I have, now and again, made the jokey claim that if only I were pursuing my research project into the modern influence of Thucydides in the US rather than in Bristol, I would be deluged with offers from well-funded think-tanks and the like, and would have no problem at all in demonstrating Impact. It’s certainly the case that, for any number of different reasons, Thucydides is far more widely cited in public life over there, and there is an obvious precedent for a Thucydides-focused academic getting involved in policy debates in the case of Donald Kagan, whereas here in the UK I’ve been confronted by complete indifference (and a lot of unanswered letters and emails) in attempting to interest anyone in my project to use annotated extracts from Thucydides as a basis for debating key issues about citizenship in schools. The project pre-dates the Impact Agenda, so I was never required to produce an Impact Plan or build any outreach activities into the design; the Thinking Through Thucydides idea was a late and spontaneous development, and I don’t know whether it might have got off the ground if I’d been working at it from the beginning, or whether the lack of interest in Thucydides in the public sphere in the UK would have been grounds for rejecting the whole project. The application I’m developing for Phase II (strictly speaking, Phase III) of the whole enterprise has the TTT project fully integrated into the plan, so perhaps this is the opportunity to test that counterfactual.
Posts Tagged ‘Thucydides’
Be Careful What You Wish For…
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged Dominic Cummings, Impact, Thucydides on October 13, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
Reenactments
Posted in Musings, tagged computer games, Thucydides, wargames on October 7, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
It is a very long time indeed since I had the time or energy to get involved with any computer games – I think the last time was when I embarked on Final Fantasy VII as a means of bonding with my then newly-acquired stepchildren – but there are times when it seems at least a little tempting. It was always the complex strategy and administration games that appealed the most, above all my lovingly tended low-rise, high-tech and eco-friendly utopia in SimCity (its only flaw being the refusal of that version of the programme to support the creation of allotments and urban beekeeping), and so I am probably part of the target audience for Hegemony Gold: Wars of Ancient Greece, which allows you to recreate the fifth and fourth centuries BCE as the Spartans, Athenians or Macedonians. One reason why it’s especially tempting at the moment is that it’s obvious how far the designers have drawn on Thucydides, at least in the way they’re advertising it, and so I could almost claim this as a work-related activity; after all, what better test of our interpretations of Thucydides than playing out his analysis of the Peloponnesian War again and again? Maybe not; if the designers have indeed read a lot of Thucydides, it’s entirely possible that the game system – the new “diplomacy engine”, for example – is precisely calibrated so that the conventional ‘Thucydidean’ version is the optimal strategy, and so it won’t be any real test. Unless, of course, they’re political subversives, seeking to establish that the ‘might is right’ approach of the Melian Dialogue automatically leads to catastrophe, and the optimal strategy is one that respects Greek tradition and international norms. No, must stop thinking about this, I really can’t afford the time…
Colloquium: Thucydides in Modern Western Culture
Posted in Events, tagged Thucydides on October 7, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
The Most Politic Historiographer: Thucydides in Modern Western Culture
Clifton Hill House, Bristol
Thucydides has been, at least since the nineteenth century, one of the most-cited and most influential classical thinkers. His work has inspired not only ancient historians and classicists, but historians of all periods, political theorists, international relations specialists, soldiers and military educators, and novelists, all of whom have found it a source of deep insight into the nature and experience of war and of how one should study this. This is the final research colloquium of the AHRC-funded project on Thucydides: reception, reinterpretation and influence, drawing together different themes in his modern reception with papers from a range of international experts and from members of the project team.
Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge): Who does Thucydides please?
Aleka Lianeri (Thessaloniki): Time and Method: Thucydides’ contemporary history in nineteenth-century Britain
Christian Thauer (FU Berlin /U of Washington): Re-approaching Thucydides? An Intellectual History Perspective
Edith Foster (Ashland University): Narrating Battles: Thucydides and Ernst Jünger
Andreas Stradis (Bristol): Thucydides and Vietnam: A Vehicle for Ethical Professional Military Education
Seth Jaffe (Toronto): Reflections on the Straussian Thucydides
Neville Morley (Bristol): The Idea of Thucydides in Western Culture
Ben Earley (Bristol): The Spirit of Athens: Thucydides as a theorist of maritime empire
Liz Sawyer (Oxford): From contemporary relevance to eternal truth: Thucydides and the Great Books movement from the 1960s to today
Discussants: Christian Wendt (FU Berlin), Emily Greenwood (Yale), Katherine Harloe (Reading)
Attendance is free, but numbers are strictly limited, and places must be reserved in advance: please contact Neville Morley on n.d.g.morley(at)bris.ac.uk by 15th November.
