This morning’s case in point. A few days ago, Corey Robin published an article in The Nation called ‘Nietzsche’s Marginal Children’, suggesting the existence of an affinity between Nietzsche’s diagnosis of a crisis of values in modernity and advocacy of a new aristocracy and the ‘marginal revolution’ in economics, led by Austrian economists in late-C19 Vienna, that laid the intellectual foundations for market fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek. In a post on Crooked Timber yesterday, ‘Nietzsche and the Marginalists’, Henry Farrell suggested that there might be a less indirect link via Max Weber, who was heavily influenced by Nietzsche (albeit sometimes negatively) and was engaged in debates with and about contemporary economic theory, and who developed his own conception of aristocracy and its role in contemporary society; this might represent a bridge, or a vector of contagion. This also threw up a link to a piece by Rafael Khachaturian, ‘Nietzsche, Hayek and the Marginalists…and Max Weber?’, responding to Robin’s piece in a similar vein but also bringing in the name of Hobbes as a possible longer-term influence on some of these ideas.

Mention of the German Historical School, key opponents of the Austrian marginalists, led me to think of Wilhelm Roscher, if only because he’s the only one of them I’ve studied in any depth – and at that point the paranoid delusions kick in. Roscher of course wrote a major work on Thucydides before he embarked properly on his career as a historical economist, presenting him as a model for a truly modern critical history; this was read by Nietzsche while he was developing ideas on history and historicism, and by Weber, who focused on the Thucydides book to a remarkable degree in his essay on Roscher’s historical economics. And Hobbes was of course the translator of Thucydides, as well as drawing on many of his ideas in Leviathan. Could there be a connection..?

If there is – I’m trying to keep an open mind, honestly – then it may not lie in the field of values that is the focus of Robin and Farrell. Of course Thucydides does offer two important discussions of the way that communal values and agreed meanings collapse under pressure, in the descriptions of the Athenian Plague and the stasis at Corcyra; these, particularly the latter, have reappeared persistently in political thought since the Renaissance, but they were not, as far as I can recall, especially important for Roscher, Nietzsche or Weber in their readings. Maybe they find their way into modern conservative thought at a later date, with the Thucydidean takeover of Straussian political theory and/or international relations after WWII, or by a different route, e.g. via Burke’s account of the French Revolution in Thucydidean terms. It’s certainly easy to see how they could be fully compatible with the conservative agenda, if one reads these episodes in a Hobbesian manner: they show the awful consequences, the reversion to the state of nature, if social order is not rigorously established and controlled, and meanings fixed in stone, and the masses kept in their place.

I am thinking rather of one of the other key themes in the triumph of Austrian economics, namely the rejection of history and historicism in favour of supposedly universal and eternal principles of economic behaviour founded on a universal self-interest (even if formally presented as a theoretical assumption rather than a statement about reality, the latter is how it tends to be understood). Here, Thucydides can be seen as a critical text, in precisely the period in question. Yes, on the face of it he’s a historian and so assumed to be on the side of the historicists versus the universalists; but in his claims that history is useful because it can uncover the underlying regularities in human behaviour (not the only way of interpreting what he says, but it’s a common reading), he looks more like a nascent social scientist, committed to generalisation and drawing wider lessons from the past rather than establishing the detail of past events as an end in itself, and this is one of the reasons he increasingly falls out of favour with historians.

Roscher tries to read him as a historian like himself (and even claims that Th. has important things to say about economics, which is pushing it), equally committed to historical truth and generalisable conclusions, echoing (unconsciously?) Hobbes’ presentation of Th as a ‘most politic historiographer’, combining both particular and general truths in his account. It’s arguable how far it is ever possible to maintain this balance, rather than the historical overwhelming the general (as historians tend to read Th) or the general overwhelming or ignoring the historical (as tends to happen in realist IR), and certainly Roscher’s approach didn’t persuade anyone. The defeat of German historical economics could be seen as a defeat for Thucydides’ influence, in the same way as the rise of economic and social history led to a rejection of Th as being too narrowly political and too Rankean; but one might see it instead as a defeat for that version of Thucydides, overcome by readings that claim him as a forerunner of normative social science, the founder of history who is actually batting for the anti-historicists (as Strauss read him…), the man who offers the founding statement of the principle that, ‘according to human nature’, events tend to repeat themselves in a predictable way, driven by eternal motives of honour, fear and interest (all to be subsumed within a general heading of ‘self-interest’, the realist view that claims about the existence of other motives are either delusions or deceptions).

