LBST 301: Lecture on Thucydides

[The following is the text of a lecture delivered, in part in LBST 301 in
October 1997.  This text is in the public domain, released October 1997]

A. Introduction

In Liberal Studies we have already read a number of narratives which have
included depictions of war.  So we should be ready for what Thucydides is
attempting in his famous book—another analysis of a cataclysmic social and
political event.  However, it quickly becomes clear when we read the opening
of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War that the author is very
consciously attempting something different, something new.  Thucydides goes
to some length to insist upon this point: his narrative account of
contemporary events is going to be something quite different and very much
better than similar accounts delivered by his predecessors, and he wants his
readers to understand up front just why that is so.

The points Thucydides puts forward raise a number of interesting questions,
not just about his text, but also about the work of his predecessors, and
these questions we can usefully approach by considering just what Thucydides
is doing here in the way of clarifying new conception of what we call
history.  In setting out his method and his critique of earlier narrative
accounts of past events, that is, Thucydides is making a proud defence of a
new method of telling such stories.  And this defence, some have argued,
marks the beginning of a new form of enquiry, history, as distinguished
from, say, myth, romance, epic poetry, and so forth, other forms of
narrative story telling about the past.

In this lecture I would like to explore some of the implications of the
issues raised by Thucydides in the opening of his famous book.  My purpose
in so doing is to call attention to a number of things, in particular, the
way in which Thucydides is trying to revolutionize the way in which we
understand events by putting them into narrative form and some of the ways
this method is significantly different from other narrative accounts we have
dealt with, for example, in Homer and in the Old Testament.  Thucydides
clearly feels that his method is preferable to earlier ones (I am not
suggesting he was familiar with the Old Testament, by the way) because it
will bring human beings closer to an understanding of the truth of things,
rather than deceiving them about the past.  And, for reasons which will
emerge later, Thucydides is moved to insist upon this because he clearly
believes that telling a "true" account of the past events serves a vital
moral purpose.

After dealing with this question of Thucydides’s method of enquiry, I will
then, if there is time, address some of the ways in which, in many respects,
his style, for all its newness, still retains important features of the
traditional narratives.

The Methods of History: The Mythic Tradition

To begin with, we might consider the most important word in the title: the
word "history."  This is a Greek word meaning story, and, as such, in the
traditional usage of the word it is not far from the word "myth" which also
means a story.  In that sense, Hesiod, Homer, Aeschylus and others provided
histories or myths, famous stories about the past.

The ancient Greeks, it is clear, like so many other people, never tired of
recounting the myths or histories from the past, particularly as these were
embodied in the most famous and popular elements of the oral tradition—in
epic poems and dramatic performances.  These stories are clearly a part of
their history, if we mean by that in a general sense a story from the past.
And there is no doubt that for many of the Greeks, these stories were true
in two senses: they recounted events which had really occurred and, more
importantly, although they were very old, they continued to reveal things
about the way the world presently works.

It may well be the case, as many Greeks believed, that the great heroic age
of the Trojan War (as recounted by Homer) has passed and that there are no
people of the heroic size and stature of those ancient warriors.  It may
also be true that there are competing versions or at least many ambiguous
details about major events.  But at the same time the poems contain and
reveal and pass on a vision of the world, particularly of the relationship
of the divine to the events in the human sphere that are central to how
people understand their past and shape their hopes for the future.  In this
tradition, what matters in history is the emotional power of illumination
which the story can provide.  There is no great demand for empirical
accuracy.  In the sense of their revealing power, these ancient stories,
embodied in various forms, are "true."

In Liberal Studies so far, we have read a number of stories from this
tradition.  And we have seen that as we move from work to work the attitude
the work expresses towards the tradition changes.  In the Odyssey, for
example, Homer celebrates the order of the universe: the gods may be
capricious and often antagonistic.  But they endorse the home and are
willing to help the hero restore order to his house.  Aeschylus in the
Oresteia holds out the enormously optimistic hope that the gods will favour
a new synthesis between the irrational destructiveness of the Furies and the
calmer more reasonable world of human debate and reason (the world protected
by Apollo), so that the political life of the community can achieve a full
measure of justice which satisfies all the emotional and rational demands we
might make.  Thus, as I mentioned in the lecture on the Oresteia, Aeschylus
holds out as a lofty and beautiful hope, a symbolic expression of the
highest hopes for the human community.  He does not give us a blueprint for
how to get there, but he offers us a celebratory symbol of such a fusion.

