Athens at War (review)

When I was growing up, the ancient Athenians were very wonderful people who invented democracy, carved a lot of marble statues wearing fig-leaves (I'm ashamed to say I never questioned the sculptors' knowledge of Genesis) and spent a great deal of time walking in the sun and asking difficult questions. Such sketchy bits of ancient politics as came my way never seemed to be about the same wonderful people, but I thought that was because I was more interested in art and sunshine than in politics.

The Spartans however, had invented a state rather like my own boarding school and were not very imaginative. They were only happy when returning from battle with their shields or on them: and I never did understand why they combed their hair before being defeated by the Persians, except that there seemed something insulting about it, like a cat washing itself while you try to talk to it. They invented one revolutionary idea, which was vaguely linked to our having daily gymnastics.

When I came, late in life, to realize that art and sunlight are conditional on politics, I read Thucydides, and the shock was terrible. I had lived (largely underground) through a world war, and now read every day in the current news of the slow destruction of Indo-China; and here, like a backdrop to all the slaughters were the golden people grabbing for land and trade, uttering unctuous justifications of imperialism and, to the limits of their non-technological ability, "laying waste" or "devastating" their enemies' dwellings, farmlands, crops. They were, after all, no better than we; the limits of destruction were marked only by the bounds of possibility.

If Athens at War had existed in those days, I might have been better educated for that future which is now the present. In this abridgement of his original translation of Thucidydes' Peloponnesian War (Penguin, 1954 and many times thereafter) Rex Warner has omitted many of the complications of that war, but simplified nothing of its meaning. Ironic, clear-eyed beyond despair and the edge of tragedy, Thucydides still speaks; despite the compression of material and the addition of necessary explanations, the translator's elegance of style remains.

The moments of high and deliberate drama are kept—it is mostly narration which has been abridged—and it is this rather than anything in the attitude which renders the book more appropriate for children than the original. It is more consistently appealing to the instinct for drama—and this, of course, is where false dreams of history begin. ("Boredom is the force in life which histories always omit," said Robin Fox, writing about, of all people, Alexander the Great).

Yet the scenes so graphically described have none of the imperial coziness that made my visions ludicrous. We see the plague in Athens (p. 40); we hear the shameful debate at Melos (p. 110); and we end with the soldiers of the Sicilian expedition crowded together, dying in the stone quarries at Syracuse (p. 167).

To those of us who are not young, these scenes are intolerably full of ghosts and echoes. To those growing up in a world already inured to future shock, this dark vision of our likeness across the millenia may be the best foundation for true understanding of the wonders that sprang from the ancient world—from man himself. They were not better than we; yet they had the ability to create which we so desperately need to believe ourselves capable of—a vitality which in art, in literature, in politics, in the record of its own shame negates the terrible ending of the Sicilian expedition.

They were utterly and entirely defeated; their sufferings were on an enormous scale; their losses were total; army, navy, everything was destroyed, and, out of many, only few returned.

(p. 168)