If pulled from his grave near the base of the Pnyx Hill, unceremoniously revivified, and given a chance to witness so gratuitous a spectacle of rhetorical excess, passion, hastiness, recrimination, and remorse as, say, the Covington Catholic affair, Thucydides might feel a bitter satisfaction in noting how little human nature has changed since his writing.
For some years, however, this forbidding Greek's portrayal in the headlines—such as it is—has given pride of place not to his immortal portraits of political melee but to his purported notion of the “Thucydides trap.” The term was coined by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison to describe the great risk of war that occurs when a rising power, in our case China, confronts an established power, that is, the United States. At one point in his recent book on the subject, Destined for War, Allison generously suggests it was better that Thucydides did not live to see his beloved city of Athens lose the war she started. (Unfortunately, as much for Thucydides as for Allison, the historian did in fact survive the Spartan victory in 404 BC.)
Luckily for us, we now have a testament in our own time to Thucydides's unmatched ability to illustrate the awful sway that passion and persuasion wield over human affairs. Joanna Hanink, a Brown classicist (in the sense pertaining to the university in Providence), has given us How to Think about War, a collection of the most well-known speeches in Thucydides's History. The book is part of an attempt to resurrect a genre of classical handbook that was once a staple among the educated but which has, along with the classical persuasion in general as a subject of more than purely academic interest, fallen on hard times in past decades.
The six speeches—from Pericles's successful attempt in 432 BC to convince the Athenians to go to war, to Nicias's vain bid to scuttle the Sicilian expedition—accompanied as they are with Hanink's succinct and reserved introductions, together make up a convincing précis of Thucydides's mammoth history.
The translations are fresh but faithful. They convey the delicate equilibrium of Thucydides's prose without rendering it stagnant or stilted. True, Hanink's rendering of an especially famous line in Pericles's funeral oration—“The city as a whole is an instructive model for Greece”—is a little less soaring than the version in the trusty Richard Crawley translation, which features the memorable line, “We are the school of Hellas.” But elsewhere her version is more direct than Crawley's (no insult intended to Crawley, considering he wrote under the literary conventions of the nineteenth century). Crawley, for example, has the beleaguered Melians object, “It is expedient” that the Athenians “should not destroy what is our common protection.” Hanink, on the other hand, has them say, “We think it will be to your advantage … to refrain from violating a rule of common decency,” succinctly thus capturing the Melians' failed bid to repackage their claim for justice in the language of self-interest.
The rhetorical focus of the handbook is equally welcome: after all, the speeches are the gems of Thucydides's history. Their historical accuracy is debated—the historian himself says, obscurely, that he either reported the speakers' words exactly or wrote down what they ought to have said—but their accuracy is also, in a sense, moot. Thucydides uses dialogue at least as productively as Plato, as a vehicle to set ideas against each other, illustrate paradoxes, and give the reader not a pat conclusion but a vocabulary and a lay of the political land. This is one reason why, also like Plato, Thucydides is a perennial source of wisdom: he does not seek to convince or inculcate as much as to unsettle and challenge.
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