The Birth of the Past

Part One. Antiquity

KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Part One KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK KKKKKKK Antiquity In flat appearance we should be and be, Except for delicate clinkings not explained. —Wallace Stevens, “Description without Place” 16 Flatland A rguably the greatest of all historians, Thucydides remains at best intensely difficult for modern readers and at worst utterly boring. In part the reason for his inaccessibility lies in his deadpan description of even the most horrific events, embroiling a complex cast of characters—aloof statesmen, pandering demagogues, egocentric rogues, decent fools—depicted with the severest economy of expression. The pulse of the narrative barely quickens as Spartans slaughter the courageous Plataeans after a heroic siege, as Athenians eradicate the luckless Melians for choosing to resist imperialist aggression, as Corcyraeans massacre one another in an unstoppable internecine bloodbath. Even the outcome of the famous “Mitylenian debate”—when the Athenian Assembly recoils from its previous resolve to execute all the adult males of the rebellious city of Mitylene and enslave all the women and children—still entails the deaths of the rebel leaders, “the number being rather more than a thousand.” Thus, with these dispassionate words, they exit the scene of a narrative that flows on and on, from horror to horror, almost in a monotone. And the perpetrator of the Mitylenian bloodletting, the Athenian demagogue Cleon—who insisted on at least a thousand heads if he could not have more—merely garners the title “most violent man in Athens,” opprobrium of such concision that it might pass unnoticed had not some scholars fastened upon it as a rare instance of Thucydidean ire. Of course, all this reticence serves the interests of what we now call “historical objectivity,” which Thucydides would regard less grandiosely as “accuracy,” a scholarly virtue he is widely regarded as personifying. Indeed, he does not entitle his work a “history,” perhaps because of that term’s association with Herodotean storytelling. And, lest anyone confuse his efforts with the tales of his predecessor, Thucydides expressly disavows entertainment in favor of instruction. To this end he stretches every nerve to appear impartial. The whole narrative takes its structure from this drive for accuracy, being organized by the Antiquity 17 chronological scheme of successive summers and winters that marks the campaign seasons of the war. Thucydides justifies this novel scheme as more precise than the traditional form of dating by the names of a city’s annual magistrates, for it better enables him to locate events within any given year. This aspect of the drive for accuracy, though, has the effect of further flattening the narrative, confining it to a recurrent pattern, a monotony of seasons that (ironically) strikes our sensibilities as unnatural. But for the modern reader, the real source of the narrative’s impenetrability lies beneath its unruffled surface. The work begins with a striking statement: “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.” From this point he launches into a nineteen-chapter digression (about a dozen pages in English translation) ostensibly proving that the Peloponnesian War was the greatest yet fought. This digression begins innocuously with the words “For instance” and—after a highly imaginative and detailed reconstruction of the material circumstances of the Greeks from the remote past to the present—ends abruptly with the phrase, “Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times . . .” The digression is so famous and insightful that tradition accords it a title: the Archaeology. Yet, regardless of its ultimate significance , its immediate effect is to bewilder the modern reader, who quickly loses sight of the Peloponnesian War as Thucydides details patterns of ancient migration , the subsequent establishment of walled communities, the gradual accumulation of material resources, and the eventual rise of navies and sea power. Instead of presenting a linear argument about the present, he takes a giant looping detour into the distant past. And this is only the first of many such loops, which classicists term “ring compositions.” These loops begin so imperceptibly that readers unaccustomed to Thucydides’s style only gradually become aware that they are lost in the thicket of a digression and, to recapture...