In Our Time - Thucydides

Episode Date: January 29, 2015

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. In the fifth century BC Thucydides wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of a conflict in which he had himself taken part. This work is now seen as one of the first great masterpieces of history writing, a book which influenced writers for centuries afterwards. Thucydides was arguably the first historian to make a conscious attempt to be objective, bringing a rational and impartial approach to his scholarship. Today his work is still widely studied at military colleges and in the field of international relations for the insight it brings to bear on complex political situations.With:Paul Cartledge Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture and AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, CambridgeKatherine Harloe Associate Professor in Classics and Intellectual History at the University of ReadingNeville Morley Professor of Ancient History at the University of BristolProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Thucydides and 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. This belief was not without its grounds. So begins one of the earliest and greatest works of history, Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War.

Written in the 5th century BC, it recounts the events of a major conflict in which its author took part. Like his predecessor, Herodotus, Thucydides has come to be seen as one of the founders of the Western tradition of history writing. His rigorous approach to evidence, an attempt to provide an objective view of events, provided a model for later historians which was influential many centuries after his death. with me to discuss the life and work of Thucydides are Paul Cartlidge, Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture, an A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. Catherine Harlow,

Associate Professor in Classics and Intellectual History at the University of Reading, and Neville Morley, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Paul Cartilage, we don't know precisely when suicidities is born to some time around 460 BC in Athens. Before we get to him, can you tell us something of the Greek world

into which he was born. Let me begin by saying that Greece is a word we have inherited from the Romans. The Greeks called themselves Helens, and they lived in Hellas, which was a much bigger entity than the modern state of Greece. It extended all over the Mediterranean all around the Black Sea. And Thucydides was a kind of world war historian. He's following, as you rightly said in your introduction, Herodotus, and we'll be coming back to the relationship.

between those two, I'm sure, several times. But whereas Herodotus took a foreign subject, as it were, his main subject was the rise of the Persian Empire and the impact that had on the Greek world, Thucydides comes after the Greco-Persian wars, which were a success, and he deals with a period of, well, you could call it tragedy, you could certainly call it disasters,

within which Greeks fight Greeks and Aoutros, They fight to the death. Huge Thucydides thought unprecedented numbers of deaths, of appalling atrocities, everything going to hell in a handcart. Thucydides himself was a participant. We'll be coming back to his life, of course. But the key thing is that he excluded very deliberately what Herodotus had talked about mainly, which was the Persian Empire.

So though we're in the Greek world, is an intra-Greek conflict. Actually, the Persian Empire still existed, and it was on the fringes stretching way off to what's today roughly Pakistan in the east, Afghanistan in the near northeast. And yet Thucydides decides to focus intently on the Greek world. We're in the 5th century BC, that's between 500 and 400. Thucydides, as you say, is born roughly in the middle of that.

He says at the very beginning of his work, I was of an age to understand when the war broke out. Can you give us a parabola of that 27-year, as it were, with a conflict? I can certainly try. And we speak of it as a war. Thucydides is the inventor of that one war theory. And it's one of the very key dimensions in the way in which he was a revisionist historian. He's not going to take on trust what anybody thinks.

things. You or I, looking at the fifth century, might well say, well, there was a 10-year war, 431 to 421, then there was a piece, okay, a phony piece, because they actually fought between the Athenians and their allies, the Spartans and their allies, then the war began again, and you could almost see it as three very separate phases. Why did the Hucydides want one 27-year war? Well, one reason was because he was very competitive. His war was going to be almost three times as long as the longest war that any Greeks hitherto knew about, namely the Trojan War. So Homer, 10 years, come on. Mine is 27. So it starts 431, and the first 10 years is a kind of stalemate. They make a peace, and both sides have to make

concessions. But because there are areas of dispute, the struggle resumes. And it's the struggle resumes. And It starts again in 413 and carries on until 404 with total victory for the Spartans and their now Persian allies. I mean, this is something which had Thucydides lived longer, he lived until the end of the war. We know that because he refers to it. He doesn't manage to complete his account of the war. He presumably dies. But had he lived longer, he might well have done more to incorporate the Persians into the picture. but as it is, the Spartans win

and they then take over the position of the Athenians. They are now the great Greek power in the eastern end of the Mediterranean world. Thank you. Catherine Harlow, how much is known about Eucydides' life? Well, actually, we know relatively little about his life apart from what he himself tells us in his text, and that's fairly little.

