Live Long And Prosper

This blog is likely to be rather quiet over the next month, as I have to get my head down and finish my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History and so won’t have time to write extended essays on here, and no one else ever seems to contribute anything. However, I couldn’t resist sharing the latest example of the place of Thucydides in contemporary popular culture: the Thucydides class Federation starship:

This has at least some sort of formal status within the universe of Star Trek and its licensed products, though my impression is that it derives from a role-playing game rather than any of the series or films. Apparently (I quote) the Thucydides was conceived as the Federation’s first timeship in response to the rising number of temporal refugees discovered to be traveling through time by the Department of Temporal Investigations; they were very small, maneuverable ships designed to travel to other time periods and recover people and items that could possibly contaminate a timeline. All of which seems very appropriate; after all, calling such vessels the Herodotus class would presumably entail traveling back in time and grabbing a random selection of people and things that looked interesting; the Tacitus class would go back to make sarcastic remarks about people, and so forth.

I am now waiting with bated breath to see what this post does to my blog statistics; am I now going to attract a lot of annoyed Star Trek fans to argue about the limits of the canon, or a lot of even more annoyed Tacitus scholars..?

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Of all Manifestations of Power…

…restraint impresses men most. Or so it has been said: by Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State and before that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on many occasions; by President Lyndon B. Johnson, some thirty years earlier, in a speech at the Annual Swedish Day Picnic in Minneapolis; by a number of writers and scholars, at least some of whom should have known better; and by an alarmingly large number of websites. By Thucydides, however, not at all, although the line is attributed to him in the majority of cases. Since 2004, it has been reasonably well established that the quote is not to be found in any extant English translation (see Shifra Sharlin, ‘Thucydides and the Powell doctrine’, Raritan 24.1 (2004), pp. 12-28), and so is unlikely to be genuine (though several reputable classicists have suggested that it could be a reasonable paraphrase of one or other line in Thucydides); but its actual origins, and the means by which it came to be associated with Thucydides, have remained in darkness. Until now, or to be exact until a couple of weeks ago.

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Elitism and Anti-Elitism (and vice versa)

Elitism, especially in education, is almost universally acknowledged today to be a Bad Thing, to the extent that even those who actually believe in it feel called upon to explain that they mean a kind of meritocracy (in opposition to socialistic leveling) in which unavoidable natural differences in intellectual ability and talent are recognised and properly supported, rather than the bad sort of elitism that just protects the privileges of the already privileged. This being the case, it’s scarcely surprising that accusations and imputations of ‘elitism’ have become a conventional means of discrediting one’s opponents in any education- or culture-related debate; the only interesting thing is the particular grounds named or implied as justification for slapping on such a label. Looking back on the whole RIII thing from the perspective of a week and a half, one of the more striking aspects of the discussion – above all in the responses to critical comments made by myself and others – was the prevalence of the term ‘elitism’, even more than accusations of jealousy and petty-mindedness. Further, the same ideas surfaced in discussions of the proposals for a revised National Curriculum for History; again, not in the initial criticisms, but in the response to the criticisms, exemplified by Niall Ferguson’s piece in the Guardian: Why Michael Gove Is Right (And Not Just Because I’m One Of His Chosen Gurus).

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Flexible Accumulation

A few brief comments – since I have now finished writing my unashamedly inaccessible and impactless piece on different approaches to reading Thucydides in modern political theory – on a far more important and serious issue than my uncontrollable envy of Leicester archaeologists. A story in yesterday’s Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/feb/04/academic-casual-contracts-higher-education) offered a reminder of something that most of us in universities know about but, for various reasons, prefer not to dwell on too much: the increasing dependence of the whole enterprise on casualised labour, fixed-term research and teaching fellows. This is certainly a problem for those individuals who are stuck in such posts, and for those (including at least some academics in permanent positions) who are concerned about them; but it’s also a reflection of wider, equally worrying changes in the modern university, which aren’t always so easy to spot as they creep up on us gradually.

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Bah. And Furthermore, Humbug.

Apparently we will discover later today whether a skeleton excavated in a Leicester car park is that of Richard III. Whoop-de-doo. Apparently it has a curved spine and battle injuries (and obviously no one else in the middle ages ever suffered such things), but the crucial piece of the jigsaw will be the DNA test. Too much to hope that the margin of error on such things will be properly explained; I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to see whether it’s one in a million or one in seventeen billion that it isn’t the man himself. Of course, even if there isn’t a plausible match (the level of hysteria this morning suggests that they must feel pretty confident), this has still been wonderful publicity for the Leicester Archaeology department, and maybe even for archaeology in general. Who can complain about that?

Well, I’m going to.

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