The tone in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King is much more pessimistic.  The
human condition is tragic, and the intentions of the gods and fate are
veiled in mystery.  Still, there does exist the possibility for human
heroism on the grand scale, when someone like Oedipus seeks to penetrate the
mystery.  He may destroy himself in the process, but he comes to understand
something fundamental about the nature of the world, a knowledge which is
unavailable in any other way.  Though fate is something deep and perhaps
malevolent, there is still dignity to heroic effort, and the hero’s efforts
make all the difference to a city in crisis.

All of these are stories—myths and histories—from the past.  They interpret
present experience by revealing to the present day citizen the nature of the
world, physical and metaphysical.  And most ancient Greek would have been
quite puzzled by the question about whether or not such stories were true.
Of course, they were true: they conferred value upon experience; they
revealed the truth of experience.

When we considered the Bacchae, I suggested that, among other things, this
play is a cry of despair over the inadequacy of the past stories to account
for the destructiveness of human life.  I made the point (briefly) that, in
part, this play is savaging the traditional view of the past through the
agency of the traditional stories.  Here the gods, personified by Bacchus,
are insanely destructive, without regard for the political life of the
community, the traditionally heroic figures, like Cadmus and Teiresias, are
portrayed as foolish timeservers, and Pentheus, in his role as King, the
traditionally heroic protector of the polis, is an insecure adolescent,
whose attempts at authority are merely rhetorical armour to conceal from him
the emotional inadequacy within.
Hence, at the end of the Bacchae, there is no resolution of the forces in
the conflict, as there is in the other works.  The polis is destroyed, the
hero is scattered in bits all over the stage, and the work of destroying the
next Greek city is underway, as Dionysus and his entourage move on.  When
the world becomes as instantly destructive as this, I have suggested, then
there’s a sense in which we have to recast the way we think about it.
Survival of the community is impossible in the world of the Bacchae.

C.  The Methods of History: Thucydides’s Method

Euripides wrote the Bacchae near the end of the Peloponnesian War, during
the time when Thucydides was writing his great work.  By this time, it was
clear to anyone who would care to look at the question that, whatever the
original goal of the Peloponnesian War, which began in 439 BC, its effects
had been totally devastating to traditional political life in the Greek city
states: the insane destructiveness of civil war in almost every community,
the lies, the extermination of entire communities in the name of democracy,
the corruption of Persian gold, the venality of the Delphic oracle, and all
sorts of other factors had, as in most wars, made a mockery of almost every
noble pretence used to justify the activity.  What Thucydides’s and
Euripides’s works share, I think, is the fundamental awareness that the old
way of life, a community held together by traditional stories from the past,
has become impossible to sustain.  There must be some new way of
understanding our past and our present.

This awareness is fundamental to understanding why Thucydides wants us to
see his undertaking as something quite new.  He takes aim at Homer and
Herodotus (a historian from a previous generation) and, in effect, treats
them with contempt.  And he treats them this way, because he wants us to see
their efforts as, in some basic way, untrue, as a falsification, something
upon which we should not rely for our understanding of how the world works.
They are, in short, liars.

These earlier works are suspect or "untrue" because the facts of the story
are unverified and unverifiable.  They are too full of what he calls
"romance," fanciful tales without basis in the empirical world of
observation, eye-witness reports, or documentary verification.  His account,
by contrast, is based upon firm evidence, which he has made considerable
effort to check.  As he puts it:

"But if the evidence cited leads a reader to think that things were mostly
as I have described them, he would not go wrong, as he would if he believed
what the poets have sung about them, which they have much embellished, or
what the prose-writers have strung together, which aims more to delight the
ear than to be true.  Their accounts cannot be tested, you see, and many are
not credible, as they have achieved the status of myth over time."  (12)

What Thucydides is insisting upon here is something new and important:
namely, that the truth of an account has to answer to the empirical facts,
has to have some observable validity confirmed by experience in an objective
manner.  It is not enough simply that the writer thinks the event happened
or that tradition insists that it happened or that the particular way of
recounting an event carries a great emotional appeal.  There must exist some
evidence independent of the writer to "prove" the veracity of the event.  He
does not, it is true, use anything like a modern convention of references to
underscore the validity of every point he makes, but his opening assurance
that he has gone to the trouble of checking events against observation sets
out the criterion that is going eventually to lead to that modern
convention.