There are a couple of ancient biographies of Fucydides that have come down to us with his mind, manuscripts. But a lot of the information in ancient biographies tends to be viewed as quite untrustworthy. It can be speculative. It can be extrapolated from what's in the text. As you said, we think he was born in the four-60s BC. This is a judgment that we make because he held the generalship at Athens, an important military office in 44 BC. And you had to be at least 30 years old. He also tells us, as Paul mentioned, that as the war broke out, he was already of an age to have understanding of the significance of the events.

So we assume he was already a relatively mature man in 4-3-1. While all this is going on, we're still in one of the centuries of unparalleled genius, aren't we? Yes, well... And a lot of these people that we're talking... I mean, I'm trying to put societies in that context. A lot of the people we admire

and whose long finger of genius still points to us today fought in wars and were part of it. So the war and the thinking is going on at the same time. Absolutely. Well, the fifth century was really a century of a great deal of war. And that's something that we don't always think about when we're thinking about the Greek world. There were the Persian wars at the beginning of the century.

There were a series of conflicts going on in the mid-century. And then, of course, this big, long period of almost a kind of total war, the Peloponnesian war going on at the end. It was interesting about Eucydides. I suggest you tell him, he's, he's, part of that intellectual pattern that he not only reports on what he thinks about war, he constructs ideas about war, which still are pertinent today. I mean, they're taught in the most effective military academies in the world,

which are across America, West Point and so on. So he has that zeitgeist is there with him. Yeah, absolutely. He's one of the founding figures of modern international relations theory. He's been taken up throughout the modern period. as a theorist of the logic of preemption and the logic of war. So when people think about war, they tend to also think through Fucydides. Paul pointed out that Thucydides, one of his aims of writing this war, well, was to write

because he wanted to put all this down and he saw himself in a position to do it in his 20 years exile, but also it was competitive to make it longer than the Trojan War. Are there any other reasons that you can bring to bear on why he wanted to do this in the way he did massive, of so well researched by, objectively realised. Well, he does tell us that apart from the greatness of the events, very intrinsic historical significance, that he's also interested in exploring the reasons for the war. He wants to write down these events

so that no one will be in any doubt about the causes of the fighting between the Spartans and the Athenians, these two great powers. And he makes a very interesting distinction, which is relevant to his whole methodology, between the causes that are apparent, the kind of pretexts people give, the debates and the disputes that lead to the outbreak of fighting in 431, and what he calls the truest cause, the real cause, which is the least evident, the least easy to see, and that, he says, is the growth in power of Athens,

Athens increase in greatness and Spartan fear of it. So he sees himself as uncovering a certain explanation of why this war breaks out that is different from what people have understood. And insofar as a Peloponnesian War is seen as paradigmatic for all wars, Cucydides is telling us something about the reasons why wars happen in general. And that's often why it's brought back again and again. The Soviet Union is Sparta, America, is Athens and so on. These war, thinking war games have gone on for two and a half.

Well, they're gone and still gone, right. Neville Morley, in book one of the history, with Cucydides outlines his historical method. Could you tell us about that? I think one place to start is actually to carry on what Catherine's just said about the aims of his work and what he tells us. It is the drive towards understanding what had happened. And that's not as an end in itself.

Thucydides says quite expressly, his history is going to be useful. It's going to be worth reading because people can learn from it. because, and he uses a phrase catatopanthropinon, which is often translated as according to human nature. It's a bit vaguer than that. It's more like sort of because of the human thing. And he says, you know, because of the human thing, events tend to repeat themselves. Things are likely to occur again in more or less the same way. And so it's worth reading his accurate history of the events of the Peloponnesian War.

because that's what's going to tell us how to understand things in future. And I mean, that's why he continues to be read, for example, in US military academies. It's this same idea that we don't just learn about the past, we learn about how history works,

how people and states behave. It makes a point of being objective, doesn't it? I mean, you would have thought that he would totally favour the Athenians, as Catherine pointed out. But he doesn't. He sets out to be objective to try to tell. He keeps using the word truth in Greek, of course, but that's what he's trying to do.

