Hanson’s sly (and, in view of his familiarity with the text, deliberate) misrepresentation of Thucydides—the implication that this is a great Dead White Male’s response to contemporary political issues, when it is in fact the response of a character whom Thucydides is merely quoting—is, at one level, a betrayal of the Athenian historian’s ostentatious emphasis on methodological rigor. This is particularly ironic, given that Hanson apparently sees himself as a writer not unlike Thucydides himself: tough-minded, unsentimental (except, perhaps, about farmers, and those who fell in the last world war, “that better age” as he calls it in Ripples of Battle), perhaps more in touch with the tough realities of lived life than most effete academics. “My interests,” he writes at the beginning of Carnage and Culture, his 2001 study of why Western warfare has proved superior to that of all other cultures, “are in the military power, not the morality, of the West.” Unsurprisingly, a certain self-conscious machismo characterizes much of the writing; you can’t help sensing a certain relish in the author’s descriptions of dead hoplites “washing up in chunks on the shores of Attica” or “the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of an artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul.”
This Tarantino-esque swagger inevitably colors Hanson’s reading of Thucydides. In Hanson’s introduction to The Landmark Thucydides, the amply annotated presentation of Richard Crawley’s 1874 translation of the History, the soi-disant gimlet-eyed modern historian takes the measure of his gimlet-eyed predecessor’s narrative. The latter, Hanson asserts, shows us peoples and states “all caught in the circumstance of rebellion, plague and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.” But did Thucydides think that what human beings “really” are is (say) what the Athenians had become during the Melian debate and its aftermath, or what the mercenaries who murdered the schoolboys were? It’s not clear that he does; and, as we know, he never comes out and says so directly. (Then again, he does seem to admire the Melians, who certainly weren’t that way.)
To some extent, then, “what we really are” may have less to do with Thucydides than it does with Hanson’s image of himself: a tough guy who knows the score better than his soft counterparts on the East Coast do. “There is an inherent truth of battle,” he asserts in “Carnage and Culture”:
It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory…. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality.
But if this is true, then Hanson’s catalog of the immoral would have to begin with the Greeks themselves—not least, Thucydides himself. In fact, it is Hanson and Kagan who strip away the moral meaning that underpins Thucydides’ account of the war. To get a better sense of what that meaning is, you have to turn from the book that was started in 431 to the play that premièred that spring—which is to say, from history to tragedy.
To the Athenians, Thucydides’ History may well have looked a lot more like a tragedy than it does to us. You are, indeed, inclined to be suspicious from the very start of Thucydides’ notorious claim, in his Introduction, that his account of the war will lack “literary charm” (the Greek here is mythodes, a word related to myth). He begins his work by boasting of having used only “the plainest evidence” and having “reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate”—stringent methods that, he declares, set him apart from literary types such as poets (“who exaggerate the importance of their themes”) and certain earlier historians “who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public”—the latter being a swipe at his predecessor, Herodotus, whose narrative flourishes and fondness for the colorful anecdote the younger historian famously eschews. That said, Thucydides must nonetheless admit to a methodological difficulty that will result in some fiction-writing of his own:
I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.
As it happens, this is precisely what tragedians do, too: it dovetails perfectly with Aristotle’s recommendation, in the Poetics—his treatise on poetry and stagecraft—that tragic dialogue needs to reflect what a character is “likely” to say. What’s noteworthy about the speeches you find in Thucydides (and there are 141 of them) is that the most memorable of them aren’t, as it were, monologues: nearly all of the turning points of the war, the crucial moments in Athenian policy-making, are cast in dialogue form. This, more than anything, is what gives the History its unique texture: the vivid sense of an immensely complex conflict reflected, agonizingly, in hundreds of smaller conflicts, each one presenting painful choices, all leading to the great and terrible resolution.
Why did Thucydides cast so much of his history as dialogue? One reason is that the Greek habit of mind was to think in terms of polar opposites. There is, built into the Greek language itself, a grammatical element that structures most sentences into balanced clauses. (Most Greek prose, and a lot of poetry, too, sounds like this: “On the one hand, x; on the other hand, y.”) This habit of thought was reflected in the institutions of Greek life, nowhere more so than at Athens. Athenians were, even in ancient times, notoriously litigious—which is to say, both highly verbal and highly combative: a daunting number of the extant prose texts that we have from the great age of Athenian literature are, in fact, lawyers’ speeches. In that context, it comes as no surprise that the three greatest intellectual achievements that came out of Athens—Platonic philosophy (treatises cast as dialogues between Socrates and his interlocutors), Thucydidean historiography (historical events reduced to dialogues between opposing viewpoints), and tragic theater (verbal “contests,” called agones, between characters representing differing moral, religious, or ethical positions)—are all genres that aim to elucidate the truth of the human condition by means of dialogue, of verbal contests. Plato, according to legend, started out wanting to be a playwright and only later turned to philosophy.
