Zhang Xingang, professor at the School of History and Culture of Shandong University
Thucydides, by P. J. Rhodes, translated by Bai Chunxiao, Wuhan University Press, September 2021, 131 pp. 25.00 yuan
Peter John Rhodes (10 August 1940 – 27 October 2021)
Since the middle of the last century, the highest exposure rate of "breaking the circle" among ancient Greek historians is Thucydides. Thucydides has become not only the subject of lectures in ancient history or international relations theory, but also far beyond the scope of doctrine, and has become the object of frequent expropriation and even abuse by politicians and scholars. During the Cold War, U.S. Secretary of State Marshall said in his speech that Thucydides needed to understand the international situation at that time; more recently, American scholars proposed concepts such as the "Thucydides Trap", so that people who had not read the Peloponnesian War History could hear or talk about Thucydides' name on various occasions. It is not known how Thucydides himself would have felt if he had known about such expropriations of him in the future, but judging from the expressions in his writings, it is estimated that his state of mind would have been more complicated. For Thucydides, on the one hand, makes it clear that "my writings do not want to win a momentary reward from the hearers, but rather to become permanent wealth"; but on the other hand, the core of this permanent wealth is to see the human condition itself, not simply to make historical comparisons. Is it possible, then, to remove the word "trap" that follows Thucydides' name and try to return to Thucydides and his writings themselves? Thucydides, one of Britain's preeminent contemporary ancient historians and classicists, is a great entry point.
"Thucydides" word frequency trends in Google Books Ngram Viewer
Professor Rhodes is an Emeritus Professor of Durham University in the United Kingdom and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (FBA), and has also served as President of the British Classical Association, and is a representative scholar in the field of classical Greek history. Professor Rhodes's extensive writings include in-depth research on the city-state system (such as the Council of Athens) and annotated collation of the basic documents and materials of Greek history (such as the collation of ancient Greek historical inscriptions and legal inscriptions, as well as the annotated study of Aristotle's "Athenian Political System"), which has become a necessary document and research work for the study of ancient Greek history. Professor Rhodes also devoted great efforts to Thucydides, having made meticulous translations and annotations for the first few volumes of the Peloponnesian War History, and in recent years has published works such as Athens in the Age of Pericles and Asibides. The book Thucydides is an introductory book written by Professor Rhodes at the invitation of Bloomsbury Press, and usually such books are written in a stable manner, but Rhodes's "Little Book for Everyone" reflects the author's unique vision everywhere.
Cover of the English edition of Thucydides
Thucydides is divided into four chapters, the first chapter, "Thucydides's World", is a general introduction to Thucydides and the historical world he narrates; the second and third chapters focus on Thucydides' writing, introducing the characteristics of the Peloponnesian War History from the perspective of historians and thinkers, respectively; and the fourth chapter is a general summary of Thucydides' history of acceptance. After reading the book, Rhodes's analysis of Thucydides's way and intentions in writing is impressive, and it further asks the reader what historical writing meant in the context of ancient Greece.
Thucydides is often regarded today as an "objective" and "rational" historian, a title largely inspired by another ancient historian, Herodotus. Although Herodotus was called the "father of historiography" by Cicero, he was also followed by a "father of lies" after this title. Opening Herodotus' History reveals that in addition to the wars between the Greeks and Persians, there are a large number of ethnographic and anecdotal accounts, which make the reader feel that there is a great difference from people's perceptions of historical works today. Not only that, but the genre of historia was not appreciated by philosophers in ancient times, and was often even attacked and denigrated. For example, Heraclitus criticized historical writing as collecting and sifting through a large amount of material and claiming to have wisdom, but in fact it was a clumsy skill. Similarly, Aristotle also distinguished in Poetics between the poet and the writer of history, arguing that the creation of tragedy is more noble and closer to wisdom than the writing of history, because tragedy is written in accordance with the law of necessity, and history is only a record of occasional single events such as Assibid's living notes, and is basically insulated from the wisdom of love.