It will be clear from what we have read in the Old Testament and in Homer,
that this is a radically new demand.  Nowhere in Homer or in the Old
Testament selections we have read do the writers call our attention to the
evidence they possess for asserting that such an event really took place in
teh way they describe, and we have been wondering ever since to what extent
stories like the Exodus or the Trojan War really happened.  A lot of energy
has gone into the search for empirical evidence, since for us, the
inheritors of Thucydides’s conception of history, the existence of such
evidence is an essential factor in determining how we react to the story.
But the writers of those narratives evidently did not believe that such
things mattered very much.  The fact that the story was old, that people
believed it, and that it was emotionally satisfying (that is, it embodied
certain permanent emotional truths) rendered the narrative account true.

Thucydides, by contrast, is asserting that that is not enough.  Old stores,
no matter how famous and beloved can lie, can deceive.  Hence, the need for
some rational check on their credibility, and that rational check is a basic
test for their empirical truth.  Thucydides is not the first to make this
demand, but he is the first to insist upon applying it so rigorously.  And
in making this demand he is drawing a firm line between what we call myth or
poetry and something new, history.  For an account to be considered true, to
be considered history, the facts of the story must meet this criterion.
Hence, in Thucydides we meet for the first time a very firm insistence that
there are two kinds of old narratives: myths (which are unreliable,
romantic, fanciful, untrue) and accounts like his which are, properly
speaking, history, because they are, in an important new way true.

[Note how we are still trying to sort out this distinction in arguments over
creation narratives in Genesis and in Darwin or in school textbooks which
create a different past in order to bolster the cultural self-esteem of a
group.  There are still many people who maintain that the "truth" of a
narrative of past events must satisfy the emotional needs of the reader
rather than the objective, impersonal demands of empirical enquiry.  This
point may help to explain the reason why so many popular historians, like
Pierre Burton or Barbara Tuchman, are often held in such disrespect by the
academic historians.  The popular author is, in the eyes of the academics,
often very suspect, because he or she does not adhere scrupulously enough to
the facts, but is willing to shape events to make the narrative more
emotinally coherent to the reader].

To this empirical demand for verification of the facts, T. adds one
important stylistic innovation as well, something which is not so obvious in
selections as in the full account, namely, a scrupulous attention to the
time sequence of events.  Lacking a coherent and consistent calendar or
method for indicating the passing of time, year by year, Thucydides
establishes a clear time sequence of events with constant reference to the
particular year of the war in which the events took place.  This, too, is a
feature of his style of which he is very proud, conscious of its novelty.

It's important to remember that for Thucydides history did not exist as a
separate discipline with a carefully worked out traditional methodology and
examples.  Beyond Herodotus and a few others, there was no major tradition
to inform him how history should or should not be written.  So there were no
conventions for that most elementary of historical narrative techniques,
delivering a precise time framework.  Even the (for us) very elementary
principle of telling events by reference to a standard chronology of months
and years did not exist for Thucydides, since there was no standard calendar
in Greece.  And thus Thucydides had to invent his own time scheme (as he
himself tells us).

Once again, if we reflect upon the earlier narratives we read, we can see
that this scrupulous attention to the time sequence is of little account
before Thucydides.  Homer and the Old Testament writers may stress the
sequence of events, but we are never all that aware of just how many days or
years particular events took, except occasionally.  We have grave doubts at
times about the veracity of the times given to us (like the ages of the
patriarchs).  But we can see, upon reflection, that for the effect of these
stories, such a careful attention to time is irrelevant.  What’s important
is the story itself and perhaps its place in the sequence.  Whether it is
factually or chronologically credible is a distant concern; what makes the
stories credible are their emotional impact, their characters,
relationships, conflicts, and outcomes and how these embody a vision of the
world.  Whether that narrative actually happened, or happened in exactly
that way or in the time allotted, is not a key factor upon which the meaning
or the importance of the story necessarily depends.  That is one reason why
in the world a myth, there might be two or three or four versions of the
same story, all equally "true" (e.g., the stories about Helen of Troy, some
of which factually contradict others, two accounts of the creation, and so
on.).

D. History and Myth

In making these demands, then, Thucydides is driving a large rational wedge
between an old and new way of telling stories.  He is insisting that
"poetic" stories do not meet the most important criteria of truth.  He is,
in other words, delineating an essential difference between what we call
myth, saga, folk tale, epic and what we call history.

Now, the word history has an interesting double meaning.  On the one hand,
as I have mentioned, it simply means a story, as, for example, in the phrase
"the history of my family" or "the history of the Trojan War."  On the other
hand, the term history also refers to a certain form of rational disciplined
enquiry, a way of studying and evaluating such stories, or determining which
stories are worthy of attention because they are true and which are simply
romance or fancy.  Before Thucydides, so far as we can tell, there was
little attention paid to making a distinction between these two.  An old,
famous, story which people liked was history; its truth was determined by
the belief it generated, by the insights it revealed.  Hence, the truth of
something was independent of any checks on whether there was evidence to
support the description of the facts.