The common intellectual heritage of tragedy and Thucydidean history helps explain why it’s possible, and indeed desirable, to read the two genres against each other. To see just how “tragic” Thucydides can be, it’s worth studying the most famous dialogue in Thucydides: the Melian Dialogue, the historian’s presentation of the confrontation in the spring of 416 B.C. between the representatives of Athens and those of Melos. In this section, the Athenians have come to demand cooperation from the Melians, on pain of total destruction, insisting on their right, as the more powerful, to decide the island’s fate. (They blandly dismiss any considerations of what is actually just, since for them Justice “depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”) Slyly taking up the Athenians’ argument for action based on self-interest, the spirited Melians reply that it might be in the Athenians’ best interests to exercise restraint and refrain from devastating the island, since “in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected from the difference in numbers of the two sides.” Instead, they doggedly place their trust in “hope” and “fortune.” As we know, the negotiations soon collapsed; that winter, the city fell and the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians who, true to their word, put to death all the men of military age and sold into slavery all of the women and children.
The tragedy of the Melian episode doesn’t lie so much in the fact that it has an unhappy ending (many Greek tragedies don’t), as in the crisp exchanges between the principals, which indeed resemble the stichomythia, the rapid-fire dialogue, between warring duos in so many Greek tragedies: unscrupulous tyrants threatening innocent women who have taken
sanctuary at altars, as in Aeschylus’s Suppliants and numerous other plays, or all-powerful kings locking horns with physically powerless yet morally ferocious antagonists, as in (to take the best known example) Sophocles’ Antigone. As if to underscore the similarities between his text and those of the tragic poets, Thucydides gives this debate a remarkable physical resemblance to the scripts of real tragedies, with the names of the “characters,” the Athenians and Melians, abbreviated before their respective speeches, like this:
MEL.: And how could it be just as good for us to be the slaves as for you to be the masters?
ATH.: You, by giving in, would save yourselves from disaster; we, by not destroying you, would be able to profit from you.
MEL.: So you would not agree to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?
ATH.: No, because it is not so much your hostility that injures us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness in us, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.
A thrilling, if disheartening, bit of drama.
It is, however, in yet further manipulations of his text that Thucydides suggests the extent to which we are to read his book as a play, his history as a tragedy. In the Poetics, Aristotle observes that even good dialogue doesn’t make a good tragedy. “If a man writes a series of speeches full of character and excellent in point of diction and thought,” he observes, “he will not achieve the proper function of tragedy nearly so well as a tragedy which, while inferior in these qualities, has a plot or arrangement of incidents.” Chief among the devices that give a narrative the sense of being a true tragic plot, he goes on to say, are peripeteia, “reversal of fortune,” and anagnorisis, a “recognition,” resulting from the reversal of fortune, of what one hadn’t realized before. (When the Melians remind the Athenians that the latter could well be the losers one day, they’re talking, rather optimistically, about a peripeteia.) Tragedy, after all, thrives on shocking reversals and morally pointed echoes and inversions: so Oedipus, in Sophocles’ play, is a king who turns out to be an outcast, a sleuth who turns out to be the criminal he seeks, the foreigner who is revealed to be native-born, the son who replaces his father in his mother’s bed. So Pentheus, in Euripides’ Bacchae, the rigid young man obsessed with maintaining the boundaries of his city and his own psyche, ends up literally disintegrating, torn into tiny pieces by god-maddened women.
Thucydides, naturally, couldn’t “arrange” his plot as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides so artfully did; throughout the History, as we know, he sticks to his careful narration of events as they happened. But while Thucydides can’t invent what his characters did, he does have more control over what they say (since, as he himself tells us, he’s putting words in their mouths). It’s here, in the diction and arrangement of the speeches, that he forges the literary parallels and verbal echoes that allow you to perceive how much of what happens to Athens is an Aristotelian peripeteia.