Difficult to know how to take these vague speculations any further without some intensive re-reading of the debate about historical economics, proper study of Hayek, Schumpeter et al, and so forth, to see if there’s any trace of Thucydides to be found, and at the moment I wonder whether life isn’t simply a bit too short. Still, we can at least pencil it in on the charge sheet; blame Thucydides for Hayek, neoliberalism and libertarianism as well as for the neocons…

Keene argues that we should see a major role for Arnold J.Toynbee, the universal historian and theorist of history, whose work was increasingly derided by academic historians but sold impressive numbers of copies, esp. in the US, winning him a Time magazine cover in 1947; he was a long-standing foreign policy adviser in the UK, and an influence on the development of what became ‘international relations’ in the period after WWI. This makes lots of sense; I’d also chuck in a reference to Alfred Zimmern (at least, I don’t recall Keene mentioning Zimmern; maybe he did, in which case he deserves credit for this), a classical historian whose account of Pericles’ Funeral Oration was printed and distributed as propaganda during WWI, and who thereafter also turned to international politics with the goal of preventing such carnage ever happening again, holding the first ever chair in International Politics (at Aberystwyth) and later working at Cornell and Oxford. Both these men studied Thucydides extensively in their youth; both developed an understanding of him (and at this point I’m pretty sure that this is my argument rather than Keene’s) at odds with the conventional historical reading, above all in the drive to extract generalisable political principles from the study of the past rather than recording it as an end in itself – which was precisely what led them instead into the developing field of political theory, bringing with them an interest in Thucydides as a historically-minded political theorist that has persisted in the discipline to the present, even when scholars like David Welch suggest that perhaps International Relations theorists should stop reading Thucydides, or at least stop reading him so badly.

If this intellectual genealogy is plausible, then one further figure seems likely to have played some role: Louis J.Halle. Halle worked as part of the policy planning staff in the State Department, and in 1952 published an article called ‘A Message from Thucydides’, developing an interpretation of the Cold War in terms of the Peloponnesian War; he reproduced this piece in a general book on Civilization and Foreign Policy: an inquiry for Americans (1955), and attributed the significance of Thucydides in this period directly to Toynbee and his response to the general war of 1914-18. I haven’t yet studied Halle’s subsequent career in detail – he certainly spent some time in academia, and so may have contributed more directly to the introduction of Thucydides as a key text for discussion – but I have come across a further example of his engagement with the work, in his 1967 The Cold War As History. In this he attempted to adopt a Thucydidean perspective on the events of his own time – which meant identifying the underlying order of development, beneath the apparent chaos and accident of events, and recognising the extent to which both sides felt equally compelled by their situation and their perception of the other side’s actions.

Halle mentions Thucydides several times in his narrative, not only to legitimise his own project but also to emphasise the way that certain events had happened before in more or less the same way. One example turns up in Washington in the period immediately after the Korean War:

As always happens when the military element becomes dominant in government, the thinking on which Washington based its policy would now become progressively coarsened. The men of sensitivity and insight would tend to be displaced by the rough commanders who see things in simpler terms. Thucydides had given the classic account of such a development twenty-four centuries earlier, observing that what had happened in his Athens during the long course of the Peloponnesian War would ‘according to human nature happen again in the same way’. It was inevitable that the Cold War, intensified and prolonged, would entail a degeneration of government.

Hmm. Truman as Pericles succeeded by Eisenhower as Cleon? Or are we to imagine the President as being the Athenian demos, initially open to persuasion by the sensitive and insightful types like Halle but increasingly falling under the rhetorical spell of the military? Other than the basic claim that post-Periclean leaders were inferior and led Athens into disaster, it’s difficult to see a terribly close parallel between Thucydides and the development of the US military-industrial complex; there seems to be a terrible vagueness here about where power actually lies and the nature of the process of advice, persuasion and decision-making, whereas Thucydides is very clear about why such things were able to happen in the Athenian democracy (and it isn’t at all clear that there is a general principle of the degeneration of government under conditions of prolonged conflict, since Sparta doesn’t seem to have had the same problem). But, as ever, that isn’t how such analogies work; rather this is yet another example of the capacity of Thucydides to inspire readers to cry out, as did Lorenzo Valla, the fifteenth-century translation of Thucydides, “All this very neatly fits the corruption of our own times as well.”

