Thucydides’ moral chaos, by PETER THONEMANN, TLS, 3/9/2014// democracycrisis/2009-09-08-20-47-13/2878--15112012 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians took Thucydides as a model for his diligence, his secularism, and his supposedly critical attitude towards his sources (much exaggerated, it is now thought). Thomas Hobbes particularly admired his “elocution” or style and arrangement of material, by which “the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept”. The Reformation theologian David Chytraeus thought that the Corcyrean civil war “shows the clear image of our modern revolutions and internal struggles in the Church”, while for the early Victorian historian George Grote, the Corcyra episode was “especially applicable . . . to France between 1789 and 1799”. Perhaps the most delightful of all Thucydidean homilies is to be found in Samuel Bloomfield’s dedication of his 1829 translation of Thucydides to the Duke of Wellington: “The political lessons to be learned from this important History (suited alike to every age) are well known to be of the profoundest kind; the chief purpose of it being, practically to illustrate the evils of unbalanced democracy, and to show the necessity of that happily attempered admixture of aristocracy and democracy, which, however it might float in the imaginations of ancient theorists, was never actually embodied but in the British Constitution, whose preservation we owe to Your Grace’s military successes.” Charles Dickens’s Mr Podsnap could not have put it better. The chief focus of Thucydides and the Idea of History is on Thucydides as a model for history-writing between, roughly, 1500 and 1950. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of Thucydidean reception (rhetoric; partiality; usefulness). Morley’s ambition is impressive, but one cannot help but wish that he had not spread himself quite so thin. As Morley vaults back and forth between Jean Bodin (1530–96) and R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), the reader is left with little sense of the very different intellectual and cultural contexts of the writers concerned. At times, the volume comes to resemble a scrapbook of interesting things that people have said about Thucydides over the centuries (“Georg Friedrich Creuzer emphasised . . . Hermann Ulrici reported on . . . Wilhelm Wachsmuth had emphasised . . .”)
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 17:44:59 +0000
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