Absolutely. And his starting point is that... So the poetic, the mythologising, the propagandising, he tries to get rid of all of that. Yes, or at least to get at what he thinks is the truth behind these stories. And he's quite disparaging about other people's confused idea of the past, that people tend to believe any old story, which possibly he's pointing at Herodotus. He certainly suggests that there is historical truth in Homer,

but there's lots of stuff we can't believe. So he tries to strip away the mythological, fantastical aspects to get at what was the historical development that really lay behind the myths and legends. And when he looks at contemporary events, he wants to get past the different perspectives that people have to get at sort of his sense of what really happened. And as you say, precisely, to get past the Athenian view or the Spartan view

to this is why it really occurred in the way that it did. Can you give us an idea of the style and structure of the work? The structure on the face of it is fairly straightforward. most of it is a year by year account of events. And next spring and next winter they did this. Yes, he uses that phrase again and again. Those were the events of winter in the following summer, dum-de-dum. I mean, that actually gets criticised by some ancient critics

because it breaks up the action. So he moves from different theatres of war. He moves from what's going on in Athens to what's going on the other side of the Peloponnese. For an ancient critic, actually that's a problem, because you're not seeing how events follow through as a unity. But of course, what it does do is convey the complexity of events, that different things are going on in different places,

and they affect one another. And in other respects, his presentation is more complex than it sometimes appears. There is, in fact, quite a lot of sort of foreshadowing, and you read a passage, and suddenly it becomes clear how this relates to something that should have. happened earlier, he has a couple of sort of longer flashbacks. So he opens his history with an account of events in Greece up until the point where the war broke out. At a few other points in the history, he'll sort of look back over a longer period of time. In terms of style,

it doesn't generally get judged positively, or at least the adjective. used by critics are things like sort of austere and complex and occasionally convoluted. His language is he has a preference for very long complicated sentences and it's sometimes suggested that this is deliberate

that you have to read Thucydides incredibly carefully and read between the lines and work out which bit of the sentence relates to another bit and that this is a deliberate attempt to get us to think things through Yeah, but for this, our purpose, just thank goodness I've got the three of you here. All right. Paul Cartledge, can you give us, can we sort of zoom in on,

just give us some idea from the early years of the war, how he treats the early years of the war. If I could just, though, pick up on Neville's point about writing, whereas Herodotus, its thought, actually delivered orally, at least some versions of what he eventually wrote. And though people probably did, in some cases, read Herodotus, early on, they often would have heard him. Thucydides is almost impossible to hear orally. And the Ucudides himself says,

my work is not a prize composition for competitive performance, but it is done forever. In other words, you read and you reread and he uses a word, he never uses the word Historia, which is Herodotus's word. He uses another word for inquiry, he uses another word for composition and he is very much clearly writing a text for people to reflect upon.

So he starts off the war 431 and as Nebel says he does it by summers and winters. His summer is a very long summer. It includes the spring and part of the autumn. So it's sort of from March until October, November and winter is a much more. What are you concentrating on? He's focusing initially

on events, actually, what clashes the two sides engaged in which put them at a level at the world. What he's interested in is, why does it jack up to such a global conflict in Greek terms? So it starts out with an incident not affecting directly either Athens or Sparta. It starts in Thebes and it affects an ally of Sparta, Thebes and an ally of Athens-Patia. And thereafter, he's off. And the Spartans invade Attica and the Spartan. This is part of the pattern.

They are the prime military force. They have a large alliance. They are unbeatable on land. And Pericles is very well aware. Pericles being the leading spokesman of the Athenian, as it were, resistance. And the way the Athenians cast themselves is non-aggressors. The Spartans have broken the peace. They had been in a peace relationship for 14 years.

And it is therefore the Athenians' task to resist. and not to be beaten. And so the war goes on, on and off. Spartans invade. So this is the Thucydides, the narrator, the chronicler, because that's one aspect. It's a multifaceted historian, isn't it? Because there's that and there's a concentration on, as it were, case histories,

and there's the reflections. But he just gets it off to this is what is happening. Well, broadly speaking, in his methodological passage, which Neville dealt with earlier, He divides his whole text, which presumably he hadn't yet written. I mean, it's a real puzzle when he wrote his preface, but between narrative and speeches. And what he's interested in is the degree of accuracy

that is possible to attain as between the two, and he draws a sharp distinction. Can we talk, Catherine Hullnett, about his... Does he look back on others? Paul has often mentioned Herodotus, so maybe you want to refer to Herodotus again here. But does he look back and say, I am not like this person or I want to be like that person and so on?

