How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (49 page)

You knew, too, what it was like to live in a world divided between “two sides [that] were at the very height of power and preparedness,” as Thucydides remarks at the beginning of his
History
; and you knew how that polarization created a global political climate in which “the rest of the…world was committed to one side or another,” and how the blind adherence to ideology or established policy which resulted from such polarization could result in a fearful illogic. (Kagan dryly points out, of the Greek conflict, that “the Spartans were therefore willing to expose themselves to the great danger of a war to preserve an alliance they had created precisely to save them from danger.”) The Peloponnesian War—or, to be more precise, Thucydides' account of it—was, in short, every Classics professor's dream: an ancient text whose relevance to contemporary society could not be questioned.

In the bipartite world of the Cold War, there were two ways to read Thucydides as a political text. If you leaned to the left, you saw, in the carefully structured presentation of Athens's gradual descent from cautious self-restraint first into brutality and then into anarchy, a cautionary tale: about the abuses of imperial power, say, and the moral decay that accompanies unscrupulous exercises of such power. If you leaned the other way, you took Thucydides' famous detachment, his failure to pass explicit moral judgments on the Athenians and their wartime behavior, as an implicit if cautious endorsement of
Machtpolitik
as a grim requirement for being a superpower. (“Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can,” the Athenians blandly opine during the debate about the fate of the Melians.) But whichever way you read Thucydides, the bipolar structure of the real world, the world in which you actually lived as you read the
History
, implied that you needed to heed the implied message of its numerous polarities—between the Athenians and Spartans, between the Corinthians and their frisky former colonists the Corcyreans, between the Athenians and Melians—which was that one side or the other must be right. Or, more to the point, must win.

Almost as soon as the Cold War had begun, in fact, people who knew their history were using the Peloponnesian War as a lens through which to examine the modern-day global geopolitical scene. On February 22, 1947, Truman's secretary of state, George Marshall, came to Princeton University to talk about world affairs. In his speech, he declared that he “doubt[ed] seriously whether a man can think with full wisdom and deep conviction regarding certain of the basic international issues today who has not at least reviewed in his mind the period of the Peloponnesian War and the Fall of Athens.” These words were no more than a fulfillment of a prophecy that Thucydides confidently, if rather cynically, makes in the Introduction to his
History
:

That the American general-diplomat could so emphatically invoke the Athenian historian's narrative twenty-three hundred years after the death of its author would seem to bear out not only the latter's dim assessment of human nature, but also his declaration that his book would be “a possession for all time.”

 

But what kind of possession, and whose? Time, or rather times, have changed—far more radically, you could argue, between Marshall and the present than between Thucydides and Marshall. What do you make of Thucydides—or, for that matter, the Peloponnesian War itself—at the “end of history,” when there is only one superpower?

One answer to this question is to be found in the new book by Kagan, who is alert to the opportunities presented by the new world order for rereading—or, some might say, rewriting—the Peloponnesian War. At the beginning of his new history, he writes that although the Greek conflict's “greatest influence as an analytical tool may have come during the Cold War,” he wants his work to “meet the needs of readers in the 21st century.” Self-consciously echoing the famous Thucydidean objectivity, he declares that he will refrain from drawing parallels between the ancient event and any modern counterpart, in the hopes that “an uninterrupted account will better allow readers to draw their own conclusion.” Uninterrupted, yes, but not disinterested. Kagan is famous on campus and off for his conservatism (he numbers Ronald Reagan and Otto von Bismarck among his “heroes”); what strikes you the most after reading his history of the Peloponnesian War is that you can come away from it with an entirely different view of the war than the one you take away from Thucydides. Unsurprisingly, it's a view that could be taken to support a very twenty-first-century project indeed: a unilateralist policy of preventive or preemptive war, with no tolerance for rivals.

The only way to do this, of course, is make the Peloponnesian War unilateral, too—to strip all the Thucydides out of the
History
, omitting the many voices and famously dialogic structure that the Athenian historian worked so hard to include. Kagan is, indeed, far less shy about intruding his own voice into the proceedings than Thucydides is. This is nowhere more apparent than in his revisionist championing of Cleon
and the war party in Athens, whose hawkish policies Kagan consistently presents as the only reasonable choice for the Athenians: in the debate over the punishment of Mytilene, in the crude rejection of Spartan peace offers in 424 (after Athens gained the upper hand at Sphacteria) when the Athenians refused to allow the peace-seeking Spartans to save face, in the city's harsh punishment of generals who'd concluded a peace with the Sicilian states in 424, even in the “un-Periclean aggressiveness” that backfired at Delium. “It is tempting to blame Cleon for breaking off the negotiations,” goes a typically tendentious sentence. “But what, realistically, could have been achieved?” Anyone who hasn't read Thucydides (whose comment on the Athenians' rejection of peace is that “they were greedy for more”) will be inclined to agree.

The desire to rehabilitate Cleon results, inevitably, in a corresponding denigration of the peace party (with their “apparently limitless forbearance,” as Kagan dismissively remarks) and of the cautious policies recommended first by Pericles and then by Nicias, a figure for whom Kagan has great disdain. (“Misguided.”) It's here that Kagan's revisionism borders on the misleading. At one point, for instance, Kagan bizarrely refers to the Sicilian expedition as “the failed stratagem of Nicias.” This is absurd. The pious Nicias had no taste for the Sicilian expedition: what happened was that Nicias had tried to bluff the Athenian Assembly into abandoning the invasion of Sicily, declaring that it would require far greater expense than people realized; but they simply approved the additional ships and troops. It's a grotesque stretch to use his failed political ploy to blame the disaster on Nicias, who indeed paid for it with his life. As for the Athenians' massacre of the Melians, Kagan dismisses it as “the outlet they needed for their energy and frustration.”

