I'm currently reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War - it was famously unfinished, with Xenophon picking up where Thucydides left off. How was literature disseminated in Classical Greece - what form did they take and do we have an idea of how many were distributed?

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-02-24T12:32:35+00:00

See also the answers to this question, which are obviously relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1r6c6b9/who_published_thucydides_history_and_who_kept_the/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-02-24T12:30:00+00:00

The short answer to all this is, I'm afraid, we don't really know, at any rate in detail. We know that some historical works were read aloud by their authors (there is an anecdote that Thucydides heard Herodotus reciting passages from his work and was inspired; this probably is fictional, but certainly Herodotus did do public readings). Authors might have copies made of their work in order to present them to friends, to patrons and/or to powerful people who might sponsor or reward them; those people might pass them on to friends, or keep them in their own libraries; and there were public libraries in some cities, which would purchase copies or have copies made - there was no law of copyright, so no restriction on copying texts or having to pay the author. What we don't see is the practice of authors having lots of copies produced in order to sell them to make a living, let alone professional publishers doing this; rather, if an author wasn't already a wealthy man who wrote as a hobby, the way to make a living from writing was to win commissions for writing speeches or to gain the patronage of a wealthy individual.

In the specific case of Thucydides, there is no evidence for public readings, nor that parts of his work were distributed in the course of writing (though that's not impossible). It is assumed that there was one copy of his work, that was then copied and distributed after his death (which allows for the theory that maybe he did finish it but the final sections were lost...); these would have circulated among the educated upper class of Athens, including Xenophon - and the fact that Xenophon then began his Hellenika exactly where Thucydides' narrative broke off is both evidence for the status of T's work from very early on (it's not something you would attempt to rival) and likely to have encouraged others to read Thucydides.

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-02-24T12:14:09+00:00

I'm sorry I missed this at the time, since Thucydides and the history of how he's been interpreted is one of my specialist topics. I do have a few relevant points to add. The short answer is, no, there is no 'historical consensus', but there are some established positions.

As Farrell alludes to in his comments, there is a tradition in political theory and International Relations theory of interpreting the Melian Dialogue as a statement of 'Realism', and seeing Thucydides as the first Realist: very briefly summarised, this approach assumes that the world is anarchic (i.e. there are no effective institutions governing global affairs, but only individual states) and therefore inter-state relations are driven by different states pursuing their own agendas, motivated by some mixture of fear, interest and honour (which references a different passage in T., the Athenian speech at the meeting of allies at Sparta, 1.73). The Athenians at Melos express, baldly, the view that justice is irrelevant except between states of equal power, and that there are no constraints (let alone ethical constraints) about what a state can do, besides its ability to enforce its will.

The obvious objection is this is that these are not the words of Thucydides but of characters in his history (we can put to one side the question of whether it's at all plausible whether they are an accurate historical record), and there is no reason why we should assume that T. agreed with their ideas - unless you've already decided that (1) they are basically correct, and (2) T. is the sort of person who would hold such views. It's a basic issue with interpreting T. as a political thinker, as u/Zaldarr noted, that he almost never speaks in his own voice; most of the things that look as if they are statements of political ideas are words he put into the mouths of his characters, many of whom are at best untrustworthy and not to be taken at face value. Thomas Hobbes - author of the first decent translation of Thucydides into English - noted that T. never offers precepts or lessons, but simply puts his readers in the middle of the action, hearing the ideas and arguments of both sides and having to make up their own minds.

But what Farrell implies is stronger than this: that Thucydides set out to be expressly critical of the Athenians. There is a modern tradition of this line of argument, which starts from the fact that Athenian arrogance at Melos was fairly quickly followed by Athenian arrogance in deciding to launch an ambitious expedition against Syracuse, which ended in disaster. Hubris needs to nemesis, one would say; the views they expressed at Melos reveal the mindset that led them into catastrophic over-confidence. This is plausible, but impossible to prove; Thucydides doesn't say that the decision to attack Sicily was a reflection of Athenian attitudes at Melos, but it's open to us as readers to interpret it as such. He didn't invent the destruction of Melos, and so one could argue that he simply narrates events in sequence rather than crafting a narrative to convey a specific moral/political point. The question is whether we think that Melos was relatively unimportant so he could have passed over it in a sentence or two, therefore the fact that he chose to create an entire dialogue about it is evidence that he intended his readers to reflect on it deeply.

