On Thucydides

There comes a time in a man's life, when he's riding the train next to some untouchables--some vile, smelly, unshaven, ritually unclean maths geeks from MIT, reeking of desperation and talking loudly of their inane pursuits--when he realizes that there really is a certain level of necessary civilization. At least, that's what the girls across from me said when our intrepid Math-nauts, chortling to themselves about "sluicing," departed the train, leaving only their foul miasma behind them: "God, those guys make me want to really achieve something!"

"I was trying so hard to tune them out," her friend responded. They were sitting two seats apart, bracketing a blonde in a white top who had been spared it all by virtue of her earbuds. "They really did seem to be happy," the original interlocutor stated, after further reflection.

And that was that. The end of The History of the Pelopenesian War, with some smelly math geek invading my personal space just as surely as Spartan hoplites did the fields around Athens...

***

As I admitted earlier, I had never been able to stomach Thucydides. I read Seutonius at an early age (he's so delightfully risque) and was able to handle Livy and even Tacitus (hardly the most straightforward of Latin prose stylists, but a magnificent historian). I read my Herodotus, and was unimpressed with the "Father of History's" rampant credulity, which, literally, knew no bounds. Homer, of course, and Virgil, and some Caesar and some servicable, redoubtedly British general histories of the Punic Wars, Alexander's conquests, Marathon, Augustus' disastrous German campaigns (you know, banging the head against the door and yelling "Varus, give me back my legions!" because what else can you say after the greatest Roman military disaster since Cannae?) which led into schoolboy admirations for the dark Phoenician and his doomed enterprise but a bracing young imperial respect for the great Scipio Africanus, the winning general who is merely a footnote...

Thucydides isn't much of a romantic. He's hard-nosed, rigorous, honest. He's unspairing, seeing clearly, even as a contemporary, the incalcuable stupidities, arrogances, overreaches of the power-hungry Athenian mob or the enthusiastically block-headed Spartans. He finds no easy solace in oracles or the accumulated obediences of Greek religion. They are, for Thucydides, arbitrary and irrelevant.

Well, I realize, in retrospect, that I simply wasn't ready for such an adult work. I might have been a happier kid, or at least someone that only understood despair, disapointment, and loss in an intellectual sense. That's not going to do it, when confronted with the self-immolation of a glorious situation, the wasteful abandon of the flower of Greek youth, all for more talents, a couple more ships, greater prestige.

Thucydides: a masterpiece of history, calm, dispassionate, boldly analytical, and magisterially comprehensive. Highly recommended.