Kagan's reading of the war, with its pervasive pro-Athenian triumphalism, its willing, Cleonic disdain for anything that doesn't serve the aggrandizement of Athenian power, may indeed be the right reading for the twenty-first century, when the United States, unlike the ancient city-state to which it used to be confidently compared, has no traditional military opponents, and no global ideological system to oppose its own ideological aims, of the kind it had thirty years ago. But while his approach owes something to an admirable, and perhaps Thucydidean, desire to look at the war with fresh and unsentimental eyes, you often can't help feeling that it also owes something to a hawkishness
on the author's part, a distaste for compromise and negotiation when armed conflict is possible. His book represents what you could call the Ollie North take on the Peloponnesian War: “If we'd only gone in there with more triremes, we would have won that sucker.”

 

This way of reading Thucydides in light of the new world order is reflected in other recent books about the Greeks at war, none more so than those by Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson, who is extremely prolific on the subject of war—his most recent book,
Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think
(Doubleday; $27.50), is his fourteenth in twenty years—writes absorbingly and well about ancient infantry battles. Increasingly, he's devoted himself to other topics. Among other things, he's a tireless opponent of what he sees as corrupt practices in the current academic study of the Classics. For instance, in his 1998 polemic
Who Killed Homer?
, he suggests that we discard what he clearly sees as a decadent preoccupation with femininity and sexuality, and instead pay more attention to the average guy in ancient Athens—ordinary men who (like Hanson himself, as it happens) farm the land.

But Hanson's own handling of the texts that he wants to reclaim for authentic Greek manliness is itself more than a little suspect. In an article for the National Review Online entitled “Voice From the Past: General Thucydides Speaks About The War,” since collected in a volume of essays entitled
An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 And the War on Terrorism
, he poses questions about the Gulf War and has Thucydides “answer” them, by means of citations from the
History
. For example, to the question “Why do you think bin Laden and his terrorists…believed they could repeatedly get away with killing Americans, win prestige, and gain concessions—without eventually incurring the destructive wrath of the United States?” he gives the following “answer” from Book 3 of the
History
:

Any classicist will immediately recognize in this an appalling misrepresentation. Hanson neglects to mention, in citing this implicit Thucydidean endorsement of a “right” American response to 9/11 (presumably one that would involve “destructive wrath” in the Middle East), is that the words he's citing here aren't, strictly speaking, Thucydides', but rather Cleon's: the speech he quotes, as it happens, is the one in which the politician urged his fellow Athenians to slaughter all of the adult males and enslave the women and children of Mytilene, a punishment from which the Athenians themselves, before they entirely lost their moral bearings, shrank in guilty horror. (Cleon's apparent distaste for the enemy's preference for “might to right” in this passage is, in any case, a disingenuous piece of rhetoric; as we know, he was the most outspoken advocate of
Machtpolitik
.) To make matters even worse, nearly all classicists agree that Thucydides had a special loathing for Cleon. To cite Cleon's speeches as if they represented Thucydides' views on the subject of retributive violence is grotesque—it's like quoting Iago's speeches and saying it's what Shakespeare thought about love.

Hanson's sly (and, in view of his familiarity with the text, deliberate) misrepresentation of Thucydides—the implication that this is a great Dead White Male's response to contemporary political issues, when it is in fact the response of a character whom Thucydides is merely quoting—is, at one level, a betrayal of the Athenian historian's ostentatious emphasis on methodological rigor. This is particularly ironic, given that Hanson apparently sees himself as a writer not unlike Thucydides himself: tough-minded, unsentimental (except, perhaps, about farmers, and those who fell in the last world war, “that better age” as he calls it in
Ripples of Battle
), perhaps more in touch with the tough realities of lived life than most effete academics. “My interests,” he writes at the beginning of
Carnage and Culture
, his 2001 study of why Western warfare has proved superior to that of all other cultures, “are in the military power, not the morality, of the West.” Unsurprisingly, a certain self-conscious machismo characterizes much of the writing; you can't help sensing a certain relish in the author's descriptions of dead hoplites “washing up in chunks on the shores of Attica” or “the collision of a machine-gun
bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of an artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul.”

This Tarantino-esque swagger inevitably colors Hanson's reading of Thucydides. In Hanson's introduction to
The Landmark Thucydides
, the amply annotated presentation of Richard Crawley's 1874 translation of the
History
, the soi-disant gimlet-eyed modern historian takes the measure of his gimlet-eyed predecessor's narrative. The latter, Hanson asserts, shows us peoples and states “all caught in the circumstance of rebellion, plague and war that always strip away the veneer of culture and show us for what we really are.” But did Thucydides think that what human beings “really” are is (say) what the Athenians had become during the Melian debate and its aftermath, or what the mercenaries who murdered the schoolboys were? It's not clear that he does; and, as we know, he never comes out and says so directly. (Then again, he does seem to admire the Melians, who certainly weren't that way.)

To some extent, then, “what we really are” may have less to do with Thucydides than it does with Hanson's image of himself: a tough guy who knows the score better than his soft counterparts on the East Coast do. “There is an inherent truth of battle,” he asserts in “Carnage and Culture”: