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[by Lynn C. Rees]

Curious how many top tier historians of classical antiquity were quislings:

• Herodotus: an exile from Halicarnassus, a city ruled by an oligarchy of Persian puppets, who turned into an unabashed booster of Athens.
• Thucydides: an exile from Athens, a city ruled by democrats, who turned into an abashed booster of the oligarchic Peloponnesian League.
• Xenophon: an exile from Athens, a city ruled by democrats, who turned into an unabashed booster of the Peloponnesian League.
• Polybius: a hostage from the Achaean League, which superseded the Peloponnesian League, who turned into an abashed booster of the Roman Republic.
• Titus Flavius Josephus: an exile from Judea who, after being captured a Roman army led first by future princeps Titus Flavius Vespasianus and later by future princeps Titus Flavius Vespasianus, turned into an unabashed Roman booster so boosterish that he changed his name to that of his patrons, one of many Flavians to come.

These men probably didn’t see themselves following in Vidkun’s bloody footsteps. They remained loyal to a political community of their birth, just not the flesh and blood political community of their birth. They pledged allegiance to a nation in being that remained moored just over the horizon in the Scapa Flow of their imaginations, waiting for Der Tag of political change.

Donald Kagan has pointed out that the Athenian quisling Thucydides’ terrifying silences and omissions are as important to an informed reading of The History of the Peloponnesian War as what he directly writes about. Though much of Kagan’s most recent distillation of his argument in Thucydides: The Reinvention of History is an indirect refighting of that war in Iraq his boys and daughter-in-law got mixed up in, it makes some valid arguments.

Thucydides went out of his way to frame such subjects like how a series of separate contests were one single war (since Thucydides was in exile for most of its length), how deranged the war policy of the Athenian democracy was (since it had exiled Thucydides), how enlightened the war policy of his fellow aristocrat Pericles had been (since Thucydides admired him), and how clever the Spartan Brasidas was (since he’d been responsible for the defeat that led to Thucydides’ exile). Kagan gathers enough information from other sources about the time and Thucydides himself to plausibly argue Thucydides’ narrative was somewhat skewed to fit his personal agenda.

How human.

There may have been no single “Peloponnesian War”. You could plausibly treat each of the conflicts that Thucydides lumps together as distinct wars that should be studied individually rather than as a group. Or you veer all the way to the other extreme and portray every Athenian-Spartan war between 460 B.C. and 387 B.C. as a single “Hundred Years War”-type conflict. The “Second Peloponnesian War” is a narrative convenience invented by Thucydides for his polemical needs.

Similarly, the military strategy pursued by Cleon and other demagogues that Thucydides despises for their policies, social class, and (oh yes) his exile was far more successful than the military strategy pursued by the sainted Pericles that Thucydides so strongly support. Conceptually, the Sicilian expedition was not doomed to inevitable ultimate failure. A twist of fate here, a twist of fate there, and it might have succeeded. Its eventual defeat was a near run thing in any case. Much more risky military expeditions have been attempted and succeeded against much greater odds.

Thucydides is lauded for his realism. Indeed, his history is a cold shower of corrections to many contemporary delusions. Thucydides shows us democracies fighting each other in spite of MacDonalds in both Athens and Syracuse. He shows us Athens intervening in the affairs of other Greek poleis to overthrow oligarchies and install democracies. He shows us Sparta intervening in the affairs of other Greek poleis to overthrow democracies and install oligarchies. He shows us civilization reduced to primal savagery, the foolishness of men, and a cynical game of political musical chairs.

But, like many avowed realists, Thucydides is a closet romantic. Like the leadership of his Spartan, Corinthian, or Theban hosts or any clique of fellow Athenian nobles at home, Thucydides believed in rule by “the best” (aristoi) as the cure to all problems. This recurring theme, passed down to us by Thucydides, Socrates, and younger Athenian contemporaries like Xenophon or Plato, holds that, given enough educated, well-bred, well-intentioned, and well-groomed men, no political problem is insurmountable. Handing rule over to the mob only condemns society to insurmountable foolishness.