One throwaway comment particularly caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

Another enduring lesson from [Thucydides], says Mr Kagan, is “that you can expect people, whatever they may be, to seek to maximize their power” – then a slight pause – “unless they’re Europeans and have checked their brains at the door, so mortified are they, understandably, by what happened to them in the 20th century. They can’t be taken seriously.”

Hmm. Okay, it’s just a quip and so perhaps shouldn’t be subjected to excessive analysis – but, rather like Niall Ferguson’s recent comments on Keynes, perhaps it is more revealing than it intends to be (we could at this point evoke Freud…). The conventional reading of Thucydides, which Kagan has in the past shown every sign of following, is that he identified eternal principles in the behaviour of individuals and of states; whatever claims may be made about justice, ethics etc., and even if the people making such claims genuinely believe what they’re saying, what’s really going on is the pursuit of power and the fundamental drives of honour, fear and interest.

A state that resolutely refuses to behave in this way (that is, refuses to sign up to US military adventures with sufficient enthusiasm; I honestly don’t know if Kagan counts the UK as European in this context or not) is clearly a bit of a problem. The obvious response – leaving aside the notion that Thucydides might be wrong, which is of course unthinkable – is to conclude that European states have a different notion of how to maximise their power and a different sense of what will best serve their interests, calm their fears, realise their hopes etc. For Kagan, however, there is only one sort of power (none of that ‘soft power’ nonsense) and only one way of achieving and/or manifesting it, namely through military action, which therefore has normative force; the Europeans are wrong in eschewing military action, and deluded in imagining that others might do the same.

But this is to present Thucydides’ conception not as a claim about motivation but as a claim about the nature of the world: it is not that all states are driven by these motivations, whether they admit this or not, but that the world is such that the only rational approach would be to be driven by these motivations, even if some states fail to recognise this – the pursuit of self-interest is here presented as a choice rather than as an inevitable, if sometimes concealed or unconscious, motivation. The usual reading of Thucydides in realist IR depends on taking the words of speakers in the narrative as expressing Thucydides’ own theoretical principles, fleshing out his idea of ‘human nature’ or ‘the human thing’ that means events will tend to repeat themselves because people tend to behave in much the same way every time. This new Kaganian reading implicitly rejects the notion of a more or less constant human nature, since people do not (contra Thucydides) behave in more or less the same way every time, and instead takes the words of speakers in the narrative as expressing Thucydides’ understanding of what the world really is like.

In what way can the world be of such a nature that the only rational form of behaviour is aggressive military action in the pursuit of power? The obvious answer is a world in which everyone else will be pursuing power through aggressive military action so one must respond or go under – but that shifts everything back to the assumption of a uniform and predictable human nature that Kagan has implicitly rejected. It seems uncertain whether, in a world in which motivation and behaviour are not so uniform and predictable, there is any other force or condition that can make aggressive military action the only rational course of action, as opposed to an opportunistic attempt at seizing the opportunity to establish dominion over others and then rustling up some alleged legitimation, viz to anthropinon made me do it, guv. It is as if Kagan has concluded, not that war is sometimes the rational course and therefore sometimes the right course, but that war is always the only rational course and therefore always the only right course, and anyone who fails to recognise this has “checked their brain in at the door”. Which seems an astonishing conclusion to draw from Thucydides, even if we take no account at all of more recent events…

One thing that’s striking, given the current focus of my interests, is how often he brings up Thucydides as a key example; not, as in most 20th-century historiographical studies, simply as an example of the old-fashioned approach to history that was replaced by the rise of ‘Geschichte als Wissenschaft’ in the nineteenth century, but as a text that helps to tease out distinctive features of the nature of history, and different tendencies within it. Basically, writing an article on Koselleck and Thucydides now goes onto my ever-expanding ‘to do’ list, and adds to my frustration that there is barely six months of the AHRC-funded Thucydides project left and then I have to develop something completely different in order to apply for further funds… In the meantime, however, I was most struck by the way that he returns several times in the course of the essays, mostly from the 1980s and 90s, collected in Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main, 2000) to consideration of the Melian Dialogue (V.85-115), in a manner that is quite different from the usual reading of it as a simple statement of the universal principles of international relation.

I’m going to concentrate on the discussion in ‘The unknown future and the art of prognosis’ from 1984. Koselleck’s general theme at this point is “the metahistorical statements, in which the conditions of possible histories, hence of a possible future, are reflected”. He refers here to the speeches of Thucydides and the general theme of Tacitus’ history, “which doesn’t describe the actuality of events so much as the manner in which they were contradictorily experienced” (and I know that’s a clumsy translation, but I’m tired, and it is at least understandable…).