Thucydides is insisting that there is an important distinction to be drawn
between real history, that is, a narrative which meets the criteria he sets
down and earlier histories, which he does not consider to be the proper form
of historical enquiry.  Such earlier accounts may be popular, but they are
not the real thing, because they do subject their historical accounts to the
studied discipline of empirical enquiry.
He is aware, in making this demand, that he is removing from history one of
its most popular ingredients.  But in the name of truth, such demands have
to be made:

"This history may not be the most delightful to hear, since there is no
mythology in it.  But those who want to look into the truth of what was done
in the past . . . those readers will find this History valuable enough. . .
. " (13)

This hard headed facticity (to use a horrible but accurate Germanism) is the
quality which has made Thucydides, for many people, the first real historian
in the Western tradition, the first for whom accounts of the past did not
count unless they satisfied rational criteria by which the facts were
evaluated.  It’s that quality that enables the eighteenth century
philosopher Hume to observe the following:

 ". . . the first page of Thucydides is, in my opinion, the commencement of
real history.  All preceding narrations are so intermixed with fable, that
philosophers ought to abandon them, to the embellishments of poets and
orators."  (Hume, Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations)

Parenthetically, one might observe there that this requirement for facticity
in history has often been seen as a limitation on its power.  Aristotle, for
example, felt that history was less philosophical than tragedy (i.e.,
further from the truth), because the historian is not, like the dramatist,
free to shape the narrative exactly in accordance with his inspiration; for
the historian has to respect the facts of the case.  Dr Johnson has a
similar opinion, seeing in the work of the historian something that is not
an exercise of the most creative powers of the mind.

At any event, the important point to note about this new method of T. is the
demand that our understanding of the past meet some rational demands, the
demands of evidence.  And we can see in this insistence one of the keys in
the revolution that Thucydides is spearheading and which Plato and Aristotle
are going to continue, namely that our accounts of the world cannot rest
simply upon their aesthetic quality or their traditional value.  They must
meet the test of reason.  Poetry is no longer a reliable guide, and the most
notable achievements of poetry, the great epics and dramas, are not to be
believed.

D.  The Forces of History

But there’s another very marked feature of Thucydides’s style which also
contributes to making his writing a distinctly new voice and, in many
respects, the first great historian.  And that is that he brings the
causative forces in the historical process firmly into the sphere of human
behaviour, that is to say, he rationalizes the forces of history.

Let me explain this point in a little more detail.  From historians we
moderns expect more than just a verification of the facts and a
comprehensible time scale.  We also expect some explanation for why things
happen, some attention to the motive forces of historical events.  Why did
the Peloponnesian War occur?  Why did the Athenians behave the way the did?
Why didn’t they behave in other ways?  And so on.

Now, almost all narratives pay some attention to this, and Homer and the Old
Testament are no exception.  But in those texts, the major motive forces of
the narrative lie outside the sphere of human behaviour; they are driven by
divine forces external to human agents (Zeus, the fates, Dike, Yahweh) or by
the human interactions with these divine forces; moreover, these forces are
for the most part thoroughly irrational--they do not appear to operate by
consistent rational principles.  In other words, the historical process, in
the last resort, lies beyond human understanding and control.  We can
describe what the gods or god do, we can occasionally speculate about the
possible motives, but because we are dealing with gods and not human beings
our understanding of the principles or patterns behind such actions is
limited.

With all of this Thucydides will have nothing whatsoever to do.  For him, as
he announces very early in the book, understanding the driving events of
history do not involve appeals to divine inscrutability and everything to do
with understanding human nature.  Hence, his narrative forces us to confront
the way in which the historical process is driven, not by some divine plan
or divine emotion, but by decisions and actions human beings undertake for
their own very human reasons.  This is, in other words, a total
secularization of our understanding of the past.

What Thucydides is clearly saying from the opening of this book is something
like the following: From my book, by paying close attention t what human
beings really did in the past and their very human reasons for acting in
this way, you will come to understand something about the permanent features
of human nature, including your own.  And you can ignore any of those
traditional appeals to divine plans or interventions or assistance or
punishment as so much poetic nonsense.

This sometimes contemptuous dismissal of an appeal to oracular, divine, or
otherwise non-human reasons for the motive forces of history gives to
Thucydides’s analysis a profoundly modern tone. Understanding the past is a
matter of understanding how human beings behave for their very human
reasons.  If oracles and prophecies play a role in history, that is not
because they have any inherent truth, any pipeline to the way things really
are; they matter only because of the construction human beings put on their
utterances for very human reasons.

