Greek triumphalism

Above is a lecture from Jeremy McInerney of the University of Pennsylvania on the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC) in which, famously, a small group of Greek warriors led by Leonidas’ 300 Spartans, resisted for three days a vastly superior force of invading Persians, dying heroically to the last. It’s a seminal moment in Greek and European history that McInerney provides a good introduction to, placing it within the wider context of the Persian invasions of Greece – the Ionian revolt, Marathon, Salamis, Plataea and so on – the repulsion of which is widely considered to have resulted in an upsurge of Greek self-confidence that paved the way for the flowering of Greek culture that continues to resonate to this day. 

In the last 10 minutes of the lecture, however, McInerney claims that apart from the extraordinary vitalism of Greek culture that flowed in the aftermath of the defeat of the Persians, he also detects the emergence of an overweening and deplorable triumphalism in which Greeks developed a contempt for the East that has never been erased from Western discourse – and McInerney points to the war on Islamic terror and the recent cartoon film, 300, which purports to be about the Spartans at Thermopylae, as examples of this. 

McInerney’s condemnation of the Greeks is nonsense. 

Not only was swaggering pride not something the Greeks lacked before the Persian invasions, but it is also characteristic of Greek culture, beginning with Homer, that this conceit was tempered by self-criticism and objectivity. Aeschylus’ Persians is anything but patriotic tub-thumping and even Herodotus, in whose Histories the Persian invasions are documented, was censured, most notably by Plutarch in his Of Herodotus’ Malice, for favouring the barbarians and maligning the Greeks. 

Cornelius Castoriadis: Why Pericles Matters

I mentioned in my previous post on Robin Lane Fox’s defence of Pericles and his funeral oration that the Athenian statesman’s address is also regarded by the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis as ‘the most important political monument of political thought I have ever read’.

And, indeed, it’s worth dwelling on why Castoriadis believes this because in so doing we can make an important amendment to Lane Fox’s interpretation of Pericles’ funeral oration, particularly that part of it where he refers to Athenian culture and education inculcating among Athenians a ‘love of beauty’ and ‘love of wisdom’ as part of a process of creating better and fuller citizens.

Essentially, Castoriadis argues that the traditional translation (which Lane Fox ascribes to) of Pericles’ Philokaloumen gar met’euteleias kai philsophoumen aneu malakias – we love beauty without ostentation and we love wisdom without being soft – is too literal and limits our understanding of what Pericles is saying and of the nature of Athenian democracy.

Rather, Castoriadis says:

‘Pericles’ sentence is impossible to translate into a modern language. The two verbs of the phrase can be rendered literally by “we love beauty… and we love wisdom”, but the essential would be lost. The verbs do not allow this separation of the “we” and the “object” – beauty or wisdom – external to this “we”. The verbs are not “transitive,” and they are not even simply “active”: they are at the same time “verbs of state.” Like the verb to live, they point to an “activity” which is at the same time a way of being or rather the way by means of which the subject of the verb is…

‘Pericles does not say we love beautiful things (and put them in museums), we love wisdom (and pay professors or buy books). He says we are in and by the love of beauty and wisdom and the activity this love brings forth, we live by and with and through them – but far from extravagance, and far from flabbiness.

‘The object of the institution of the polis is for [Pericles] the creation of a  human being, the Athenian citizen, who exists and lives in and through the unity of these three: the love and “practice” of beauty, the love and “practice” of wisdom, the care and responsibility for the common good, the collectivity, the polis.

‘Among the three there can be no separation; beauty and wisdom such as the Athenians loved them and lived them could only exist in Athens. The Athenian citizen is not a “private philosopher,” or a “private artist,” he is a citizen for whom philosophy and art have become ways of life.’

The Greeks, Castoriadis says, never stopped asking: what is it that the institution of society ought to achieve? It is a question to which the Athenians answered, he says, in this way: the creation of  human beings living with beauty, living with wisdom, and loving the common good.

Socrates on how to reverse the decline of Athens

I mentioned in a previous post how, for classical Greeks, identity, self-perception and psychology were significantly configured by a mix of history and myth.

In fact, I came across a good illustration of this when reading Xenophon’s account of a conversation between Socrates and Pericles the Younger, on the subject of how to revive a declining Athens.

The dialogue would have taken place towards the end of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was staring defeat in the face, and, obviously, before 406 BC when the aforementioned Pericles the Younger (son of Aspasia and the outstanding statesman of Athens’ Golden Age, Pericles) was tried and executed, along with five other generals in charge of Athenian forces at the naval Battle of Arginusae (406 BC).