The analyses of civil war of both authors, which not only depict the course of events but at the same time semantically reflect them and probe their experiential content, lead to lessons of history, which can be repeated not only rhetorically. They are actually applicable. The overcoming of the confessional struggles of the early modern period might have been achieved even without ancient authors, but in fact they made available lessons which were immediately ready for use. They contained a prognostic potential, which killed off the effect of surprise of the new experiences. Religious intolerance became calculable, reckonable in political terms, and therefore tameable.

[It would be good to know exactly what Koselleck is referring to at this point; having spent some time surveying the reception of Thucydides in this period, my immediately thought is that this sounds rather like the Rostock theologian and historian David Chytraeus' remark that the evils of the Corcyrean stasis are fully applicable to his own times as well - for here too people claim to be fighting over principles but are actually contending for primacy.]

We can bring this into the present and make use of a supposition.  We don’t know what arguments Dubcek was presented with in 1968 in the Kremlin, before he submitted to the Soviet conditions. But the basic structure of the argument is found in Thucydides, in his famous dialogue between the Athenians and the citizens of Melos. The Melian Dialogue consists of an argument divided into two roles, which in modern terms amounts to alternative prognoses, so as to be ready for use. Thucydides defined the attitude of the Melians as a wishful prognosis: they take the veiled future for the present out of sheer desire for justice, and therefore are mistaken. The Athenians on the other hand appeal to the law of power, which they have not invented but only taken over in order to employ it… [The Athenians of course end up massacring the Melians and selling women and children into slavery] Prague was spared an analogous fate. The Czechs submitted. As in 1939 Hacha did before Hitler.

It would be ridiculous to want to construct here a linear history of Thucydidean influence. Rather there are historical structures of experience which, once formulated, don’t then disappear, which persist under completely different conditions of modern exertion of power or new conceptions of justice. A prognostic force lives within them, which is of metahistorical duration and which can be used at any time for political extrapolations.

In a slightly later essay on ‘Historicism and hermeneutics’, the point is made more strongly: “The Melian Dialogue of Thucydides was doubtless repeated in Moscow when Dubcek sought to save the freedom of Prague.”

Can the study of the past offer a reliable basis for prognosis? Arguments along these lines generally have to assume a basic continuity between past and present, so that past experience remains relevant to actual present and possible future, an idea which Koselleck comprehensively undermined in his work on themes such as the dissolution of the topos of historia magistra vitae – and the belief in the existence of a constant ‘human nature’ and universal laws of human behaviour, which underpins much of the continued evocation of Thucydides in Realist international relations studies, is equally subject to his criticisms. That might seem to imply the outright rejection of Thucydides’ claims that his history will be useful; the basic presuppositions of historicism are incompatible with such an idea.

Koselleck argues that Thucydides does not offer eternal laws, but nor does he offer just an account of events; he outlines different modes of living in time and comprehending historical experience, including the different ways in which in which people think about and seek to anticipate the future. Neither the Soviet leadership nor, so far as we know, Dubcek had read Thucydides; but Thucydides, through his understanding of ‘the human thing’, including the ways that humans live within time, had identified the forms of thought to which people resort in certain situations.

The reason for this little detour into the eighteen century is my embarrassment at the almost complete absence of women from my finished manuscript on Thucydides and the Idea of History; obviously I cite modern scholars like Emily Greenwood, Giovanna Ceserani and Marianne Pade, but my source material for how Thucydides was regarded between the 15th and 20th centuries is thoroughly male. Further, when these writers discuss the principles and rules of historiography, the historian they have in mind is clearly male, someone like them, and that left me with a dilemma: when paraphrasing rather than quoting their words, should I switch to more inclusive forms (whether s/he, him/her etc., or alternating between the genders), or should I stick with the more historically accurate but uncomfortable masculine form? I’d be interested to hear anyone’s views – still a small window to change the manuscript – but for the moment I’ve gone with the latter approach, and an embarrassed note in the preface so that at least no one thinks that I’ve unconsciously assumed that the ideal historian must be a man.