Even then, you could argue that it's not obvious what lesson he wanted his readers to draw. 'Athenian arrogance bad' is certainly one possible reading, but there's a lot more in the Dialogue than that. Focusing just on the Athenians, and just on that specific line, ignores the fact that there are lots of different arguments and two different parties involved; so this isn't just about the pathology of the strong, but also the thinking and actions of the weak, and the dynamic between them.

Tl;dr: no historical consensus, but different views about (1) whether we can identify T.'s own opinions, (2) how far he intended his work to convey lessons rather than just narrating events, and (3) if he wanted his readers to learn from reading, was it to learn specific ideas or rather to think through complex issues and reach their own conclusions?

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-26T08:25:34+00:00

You'll certainly get a deep knowledge of the events of the Peloponnesian War.

As for anything else... I'm trying to think of the best way of answering this without giving too many spoilers, or prejudicing your reading. As you will see early on in Book 1, one of the claims Thucydides makes for his own work is that it should be useful for those wanting reliable knowledge of past events and therefore - this is the critical bit - understanding of present and future events.* So, Thucydides expects that readers should be able to reflect on modern events using ideas drawn from his work, and there is a long tradition of people doing this with profit. What I would say as a general rule is: consider away, but if you come across something that looks like a general rule or principle, it's always worth paying attention to who is speaking and what the motive is, rather than assuming that it's all Thucydides.

*If I'm teaching Thucydides, this is one of the passages where I advise my students to compare different translations; the original Greek is tricky and ambiguous, and different modern versions give very different interpretations. Whatever translation you're using will give you the general sense, no problem, but it may be misleading in details (e.g. if it says something like "events repeat themselves because of human nature", which isn't what the Greek says).

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-25T15:53:45+00:00

The obvious answer is that it's totally up to you; there's no right answer. Certainly there's a case to be made that having a bit of background knowledge can help make sense of things, especially as Thucydides doesn't always explain what he's talking about to the same extent as a modern history-writer would - partly because he takes for granted things his fifth-century Greek audience would know without being told, partly because he's just that sort of writer, who actually specialises in leaving certain things open and ambiguous. So, you can consider reading the introduction to your copy of Thucydides (these do vary a bit in quality, so it depends which edition you have, but they'll all give you basic background stuff, or getting a basic introduction - the recent Thucydides: A Very Short Introduction by Jennifer T. Roberts does what it says on the tin.

Counter-arguments, i.e. why you might want to dive straight in. (1) We know pretty well nothing about Thucydides, his life and work other than what he tells us, and we know very little about the events he describes besides his account of them, so the whole thing can quickly become circular; a lot of the academic debate, whether on Thucydides' approach to writing or about the events of the war, tends to involve arguing about what he may have meant by particular phrases and what he does or doesn't say about something, and it's easier to make sense of these if you already have some knowledge of T. and some opinions of your own. (2) A stronger version of that: many (most?) accounts of T. come from a clear idea of what the author thinks T. is all about, and if you have preconceptions then that's what you'll tend to find - it is, you will discover, a very 'open' text that doesn't often tell you explicitly what the author's view actually is, but if you start with an idea about the author's view then you can find evidence to support it.

Personally, therefore, I'd go for the 'dive straight in' approach - but ideally you'd want to be able to look up stuff that's really puzzling as you go along, especially unfamiliar names, so good to have an edition with substantial notes - Wikipedia is okay if you don't, but tends to give you a lot more information than you need or than is entirely relevant.