From Homer, the tragedians, and Herodotus, Thucydides could learn about the
importance of divine interference in human affairs and about the important
moral lessons to be derived from past stories.  But Thucydides, very much in
the rational spirit of the new age of the mid-century, will have nothing to
do with such irrational theories of causation.  For him, if we are to
understand history, we begin and end with a study of what motivates human
beings in action.  History, in other words, is to be understood in terms of
the eternal well springs of human conduct, unattractive as they may be.

And what are these human reasons?  Well, about that Thucydides has no doubt.
The great motive forces in human history are an ineradicable love of power
and an inescapable fear of other people’s power.  These are the touchstones
of human conduct, and if we want to understand the historical process, we
have to understand that no matter how narratives of the past have presented
the events, the realities were either a quest for power or a fear of someone
else’s power or potential power.

Power, of course, means the power to get one’s own way, the power to instil
fear in other people.  Hence, if we want to understand why Agamemnon was the
leader of the expedition to Troy, we must abandon all notions that the myths
provide about promises to Helen’s father or concepts of heroic status or
whatever: he was the leader because he had the most power, the most ships.
To find out the truth of the past, we need to look at the size of the
different navies, the numbers of troops available, the economic resources of
a community and forget about all such things as the favour of the gods or
divine punishment for sin or oracular prophecy.  Those cities with large
navies, impressive economic resources, and a lot of troops are going to
drive the historical process far more than cities with few power resources.

It is not the case that Thucydides was a cynical intellectual, always
determined to reduce human nature to its lowest common denominator.  Indeed,
an important theme running through the book is the way in which war, and
particularly civil war, creates conditions in which what is most worthwhile
in human life is placed inexorably in jeopardy because in warfare the most
selfish and brutal elements of human life become the ruling principles.  The
ruling tone in Thucydides is not cynicism, therefore, but a deep and abiding
pessimism: human nature being what it is, the finest achievements of
civilization will again and again inevitably destroy themselves.  He is, if
you like, a realist, if by that we mean someone who wants to explain events
by the practical realities of life all around us.  He is, no doubt
reductive, powerfully forcing our understanding of events into his scheme of
self-interest, fear, and power.  But so acute is this perception, we may
complain about important things being left out, but it is difficult for us
to deny the truth of what is there.

E. The Shape of History

Given this view of history, that the historical process is deeply rooted in
the psychology of human beings and their inevitable acquiescence to the
human realities of power and fear, Thucydides can see in his history an
eternal lesson for all his readers.  Since human nature is not going to
change and since there is no such thing as a metaphysical interference in
the historical process, the details of his account are going to repeat
themselves.  This point gives him the confidence to make what, on the face
of it, may appear the most arrogant statement ever written by a historian:

"But those who want to look into the truth of what was done in the
past--which, given the human condition, will recur in the future, either in
the same fashion or nearly so--those readers will find this History valuable
enough, as this was composed to be a lasting possession and not to be heard
for a prize at the moment of a contest."  (13)

Now, I want to focus on this point for a moment, because it calls attention
to a third quality we demand of the historian, in addition to a verification
of the facts and some account of the motive forces in history, namely, some
sense of the shape or direction of the historical narrative.

For an important part of the historian’s task has traditionally been not
merely to present and confirm exactly what happened and to suggest the
immediate causal forces.  We also have expected the historian to fit what he
or she has to say into a very much larger framework, a sense of the
direction or purpose or shape to the historical process itself.  Put another
way, we want to see how this particular narrative fits in relation to a much
wider overall perspective of the unfolding of human history.

By way of clarifying this point, let us consider for a moment the stories we
read in the Old Testament.  It is clear that the events there we are
encouraged to see as part of an overall historical scheme, a driving forward
of the narrative events towards a final purpose, the establishment of God’s
kingdom on earth.  There is, in other words, a very strong sense of linear
purpose in those Old Testament stories, a push that is picked up, as we
shall see, in the New Testament and reaches its most fervent expression in
the last text of the Bible, the Book of Revelations.