The Jovian Dialogue
Posted in Musings, tagged classical reception, Ken MacLeod, Melian Dialogue, Thucydides on September 4, 2013 | 4 Comments »
In the mid-24th century, Ellen May Ngwethu, a member of the Cassini Division, the front-line force of the Solar Union in the face of the post-human Jovians, summarises to herself the ‘true knowledge’ that was the foundation of her society:
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything. All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
Thucydides is not mentioned (more…)
Thucydides and the Surveillance State
Posted in Musings, tagged politics, Thucydides, war on August 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
One of the ideas from Thucydides that is regularly cited, deployed and abused in contemporary political theory – not least because it’s one of the few ideas in his work that looks like a proper statement of a political-theoretical principle, the sort of thing that we might be expecting to find there after reading I.22 – is the claim, made by two different speakers on two different occasions, that states make decisions based on considerations of honour, fear and interest. This idea is taken as the basis, or offered as justification, for believing (a) that all states are rational and (b) that issues of justice and the like are irrelevant, hence leading in many cases to variants of the Realist view of international relations, and ignoring the possibility that Thucydides’ own narrative spends much of its time apparently questioning the validity of the statement, or at any rate emphasising that states and peoples don’t generally have a very good grasp of what their interests actually are or how best to pursue them. (more…)
Pericles and A.S. Way; or, Why you should write for your local paper
Posted in Research in Progress, tagged Pericles, Thucydides, war on August 23, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
[Guest post from Liz Sawyer (elizabeth.sawyer@trinity.ox.ac.uk)]
If you visit the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park, you will find, among the more predictable quotations by Churchill, one attributed to Pericles: ‘Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.’ The sentiment rings out proudly with the ideals of self-sacrifice, bravery, and staunch defence of liberty that the memorial was intended to praise, and its rhetorical power is undeniable. Thucydides’ succinct τὸ δ’ ἐλεύθερον τὸ εὔψυχον κρίναντες (literally, ‘after judging freedom courage’) has been expanded in this version into a rhetorical flourish that has been carved into soldiers’ memorials the world over since the end of the First World War, and today is emblazoned across their societies’ websites and email signatures. But where did this translation come from? (more…)
More Thucydides Events in Bristol
Posted in Events, tagged history, politics, reception, Thucydides, war on August 2, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
This blog is going to go quiet for a couple of weeks as I’m off on holiday (and desperately trying to finish scribbling a paper on ‘History as Political Therapy’ for the American Political Science Association conference at the end of the month), but I thought I’d sign off with advance notice of a couple of events related to the Thucydides research project in Bristol in the autumn.
Might is Right? Ancient and Modern Debates
Sunday November 10th, Foyles Bookshop, Cabot Circus, 2pm.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” So claimed an aide of George W. Bush in 2004, but it’s an idea that dates back to 5th century BC Greece and the historian Thucydides – one of the most-quoted ancient writers in debates about contemporary affairs, including on such topics as the invasion of Iraq and post-9/11 US foreign policy. This public event, part of the University of Bristol’s annual InsideArts week, draws on the work of the Bristol Thucydides project over the last four years: Studiospace, the UoB Student Drama Society, will be staging the Melian Dialogue, the famous passage in Thucydides’ work where he explores different approaches to justice and interest in inter-state relations, and this will be followed by a discussion between scholars working on different aspects of the topic (including Neville Morley and Ellen O’Gorman from Classics & Ancient History, and Torsten Michel from Politics; chaired by Josie McLellan from Historical Studies), and plenty of opportunity for questions from the audience.
Attendance is free, but we do ask you to reserve a place in advance; further details will appear on the project website (www.bris.ac.uk/classics/thucydides/events/) in due course.