Well, it's an interesting question. Cichydides doesn't mention very many of his predecessors by name in his history. And we're in a relatively impoverous position because actually the only very extensive historical account that survives in prose before Fucydides is that of Herodotus. They're quite close, aren't there? We're not talking about somebody's sensual. as before. They're running in the same century

those two. Yeah, Herodotus was an older contemporary of Thucydides and certainly lived into the Peloponnesian War and his works were certainly circulating around the Greek world in the four-twenties in the period that Fucydides is writing about. And there's actually in one of the lives of Thucydides from antiquity,

there's an anecdote that Thucydides heard Herodotus reciting some of his history, which can serve as a lot of, you know, it's the handing on the Baton Thucydides is inspired but goes on to do something else. But it does also set up the contrast that Paul mentioned that Thucydides is doing something different.

So there's a sense that Thucydides is in competition with Herodotus, even though he isn't mentioned by name. I mean, perhaps it would be useful just to say a couple of things about Herodotus, that he wrote the history of the Persian Wars, the Great Wars, earlier on in the century, and Thucydides picks up his narrative in a sense in book one from where he has. Herodotus leaves off. Herodotus is narrating the rise of a great power, the Persian Empire, and Fucydides in a sense is narrating the rise of a great power too in the shape of the Athenian Empire. So although Fucydides and Herodotus are often seen as in competition, there are

some ways, I think, in which Fucydides is taking on Herodotus and is influenced in a more sort of positive way. There are elements of imitation there as well as rivalry. But there's other and even deeper differences. Errida seems to be willing to and happy to invoke gods, myths, supernatural events. And Thucydides is much more careful about that. And if he does, it's a rather ironic the way he passes through them. Yeah. It's much more rationalist.

I mean, Fucydides history is sort of marked by its absence of focus on religious explanation. And even in terms of the motivation and for various actors, Herodotus is much more expansive in other ways. I mean, his narrative is digressive. He has long discussions of the customs of different barbarian peoples, the Sivians, the Persians and so on. And he also says this is a really important difference between them. Herodotus says at one point that although he doesn't see it as his duty

to believe the stories, the different stories that people tell about the past, he sees it as his duty to report them. Cucydides doesn't do that. Fucydides tells us how difficult it has been to extract the truth about events from the varying stories of men. Especially the Spartans. Once he's extracted that truth, he doesn't tell us the different versions. He gives us his own unitary, fairly monolithic account. Neville Morley, I think I refer to it.

It doesn't matter about it, Donush. One of the things he does is concentrate on particular things, sometimes at great length, and it gives us a big close-up and a detailed examination. Paul's talked about the flow. The flow stops. It hits a rock as it were, and the water goes round the rock in very strict. And one of these is the sasses of Kokira. I pronounce it Korsaira.

Thank you very much. Well, I'll pronounce it Korsaira from now on. Now, what was important enough about that to make him do it in such detail? It's civil war. It's a Greek state falling apart, falling into faction. It's in Kofu? Yes. Right.

Pretty well all the Greek state. had different groups within them. So you'd have a sort of populist party who would favour a more democratic constitution and would tend to be favourable to the Athenians. You'd have as an oligarchic party. And in the course of the war, Thucydides tells us,

it becomes more and more common that these different cities fall into civil war. Corsaira is the first and he uses it. You referred to the idea of the case study and it's precisely that. He goes into deep.