This then prompted one of the readers to suggest that I might look at Macaulay to see if she says anything about Thucydides. The good news is that I now have another example of the use of the Greek historian in compliments; Horace Walpole referred to Macaulay in a letter as ‘Dame Thucydides’. The bad news is that she doesn’t make any direct reference that I’ve been able to find, not even in her lists of what texts a pupil of hers should be able to read. There’s a general reference to Greek history as an important topic, which may be postponed until the student can read it in the original, but the authors she mentions are Plutarch and Demosthenes, as well as Plato, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles; her portrait of Pericles in her account of education in Athens looks very Plutarchian to me, focusing on how the Athenians had already been corrupted by earlier politicians so he was able to bribe them with money and the Parthenon.

Macaulay’s preface to the first volume of A History of England is tantalising. She emphasises the role of the historian in scrutinising the evidence and presenting a true account to the public, since so many people do not trouble to investigate the past properly. “I have ever looked upon a supposed knowledge of facts seen in the false mirror of misrepresentation as one of the grear banes of this country… The vulgar are at all times liable to be deceived” (pp. vii-viii). She emphasises that her task is the pursuit of truth, and apologises for her style. This does seem reminiscent of Thucydides – and if there is an influence, she puts a populist spin on it, insisting that if the general public is presented with a true account it will instantly recognise its merits, rather than Thucydides’ belief that his history will always remain the preserve of an elite few. But it’s all very vague, and very conventional – female writers were expected to be apologetic, all historians insist on their dedication to the truth – and I don’t think there’s enough here to demonstrate a direct link rather than a general influence from several centuries of historiographical platitudes, where Thucydides was just one of the original sources.

So, regrettably, I don’t think I can get her into the book. I’d be delighted if someone could change my mind, or find some more direct references in the works I haven’t been able to get hold of, and in the meantime I’ll simply enjoy a quiet pleasure at having encountered Dame Thucydides, also known as the Republican Virago.

Elizabeth Frayer, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay on education’, Oxford Review of Education 37.5 (2011), 603-17

Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: the life and times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992)

Devoney Looser, ‘Catharine Macaulay: the “female historian” in context’, Etudes episteme 17 (2010), 105-11

Okay, it’s not a completely alien concept; in the last year or so in Bristol, we have had the right to claim a few hours’ worth of student time in the course of a year, most often for the unspeakably tedious job of photocopying essay cover sheets (roll on electronic marking as far as I’m concerned). However, that needs to be booked in advance, and the rationing of time means that one constantly hesitates to use one’s quota for something for fear that an even more tedious task might suddenly turn up. The idea of having such assistance constantly on call… No, not even professors get that, as I had to explain gently to my colleague; British professors don’t really get the god-like status and absolute power that they do here, or not by virtue simply of being a professor.

The students in question get paid (not sure how much), and they get a decent-sized room with computers, bookshelves and desks in which to work while being available for any member of staff who wants them to do something. I suspect that many of our PG students would gladly pay to have the use of such a room, given the level of overcrowding in the library and everywhere else, and would certainly be happy to do the odd bit of photocopying in return for it. The reason that the use of such student assistance is tightly rationed in Bristol is of course financial, as there’s only so much leeway in the budget, but it would be worth exploring whether we could manage this through more of a barter system – how much would it cost to kit out a study room in return for some menial office tasks? I’m really not advocating the exploitation of PG students here, trying to avoid paying them for work; rather, I wonder whether they’d be happy to do more than we can actually afford to pay them to do, and whether the use of a room would be worth more to them than anything that we’d be able to afford to pay. Plus the bureaucratic elements of claiming reimbursement would be lifted from all of us.

It’s difficult to avoid the suspicion, however, that there is something else going on here besides simple financial calculations – and not just the greater authority of German professors, who do sometimes (with all due respect to my wonderful colleagues) seem more inclined to regard things like photocopying as beneath their dignity, where I’d now take it for granted that I have to do such things (and actually felt rather uncomfortable asking a student, however willing he was to do it – it feels like barely a step above sending someone off to get me a coffee…). PG students in Germany seem to be more genuinely part of the department, very junior colleagues, rather than – as in the UK today – an awkward mixture of proto-colleagues and customers. I suspect – on the basis of much less knowledge – that it’s similar in the US, where TAs seem to do lots of the dogsbody work – and again, lots of our PG students would jump at the chance of having that sort of role, but we don’t have the money to do it properly. For us – not individual academics, but for the system – PGs, especially MAs, are primarily a source of income, some of which we may then use to buy a bit of their time, but most of which goes to support the rest of the enterprise; hence there’s a limit to what can be asked of them, and hence there are all sorts of tensions in the supervisor-supervisee relationship.