This is certainly evident in the masterly portrayal of Athens’s disastrous Sicilian Expedition. In tragedy, reversals are usually punishment for hubris, and there are clues, in the History, that Sicily is to be seen as a heroic delusion on a scale as grandiose as anything you find in tragedy. When the magnificent Athenian fleet, led by Alcibiades, set out for Sicily in the winter of 416 B.C., she was equipped with lust for conquest and not much else, apart from a hubristically misplaced self-confidence: “They were,” Thucydides writes, “for the most part ignorant of the size of the island and of the numbers of its inhabitants, both Hellenic and native, and they did not realize that they were taking on a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians.” And there’s little doubt that we’re meant to see in the disaster that ensued a grand retribution for the cynical policies of which the Melian slaughter stands as the great symbol. The Melian affair closes Book V, and the Sicilian Expedition opens Book VI—a pointed juxtaposition. In Sicily, moreoever, the Athenians are forced, in a typically tragic reversal, to “play” the Melians whom they themselves had destroyed. In the very moment of the Athenians’ total defeat, Nicias urges his troops to place their trust in “hope,” “fortune,” and the gods—the very things that the Melians, facing obliteration at the hands of a vastly more powerful enemy, had trusted in, to the derisive amusement of the Athenians during the Melian debate. What befalls the Athenians in Sicily therefore fulfills the desperate prediction of the Melians: “We know that in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected.”
This is surely why Thucydides takes special care to present the climactic defeat of the Athenian forces in the Sicilian campaign, at the Assinarus River in 413, as a theatrical spectacle, with what can only be described as an audience of Syracusans watching the battle, “prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions.” How better to behold what the author describes as “the greatest reverse that ever befell an Hellenic army”? The notion of reversal colors the entire passage: the Athenians, those great seafarers who had come across the vast waters to this island, greedy to fatten their empire, finish by crawling around in the river mud, pathetically desperate for nothing more than enough water to slake their dreadful thirst. “They now suffered very nearly what they had inflicted,” Thucydides writes. “They had come to enslave others, and were departing in fear of being enslaved themselves.”
But no reversal in Thucydides’ presentation of his native city is more pointed, or more appalling, than one that would have been obvious to his contemporaries. In Herodotus’s history of the glorious conflict in which Athens and Sparta fought side by side against a common enemy, the Persians, he relates how the Great King of Persia, confident of his military superiority, the enormous numbers of troops and rich provisions at his disposal, tried to persuade the Greeks that resistance was futile; that might made him, if not right, then inevitable. And yet they trusted to hope, and fortune, and the gods, and were richly rewarded in their stunning victories at Marathon in 490 and at Salamis ten years later. That the Athenians, in Thucydides’ History, should, in the course of fifty years, have come to resemble the villain of Herodotus’s Histories, using the same words to the Melians that the Great King had once addressed to them, is an irony as bitter as any you find in Sophocles. This was something that Thucydides’ ancient readers already understood. “Words like these,” the first-century B.C. historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote in his analysis of the Melian dialogue, “were appropriate to oriental monarchs addressing Greeks, but unfit to be spoken by Athenians to Greeks.”
So the lessons to be learned from Thucydides are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world.
These are, indeed, the lessons of Medea, that other product of the spring of 431 B.C. To our post-Freudian eyes, Medea looks like an over-the-top domestic and psychological drama; to the Athenians, that fraught March, it may well have looked like a political fable. The play’s setting is Corinth—a highly unusual locale for a Greek tragedy—and its heroine is obsessed with violated oaths. These two facts suggest an underlying commentary on the Corinthian diplomatic crisis of a few years earlier—an event characterized by broken covenants and explosive confrontations between “kindred” states—which led to the outbreak of the war. Then there’s the heroine’s philandering husband, Jason the Argonaut. With his aggressive bearing and fancy rhetorical footwork (at one point he tells Medea that he’s abandoning her and their children in a strange land for their own good), he begins to look like a parody of a certain kind of Athenian politician—the kind who might for the sake of winning an argument denounce in an enemy the crass ethics (a preference for might over right, say) that he himself is known to hold dear.
Nearly
all of Euripides’ extant works were written during the war, and, more than any other tragedian, he kept returning to the tragic lessons of history. His Trojan Women, which depicts the horrific aftermath of the Greeks’ sack of Troy, was first produced in the spring of 415 B.C.—all too clearly a bitter artistic reaction to the slaughter of the Melians the preceding winter. One of the questions the play asks is, in fact, a question that Hanson scorns as “immoral”: whether abject defeat can yet somehow be a victory—not, obviously, a military victory, but a moral victory.
Euripides’ answer to this question is as clear as Hanson’s, although somehow the Greek has come to a conclusion different from that reached by the Californian. The first great speech of the play is given to the mad Trojan princess Cassandra (she’s the one who’s doomed to make prophecies that no one will believe), and bizarrely, although the Greeks have utterly destroyed Troy, the monologue is a paean to an alleged Trojan (or “Phrygian”) victory:
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 47