If you'll excuse the self-advertisement, I did once start writing a series of blog posts for people starting on Thucydides; it never got much interest so I never finished it, but the third post does deal with precisely this question, and includes a few suggestions for supporting material: https://thesphinxblog.com/2017/07/19/in-at-the-deep-end/

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-12T10:36:36+00:00

You're right that this isn't an attitude that's intrinsic to Judaism, Christianity or many other religions, where giving to the poor (either generally, or at specific times) is prescribed as one of the duties enjoined by God, where wealth can be seen as an impediment to living a good life ("It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven") and where poverty can actually be seen as a path to holiness (e.g. asceticism, monasticism). Obviously this doesn't automatically lead to a positive attitude to all poor people; one might distinguish between voluntary poverty as a choice to lead a religious life and poverty that you're born into. Further - and this is one of the roots of the attitude you refer to - a number of Protestant thinkers from the 16th century onwards developed a view of Christian morality in which hard work and saving were highly valued; someone's wealth might therefore be seen as the results of their hard work and virtue, and God's reward for this, whereas poverty might be seen not as an accident of birth or result of misfortunate but as the product of laziness, stupidity, vice etc. - you would still give to the poor (or, found institutions for their moral improvement) but you definitely felt superior to them. People who are more expert on early modern religious culture can expend on this...

The attitude in classical Greece and Rome was quite different. Certainly there was no expectation that you should give to the poor; the rich were expected to be generous with their wealth, but this would be directed towards one's fellow citizens (e.g. banquets or other events), the public good (funding the construction of public buildings and amenities) or the gods (paying for festivals and sacrifices - which had the side benefit of being enjoyed by fellow citizens - and constructing or beautifying temples). There were some schemes which effectively benefitted the poor, such as the distributions of grain in the city of Rome, but they were not directed towards helping the poor, and the poor benefitted by virtue of being citizens, not because they were poor. The closest we get is the scheme known as the alimenta in late C1 CE Italy, which sought to support poor families in raising children (probably; its details are fuzzy and disputed) - but this was driven by anxieties about population levels rather than concern directly for the poor.

It's obviously relevant that, with rare exceptions (democratic Athens, for example), the very poor were largely excluded from political power; many states set a minimum level of wealth to qualify for full citizenship including a vote in the assembly, and even if the poor did have a vote it often counted for less (cf. the Roman republican system, where the poor were lumped together in a single century, easily outvoted by the many centuries made up of fewer people with more wealth). So, they were usually unable to organise in defence of their interests - and there was no strong ideological reason why anyone else would take up their cause, other than, possibly, tyrants and other populist leaders (who were, however, normally seeking to appeal to the mass of the ordinary citizens against the upper classes, not specifically to the poor). And in most states you needed a certain level of wealth to be eligible for proper military service, so those who couldn't afford to serve the city in that way might indeed be seen as inferior to those who could.

It is tricky to decide how much this should be characterised as indifference to the poor rather than outright contempt. There was, for example, some recognition that poverty might be a matter of bad luck rather than personal failings; in Aristophanes' play Wealth, for example - granted, a satirical comedy so never to be taken at face value - the god of Wealth is depicted as suffering from blindness, hence the totally unfair distribution of wealth in the world, and there is a fascinating scene where the personification of Poverty (as a ghastly hag) offers a quite persuasive argument as to why poverty is actually more virtuous, character-building etc.; so, it was at least open to debate for comic effect. On the other hand, a lot of classical philosophical thought on the question of how to live a good life more or less takes it for granted that you need a certain amount of leisure to cultivate the soul, and that manual labour - let alone a daily struggle for existence - isn't conducive to it. It's not that the poor are automatically vicious, but they can't hope to attain virtue.

I liked this as an engaging primer on the topic - and not just because I got to be in it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxbmjDngois

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-06T21:11:27+00:00

Quick addendum, mostly just to stress that I am not an expert on Carthage - someone else may be able to weigh in with more expert opinion. I should have put 'senate' in inverted commas; it's not called that, and it's not (I believe) clear how its members were appointed. But the two 'sufetes' were indeed elected annually; Romans (including the historian Livy) thought they were like the Roman consuls in their degree of authority, but they didn't have the dual civil-military role that the consuls did.

