How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (50 page)

But if this is true, then Hanson's catalog of the immoral would have to begin with the Greeks themselves—not least, Thucydides himself. In fact, it is Hanson and Kagan who strip away the moral meaning that underpins Thucydides' account of the war. To get a better sense of what that meaning is, you have to turn from the book that was started in 431 to the play that premièred that spring—which is to say, from history to tragedy.

 

To the Athenians, Thucydides'
History
may well have looked a lot more like a tragedy than it does to us. You are, indeed, inclined to be suspicious from the very start of Thucydides' notorious claim, in his Introduction, that his account of the war will lack “literary charm” (the Greek here is
mythodes
, a word related to
myth
). He begins his work by boasting of having used only “the plainest evidence” and having “reached conclusions which are reasonably accurate”—stringent methods that, he declares, set him apart from literary types such as poets (“who exaggerate the importance of their themes”) and certain earlier historians “who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public”—the latter being a swipe at his predecessor, Herodotus, whose narrative flourishes and fondness for the colorful anecdote the younger historian famously eschews. That said, Thucydides must nonetheless admit to a methodological difficulty that will result in some fiction-writing of his own:

As it happens, this is precisely what tragedians do, too: it dovetails perfectly with Aristotle's recommendation, in the
Poetics
—his treatise on poetry and stagecraft—that tragic dialogue needs to reflect what a character is “likely” to say. What's noteworthy about the speeches you find in Thucydides (and there are 141 of them) is that the most memorable of them aren't, as it were, monologues: nearly all of the turning points of the war, the crucial moments in Athenian policy-making, are cast in dialogue form. This, more than anything, is what gives the
History
its unique texture: the vivid sense of an immensely complex conflict reflected, agonizingly, in hundreds of smaller conflicts, each one presenting painful choices, all leading to the great and terrible resolution.

Why did Thucydides cast so much of his history as dialogue? One reason is that the Greek habit of mind was to think in terms of polar op
posites. There is, built into the Greek language itself, a grammatical element that structures most sentences into balanced clauses. (Most Greek prose, and a lot of poetry, too, sounds like this: “On the one hand,
x
; on the other hand,
y
.”) This habit of thought was reflected in the institutions of Greek life, nowhere more so than at Athens. Athenians were, even in ancient times, notoriously litigious—which is to say, both highly verbal and highly combative: a daunting number of the extant prose texts that we have from the great age of Athenian literature are, in fact, lawyers' speeches. In that context, it comes as no surprise that the three greatest intellectual achievements that came out of Athens—Platonic philosophy (treatises cast as dialogues between Socrates and his interlocutors), Thucydidean historiography (historical events reduced to dialogues between opposing viewpoints), and tragic theater (verbal “contests,” called
agones
, between characters representing differing moral, religious, or ethical positions)—are all genres that aim to elucidate the truth of the human condition by means of dialogue, of verbal contests. Plato, according to legend, started out wanting to be a playwright and only later turned to philosophy.

The common intellectual heritage of tragedy and Thucydidean history helps explain why it's possible, and indeed desirable, to read the two genres against each other. To see just how “tragic” Thucydides can be, it's worth studying the most famous dialogue in Thucydides: the Melian Dialogue, the historian's presentation of the confrontation in the spring of 416
B.C
. between the representatives of Athens and those of Melos. In this section, the Athenians have come to demand cooperation from the Melians, on pain of total destruction, insisting on their right, as the more powerful, to decide the island's fate. (They blandly dismiss any considerations of what is actually just, since for them Justice “depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.”) Slyly taking up the Athenians' argument for action based on self-interest, the spirited Melians reply that it might be in the Athenians' best interests to exercise restraint and refrain from devastating the island, since “in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected from the difference in numbers of the two sides.” Instead, they doggedly place their trust in “hope” and “fortune.” As we know, the negotiations soon collapsed; that winter, the city fell
and the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians who, true to their word, put to death all the men of military age and sold into slavery all of the women and children.

The tragedy of the Melian episode doesn't lie so much in the fact that it has an unhappy ending (many Greek tragedies don't), as in the crisp exchanges between the principals, which indeed resemble the
stichomythia
, the rapid-fire dialogue, between warring duos in so many Greek tragedies: unscrupulous tyrants threatening innocent women who have taken sanctuary at altars, as in Aeschylus's
Suppliants
and numerous other plays, or all-powerful kings locking horns with physically powerless yet morally ferocious antagonists, as in (to take the best known example) Sophocles'
Antigone
. As if to underscore the similarities between his text and those of the tragic poets, Thucydides gives this debate a remarkable physical resemblance to the scripts of real tragedies, with the names of the “characters,” the Athenians and Melians, abbreviated before their respective speeches, like this:

A thrilling, if disheartening, bit of drama.

 

It is, however, in yet further manipulations of his text that Thucydides suggests the extent to which we are to read his book as a play, his history as a tragedy. In the
Poetics
, Aristotle observes that even good dialogue doesn't make a good tragedy. “If a man writes a series of speeches
full of character and excellent in point of diction and thought,” he observes, “he will not achieve the proper function of tragedy nearly so well as a tragedy which, while inferior in these qualities, has a plot or arrangement of incidents.” Chief among the devices that give a narrative the sense of being a true tragic plot, he goes on to say, are
peripeteia
, “reversal of fortune,” and
anagnorisis
, a “recognition,” resulting from the reversal of fortune, of what one hadn't realized before. (When the Melians remind the Athenians that the latter could well be the losers one day, they're talking, rather optimistically, about a
peripeteia
.) Tragedy, after all, thrives on shocking reversals and morally pointed echoes and inversions: so Oedipus, in Sophocles' play, is a king who turns out to be an outcast, a sleuth who turns out to be the criminal he seeks, the foreigner who is revealed to be native-born, the son who replaces his father in his mother's bed. So Pentheus, in Euripides'
Bacchae
, the rigid young man obsessed with maintaining the boundaries of his city and his own psyche, ends up literally disintegrating, torn into tiny pieces by god-maddened women.