However, history testifies that moving from rule by demagogues to aristocrats doesn’t guarantee either a gain in wisdom or a loss of foolishness. It only rearranges the chairs on the deck, moving the source of foolishness from one group to another. The same human stupidity behind the foolishness of the crowd haunts the human stupidity of the elite. The best laid plans of the “best and brightest” will be as thwarted by the stupidity of the “best and brightest” as the passions of the mob are thwarted by the mindlessness of the crowd. Rule by the “best” is as prone, if not more prone, to epidemics of destructive foolishness as rule by anonymous peons in a mobocracy.

Pericles’ finest hour was made possible by luck, a fortuitous swing in the politics of Megara in a pro-Athenian direction. Control over the Megarid during the “First Peloponnesian War” let Pericles keep Peloponnesian armies from reaching Attica to ravage Athenian territory. His worst hours were made possible by a less fortunate swing in the politics of Megara, this time back in a pro-Spartan direction. Loss of control over the Megarid reopened Attica to Peloponnesian ravaging in Peloponnesian War I and II. Pericles defended the Athenian people against this ravaging by gathering them inside Athens’ Long Walls. This protected them from the Peloponnesians but, crowded in as they were, they were now vulnerable to the plague that eventually killed Pericles himself, along with many of his fellow citizens.

In the end, Pericles’ luck in war was no better than that of Cleon, Alciabides, or his other successors. But, through Thucydides’ “possession for all time”, Pericles’ luck in history has far transcended the usual fate of small regional conflicts 2,500 years ago.

[by A. E. Clark]

The reflections of Thucydides on the murderous polarization at Corcyra (III.82-84) are justly celebrated. He himself claims a timeless insight into human nature:

…sufferings … such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same

and

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition . . .

Yet he also makes it clear that these horrors could not occur in the absence of certain conditions:

In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war . . .

This is the context for his memorable epigram that war is a violent teacher. The hasty reader might conclude that Thucydides is saying merely that war is hell and it brings out the worst in people. This would be a mistake.

***

The passage is a difficult one.  An early critic — Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing from Rome in the reign of Augustus —  singled out these chapters for censure as “affected, artificial, and crowded with all kinds of ornamental additions.” And he was Greek!  While the translator has smoothed out some difficulties for us, he may have introduced a new one. The subject of this passage is stasis, which Crawley renders as “revolution.”  Stasis is related to the word for “stand” and can mean ‘the place in which one stands or should stand.’ It came to be applied to political faction and the strife arising from the mutual antagonism of factions. This etymology brings to mind the language of the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards would often exhort a person “to take a stand,” which often meant “drawing a line between” oneself and some friend or relative who carried a political taint. But I wonder if the most natural translation for Americans today might be ‘polarization,’ except that when we talk of polarization, we are usually just talking about strong differences of opinion. The stasis of which Thucydides writes is something that leads rapidly to the breakdown of all morality in a fight to the death.  Where does that come from?

***

Our author drops a strong clue in Chapter 84:

In the confusion into which life was now thrown in the cities, human nature, always rebelling against the law and now its master, gladly showed itself ungoverned in passion . . .

This is pretty clear.  It must have made an impression on the seventeenth-century British scholar who produced the first English translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War.  Decades later, after surviving England’s own Civil War, he developed a social philosophy on the following premise:

. . . during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

Thomas Hobbes usually translates stasis as ‘sedition,’ which doesn’t seem quite right to me. Rather than overthrowing a civilizing top-down power, the stasis of Thucydides arises in the absence of that power.

And the horror with which Thucydides describes stasis suggests that for him it is not the natural state of man, held at bay by a central power. He seems to be describing extraordinary conditions in which human nature is unable to express its true qualities in the social sphere.  One thinks of W. B. Yeats (“the centre cannot hold”) when reading

. . . the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two [extremes] . . .

Yeats understood this unnatural state of society, at least symbolically, in eschatological terms. As we work out what Thucydides’ understanding may have been, we may learn from his description of another phenomenon that, like stasis, dissolved all morality: the plague at Athens.