Historical writing and historical writers, though so heavily criticized in ancient Greece, seem to me precisely a reminder to understand his original intentions. When writing history is accused by philosophers of not being wise enough, it implies that those who collect material to write history at the time wanted to pursue wisdom in this way, rather than writing historical works that met the expectations of twenty-first-century readers. However, on the track of love of wisdom, philosophers and poets seem to join forces to block the entrance of historical writers. From the standpoint of Herodotus and Thucydides, it is natural not to agree with the attacks from philosophers, for the original meaning of the word historia is "inquiry", and both History and the Peloponnesian War claim to investigate the causes of the two great wars, not of people or events at one time or in one place, but of the human condition. It is difficult to draw a simple conclusion about the ancient battle between historical writing and philosophy, epic/tragic, but returning to the intellectual context of the fifth century BC, we can be sure that writing history is not just a matter of combing through the material, but is the result of careful design and conception by the author.
Rhodes has a very shrewd assessment of thucydides, the writer of history: "In general, as a historian, Thucydides claims that he strives to restore accurate facts, and we should also recognize this. While his handling of this is clearly shrewd, he is not absolutely correct, and in some places we have reason to think that his details are wrong. From a broader perspective, he completed a masterpiece that puts together what happened and explains from a rational point of view how and why it happened. (p. 67)
Rhodes reminds us to consciously grasp the purpose of Thucydides' narrative from the detailed arrangement of his narrative. Taking the peloponnesian war as an example, Thucydides clearly prioritizes the narrative. In The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides distinguishes between the truest causes of war and the apparent public complaints and disputes. The real reason was that the rise in athenian power caused Sparta to fear, which was Thucydides's own synthetic judgment, not by one or two things. But with regard to public complaints and disputes, Thucydides records four events, each in half detail. Both events detailed by Thucydides eventually led to a conflict between Athens and Corinth, a pivotal member of the Peloponnesian League. Athens first formed a defensive alliance with Corinth in a colony of Kirbya in northern Greece in 433 BC, but a direct conflict broke out between Corfu and Corinth, resulting in Athens and Corinth becoming rivals. In 432 BC, Athens attacked Corinthian colony of Portidaea in the northwestern Aegean Sea. Botticia had good relations with Corinth, but was a member of the Athenian-controlled League of Delos. After Athens attacked Portidaea, Corinth sent troops to the rescue, again clashing with Athens. In contrast to these two detailed cases, the other two complaints and disputes are mentioned only very briefly. One was a dispute between Athens and the island of Aegina, which claimed that Athens did not recognize the autonomy promised to it in a treaty. The other time was about Megara, where Athens issued an embargo against Megara because of a dispute between the Holy Land and fugitive slaves, while The Megara was complaining about the economic sanctions they had suffered. Rhodes's explanation for Thucydides' uneven narrative arrangement is that Thucydides may have thought that Athens was justified in the dispute between Kira and Portidaea, and that Athens might have been justified in the complaints of Agina and Megara.
If Thucydides uses content arrangement and narrative rhythm to make the reader accept his intentions, then in the Peloponnesian History, he often appears directly to comment on important people or events, allowing the reader to get a glimpse of his personal thoughts. Rhodes provides a concise overview of this subject in the third chapter, Thucydides the Thinker, and states: "Thucydides did much more than simply describe what happened, and his political and intellectual background allowed him to interpret the material in a unique way, while people from other backgrounds may not agree with his interpretation." (p. 71)
The subject that best anchors Thucydides' personal views is undoubtedly his attitude toward Athens, which can be further refined into a democracy-empire. But this question is not easy to answer, and if you carefully read the History of the Peloponnesian War, you will find it difficult to guess the true mind of the author from the surface of the text. In the case of the Athenian democracy, Thucydides praised the government under Pericles, but at the same time said that Athens was ostensibly a democracy, but in fact the rule of The First Man of Pericles. After Pericles, Thucydides was mostly critical of the new populist statesmen and often disparaged the athenian people. However, after the failure of the Athens Sicily Expedition, Athens faced the rebellion of the Aegean allies and the internal change of government, but it was remarkable. Thucydides gives the highest praise to the five-thousand-man polity of Athens at the end of the book, and even calls it the best Athenian polity he has ever seen. In the face of these contradictory descriptions and comments, it is much harder to determine Thucydides' true view of Athenian democracy than it seems. Rhodes naturally noticed the problem, and linked it to Thucydides' family background and personal experience. The Thucydides were opposed to Pericles and democracies, and Thucydides was later exiled during the war. But through Thucydides' rejection of Athenian politicians, Rhodes argues that Thucydides, in favor of Pericles, broke away from his family's political positions; but Thucydides undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which individual leaders controlled democratic Athens, and also exaggerated the difference between Pericles and later politicians. Thucydides did not like the incendiary Creon, but had a good opinion of the conservative Nissias and was full of contradictions towards Alcabiades. By showing thucydides' complex face, Rhodes actually reminds us not to simply label Thucydides, but to move through this complexity.