I am doing my utmost not to get sucked completely into ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome; it’s not that one system is necessarily and inevitably better (or at any rate not for everyone), it’s that they are organised on different principles, with different aims and imperatives, and it’s not just about the increasing dominance of market forces in the UK.  My guess is that German departments don’t have vastly more income than UK ones, it’s how they choose to spend it. Our approach, generally speaking, has been to take every opportunity to increase the number of academics, and to resent all the money that disappears into the coffers of the centre; I’ve seen plenty of discussion over the last decade of the idea that we should spend more on admin and support to make our lives easier, rather than automatically appointing another lecturer, but when it comes down to it the majority of UK academics still seem to regard that as undermining rather than enhancing their activities, and would always rather have another lectureship (especially when the hypothetical administrator would ‘belong’ to the collective, the school or faculty, rather than to them). In Germany, on the other hand, they prefer to employ a lot fewer permanent staff, but support them much better (and they still resent the money that disappears into the coffers of the centre).

We have a lot more permanent jobs (even if it doesn’t seem like that to unemployed postdocs), whose working conditions are inferior; they have far fewer but better supported permanent jobs. Still trying to decide whether the more limited number of academics means they have to work harder as well; the fact that 6-8pm is considered a perfectly reasonable timetable slot for a Masters seminar could be taken as evidence for that…

My initial response was to wonder whether a Cleonic oration might be more appropriate for the occasion; my second was to start thinking about Sir Peter’s use of the term ‘Periclean’.  Of course the Funeral Oration is meant, as the standard go-to for commemoration of the glorious dead in speeches and epitaphs – see Jennifer Roberts’ chapter in Thucydides and the Modern World on the tradition from Gettysburg to the aftermath of 9/11, and a piece I wrote for Aeon on the use of quotes on war memorials.  But that was a speech to commemorate the deaths of a fair number of people in war, and that’s how, more or less, it’s been used since – not least as a means of co-opting those deaths into the national cause, reducing the individuals involved and their grieving families into faceless components of the collective endeavour.  It’s not an obvious choice for memorialising a single individual, which might be a good reason for eschewing Periclean orations in this instance – but my reading of his comment is that Sir Peter doesn’t think that they are inappropriate per se, just that he doesn’t see why he has to be the one to give them every time.

Probably the explanation for choosing the adjective is simply that ‘Periclean’, like ‘Ciceronian’, has now become an all-purpose term for any kind of old-fashioned, well-crafted oratory, the like of which is rarely experienced in modern politics (and even more rarely from anyone besides Sir Peter).  But maybe there is a little more to it; for example, in evoking the Funeral Oration a clear link is being implied with war, so that Thatcher is memorialised as a warrior – against the Argentines, against the unions and the lefties – and the association with the deaths of young men in war does apparently offer grounds for considering the death of an 87-year-old woman who had been in poor health for years as a tragedy.

Certainly this does reinforce the impression that every public tragedy (or every occasion that can be conceived or presented as such) is felt to call for a Periclean speech, which then establishes the idea that this is indeed both a public and a tragic event.  The tropes of the Funeral Oration are likely to be out in full force this afternoon, whether or not (mostly if not entirely not) the speakers are conscious of this.  The heartfelt assertions of ‘our’ collective values, embodied in the deceased, presented in a way that excludes the possibility of dissent; the call for us all to follow unquestioningly in their/her footsteps, honouring the sacrifice and making sure it was all worthwhile.  I can well imagine that some Number 10 functionary has already had a quiet word with Carol Thatcher to explain that her role in this event is to be as little talked of as possible, so that the political class can carry on with the task of mythologising her mother.  As an excellent article by Jonathan Freedland has already suggested, this is how history gets rewritten…

The last I saw – my university is changing over its email system this weekend and new messages are being relayed into some account that I don’t yet have access to, so I’m now cut off from developments until some time next week – we’d reached the stage of people trying to call things to a halt by pointing out some of the absurdities and unpleasant elements of the debate, which will doubtless have all the effect of Harry Enfield’s Scousers telling one another to calm down.  It does all tend to demonstrate why blogs are much better places to hold such debates, not least because it’s possible to delete trolls and prevent them coming back to argue that they’re not trolling, these are important points of academic integrity and principle and clearly the people asking everyone to calm down are traitors to the profession.