***

As the plague spread and subjected the Athenians to unbearable stress, funeral customs (which there, as in many other pre-modern societies, were endowed with a sense of propriety verging on taboo) were violated in shocking ways. (2.52-53) In Thucydides’ view, such behavior was not an uncomfortable adaptation to necessity but rather a symptom of a complete loss of moral standards: Men now did just what they pleased . . . Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none . . . [‘Honor’ translates to kalon, primarily meaning ‘the beautiful’; and its identification as a profound moral value is characteristically Greek.]

As he tells of the plague’s impact, Thucydides does more than shake his head in horror. He posits two reasons for the collapse of morality.  The first is an acute scarcity of vital resources: from want of the proper appliances through so many of their friends having died already.  The second is a contraction of the time horizon: regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. This second factor is readily understandable to us: a modern economist would say that during the plague, the Athenians applied an extremely high discount rate.  This is always demoralizing. Students of poverty have long observed that the poor are driven to do whatever they can to survive in the present, making little provision for the future; but this very style of behavior, as much as anything else, ensures that they will remain poor. And as I will observe in a moment, the time horizon is even more important socially than economically.

If you will permit me some freedom of interpretation, the first factor (acute scarcity) also resonates with modern analysis. For the life we are used to is one of ‘moderate scarcity’ and that circumstance profoundly shapes our sense of values.  Recall the thought experiments David Hume offered in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: in scenarios of effortless unlimited abundance or desperate deprivation, “the strict laws of justice are suspended.” While Hume was exploring the conditions for morality, his thought experiment is more broadly suggestive. Homo economicus chooses a combination of goods to maximize utility under an income constraint. What is popularly called the law of diminishing returns makes itself felt all the time: a person of normal income will not consume ‘too much’ of one good — even if there is no risk of satiety — because to exceed some level of consumption of that good he would need to reduce his consumption of other goods to the point that he felt a pressing need for them, a need that would outweigh the additional benefit of consuming more of the first good.  Increased consumption of one good thus incurs, at some point, negative feedback, and that ensures both stability and the choice of a variegated basket of goods. 

But what if there isn’t enough food and water?  For the starving, the whole self-equilibrating system of rates of exchange becomes irrelevant. “All that a man hath will he give for his life.” In a famine, the one who gets a morsel to eat will still want more food and he will sacrifice other things, if he has them, to get more food.  Negative feedback does not come into play, and if an equilibrium is attained it will be a “corner solution.”

***

How do these two factors of demoralization apply to civil strife?  First, consider the discount rate or time horizon.

Relationships persist, and the future constrains the present.  A. will think twice about doing an injury to B. because B. is going to be around for a while.  If the contemplated injury is serious enough, perhaps B. won’t be around: but his family, or his friends, or people who identify with him in some way, will be around; and A. will have to deal with their enmity and distrust.  If the society in which both A. and B. find themselves also has a functioning system of justice, then even people who have no personal tie to B. are going to come after A., unless he can neutralize the whole system. These considerations tend, under normal conditions, to restrain domestic political competitors from the commission of atrocities. 

The second factor mentioned above — a self-adjusting system of tradeoffs that supplies negative feedback — also seems applicable to domestic political tensions. If A. gains power at the expense of B., B. is going to start trying harder.  There will now be a greater number of people that A. needs to keep satisfied, or cowed. A. is more likely than before to be blamed when things go wrong.  This is why aggrandizement tends under normal conditions to be self-limiting.

During the Peloponnesian War, domestic conditions at Corcyra (and then other city-states) were not normal.  The crucial abnormality was the availability of external power without responsibility for it. By inviting either Athens or Sparta to enter into its domestic struggles, a party contending within a city-state nullified the two self-limiting mechanisms sketched above.  Getting one of the behemoths to fight your domestic battles for you gave you a power which your adversaries could not resist, and which had a good chance of eliminating them root and branch.  You would not have to face them tomorrow. And since the armed forces of the hegemon had no relationship with your adversaries, there was nothing but their sense of humanity to moderate their intervention.  At times, we see such humane intentions (Nicostratus in 3.75: He at once endeavored to bring about a settlement), but such efforts always fail, probably because the hegemon’s commitment is limited (he was about to sail away) and because as an outsider he doesn’t realize when he is being manipulated (the leaders of The People induced him to leave them five of his ships).