detail to show this is what civil war is like. This is what happens. But the fascinating thing is that from that, he draws conclusions, which still would seem relevant to Machiavelli, to Hobbes and to West Point. So can you tell us what conclusions he draws from that? A whole range of them. I mean, it's really the characterisation of civil war, the tendency to extremes, for example, so that... In what? In behaviour, so that people's... loyalty is to their faction rather than to the community as a whole or rather than to their families. So he talks about brothers fighting, brothers, sons fighting fathers. And in language, the way that

people think and talk about things, he suggests it changes. So that moderation, which is traditionally the great value on which a community is founded, moderation comes to be called cowardice. recklessness simply comes to be proper virtuous behaviour and violence comes to be called bribery absolutely that's fascinating isn't it and I mean as an image of

what happens when society falls apart as you say this has seemed to generation after generation to speak to their times so yes Renaissance Italy the wars of religion in the 16th century the English civil war

the French Revolution even sort of conflict today. I mean, it's been referenced in sort of modern discussions of even say what's been happening in sort of Crimea and the Ukraine, that this is the template for describing how societies are fragile, how they can very easily fall apart. The ties that unite them break under pressure and... And he got it then, didn't it? That's astonishing.

about these Greeks, they get it two and a half thousand years ago. I mean, we're just footnotes, aren't, Paul? Oh, well. You're a superior footnote. I'm going to picture on the question of language in a different sense. What Neville, as we normally do, call civil war, is in Greek, stasis. And this is a cant, it's a standard word today, and it means steady state, no change. Well, in the Greek, it has the exact opposite sense.

You have a standing apart in opposition in the most violent opposition. So the Greek word for civil conflict, civil war, is something quite to our way of thinking antithetical. However, my main point is that translation, we're talking about Thucydides, we're talking about his history. It's often very difficult to know exactly what register, what nuance, what precise, if you like, jargon or technical equivalent to choose for his language. So one must be very careful not to say that we know or we are reading Thucydides. We're reading various versions of these cities, which we read in our own ways. But there's certain obscurity is often very valuable

for a long intellectual life. No, then. I think this is a very unfair suggestion. We are obscurantists. He has speeches. Let's take parakeet of speeches. We don't want them in detail. There isn't time.

But there are speeches there which he declares as I... When you tell us about his speeches? Well, as I said, in the methodological section at the beginning, he draws distinction between the two types of writing. One is narrative, one is speeches. Why does he write speeches? Well, partly because Homer wrote speeches,

partly because Herodotus has speeches, but partly also because, in an basically oral world, actually speeches might make the difference. Where you're going to a public assembly, it is the speech that tells you the facts. But how do you trust his speeches as the speeches that were given by the people. Entirely different question.

He himself confessed that it was much more difficult. to discover what actually had been said and impossible to render what actually were said in his work. And of course, he writes Thucydidean speeches. They're not Pericles' style, that's Thucydides style. And he writes three speeches for Pericles, which marks Pericles out as the main man. No other person gets so many speeches. And he writes them in such a way that the reader is meant to use that as part of the expert, of what's going on. It's drama.

This is tragedy, the influence of tragedy. Agone is another force which we haven't yet discussed, which is coming to bear on the writing of history. No. And I think we can distinguish between different speeches in Thucydides. So, for example, Pericles' famous funeral oration, it's reasonable to imagine that Thucydides, certainly he could have been there, he could have heard it,

this could be quite close to what was said. On the other hand, there's a very famous passage known as the Melian dialogue from much later in the history, which claims to be the report of a sort of a secret meeting between some Athenians who have basically turned up to demand that the Melians surrender or they'll be destroyed and the representatives of the Melians. And there's no way Thucydides could have been there. it's very, very unlikely that he would have got any sort of record and on the basis of the way the speech is presented this is not something that actually happened it's something he has invented.

Catherine, I know you want to say something, can I push it on a little bit? A quarter of this work, is a massive work, he's taken up with a single episode and that's the expedition to Sicily. Right. Why did he spend some...

much time in it and what did that tell us about the war and about what his deeper thoughts about history were? Well the expedition to Sicily is introduced really very suddenly. We're told that suddenly the Athenians were seized with a desire to go. What date is this? So everybody knows? It's in 415 BC that the Sicilian expedition is setting off. So in that time of peace technically between the two sides? It's... Massive fleet, massive arms, a real go at Syracuse, wasn't it? Yeah, Futydides says that it is the entire city in a sense that sets sail. And so I think one of the major significance of the Sicilian expedition is that this is the moment when Athenian power finally overreaches itself. If we think about the history as a kind of tragic narrative of the rise of Athenian power and its sort of tragic mistake,

the Sicilian expedition is the point at which the Athenians go too far. There are debates about whether to go or not. one of the speakers, the general Nisias, suggests first that the Athenians shouldn't go, that it's actually safer to remain at home and to give a sense of their power. The dangers of failing are much, much greater than the dangers of success.