Thucydides: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence
Monday 25th-Tuesday 26th November, Clifton Hill House, Bristol
This final colloquium of the Bristol Thucydides project draws together different themes in the modern reception and influence of Thucydides, in different spheres of activity – history, politics, war and culture. It will probably have a different title at some point, and certainly a much better blurb, but obviously the main attraction is the line-up of speakers…
Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge): Who does Thucydides please?
Aleka Lianeri (Thessaloniki): Time and Method: Thucydides’ contemporary history in nineteenth-century Britain
Christian Thauer (FU Berlin /U of Washington): Re-approaching Thucydides? An Intellectual History Perspective
Edith Foster (Ashland University): Narrating Battles: Thucydides and Ernst Jünger
Seth Jaffe (Toronto): The Straussian Thucydides
Andreas Stradis (Bristol): Thucydides and Vietnam: A Vehicle for Ethical Professional Military Education
Neville Morley (Bristol): The Idea of Thucydides in Western Culture
Ben Earley (Bristol): The Spirit of Athens: Thucydides as a theorist of maritime empire
Christian Wendt (FU Berlin): discussant
If you have any queries about either of these events, please contact me on n.d.g.morley(at)bris.ac.uk.
Synchronicity
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, Uncategorized, tagged Germany, historical theory, Thucydides on June 18, 2013 | 4 Comments »
I think I have previously mentioned on here the more or less constant fear that I suffered during my PhD studies, that I’d suddenly discover someone else working on exactly the same topic, or that they’d publish a book or article that pre-empted everything I had to say, and so I’d have to start all over again. (Even worse, of course, would be to discover that they’d done this only when I was in the viva, so that not only would my work be pointless but I’d have even failed to demonstrate adequate knowledge of relevant scholarship…). I worry much less about such things these days, but it’s not a completely unreasonable fear, given the tendency of academic topics to move unpredictably in and out of fashion; I remember how the ancient novel suddenly and mysteriously came into vogue in the early 1990s, which must have been a nasty shock to any number of people who’d thought, quite separately, that they’d come up with a brilliantly obscure topic with which to make their name. (more…)
Thucydides and the Marginal Revolution
Posted in Musings, tagged economics, Thucydides on May 15, 2013 | 6 Comments »
There is a significant risk that being so focused on a single author and his modern influence, as I am with Thucydides, one starts to see him everywhere. I’m pretty well resigned to the fact that I now have a Pavlovian reaction to more or less any mention of Thucydides in the media, either rushing off to write a blog post or planning an article (or sometimes both), but I now seem to be imagining his influence even when there is no explicit reference or even subtle hint to be found that Thucydides has anything to do with it. It’s a little bit like the portrayal of the mentality of conspiracy theory in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum: if you assume that there must be a connection between apparently disparate things, then you can always find one with a bit of thought; if you assume that “the Templars have something to do with everything” (or in this case, that Thucydides is a pervasive influence on the whole of modern culture), then you tend to find evidence to support the theory. From the outside, and even in one’s own reflective moments, this starts to look like paranoid delusion – but then another hint of evidence turns up to suggest that there really is a vast conspiracy…
The Athenian Military-Industrial Complex
Posted in Musings, tagged military strategy, reception, Thucydides, United States on May 14, 2013 | 4 Comments »
I’ve just finished writing my lecture for this evening on Thucydides and modern political theory; as ever, it was only at about halfway through that I worked out what I wanted to say, so the text switches from nicely polished and word-processed sentences to scribbled notes that may or may not turn into coherent sentences on the night. One of my starting-points builds on the work of Eddie Keene at Oxford (in his chapter for the forthcoming Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides), noting that the conventional genealogy of ‘realism’ in International Relations theory, looking back to Hans Morgenthau and E.H.Carr, really doesn’t account for the importance of Thucydides in this tradition, as neither of them really discuss him (Carr, I think, ignores him completely; Morgenthau has at the most a couple of passing comments). Of course it is, as copious empirical evidence demonstrates, all too easy to interpret Thucydides’ account as a forerunner of neorealism, if you squint at it the right way and assume that e.g. the Mytilene Debate and Melian Dialogue are simply expressions of the historian’s analytical conclusions, but that doesn’t explain why it should be felt to be necessary to bring in Thucydides at all. (more…)