The battle was brilliantly and surprisingly won by Athens, but the commanders, after they had allegedly neglected to rescue shipwrecked Athenian sailors and retrieve the Athenian dead from the sea, were charged with dereliction of duty. The kangaroo court and subsequent execution of the six amounted to another in a long line of shameful and self-destructive decisions by the Athenian citizenry during the Peloponnesian war, (a decision which, again, in true Athenian style, the Athenians were to repent… at leisure. Indeed, both men in Xenophon’s dialogue – Socrates and Pericles the Younger – were unjustly executed, via hemlock, victims of the degenerative tendency of Athenian democracy).

Anyway, as I said, what interested me in the exchange is that Socrates’ remedy for reversing Athenian decline – which is, essentially, a conservative, nationalist remedy (let’s assume it’s not the ultra-conservative Xenophon putting words into the philosopher’s mouth) – is based on an appeal to Athenians’ historical and mythical past. Socrates not only stresses the lessons to be learned from Athenian heroism in the Persian wars, fought only two to three generations previously; but also recommends for mimesis the great deeds of legendary figures such as Erechtheus and Theseus. The conversation, an extract of which is below, gives us a strong sense of the discourses at work in formulating Greek identity.

SOCRATES: Since we wish them [the Athenians] to strive to be the first in virtue, we must then show them that it is their special inheritance from olden days, and that by striving for this they may become superior to all men.

PERICLES: How can we teach them this?

SOCRATES: By reminding them, I think, that their earliest ancestors of whom tradition tells, were really as great as they have heard.

PERICLES: Do you refer to the judgment of the gods which Cecrops and his men pronounced because of their virtue?

SOCRATES: I mean also the birth and childhood of Erecthheus, and the war he waged against the men from all the adjacent lands, and the war of the sons of Heracles against the inhabitants of the Peloponnese. I refer, also, to all the wars waged in Theseus’ time, in all of which our ancestors proved clearly that they were better than their enemies. If you wish, I mean what their descendants did later, a little before our time: by themselves, they fought against the masters of all Asia and Europe as far as Macedonia, against men who possessed the greatest power and wealth the world had ever seen and who had performed the most daring deeds…

For more discussion emanating from JE Lendon’s Song of Wrath: the Peloponnesian war begins, go here.

The limits of Pericles’ living with beauty and living with wisdom

A final word, for the time being, on Pericles, his funeral oration and Athenian democracy.

Having taken into account Robin Lane Fox’s lecture on Why Pericles Matters, which wants to rescue Athenian democracy from modern critics – determined to subject it to their anti-colonial, anti-imperialist fixations – and assert the radical and unique nature of Periclean Athens; and Cornelius Castoriadis’ insistence that we transform Pericles’ famous dictum, of loving beauty and loving wisdom, into loving and living with beauty and loving and living with wisdom; it is important to note that when Pericles speaks of Athens and the Athenians in the funeral oration, he is speaking of a vision for Athens and Athenians. Not that Pericles is conjuring up a utopia, because Pericles with his democratic reforms, his revival of the city’s monuments and subsidisation of the arts, put flesh and bones on his vision, but a vision is what his exhortations in the funeral oration amounts to.

Thus, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of believing that Athens was a pristine society that lived up to Pericles’ hopes for it. Indeed, although there is a chronological justification for including Pericles’ funeral oration so early in Thucydides’ account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, its early mention also allows us to see how, through the next 27 years of the Peloponnesian war, Athens and the Athenians fell catastrophically short of Pericles’ advice to love and live with wisdom and love and live with beauty.

We also note that Pericles’ vision of an entwined city and citizenry was hotly contested and deeply resented by significant sections of the Athenian body politic.

In particular, Athens’ aristocratic class – to which the blue-blooded Pericles belonged – loathed Pericles and his innovations, and this hostility to Periclean democracy was shared by Plato, Thucydides, Aristotle, Aristophanes and so on, who all regarded it as inclined to demagoguery, mob rule and recklessness. (Indeed, Plato was not only antipathetic to Pericles’ democratic ideals but also his promotion of the arts, with the philosopher notoriously proposing the banning of poets from his Republic).

Thus, Athens’ surrender to Sparta after the Battle of Aegospotami (404 BC) was put down to a succession of disastrous decisions taken by the Athenian assembly, while other decisions in the course of the conflict – such as the slaughter of the Melians and the execution of the six generals (one of whom was Pericles’ son) following the Battle of Arginusae (406 BC, for failing, after victory, to rescue stranded sailors) – reveal the limits of loving and living with wisdom and loving and living with beauty. (And, of course, loving and living with wisdom didn’t stop the Athenians condemning Socrates to death in 399 BC).

Castoriadis would also have us believe two things about Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war. First, that it signified the end of Athenian democracy and the extraordinary flourishing of culture that accompanied it; and, second, that the gravediggers of that democracy were Alcibiades and Cleon.