The Athenian Demos doesn't follow Nisius's advice. They are swayed by the other side who suggests that a huge show of force and expansion is precisely the thing to do to keep the allies in line. That is what happens. A huge Athenian fleet goes, they're defeated in a naval battle

in the harbour of Syracuse. This is in a sense of retelling of the Battle of Salamis and the Persian wars when the Persian fleet is defeated by the mass Greeks. The Athenian army has to retreat on land and are all but wiped out. So it's a terrible disaster for Athens. This doesn't actually mark the end of the Peloponnesian War.

It comes late in the war. Fucydides' text, but as we know Fucydides' history is unfinished. So there would have been more, presumably, if he'd finished it. But it's the moment, I think, where the image of Athenian power and invincibility is really shattered. So it's very, very significant in that respect. Paul, do we have any notion of his own political philosophy? We have the expressions of views. To me, very significant is when Pericles is the prime mover of. of the way in which the Athenians are going to resist the Spartans, but it all seems to go terribly wrong to begin with.

And the plague comes in 430 BC. Many Athenians are dying. Thucydides himself got the plague, wrote a fantastic description of it. We think it's probably a form of typhus. But the Athenians took it out on Pericles, and this wasn't the only time in Thucydides' account, that he makes it clear he, Thucydides does not sympathise

with the mass reaction to a statesman-like figure such as Pericles. And he says they deselected him, they find him. This is a democracy. This is a radical democracy. Even David Cameron might be deselected by parliament in ancient Athens. But then he says, as the masses tend to do, they re-elected him next time around. Now, that is a contemptuous statement by an intellectual who is not a member, of the masses. He's one of the elite. He's very wealthy. He's very well educated. He's very well

connected. He, I think, had no instinctive sympathy for democracy. And he was very pleased that Pericles, though Pericles, in my view, at Generate, was a radical ideological Democrat. Pericles went along with the democracy, actually fostered the democracy. The Eucydides was prepared to tolerate Athens under Pericles. And he put it that way that Pericles was as a it were the ruler of Athens, which of course, if you're an Athenian Democrat, you rule Athens, not Pericles. Neville Morley, how do you assess him? We've talked about him as historian influence he had, but before we move on to his influences

and what happened, what do you think of this version of the, we needn't go into this in detail. I just like a sort of snap alpha, beta, gamma view of what you think of him as a historian. In terms of, I suppose, his account of the events, the difficulty is we have Thucydides, we don't have a lot else. So if we disbelieve Thucydides, an awful lot of the time, all we have are our own speculations. So there are things we know he leaves out or doesn't talk about. Paul mentioned Persia, which most historians would say Thucydides' neglect of Persia until the end suggests actually it's a failure of understanding or a failure. He would have revised the history to give more prominence to Persia had he had the opportunity.

He says very little about something called the Megharman Decree, which some historians would argue is actually a much, much more important cause of the war. And he doesn't talk about everything. The difficulty is if we reject Thucydides, then we end up with an enormous blank for all sorts of things. But at the same time, I think, we have to be cautious. He doesn't, as a modern historian, would do, show he's working.

He doesn't tell us most of the time what evidence he's using, so we can't evaluate his account. We just sort of have to take it on trust. Paul. I just pitch in that though he died before he could complete his work, he lived to see the end of the war, to see the Spartans win. And when he writes a little obituary notice of Pericles, way early on in book two, as we call it,

He then adds that the explanation of, in his view, of why the Athenians lost the war was that the politicians succeeding Pericles were not up to Pericles' mark. And he actually says they contradicted, they controverted exactly all Pericles, and that's why Athens lost. But Pericles had a defensive strategy. And then they switched it to an aggressive strategy of Sicily. Well, this is how Thucydides represents that strategy. when he, as it were, makes a comment on it.