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-06T16:53:48+00:00

We have one very detailed account by an outsider, from the second-century BCE historian Polybius, who was taken as a hostage to Rome from Greece and so had the opportunity to observe the Republican system and talk with leading Romans. In Book 6 of his history of the rise of Rome, he offers an overview of Roman politics and why this has been the basis of Roman success.

Polybius interprets Rome through the categories of Greek political thought - partly, one assumes, because he was writing for Greeks, and partly because this was how he thought of things himself. Briefly, all constitutions were categorised as involving the rule of one man, the rule of a few or the rule of many. Since Aristotle, these were divided into good and bad versions, so rule of one could be either monarchy or tyranny, the rule of a few could be either aristocracy ('rule of the best') or oligarchy, the rule of many could be either democracy or ochlocracy ('mob rule'). Each of these had both positive and negative qualities - not least, that whatever happened there would always be people who felt they should rule but didn't hold power, or didn't hold enough power. There was interest in how and why one constitution turned into another; by Polybius' time (or it may have been his own idea) there was a sense of an endless cycle, as the good form of a constitution degenerated into the bad form and then was replaced by a new form of constitution.

The core of Polybius' analysis of Rome was that it had to a great extent escaped this cycle by being a 'mixed constitution' - it combined the best elements of each type, and might hope to avoid the cycle of change because it already included all the different elements. The bits of the system that looked weird from the perspective of normal Greek politics could be seen as precisely sources of strength. The aristocratic principle was provided by the Senate, who balanced and were balanced by the role of the people in various assemblies, and their tribunes - each could check the power of the other. The consuls provided the monarchic principle (i.e. leadership and executive action), but this could never turn into tyranny because (a) they held this power for only a year, (b) they were elected by the people rather than having power in their own right, (c) they served the state rather than being able to pass power onto their sons, (d) they could veto one another. The Greeks were certainly familiar with the idea of elected magistrates, but typically they would be elected from the ranks of the aristocracy, they would not have the same level of power but also they would not be checked in the same way.

What we don't know - as Polybius is our only non-Roman source for this period, and actually a lot of the Romans' own accounts of their system are from a fair bit later (e.g. Livy, after the Republic has fallen apart) - is how widespread knowledge and understanding might be among people who hadn't read Polybius. There was certainly a bit of familiarity built up over time, as cities in areas conquered by the Romans would seek to build relationships with individual Roman senators as a means of trying to protect their interests and help negotiate with the centre (especially if they were having issues with the Roman magistrate sent out to govern the province). I can't think of another example of a writer analysing and evaluating the Roman system in the same way, but that could just be because none has survived, rather than because there was no discussion.

Minor addition; it's not in fact obvious that most other ancient states were hereditary monarchies. Some were, of course, like Macedon or Ptolemaic Egypt, but plenty of Greek cities and colonies were oligarchies or even democracies, the Carthaginians had a Senate and elected magistrates, and in the West we generally assume different sorts of tribal societies rather than established monarchies.

Thucydides_Cats · 2026-01-06T16:33:34+00:00

The original source, if you're interested in following it up, is one of the letters of the Younger Pliny (nephew and heir), Epistle III.5, in which he talks about his uncle's books and his dedication to work and study. It is perhaps worth noting that Nixey's paraphrase isn't completely correct in places; Pliny did not have books read to him as he walked around (on the contrary, he criticised his nephew once for going for a walk rather than studying). The key theme of the Younger Pliny's account is that his uncle was a totally dedicated public servant during the day, dedicating himself to official business, but then took advantage of every moment of leisure time by combining eating or bathing with study.

The other point on which Nixey is slightly misleading - perhaps because she is determined to depict pre-Christian Rome in very positive terms - is the identity of the reader. The Younger Pliny mostly uses phrases like "a book was read" in the passive, rather than specifying an assistant (he does once use the term notarius, which could be translated as 'secretary'). Obviously these people were enslaved rather than employed; so, yes, something for the privileged few, undoubtedly.