On whether Alcibiades was a gravedigger of Athenian democracy: you could, in fact, make a stronger case that it was the vagaries of Athenian democracy that destroyed the life and career of the brilliant general – by bringing trumped up charges of sacrilege against him, prompting him to abandon his command in the Sicilian expedition (perhaps, the defining episode in the Peloponnesian war) and go into exile and, worse still, seek sanctuary in Sparta – and that, therefore, it was the fickle, myopic Athenians, who dug their own graves, not Alcibiades.

Nor is it clear that the Peloponnesian war did end, as Castoriadis says it did, Athenian democracy or terminate that remarkable period of creativity in the arts that characterised Periclean Athens.

John R. Hale in his book, Lords of the Sea, makes a case for an Athenian recovery after the defeat at Aegospotami, the pulling down of Athens’ walls and Sparta’s occupation of the city. Spartan leadership of the Hellencic world soon became detested and Athens’ military prowess, particularly its sea power, revived, as did Athens’ cultural invention, with Plato teaching at the Academy and Isocrates at the Lyceum, while the sculptor Praxiteles was adorning Athens with his masterpieces. Thus, it was Alexander the Great and the Macedonians who buried Athens and its unique society, not Sparta and certainly not Alcibiades.

Ultimately, then, we note that living with wisdom and living with beauty does not preclude – and did not preclude in the Athenian case, as Thucydides demonstrates – living with sickening violence, injustice and rank stupidity.

*The video above is a reading of Plutarch’s life of Pericles. It’s an old-fashioned rendering – and it even refers to the goddess Athena as Minerva, which is unacceptable – but Plutarch is an essential source for our knowledge of Pericles.

Robin Lane Fox: Why Pericles Matters

Thanks to the reader who pointed me in the direction of Robin Lane Fox’s lecture Why Pericles Matters, which was recently given at Royal Holloway College, here in London. (You can see the lecture here if your computer is up to it but, if like mine, it’s not, I did manage to extract the audio and you can listen to it above).

In his lecture, Lane Fox tells us why the life, deeds and ideas of Pericles, the great Athenian statesman – or ‘the Zeus of the human pantheon of Athens’, according to Hegel – continue to matter to modern societies. Naturally, Lane Fox pays closest attention to Pericles’ funeral oration, as recalled by Thucydides, in which Pericles, on the occasion of the internment of those Athenian soldiers who fell in the early skirmishes of the war against Sparta, presents his idealised view of Athens and its citizens. It’s an oration that, for Cornelius Castoriadis is ‘the most important political monument of political thought I have ever read’, though for its detractors is an odious expression of collectivism, nationalism, militarism and totalitarianism. And, indeed, it is to these critics that Lane Fox addresses his defence of Pericles.

Lane Fox starts by telling us that Pericles’ funeral oration matters because Pericles attaches no religious meaning or connotations to the Athenian war dead being commemorated. There is no mention of gods, martyrdom or paradise. These battlefield deaths are afforded no sacred significance and there is no religious comfort – of an afterlife, for example – that Pericles can offer to the grieving relatives.

Pericles and his funeral oration also matter, Lane Fox says, because of the radical democratic ethos represented. When Pericles speaks to the gathered citizenry, he speaks not as a monarch or president might, not as the leader of an elite or vanguard, not as a general or commander-in-chief, not even as a representative, but as one citizen to another, as an equal. Indeed, Athens is its citizens; and its citizens are Athens. The relationship is symbiotic. One does not dominate or exist separately from the other.

For Athenians to be so enamoured and engaged with their city – and for Athenians to make the best decisions on issues that ranged from the mundane to the momentous – required an unceasing dedication to education and culture – to paideia; and in his funeral oration, Pericles indicates that, in Athens, paideia is intended to prepare its citizens for civic life and public duty by inculcating in them a love of beauty – without this implying ostentation; and a love of wisdom – without this implying softness, or neglect of martial skills.

As such, for Pericles, according to Lane Fox, Athens and the Athenian way of life promoted arts, festivals and athletic games; championed thought and debate, enquiry and innovation; expected versatility not uniformity from its citizens; and, though adorned with resplendent civic buildings, recommended modesty at home and in the display of private wealth. In short, Lane Fox says, Periclean Athens matters because it promotes individual freedom but, at the same time, is vigourously communitarian. The individual who wanted to live outside the community, or disparaged civic life, was not the epitome of freedom, as he is in some modern ideologies, but an idiot (ἰδιώτης), a useless and inept character, with nothing worthwhile to offer or say.

For further discussion on Why Pericles Matters, go here and here.