Yet, if you read his narrative, actually the themes were very aggressive against Megra that Nevels mentioned, and under Pericles, huge fleets went round the Peloponnese in the first years of the war. So Thucydides has an interest. Why does he emphasise, we would say, exaggerate the defensive notion,

because he wants the notion of the Spartans as the aggressors to be the key thing that people take away from their reading. I suppose this could be one of the ways in which Fucydides turns out not to be quite the objective historian we expect him to be. But I think it also touches on one of the main political lessons from Fucydides' text, which is questions about political leadership

and political judgment. Futydides tells us how hard it is to understand the true meaning of events, to understand what really happened, even when one is looking back at events one has lived through. And both he and, in fact, Pericles say that events tend to falsify the plans of men. Fucydides is an elite Athenian He's very, very interested in the importance of intelligent judgment and the importance of strong leaders

who can lead the demos, lead the people of Athens in the right ways. Athens, at the beginning of the war and earlier on in the 5th century, had such leaders in the shape of men like Pericles and Themistocles. It's when they lose such leaders that the problems arise. We've got to move a bit fast now, and you'll be accustomed to that part.

But he had influenced on some classical writers, Bolivia and so on, and then he had influence in Byzantium. But let's go to Renaissance Europe and figures of Machiavelli and Guccadena, for instance. And is he that far on, we're talking about

almost 2,000 years on that, is he having a direct influence on the way they think? In the 15th century when printing comes along, when the Renaissance starts to get very interested in Greek writers as opposed to Latin writers, Thucydides is right up there.

and Machiavelli, though he doesn't actually mention him by name very often. Quite clearly he's read him. And somebody who does mention him by name is a contemporary from Florence of Machiavelli called Francesco Giciardini, who wrote a history of Florence and said Thucydides is the master historian. And this tends to be the, as it were, standard view, that Thucydides is the historian's historian. It's only very recently, I'm in late 20th century, that we even question whether he is, a historian in our sense. We are historians.

And one of our French colleagues, sadly, no longer with us, Nicole L'Rourne wrote an essay called T'isid, ne'pas a colleague. He's not a colleague. You couldn't imagine him sitting in the next carol in the library doing his research, because his mindset is very, very different. He's much more of a maker, much more of an artist than he is, as it were, a craftsman.

And he's much more out in the field man, isn't he? Well, he believed, and this is where Polybius takes up, you can't do the job unless you've actually inspected the battlefields and talked to the people or their descendants who fought the battles. It sort of comes on track for English-speaking people in, let's say, I'll jump to a bit, but 1629 Thomas Hobbs translates it, and Thomas Hobbs himself is a very powerful figure, and this is a powerful translation, and it's in the game in England from then on.

Yes, there had been an earlier translation 1550 by Thomas Nichols, but that was a translation from the French translation of the, the Latin translation, and it's not, Nichols French wasn't very good. No, so Hobbes we're talking about. Hobbes goes back to the Greek, or certainly his big claim is he's gone back to the Greek, he produces, I would still say, a very good translation.

The difficulty for sort of us today is... Does that enter into the political discussion generally? Sorry to hurry, but we haven't got that much time. Very much. I mean, Hobbes has this phrase that Thucydides is the most politic historiographer, and Hobbes draws on his ideas in his own, political philosophy, particularly in Leviathan. And from then on, Thucydides is part of the canon of political thought. So he's seen quite often not as a historian, but as a political philosopher

whose aim had been to study events in order to identify the laws or the principles of human behaviour. And that's been a particularly important tradition in that from the second half of the 20th century, where he becomes a very prominent figure. certainly he's quoted a lot in international relations theory as having identified the basic principles of realism. Can we just concentrate that? The Germans taking up at the end of the 19th century, Ranka and others, but then in the 20th century, he's still part of the discussion

of international relations, Catherine. That's right. I mean, he, along with Hobbes and Machiavelli, are considered the sort of three canonical founder figures for this discipline. And as never... What is the discipline? I mean, finding out why things happen in. war.

