Classic

Saved for a rainy day blip, and boy was today a rainy day, here’s my response to @Squatbetty’s  Love Blippin’ Books challenge prompt for March (#LBB3): “a classic”. 

My selected volume was a relatively recent acquisition from the Oxfam bookshop in Bradford: a 1943 edition of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War. 

This is one of those mythical texts that you’re not really sure exists outside of a Monty Python sketch, at least not if like me you’ve had a 70s/80s comprehensive education and didn’t go on to study Classics, History or International Relations. Although, to be fair, I did have half a terms worth of lectures on ancient history as part of first year Archaeology at uni. Overall though, my knowledge of Ancient Greece was mainly derived from reading Roger Lancelyn Green books when I was eight, and repeat viewings of Jason and the Argonauts. 

So what makes Thucydides’ work a classic?

1. It is Number 494 in The Oxford University Press’s “The World’s Classics.” 
2. It was authored during and is about what we now refer to as “the classical world.”
3. It is considered to be a classic and foundational text of both History and International Relations as academic disciplines, in that Thucydides sets out a method of doing history as well as writing an account of the wars between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE) and in particular Athens’ exploits, and ultimately implosion as colonial power.

The edition I read was edited in translation by R.W. Livingstone, drawing heavily on Crawley’s 1874 translation, and was published during WW2. A number of editorial notes draw parallels between the actions of Nazi Germany and those of the state of Athens. I’m sure a contemporary reading would find the events of  two and half thousand years ago speak to present times. 

I was conscious that in reading a text in translation, particularly an old translation, that the choices of the white, male, British translators will have privileged a particular world view. The current wave of feminist and queer retellings of the events of Ancient Greece is starting to redress thousands of years of stories. And I do ask the question of myself: it it worth engaging with a text so archaic? I think my answer is yes, but it has to be a conscious, critical reading.

For what looks like a slim volume I wasn’t expecting it to take me the best part of a month to read it. From the editorial notes I get the sense that it’s quite unusual to read it from cover to cover; more often particular passages or speeches within are perused in depth. Thucydides also has a reputation for long and sprawling sentences, often with multiple subclauses, such that following the narrative, which is chronological and therefore skips from place to place while events are underway rather than bringing all of the events of, say, one siege, together in one place, is challenging. And if you’re still reading this I hope you appreciate that that last sentence of mine was a joke of sorts. I found that I couldn’t read more than about ten pages at a time - and there were nearly four hundred pages.

A few thoughts on what I’ve learned through taking on this challenge:

1. I think I now know how to pronounce Thucydides (thoo-sid-id-ease).
2. I can better appreciate how the thinking and events of Ancient Greece inform the outlook of this country’s Eton-educated elite. Why should we leave the reading of these works just to them?
3. The Peloponnesian War was really brutal and horrible, whole cities starved into supplication or put to the sword. War is still brutal and horrible. 
4. Doric and Ionian aren’t just architectural classifications of columns, they refer to a fundamental divide of peoples in Ancient Greece. 
5. I really don’t like giving up on a book once I’ve started it.

So thank you to Sal for the challenge. If I were sneaky I could probably use this for April’s theme (non-fiction) too, but I’m sure I can find something else for that.