In this conception history is strongly linear and it has a destination, an
end point where history, in effect, ceases.  An even though we might dismiss
much of the Old Testament as history, on the ground that there is no
verification of events and that the time sequence is often unclear, we still
can see that it gives a very powerful shape to the overall process, a
progressive hope that history is, for all the trials and tribulations,
leading us eventually to the promised land, the establishment of God’s
kingdom on earth, where things will be very much better than they are now.
This sense of a forward thrusting direction to history becomes extremely
important in our culture, both in its Biblical form and later when it gets
secularized.  One of the great sources of the aggressiveness of Western
Culture, no where more so than in North America, has been our faith that our
historical success, especially over nature or others, in short, anything
that gets in the way of our "mission," was both evidence for and to be
explained in terms of the progressive triumph of certain ways of life, a
means of bringing us closer to the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth.

Now, it is clear that Thucydides’ notion of history is not like this.  He
regards history and the things that matter most in history as more or less
static.  Human nature does not change.  Power relations do, and thus there
will always be winners and losers.  But there is no gradual transformation
of that process manifesting itself event by event.  What has  happened in
the past will largely repeat itself.  That will occur because the most
important motive forces of history, the human desire for power and fear of
the power of others, will never change.  There are no gods to intervene to
change the situation, and there is no possibility that the human condition
will change.  That for him is the shape of the process, and that is why he
thinks what he has to say really matters, because we can perhaps learn from
the events of the war better what we are.

So for Thucydides, as for other Greek thinkers, if we are going to talk
about a direction to history, that direction is not, as it is in the Old
Testament, a strongly forward thrusting, divinely inspired force.  It is
something repetitive, perhaps, in some writers, marked even by a sense of
slow decline or even circularity.  The past thus matters, not because it
will help us, by some imaginative extrapolation figure out how far we have
come so that we can rededicate ourselves to the transforming future, but
rather because, with conditions basically unchanged, we can recognize
ourselves and our present situation in the old events.  Perhaps we can, by
recognizing our participation in the motive forces of history, in our urge
for power and our fear of others’ power, come more readily to grips with the
historical situation in which we find ourselves.

F. The Hebrew and the Greek Imagination

At the risk of digressing somewhat and of going over quickly something I
have mentioned before in connection with Hesiod and the Old Testament, I’d
like to expand a bit on this contrast between the Old Testament view of
history and what we find in Thucydides (and in other Greek writers) because
it goes to the heart of a powerful ambiguity we in the West have inherited
from our Hebrew and Greek origins.  It has to do with conflicting notions of
what lies at the heart of the way we understand the world around us,
including our history.
At the risk of making this too over simple, I can repeat a very old
observation that I mentioned in an earlier lecture this semester: that the
Hebrew imagination was overwhelmingly dynamic and temporal, whereas the
Greek imagination was overwhelmingly spatial and static.  Like all
generalizations, this is dangerous, but it might serve to offer some
illumination and coordinate a bit some of the reading we have done in
Liberal Studies this semester.

What I mean by this, at a very general level, we can best understand from
our reading.  The Israelites, it should be clear, placed no great stress on
the outward appearance of things or on understanding the world with the sort
of spatial clarity we see in Euclid or in Greek art.  For them what mattered
was dynamic action: moving, making, fighting, transforming—on a divinely
sanctioned journey to a better place.  There are very few external
descriptions of people or places in the Old Testament, and when we do learn
something about dimensions and design, it tends to come, as in the latter
part of Exodus, as part of an urgent instruction to build something.
Yahweh himself has no clearly defined outline, and the Israelites are
expressly forbidden to think of him in visual terms.  What matters about
Yahweh is his voice.  And when God speaks, things happen.  What matters in
life is our relationship with that commanding voice or its utterances,
especially in relation to an ongoing dynamic plan to move the Israelites
from place to place, from battle to battle, in the right direction, heading
toward the promised land.

In comparison with this enormously dynamic, time driven sense of life and
the divine, the Greek view, as we experience it in Homer, the tragedians,
Plato, and Thucydides is far more static and spatial, much more, if you
like, geometric.  The spatial relations between things, the dimensions and
appearance of a hero or a god are vital indications of their importance, and
in this matter the beauty of appearance is paramount (and often that is a
matter of geometrical ratio).  When we think of Greek religion, we
immediately think of the spatial manifestations of that in statues and
temples in which the influence of geometric proportions is very pronounced.

When we read Plato, we recognize the central desire for a reality, a truth
beyond the dynamic uncertainty of change, a reality that lies outside the
historical process, something which is eternally true.  What changes cannot
be true.  When we read the Old Testament we recognize that the truth of
something is confirmed by the historical process; in fact, the unrolling of
history is our contact with the divine, our confirmation that the divine
exists.