A. thus savors the realistic prospect of exterminating B.

But at the same time, because there are two hegemons out there who are nervously watching their dominoes, A. knows that B. may have a realistic prospect of exterminating A.  As much as the extreme potential gains, it is the extreme potential losses which take this conflict out of the “normal” realm of self-regulating equilibria and also contract the time horizon.  Behavior that would normally bring future punishment (formal or informal) now has the greatest survival value:

. . . the superior readiness of those united by [party spirit] to dare everything without reserve

The horrors of Corcyra flow from particular circumstances. Pace Hobbes, it is not merely the absence of a unitary power that leads to such a graphic breakdown of civilized norms.  Nor is it the fact of armed conflict — although, if an armed conflict were sufficiently destructive, we would anticipate the same demoralization that followed the plague at Athens.  It is the combination of domestic divisions with the willingness of external hegemons to intervene. This combination dismantles the feedback loops that normally keep competitive behavior “within bounds.”  Only a corner solution remains, and most of what we call civilization gets discarded on the way to it.

[by Joseph Guerra]

In my first post on this Roundtable I brought up the concept of strategic narrative and how it serves as a link between Thucydides and Clausewitz from a strategic theory perspective.  Describing the layered nature of The Peloponnesian War, Ned Lebow, expanding on W. Robert Conner, outlines four levels of narrative:  The first regards “interest, justice and their relationship”.  The second is the story of Athens as a tragedy.  The third, following the second, is “the relationship between nomos (convention, custom, law) and phusis (nature) and its implications in the development and preservation of civilisation”.  The fourth and final level in this outline is the “meta-theme” of the entire narrative: “the rise and fall of Greek civilisation, and the circumstances in which different facets of human nature come to the fore”.

This follows a standard approach to many great works.  The idea that the author is not so much presenting a story, as much as attempting to engage with the reader, get them to question their own preconceived notions about a subject, essentially to create a dialectic in which the reader is able to achieve a higher level of understanding through a process of reading, questioning, contemplating and then going on to the next related element, while at the same time retaining the conceptual whole and how the various elements are related.  Not so surprisingly the same is said about Clausewitz’s On War.

The Corcyrean revolution is chillingly described in 3.70-3.85.  Here we see all the levels of the narrative displayed as complex interactions.  Interest has overcome justice, which in any case is only achievable among equals.  But does actual equality exist between humans, as in democratic structures of government, or are they simply a myth?  Conventions and customs fall prey to human nature and impulse, while the meanings of words decay (through narrow interest) which in turn has an effect on actions, which in turn has to be justified thus leading to further decay of the overall narrative.  As with Thucydides’s description of the plague in Athens in Book II, some respond heroically to this turmoil (stasis), but most succumb giving themselves over to impulse and/or fear and act in ways that would have been inconceivable prior to the crisis.  Civilisation itself, which requires a basis (shared interests, justice, language, common conventions, etc,) for stability, starts to come apart.  This all follows more or less the development of a Greek tragedy, or repeated tragedies, with the implication that this is more the nature of humanity as a whole, than being limited to a specific time and place.

[Mark Safranski / “zen“]

After posting about “The Most Violent Man at Athens“, commenter Neville Morely who is a professor of the classics, brought it to my attention that he recently offered a qualified defense of the populist Athenian politician, Cleon.  I thought that this would serve as an excellent rebuttal to my post that would interest and inform the readership. So, without further ado, Professor Morely:

Cleon and the Lying Media

Another day, another classical Trump analogy – or rather, a reiteration of one that’s already somewhat familiar, Trump as Cleon, put forward this time by G.W. Bowersock in the New York Review of Books. I have to say that, the more I see this comparison, the more I think it’s deeply unfair to Cleon, and reproduces an old-fashioned view of Athenian democracy that is based largely on sources hostile to the whole thing. Of course we don’t expect classical analogies to be based on detailed historical insight – I don’t have much to add on this point to Donna Zuckerberg’s ‘Make Comparison Great Again’ – but there are definitely bad and worse cases, evocations of the ancient world for present political and polemical purposes that are deeply dodgy rather than just moderately dubious.