Thucydides, naturally, couldn't “arrange” his plot as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides so artfully did; throughout the
History
, as we know, he sticks to his careful narration of events as they happened. But while Thucydides can't invent what his characters did, he does have more control over what they say (since, as he himself tells us, he's putting words in their mouths). It's here, in the diction and arrangement of the speeches, that he forges the literary parallels and verbal echoes that allow you to perceive how much of what happens to Athens is an Aristotelian
peripeteia
.

This is certainly evident in the masterly portrayal of Athens's disastrous Sicilian Expedition. In tragedy, reversals are usually punishment for hubris, and there are clues, in the
History
, that Sicily is to be seen as a heroic delusion on a scale as grandiose as anything you find in tragedy. When the magnificent Athenian fleet, led by Alcibiades, set out for Sicily in the winter of 416
B.C
., she was equipped with lust for conquest and not much else, apart from a hubristically misplaced self-confidence: “They were,” Thucydides writes, “for the most part ignorant of the size of the island and of the numbers of its inhabitants, both Hellenic and native, and they did not realize that they were taking on
a war of almost the same magnitude as their war against the Peloponnesians.” And there's little doubt that we're meant to see in the disaster that ensued a grand retribution for the cynical policies of which the Melian slaughter stands as the great symbol. The Melian affair closes Book V, and the Sicilian Expedition opens Book VI—a pointed juxtaposition. In Sicily, moreoever, the Athenians are forced, in a typically tragic reversal, to “play” the Melians whom they themselves had destroyed. In the very moment of the Athenians' total defeat, Nicias urges his troops to place their trust in “hope,” “fortune,” and the gods—the very things that the Melians, facing obliteration at the hands of a vastly more powerful enemy, had trusted in, to the derisive amusement of the Athenians during the Melian debate. What befalls the Athenians in Sicily therefore fulfills the desperate prediction of the Melians: “We know that in war fortune sometimes makes the odds more level than could be expected.”

This is surely why Thucydides takes special care to present the climactic defeat of the Athenian forces in the Sicilian campaign, at the Assinarus River in 413, as a theatrical spectacle, with what can only be described as an audience of Syracusans watching the battle, “prey to the most agonizing and conflicting emotions.” How better to behold what the author describes as “the greatest reverse that ever befell an Hellenic army”? The notion of reversal colors the entire passage: the Athenians, those great seafarers who had come across the vast waters to this island, greedy to fatten their empire, finish by crawling around in the river mud, pathetically desperate for nothing more than enough water to slake their dreadful thirst. “They now suffered very nearly what they had inflicted,” Thucydides writes. “They had come to enslave others, and were departing in fear of being enslaved themselves.”

But no reversal in Thucydides' presentation of his native city is more pointed, or more appalling, than one that would have been obvious to his contemporaries. In Herodotus's history of the glorious conflict in which Athens and Sparta fought side by side against a common enemy, the Persians, he relates how the Great King of Persia, confident of his military superiority, the enormous numbers of troops and rich provisions at his disposal, tried to persuade the Greeks that resistance was futile; that might made him, if not right, then inevitable. And yet they trusted to hope, and fortune, and the gods, and were richly rewarded
in their stunning victories at Marathon in 490 and at Salamis ten years later. That the Athenians, in Thucydides'
History
, should, in the course of fifty years, have come to resemble the villain of Herodotus's
Histories
, using the same words to the Melians that the Great King had once addressed to them, is an irony as bitter as any you find in Sophocles. This was something that Thucydides' ancient readers already understood. “Words like these,” the first-century
B.C
. historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus wrote in his analysis of the Melian dialogue, “were appropriate to oriental monarchs addressing Greeks, but unfit to be spoken by Athenians to Greeks.”

 

So the lessons to be learned from Thucydides are no different from the ones that the tragic playwrights teach: that the arrogant self can become the abject Other; that failure to bend, to negotiate, inevitably results in terrible fracture; that, because we are only human, our knowledge is merely knowingness, our vision partial rather than whole, and we must tread carefully in the world.

These are, indeed, the lessons of
Medea
, that other product of the spring of 431
B.C
. To our post-Freudian eyes,
Medea
looks like an over-the-top domestic and psychological drama; to the Athenians, that fraught March, it may well have looked like a political fable. The play's setting is Corinth—a highly unusual locale for a Greek tragedy—and its heroine is obsessed with violated oaths. These two facts suggest an underlying commentary on the Corinthian diplomatic crisis of a few years earlier—an event characterized by broken covenants and explosive confrontations between “kindred” states—which led to the outbreak of the war. Then there's the heroine's philandering husband, Jason the Argonaut. With his aggressive bearing and fancy rhetorical footwork (at one point he tells Medea that he's abandoning her and their children in a strange land for their own good), he begins to look like a parody of a certain kind of Athenian politician—the kind who might for the sake of winning an argument denounce in an enemy the crass ethics (a preference for might over right, say) that he himself is known to hold dear.