As Westerners, we are inheritors of both of these notions of historical
reality, and in large part our understanding of ourselves has moved back and
forth between the two of them.  This may indeed have made our historical
imaginations at times perplexed and contentious, but a good deal of what the
West has become is understandable, at least in part, in the light of this
divided legacy, summed up by Thorleif Boman as follows: "In that sense,
Hebrew and Greek thinking are complementary; the Greeks describe reality as
being, the Hebrews as movement.  Reality is, however, both at the same time;
this is logically impossible, and yet it is correct."

G. The Peloponnesian War as a Dramatic Structure

A final important point to make about Thucydides’s great book has little to
do with his vision of the historical process but a lot to do with how the
author emphasises for us the salient features of his vision.  I refer here
to the extremely dramatic nature of Thucydides’s style and the structure of
his narrative, which, in many respects, bears unmistakable similarities to
the narrative structure of some of the plays we have read, particular the
tragedies.  In other words, while we rightly stress the revolutionary
innovations T. wishes to use in his understanding of history, we can also
acknowledge that he uses certain traditional conventions to make sure his
readers are not entirely unfamiliar with the style.

For the Peloponnesian War, although it is unfinished, is very carefully
structured.  Thucydides does not simply catalogue the events and reduce each
phase to the crassest workings of fear, power, and self-interest.  For him,
quite clearly, Athens, especially the city of Pericles, represents a
magnificent achievement.  This he celebrates in what is probably the most
famous part of the book, the Funeral Oration of Pericles (39), which I hope
the seminars are going to discuss in some detail.  By the end of the book,
the achievement which that great speech hails lies in ruins, not because the
gods have intervened against Athens or because there is some ancient curse
or because the oracles have foretold the disaster but rather because the
people of Athens failed in some important way.  The war took over their
lives and unleashed the destructive forces latent in society which entirely
compromised the ideals the city was allegedly defending.  So the great
tribute to Athens turns into the disastrous failure of the Sicilian
Expedition--the greatest single disaster every suffered by a Greek polis.

The structure of the story is not unlike that of Oedipus, who begins
supremely confident of his goodness, power, and wisdom as he moves to deal
with a crisis (and whose confidence is entirely justified in the light of
his past achievements) and who ends staggering away blinded horribly by his
own hands through a course of action which he, more than any one else,
launched and maintained.

This gives to Thucydides's history a strongly dramatic quality, which comes
out in a number of different ways.  I would like to dwell upon these for a
moment:

Like so much of Homer, a great deal of the Peloponnesian War is taken up
with dramatic confrontations in which the central issues of the war are
presented to us as a debate, a confrontation between two speaking
personalities.  The intent here is clear: to see the dramatic antagonism of
individuals as the very essence of human decision making.  In that respect,
Thucydides is paying tribute to what a Greek reader would immediately desire
and expect, individual assertion in competition as the basis for political
activity and public worth.

This technique, however, raises at once the question about the legitimacy of
this procedure in historical writing, since, as Thucydides himself admits,
clearly he was not present at many of the arguments and, even if he was, he
probably had no way of getting verbatim transcripts:

 "What particular people said in their speeches, either just before or
during the war, was hard to recall exactly, whether they were speeches I
heard myself or those that were reported to me at second hand.  I have made
each speaker say what I thought the situation demanded, keeping as near as
possible to the general sense of what was actually said."  (13)

Given Thucydides's contempt for romantic history and his statements about
the importance of verified evidence, this practice would appear to be
unacceptable.  But Thucydides's purpose is clear.  He wants his narrative to
be dramatically alive, to come to the reader with the vitality and force of
a section of Homer or Euripides.  Strictly speaking, the speeches are not
necessary.  He could easily have replaced them with passages analyzing
motives and probable causes (as he does, for example, in dealing with the
Civil War in Corcyra).  But for Thucydides, as for so many Greek writers,
the only way to bring an issue fully to the imagination of the reader was to
dramatize it, even at the expense of historical veracity.

This constant reference to human speech, argument, decision making is, of
course, one very important way Thucydides constantly reminds us of the human
dimension on which all the really important events take place  And the
enduring power of Thucydides's work, and especially the most famous parts of
it, the dialogues, are a testament to the fact that he was right, even if,
by our much more stringent rules of permissible evidence, such use of
invented speeches is quite inappropriate.  We can imagine the work without
the speeches, but we can also at once appreciate that it would not be the
same.

Of course, from one perspective, Thucydides’s speeches do fit his criteria
for verification.  They did take place.  People stood up and argued the
different sides of an issue, and they reached a decision.  So there is some
factual basis for the event, even if the transcripts are not verbatim.

