I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can’t find it. Surely it’s a thing. What would you call it?
EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses
I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can’t find it. Surely it’s a thing. What would you call it?
EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses
Rhetoric was all he had at that point. He served Athens as one of its better military minds and got banished for protecting the rural areas instead of pointlessly heading to the walled Athens. Sat out the rest of the 29 year war watching 2 entire generations of young Greeks be slaughtered for nothing. Thucydides is best read as someone wrestling with the collapse of empire and of being able to actively follow tragedy but not fully square that circle as to why they feel so hollow and depressed.
He was exiled after arriving too late to keep Amphipolis from surrendering. Pericles had already (correctly) led the Athenians to abandon the countryside years before.
I know they abandoned the countryside immediately but abandonment was not permanent, the war had large lulls and assaulting troops would go back to friendly cities when it wasn’t campaign season , but for some reason I remember A War Like No Other implying Thucydides wasn’t able to respond as fast because he was cautious about abandoning his existing region. I checked and I can’t find anything like that so oops. However his banishment is certainly an early example of the trend that would destroy Athens’ military, the banishment of commanders for being unable to do the impossible. Most significantly Alcibiades
Yes - and the execution of most of the victors of Arginusae.
Re: Alcibiades, one reason he gets more favor in Thucydides’s narrative than he otherwise might is because he was probably one of Thucydides’s direct sources, what with both of them being in exile in the same region at the same time. Like fired coaches doing play-by-play commentary of their old team inevitably losing without them in the playoffs, only with all of their friends’ lives at stake.
I recommended G.E.M. de Ste. Croix in another thread today, but also check out Jacqueline de Romilly if you can find anything of hers at your library. Her book on Thucydides and Athenian imperialism is a great antidote to the Cold War / neo-con American takes on the Peloponnesian War, and her read of Athenian foreign policy as a two-party binary of “pivot toward Persia” versus “pivot toward Sparta,” with anti-imperialist voices completely silent, is certainly something that echoes today. It’s also the best book for understanding Thucydides’s relationship to Pericles (to respond to your other reply above).
Thanks for the recs. I got my start in the subject from Victor Davis Hanson who in hindsight is a fucking maga nut. So I need some less…um fashy reading on the matter. Much as War Like No Other is well written and he does interestingly frame the Aegean islands as “Greek third world”. I got super into this era of Greek history and Hanson unfortunately is the one who sparked my love for reading history that never stopped. Finding out what he really is killed my momentum on the specific subject matter.
I feel your pain. Don’t tell anyone, but Leo Strauss and his crowd were a major influence on the way I’ve approached Greek texts, and when they let their mask slip it’s a serious buzzkill. In his lectures on the Symposium Strauss discusses the atmosphere in Athens after the mutilation of the Herms and says something like “It was a lot worse than McCarthyism, because McCarthy did nothing wrong.”
Hanson has a hilarious essay in which he insists that the Iraq invasion wasn’t going to be the U.S.’s Sicilian Expedition, because it was a reasonable response to September 11.
Donald Kagan was a huge neo-con but was probably the most influential American classicist of recent vintage who made a special study of Thucydides. I don’t know of any reason to distrust his military analysis but on matters of political interpretation I’d default more to Croix, de Romilly, or scholars who prioritized legal and literary texts, like Douglas Macdowell or Nicole Loraux, the latter of whom had wonderful books on amnesty and an account of the funeral oration as a genre. Finally, it’s not composed entirely of winners, but the Brill Companion to Thucydides has some very helpful essays providing both contemporary context as well as Thucydidean exegesis.
Perhaps also of interest - Page duBois’s Trojan Horses: Saving Classics From Conservatives, which discusses Hanson specifically.