Thucydides

Reading Mary Beard's new book, which in fact is not really new in the sense that it is a collection of reviews and articles written over time, and thus long since available to the attentive reader, is a wonderful review of what I once knew and taught. I have been reading what she has to say about Thucydides. He is an interesting specimen of ancient Greek prose, his work always contrasted with his predecessor, Herodotos, who as they always say, more or less invented history,  with his chattier more dramatic account of the events of the Persian invasion of Greece.  It's the first historical research we have, as he goes along telling what he has learned ("Solon said this, Creosus said that, the one of the Persians claimed . . . .").  Thucydides came along later in the same century, but now the big event was the Spartan military conflict with the Athenians, which Thucydides addressed in the context of the political career of Pericles and Cleon, and a few others, and gives a bravura crescendo describing the invasion of Sicily and the collapse of Athens  (although since the text does not seem to have a natural ending--broke off? or he died?) perhaps these events are misread as crescendo and finale.  Beard's review is focused on the writings of contemporary ancient historians, one of whom seems to want to find an implicit endorsement of the contemporary invasion of Iraq in Thucydides' treatment of Pericles failure to act early on.  I bring this up only because it is fascinating to me that historians invest so much into the text of this seeming witness to events all those millenia ago.  Yes, of course, Thucydides is talking about the events we know from other sources, and yes, he was a general, although a failed one and banished from the city, so he no doubt knew lots about the situation.  But there are certain items that I, as a literary critic and not a historian, find baffling and telling when I try to think of Thucydides as simply telling us the facts.  First, he announces to his reader in the first book that he was not able to be present and record all the speech making that went on in the period under his review, so he has taken upon himself to fashion what people might have said, from what he learned about their remarks after the fact.  Now, there is no way that one can understand the speeches in Thucydides' narrative as anything other than a fiction, and in searching around for the motive for making what on the basis of our understanding of the nature of historiography is entirely suspect, one thinks of the speeches in Homeric epic, a narrative very obviously true in one sense of the word and fiction in another.  It gives no problem because the hearer understands that he/she is witness to persons speaking in a narrative that is entirely the creation of the poet or what it was that inspired him--the oral tradition or whatever.  Thucydides advances his narrative on the same vehicle, that is, speeches from one or another person of this historical moment, and we read them as offering the motives for so much of the action described, and yet as we must know, they are a creation flying above the factual line, an evocation of the "meaning" of the moment, but in no way, the tissue of the moment.  That is artistry, creation, positioning, it is not the recital of facts. The question is whether one will liken these speeches to paragraphs in contemporary historians where they move from the facts they have been offering to a synthetic interpretation of them; perhaps that is the intellectual analogue, although that Thucydides puts his interpretations into the mouths of agents of the events destroys the distance the reader should have with the material.  But perhaps because it is the manner of epic narrative poetry it did not strike his readers as so peculiar.   Likewise when the Athenians hold their fateful parley with the Melians at which the fate of the latter is determined, ultimately their slaughter, an event momentous for the Athenians, as Thucydides make clear, in terms of their integrity as a culture and a people, the historian casts the facts of this event in the form of a dialogue, the one and only time in his narrative he does so.  There is no way that any rational person can read this as other than an extreme example of deliberate artifice, a determination on the part of the  writer to rise far, far above any claim to historical truth as he puts on what is essentially the essence of ancient tragic drama, that is the dialogue.  This is not history writing as we understand it, and what is more, Thucydides forces his reader to make this adjustment to something other than simple "reality," for whatever reason.  So I never quite understand what modern day historians are thinking when they consider Thucydides as simply a record of those ancient times.  That is hardly his first consideration, as he forces his reader into these adventurous engagements with reportage.  And because of this, I am far more sympathetic to the view long ago established by Cornford that the overall thrust of the narrative, its movement to Athenians so over estimating their power as to invade Sicily and thus to their defeat is almost consciously, but certainly unconsciously borrowed from the common development of action in tragic drama where hubris, or pride, is so pivotal in the oncoming destruction, rather than a neutral recital of fact.