A second factor which really brings out the dramatic quality of Thucydides's
style is the overall structure of the narrative, which one can easily
compare to the structure of a dramatic tragedy, starting with the hero
(Athens) at the very pinnacle of success, fame, and confidence, and
culminating in the last act, when inevitable disasters which originated in
the very glory and success of the hero overcome him utterly.  Books Six and
Seven of the Peloponnesian War, those sections dealing with the Sicilian
Expedition are obviously very carefully crafted to represent such an
overwhelming catastrophe, bringing to nothing the noblest dreams of Pericles
early on in the book.  Of course, Thucydides’s narrative does not end at
this point (nor did the war), but the final chapter of the Peloponnesian War
is clearly not written with the same firm sense of style and purpose.  To
some extent, they suggest that the main artistic push is over.

And finally a third technique Thucydides characteristically uses is a set
piece description or dialogue, in which he pauses in the often rather
crammed narrative to offer an extended look at a particular event, often one
far away, but always something that will bring out dramatically his
principal themes.

The effect of these is to create a continuing sense that history is a matter
of human beings in action, particular individuals making specific decisions
for very human reasons, and in the course of a long war, losing touch with
the best forces of communal life as one mistake follows another, a shattered
illusion is replaced by another even more tenuous, and social life
degenerates into an increasingly anarchic and internecine scramble for
individual security.

The famous Funeral Oration of Pericles, is a relatively insignificant event
in the history of the war, but an essential part of Thucydides's dramatic
purpose: the clear definition of the self-image the hero possessed at the
start of his story.  And the immediate juxtaposition of this famous high
point with the description of the plague makes clear just how important it
is to Thucydides for his readers to see that the unfolding of this war
represents an eternal human drama and not simply a specific historical
event.  For the plague in Thucydides is much more than simply a disastrous
epidemic.  It is a symbol for the war itself.  And the effects of the
plague, particularly the way in which it so quickly destroyed the ancient
traditions which kept society functioning, are an early announcement of the
effect of this war.

But Thucydides is also aware that war is of all human endeavour the most
unpredictable, not just because chance comes into play, but more importantly
because war affects the way people behave, it can alter their most important
priorities and thus render problematic the very basis of social living.  In
warfare all those things that keep us more or less cooperative in peace come
under strain: once our desire for power and our fear of the power of others
become, as they do in warfare, important priorities, traditional ways of
dealing with each other lose their power.  This is true of family
relationships, traditional loyalties, even of language itself.  This last
becomes a tool for extending our power or for protecting ourselves from the
power of others.  It no longer serves primarily as a means of sorting out
our difficulties amicably and reaching agreement, as Aeschylus hoped, within
the context of a thriving political community.

Thucydides keeps this central tragic aspect of the story in front of us by
pausing in the narrative at times to give us an extended look at a
particular incident, something which will drive home to us in a very
dramatic manner the moral dimension of the story he is telling.  Events like
the Civil War in Corcyra, the Mytilene Debate, and the Melian Dialogues are
given more space in the this narrative than the events really deserve, if
all we are concerned with is the power struggle in the war.  But these
moment are essential (and justly famous) for providing insight into the
corrupting effects of war, for illustrating the tragic ironies of how
warfare changes inexorably the nature of the community which undertakes it
and, however heroic or admirable the conduct of particular individuals might
be, drives that community to self-destruction by the same logic that Oedipus
drove himself to self-mutilation.

Above all, Thucydides reminds us that war has a momentum and life of its
own.  We may undertake warfare for what look like good reasons; we may think
that this is a rational thing to do, that it serves noble ideals or that it
is something we can temporarily launch to achieve certain goals, that it is,
in the words of Von Clauswitz only "policy by other means."  What his story
of the Peloponnesian War makes clear, however, is that war, once started, is
like a lethal epidemic, that it transforms us, or, rather, that it brings
into play aspects of our permanent human nature which we are not aware of or
which we like to think we have transcended or can control.  So while we may
think initially that going to war is a tap which we can turn off and on like
a tap.  His point, among others, is that, while we may decide to turn the
tap on (just as Oedipus can decide to seek the killer of Laius), turning off
the tap may be a great deal more difficult than we originally imagined.

We may think we have learned a great deal about warfare and about human
psychology in the time since Thucydides.  We may occasionally be led into
thinking that we have somehow "progressed" beyond the destructive concerns
of ancient peoples.  As we contemplate the events of various modern wars
(e.g., Vietnam or the present Balkan conflict), Thucydides is an eloquent
reminder that in our zeal to think better of ourselves we may have forgotten
some eternal truths about why we behave the way we do.