The imperial face of Athens is also one of the clues to Thucydides' recounting of the entire history, but Thucydides' attitude towards the Athenian Empire is even more entangled. After the Rise of the Athenian Empire in the Persian Wars, Athens replaced Sparta as the main leading city-state against the Persian Alliance and united with the island states of the Aegean Sea to form the Delos League. The Greek-Persian Wars undoubtedly greatly enhanced Athens' power and influence in the Greek world, and from the middle of the fifth century BC Athens also profited greatly by maintaining the Delos League. As an Athenian, Thucydides was proud of the glory and power of Athens on the one hand, which was also disguised in Pericles' funeral speech. However, from the first volume onwards, the legitimacy of the Athenian Empire became a central theme in the speeches of various parties. In other words, there were many reasons for the Peloponnesian War, but there was a common accusation against Athens, and that was the injustice of the Athenian Empire.
Rhodes notes that Sparta's last demand for Athens before the war broke out was that Athens could avoid war if it allowed the Greeks to govern themselves. After the outbreak of war, most people also showed more favorability toward Sparta because they claimed to liberate Greece. In the fourth volume, When Brassida crossed the northern part of Greece, it also used the slogan of liberating Greece to win support all the way. In contrast, Rhodes reminds us that Thucydides' emphasis on Athens' harsh treatment of allies in many places actually weakened them, the most famous example of which is the dialogue between the Athenians and the Milos. At the end of the fifth volume, Thucydides fictionalizes this dialogue, unabashedly showing the claims of Athenian realism: "We know, and you know, that in human discourse the consideration of justice applies only in the case of equality of power. But the strong do what they can, while the weak can only give in. ...... We are here for the superiority of our empire. Rhodes's final answer to the question was: "Thucydides, as an Athenian and a thinker, was both proud of The unprecedented achievements of Athens in his time and felt that the act of attaining them was not at all praiseworthy, and this sense of tear tormented him." It is precisely because he is unable to solve this dilemma for himself that he often returns to this subject in his historical narrative. (pp. 79-80)
As an introductory book, Rhodes also provides a very concise summary of Thucydides' history of influence. In addition to his profound influence on the compilation of the history of the ancient and descending, Thucydides deserves special emphasis on his influence outside the field of classics. For example, the first complete English version of Thucydides's work was completed by the famous seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was called "the most politically political historical writer of all time" by Hobbes, a tradition that continued into the recent attention paid to Thucydides in political science and international relations. Thucydides' multidisciplinary influence is also reflected in the domestic academic circles, in addition to the ancient Greek history researchers in the discipline of world history, international relations theorists Chen Yuyan and Li Junyang also have profound theoretical research on Thucydides. This all confirms thucydides' depth of insight into the actions of the state and individuals, and the history of the Peloponnesian War has become, as he wished, "eternal wealth."
Three days after writing this essay, a sad message came that Professor Rhodes had passed away on October 27, 2021, at the age of eighty-one. Upon learning of this bad news, many classical scholars and scholars of ancient history in China expressed their difficulty in accepting it. It can be said that scholars engaged in the study of ancient Greek history have benefited from Professor Rhodes' writings. I can't help but think of Professor Rhodes' visit to China in 2018. At that time, he was invited by Northeast Normal University and Peking University to give two lectures in China, and I had the honor to participate in the lectures sponsored by the Center for Western Classics of Peking University. At that time, the theme of the lectures was the Athenian Citizens' Assembly and Council, and the lecture style was as capable and clear as his writing, with clear ideas and to the point. I remember that in the lecture, Professor Rhodes repeatedly mentioned the views of some scholars, often followed by a sentence: "But, he is wrong." (However, this view is wrong.) The teachers and students present couldn't help but laugh when they heard it, but they felt sincere and cute. On second thought, isn't that what learning should look like? In the future, we will no longer be able to hear his new research and the phrase "he is wrong", but his contribution to ancient Greek history is still worth reading carefully. Professor Rhodes' life is also a life of academic career, fortunately he left us a lot of heirloom works, which may be the greatest luck of scholars, as long as there are still people reading these works, Professor Rhodes has not left us.
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng
Proofreader: Luan Meng