The reason for devoting any time to this – time that could be spent deleting the latest batch of emails from the list, or indeed finishing my book – is that such flare-ups can be incredibly revealing; like a Rorschach blot or a word association game, the way some classicists respond in this situation uncovers the true heart and soul of Altertumswissenschaft in a far more vivid and multi-facted manner than if the same people were deliberately trying to characterise their profession. Core beliefs are exposed, it becomes obvious what really matters to people, and the foundational myths and inherited archetypes of classical studies come to the fore.

In this case, the whole thing was sparked off by an innocent request from a graduate student for advice on whether there was an English translation of something or other (I’m not going into specifics, partly because I wasn’t paying attention but mostly because that’s not the point; we’re looking for the underlying patterns here).  This set off a great deal of harrumphing about the fact that modern scholars, especially Anglo-American ones, simply don’t know European languages and so can’t read foreign scholarship. Yes, came the response, but that’s because we can’t learn so many languages at school, especially those of us who came through the state system. That’s no excuse, you could have studied them at university, if only your Latin and Greek weren’t rubbish as well so you had to spend the whole time in remedial classes instead; no, the problem is that you’re arrogant know-it-all imperialists, or words to that effect. No, you’re elitist snobs…

There are of course a whole load of really serious and important issues here.  I’ve talked before on this blog about my commitment to engaging with languages other than English, even trying to give papers in them and certainly trying to be aware of other scholarly traditions; on the other hand, I’m very conscious of how much effort it has required over a long period of time to get to that sort of level. Graduate students have to prioritise, given the need to get their disserations completed in far less time than previous generations were given, under greater pressures; you cannot possibly acquire every skill that a classicist could possibly need, so you select those that seem most important for the project – sometimes that should be modern languages, sometimes epigraphy or palaeography, sometimes archaeology or even, as Elton Barker has suggested, IT skills. Sometimes, indeed, these skills are more important than Greek or Latin (“Burn the heretic!!” they cry) for a specific project; frankly, there was just one single point in my entire thesis that relied on my linguistic skills, and it was utterly trivial and so I would have been better off reading more economics instead.

There is no denying that this creates problems later: it is entirely possible not just to pass an undergraduate degree but to write an excellent and academically credible PhD in, say, ancient economic history without the slightest grasp of ancient languages, and some of my best students have been those who’ve come up through schools that offered no Latin or Greek and then preferred to study historical units rather than spent a third or more of their degree on languages.  The problem is not the quality of their research – if the subject is one where language is not required, as I said – but their future prospects; regardless of the fact that an ancient history lecturer may never have to teach language (I never have at Bristol), it’s still applied as an entry criterion for jobs that they should be capable of doing it if necessary. So, we’ve been offering non-language routes to generations of students, claiming that they’re not inferior to old-fashioned Classics degrees – in the knowledge that we’d never consider giving such people academic jobs at the end of it. There is a problem here, but I’m not sure it’s with the students.

Some of the contributors to the debate were concerned with precisely these issues, and trying to be sensible about some genuinely awkward dilemmas.  Many, however, were involved in something much more primal and instinctive; essentially, what these dilemmas express about the present state of classics as a discipline.  For example, I think we have already had evocations of all seven of the major symptoms of societal and cultural decadence: the lamentable ignorance of the young, who simply don’t know or value the things that the older generation values, and so clearly don’t really know anything.  In my day, you know, we talked Greek at the breakfast table at home, so when I got to secondary school I could concentrate on perfecting my Sanskrit and Estonian.  There’s little attempt at situating these claims about a more golden and educated past in any social or economic context; it cannot possibly be that the older generation of PhD students (let alone those who went on to academic jobs) were to a greater degree drawn from a narrower and more privileged social stratum, hence had a head start on languages, it’s that the younger ones are clearly idle and can’t be bothered.  The idea that they might have*other* skills doesn’t enter into it, because that implies putting such skills on level with those skills traditionally valued in the descipline – which is to say, effectively down-grading the traditional skills. Decadence and decline, clearly.

There is an unmistakable archetype of the ideal classical scholar lurking behind all this: not, as one might initially imagine, the academic in his fifties or sixties, but rather a research student in his twenties who is as that sixty-something academic was at that age, or an idealised version thereof. And, yes, I’m pretty sure that it’s a ‘he’ as far as the collective consciousness of the discipline is concerned.  So, youngish in age but old in attitude, polymathic, skilled in ancient and modern languages, either single so he can be monkishly devoted to his research in case he comes across another language he has to learn, or supported by loyal and self-effacing girlfriend/wife so he can be monkishly devoted to his work with occasional extra benefits.

