Chapter Six: Thucydides and that war.

My essay “Cracking the Thucydides code” has appeared recently in the Antioch Review, a literary magazine of some note. It is the kind of publication many large libraries have.

I came across something new to me, a film called “The War that Never Ends,” which credits Thucydides as the writer. This is the Internet Movie Data Base address. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103235/ When you are there check for my comment. I have also contributed to the Wikipedia entry on Thucydides. Have a look
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides
I came across a reference to this film in July a week before the semester started on the Internet Movie Data Base which showed it as unavailable from Amazon. So I mentioned it in class in case any of the students had ways and means. One or two did try to scout around without success. I also put the Audio Visual librarian, Jill Brown on it, and she came good. She found it on an educational film web site. I ordered it and it arrived just in time for me to screen it in the next to last class meeting.
It is a production of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed on bare stage by a series of men in tunics. The narration is supplied by Thucydides himself thus, sitting at a desk reading from his notes.

The actor is Alec McCowan, a regular on British television shows like Bergerac, the Midsomer Murders, and the like. The film takes liberties with the text, of course, to trim the story to seventy minutes. Bu the major events and debates are there, and also the infamous dialogue at Melos. For some reason part of an ersatz Platonic dialogue “The Alcibiades I” is inserted in the middle, concerning the education of warriors, I guess is the justification. Alcibiades is a major figure in the war, no that is not right, he is THE MAJOR INDIVIDUAL across the twenty-seven years of the war. Bob Peck is superb as the doomed Nicias.
But to get back to the History of the Peloponnesian War.
How would the responsible journalist of today cover the events Thucydides describes? Hastily, sensationally, and without many facts.

And so they might go. My essay “Cracking the Thucydides code” has appeared recently in the Antioch Review, a literary magazine of some note. The link goes to the first paragraph. It is the kind of publication many large libraries have.
http://review.antioch.edu/detail.php?id=815
I am not going to repeat my take of Thucydides here. Suffice to say he was a genius. His first great achievement was to conceptualize the twenty-seven year period as a single war. Why does World War II not include the Spanish Civil War, the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, or the Japanese invasion of China in 1937? If Thucydides told the story World War II he might have included these precursors and some the consequent conflicts like the Greek Civil War. Another was to focus on individuals as representative of bodies of opinion and expression of attitudes that characterized the participants. Finally there is that dialogue on Melos. Where Athens proves that it is no longer Athens, but a diseased hulk.
That fabulous cast of characters include the wily Pericles (try comparing him to Churchill), Alcibiades, Nicias, Hyperbole, Cleon, Diodotus, and more. I will upload my Perciles File later.
Alcibiades, the Extraordinary, a favorite of Socrates, his beauty and spirit praised in the Symposium of Plato, Alcibiades who convinced the demos in the assembly to make war on distant Syracuse – another democracy – as means of defeating Sparta! Logic, evidence, and reason did not figure in his argument. When Nicias argues against the invasion of distant and harmless Syracuse, his own fate is sealed. Who better, on Athenian mob reasoning, to lead an expedition then someone opposed to it? So Nicias was sent to Sicily and there he died. Before the last battle he walked the line and spoke to the remaining Athenian spear carriers, urging each one of them “to be Athens today! Each man the city!” They failed. Taken prisoner, he was killed. Of whom Thucydides utters his only personal opinion the five hundred pages of the book: “he least of all deserved such a fate.” Laconic indeed. Here is Bob Peck, better known as Ray the listener from “The Edge of Darkness.” (“The Edge of Darkness” is often said to be the best single drama ever produced by the BBC. It would have my vote.)

The only stage effect in “The War that Never Ends” is that the lighting dims as it goes on.
Alcibiades probably needs a further word. In addition to his talents and looks, he also had appetites that he could not control, contrary to the teachings of Socrates. His debauchery was an open secret. No sooner did the great armada sail for Sicily, hugging the shore from Athens to Syracuse, than he was suspected of a religious crime (smashing divine statues in a drunken binge) and stripped of command. Rather than return to Athens and face the risks of the demos, he sold his services to Sparta, later still when the war took another turn he negotiated a return to Athens, and finally he went to serve the Persians against all the Greeks. Why hasn’t Spielberg done this story! It has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster: murder and mayhem, and no copyright on the property!
Tune in for more.