At best, what this offers us is the pantomime villain whom we can boo and hiss with a sense of smugness that we have a superior idea of how bad he really is. But this one seems riskier than normal, if it slides easily into the belief that the emergence of such a figure is also a judgement against the system that has allowed him to rise to prominence. That’s precisely how Thucydides and Aristophanes (the lying MainsSteam Media) present Cleon, as evidence of the negative tendencies of Athenian democracy that headed downhill from there; is there a sense that Trump, even as he denounces American institutions, is also fuelling a suspicion of those institutions among some of his fiercest critics? Yes, there may be a case for that – but it shouldn’t be a case based on this arguable interpretation of the relationship between Cleon and Athens.

I may return to this theme in more detail – currently supposed to be working on a paper on a completely different topic for tomorrow evening – but for the moment, it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve already developed these ideas nearly twenty years ago in a piece for Omnibus called ‘Cleon the Misunderstood’ (can’t remember whether I put a question mark after that in the original). I’d certainly update this today with more discussion of how Cleon gets read in relation to Thucydides’ trustworthiness – George Grote’s criticism of the portrayal, and the academic row that ensued – but I think this stands up well enough as a summary to be worth reproducing here:

Cleon the Misunderstood

In the mid-fourth century B.C., an Athenian citizen called Mantitheus sued his half-brother for the return of his mother’s dowry. At one point in the speech, he tells the jury that his mother had once been married to a man called Cleomedon,

Whose father Cleon, we are told, commanded troops among whom were your ancestors, and captured alive a large number of Spartans, and won greater renown than any other man in the state; so it was not fitting that the son of that famous man should wed my mother without a dowry. (Demosthenes, 40.25)

Juries in Athens were made up of at least a hundred and one dikastai, chosen by lot from volunteers who had to be Athenian citizens over thirty years old. The speaker had to try to persuade the majority of these jurors to vote in his favour, whether because of the strength of his case or by appealing to their sentiments. Certainly he would not want to alienate too many people by expressing unpopular views; Mantitheus must therefore have assumed that his description of Cleon as a famous Athenian leader would be accepted by many among his audience. Yet such a positive assessment is likely to come as a surprise to most students of Athenian history, especially those familiar with Thucydides’ account of the part played by Cleon in the course of the PeloponnesianWar.

Read the rest here.

[by Cheryl Rofer]

I started reading Book II about the time this tweet appeared.

If Russia is in decline, why worry? Maybe, real worry is West's decline and that we manage things better? pic.twitter.com/WqG4uT5Pqt

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 22, 2016

Book II begins…

The war between the Athenians and Peloponnesians and the allies on either side now really begins. For now all intercourse except through the medium of heralds ceased, and hostilities were commenced and prosecuted without intermission.

War is often accompanied by a break in communications. In ancient Greece, that communication involved a human carrier. Communications now never really end.

The United States and Russia are not at war now, pace those who would have a new Cold War, but relations are tense. Some official channels of communication have been cut off, but others remain. Although each side claims at times that the channels of communication over Syria have been broken, the dialog starts up again.

The tweet above, however, is more like what Athenian and Spartan soldiers would have yelled at each other across the field. I won’t unpack all the insults contained in it, but I can see at least five.

This tweet is from the Embassy of the Russian Federation to the United Kingdom. That account has become famous for its insulting tweets. It tweets a lovely photo of somewhere in Russia most mornings, and retweets more or less standard news. Then BAM! One like the above.

The pattern is regular enough that it is probably strategic, part of Russia’s information warfare. Did the Athenians and Spartans have anything similar? When communications depend primarily on in-person interactions, it’s much more difficult. But rumor-spreading has always been an option, as has been misinformation about war plans and governmental actions. And those insults.

Communications to and from the battlefield have changed in similar ways. Even small insurgencies are now able to communicate rapidly.

The intensity and volume of the information war is new. Hacking and counter-hacking, although most of it is psychological, with the goal of destroying trust in institutions or people. Because I suspect you all share my fatigue with the information war of the US election, I’ll leave it to you to find the examples.

When the election is over, we will still be left with, most notably but not exclusively, the information war between the United States and Russia. Social media have become “the medium of heralds.” But the heralds have many masters, many goals.