I could go on – though actually I’m more inclined to recommend reading Nietzsche’s Wir Philologen if you don’t already know it, as he was skewering this type 150 years ago.  What most struck me this time around, however, was the way that this Heroic Classicist is conceived, quite unconsciously, as a Lone Scholar (putative self-effacing girlfriends/wives don’t count in this respect).  Even if he’s part of a department, he researches alone, which is why he needs command of all these languages and other skills.  Obviously he can’t talk to anyone else or draw on their expertise, because that’s not how things work. (Actually it may also be because all other scholars are figured as enemies, potential or actual, to judge from the tone of some of the remarks, but that’s a separate issue).

Now this is clearly mad – but it is how we think, and in this case I don’t think ‘we’ is confined to the dismayed older generation.  I don’t imagine I was the only one who reacted to Elton’s suggestion about the importance of learning computer skills with “yes, but I don’t actually have time…”  Current research students have enough trouble getting to grips with ancient languages and modern languages and technical skills for their research, and they should do computer stuff as well now?  The point is that they don’t actually have to do all these things themselves, if there is someone else they can ask.  If we think of scholarship in terms of a collective enterprise – still more if it’s actually organised as a team – then what matters is the blend of skills and knowledge within the team, not the individual accomplishments of a single person.

This has been the revelation of my Thucydides project; working with a political scientist, Christine Lee, so that she can cover certain areas of the topic and teach me to understand what’s going on there, and I can do the same for her.  That’s obviously necessary because it’s an interdisciplinary project, and so it’s easy to assume that it’s irrelevant to mainstream classical research – but it isn’t.  We don’t all have every possible skill required for Altertumswissenschaft; personally, I don’t think anyone ever has, but maybe older generations were more skilled in tailoring their projects to the skills that they possessed (a bit like the marksman who drew the targets after he’d fired), whereas today we get carried away with interesting research questions that we’re not wholly qualified to address properly.

My point is that we need to think of all projects as effectively interdisciplinary, even when they’re in theory wholly within the discipline; at which point it isn’t an issue that, say, my understanding of Renaissance Latin is rubbish, because I can simply talk to an expert or, if it’s central to the project, make sure there’s an expert on the team.  We just have to change the way we think about research.  The problem is that this goes against the foundational myth of our discipline, the idealised image of the classicist: the Polymathic Lone Scholar, contrasted against the narrow specialisms and inferior minds of scientists, social scientists and even other humanities people.  Even some of the most reasonable classicists I know – including members of younger generations who have been objecting vociferously to the “you don’t know German so you’re a bad scholar” arguments – adhere closely to this archetype in the way they conceive of their own research.

Maybe it’s understandable; for example, how much of the continuing prestige of Classics (or, if not prestige, then the fact that it’s survived as a separate discipline for so long) rests on the idea that it’s particularly difficult because of the difficult languages involved, and so classicists must be particularly brilliant?  Do we tend to conceive of the discipline in terms of its specific skills because that’s actually the only thing that makes us distinctive, because otherwise we’d be subsumed into departments of history or literary studies or philosophy?

Of course I debar myself from this conversation automatically because I don’t really think of myself as a classicist, which gives everyone else license to ignore this.  I hope they won’t ignore this question, however: yes, researching the ancient world requires an astonishing range of skills and expertise, but why do we almost always assume that these must be required of every individual researcher?

Thucydides (Thoo-SID-a-dees) is a tool designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier. It provides features that make it easier to organize and structure your acceptance tests, associating them with the user stories or features that they test. As the tests are executed, Thucydides generates illustrated documentation describing how the application is used based on the stories described by the tests.

Thucydides provides strong support for automated web tests based on Selenium 2, though it can also be used effectively for non-web tests.

Thucydides was a Greek historian known for his astute analysis skills who rigorously recorded events that he witnessed and participated in himself. In the same way, the Thucydides framework observes and analyzes your acceptance tests, and records a detailed account of their execution.

Of course, the obsessive pedant in me now wants to start speculating about whether the Thucydides framework appears to provide a reliable record of the execution of acceptance tests, which can serve as a basis for future practices (kata to hupologistikon, so to speak), but is really manipulating the user according to its own hidden agenda…