Study of the relations between states rather than the political theory of, you know, the composition of the state and the makeup of states. So a great deal of international relations is concerned with war, but not only with war, with treaty making, with various kinds of relations between states. Hobbes, Machiavelli and Fucydides are all seen as examples of this theory of realism, which holds that basically in the international arena, moral considerations, justice and so on, have no purchase. That's in its most extreme form. States tend to

follow their own self-interest, the national interest reggioni di Stato. And this tends to lead them to seek to increase their power as a means towards security. The strong grain power in the week have to put up with it. Well, that's a quotation from

Fucydides, in fact, yes. This is one of the phrases that comes up. You know, it's one in one of your papers. Obviously, I didn't know that until I read your stuff. But sorry, yes. I mean, there's a difficulty in the way that Thucydides is read for this purpose. That's a quotation from the Melian dialogue. It's something the Athenians say.

Within the international relations tradition, it is quite often assumed that this is Thucydides' own principle, rather than a line he's put into the mouth of some characters. No, that's a very good point. We very rarely can tell that something is Thucydidean, as opposed to the ideas out there. said, Paul, we come to an end now, you said you wouldn't be sitting around this table as a historian

as a three of you are. Is that a pity for pity? A pity that we are historians. No, no, no. Of course not. It's great that you're historians. But that his way of writing history is not something that you would take on in the historical

monastery at the moment. Well, we couldn't write speeches and we wouldn't write up the way Thistundi's writes up. For me, the combination of his predecessor Herodotus and Thucydides is the ideal combination. And Cicero famously said that Herodotus was the father of history, and someone once said, yes, okay, if you accept that history is born in the generation of Thucydides.

But for me, it's the combination of the two that's winning. Well, thank you very much, Paul. Paul Cartlett, Catherine Harlow, Neville Morley. Next week we'll be talking about Ashoka the Great. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Sorry as you would have a rush at the end. Well, it's always that away.

What did we omit that... That's the question. I mean, it's really worth me putting a bed on it. I think there's an awful lot more about the reception side of things. I'm partly because I've spent years studying it. But the way that he's seen as the historian's historian, as Paul says, even when the idea of history changes, you know, Thucydides' remit, remains this authority figure for people who have quite different ideas of actually what history should be.

So some of the time he is the historian as the great creative artist. Some of the time he's the historian as sort of scientist, rigorous critical analysis of evidence. And of course, for all of these, actually that's a bit of a problem. Because if you want to believe in Thucydides as the scientific historian, the speeches are really inconvenient because he said he made them up. they are two artists Can you just fill it those out? You can say, well, these are a historian

up to you come to that bit and then we'll fill it this out but we'll go on thinking of a historian and the next bit. I think the speeches are very important because Fucydides is trying to tell us about the reasons that people went to war and so we hear the reasoning, the causes of reasoning and the ways in which people argued and it's also a part of the lesson we learn.

A speech is often paired, not always in the case of Pericles, in fact, he's the exception, but a speech is generally paired with a speech telling the opposing point of view. Or an opposing. Yeah, yeah. And so the difficulty of determining in debate what is the truth of the matter is one of the lessons we learn from the speeches. But what I've got against these studies is he writes the history of war, diplomacy and politics. And even politics, he defines in such a narrow way, he never talks about actual constitutional issues, such that women are excluded. There are 50 references in the entire work to individual women, or,

collectives of women. In Herodosus, there are hundreds. He's not interested much in barbarians, and that means especially Persia, and so you lose that whole dimension of the Greek world being within a barbarian framework. His own father's name was non-Greek, Thracian. He himself is either descended from non-Greeks, or there's a very close family connection. This is rigorously excluded. He's very down on Thracians when he does in an ethrocentric sort of racist way, whereas Herodotus is a man of broad vision who tolerates the most extraordinary alien customs simply because that's what those people think are the best way to do things. And who am I to judge whether they are or are not the best for Zet.

So it's much more 21st century finger, Herodotus, at your say. Exactly. Well, he's a... But the business of not mentioning women, and Herodotus mentioned lots of women. The historical context in which you find yourself is that in which... to which you react. The idea of writing about war and saying, I must write a lot about women,

would be anathema. It does make it odd, doesn't it, how Orn't it? Herodotus is. That's the thing. History, his story. Thucundis is the progenitor. But Herodos isn't writing history in the same way? He's writing about culture, isn't it? Well, he's writing cultural history. He doesn't exactly so. He's the father of cultural history,

anthropological history, if you like. And Thucydes is the father of diplomatic, military and political history. Again, We get some tea. Well, that's a relief. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.uk slash Radio 4.