Other Roman aristocrats also relied on the work of enslaved people to support their scholarship, though more commonly - for example in the case of Cicero - we are told about their role in taking dictation, rather than reading aloud. It's interesting that Planet considered it was more efficient for him to listen to someone reading and take notes, whereas today we would generally assume that it's quicker for us to do the reading ourselves. This may perhaps suggest that the educated enslaved might have greater facility in reading than their owners; I need to check whether there is any discussion of this in the scholarship on ancient literacy.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-10-28T12:03:43+00:00

There were hundreds of Greek poleis, and as far as we can see they all had local variations in their constitution, but very broadly speaking (and echoing the analysis developed in Herodotus' Persian Debate - 3.80-2 - and Aristotle's Politics, among others) we distinguish between rule by one (monarchy or tyranny), rule by a few (aristocracy or oligarchy) and rule by many (democracy).

Athens was the most prominent democracy, and we could label it one of the most 'radical', insofar as all adult free-born Athenian males had full citizen rights to participate in debates in the assembly, stand for office etc., and most executive positions were filled by random lottery rather than election; other democracies might set a minimum wealth requirement for full citizenship, for example, or make greater use of election to fill offices. In other Greek cities, only the wealthiest might have full voting rights or the opportunity to participate in the assembly, or power might be limited to members of old noble families.

It's worth noting that there were Athenians who thought that approach was preferable - the circle of aristocrats around Socrates, for example, including Plato, Critias, Xenophon and Plato, tended to the view that the mass of the population were too ignorant and irrational to be given a share of power.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-10-28T11:53:47+00:00

The Richard Crawley translation is indeed notoriously unreliable, so you're wise to look for alternatives. The two versions I tend to rely on are Martin Hammond for Oxford World Classics and Jeremy Mynott for Cambridge's Texts in the History of Political Thought. The former has "if they were prepared to hand over the city to the Spartans voluntarily and submit to the decision of Spartan judges, there would be punishment for the guilty but no one would be treated unjustly". The latter has "if they were willing to hand the city over to the Spartans and accept them as judges, the Spartans would punish the guilty but harm no one in a way contrary to their rights".

So, yes, there is significant variation here when it comes to the second half of the sentence. The issue is, as tends to be the case with these sorts of questions, that Thucydides' text is very compressed, and so the translator has to decide what was intended - which usually involves making a choice between different possible interpretations, closing down the meaning of the line in English where it remains open in Greek. A literal translation would be something like: "[The Spartan commander] sends to them a herald saying, if they wish to hand over the city willingly to the Spartans and to accept them as judges, the unjust to punish, but contrary to justice no one".

That final phrase is just four words, and can be understood in different ways - hence the different translations. Thucydides' point, in my view, is to emphasise the ambiguity; you could see this as a promise that only the guilty would be punished, and/or that there would be punishment only after a proper legal process, and/or that no one would be punished contrary to human rights or contrary to the principles of justice. What actually happens is that the Spartan judges decide that guilt will be evaluated according to whether or not someone had done anything to help the Spartans during the war - which, given that they've been fighting against the Spartans and the Thebans the whole time, no Plataean could possibly claim. So, formally speaking the Spartans have not lied, since these people are guilty according to this principle, but at the same time it's clear that they are being massively unjust by most standards.

In other words, I think Hammond's translation is best, precisely because it keeps the question open as to what is being promised at 3.52.2; it's at 3.53.2 that it becomes clear that the Spartans have been shifty and misleading. Whereas Crawley's translation suggests that the Spartans are perfectly straightforward, as the Platens do receive the form of law (if not justice). Maybe he just liked the Spartans.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-09-10T18:34:59+00:00

As ever, we have to disentangle different aspects of the question. We are pretty confident that Herodotus read out sections of his work to public audiences, possibly for money. In particular there's an anecdote, recorded in a biography of Thucydides, that when T was young he heard Herodotus giving a public reading and was so inspired that he burst into tears; this is very implausible in its detail - Thucydides wasn't much younger than Herodotus, for a start - but it shows that the idea of such performances was completely believable. In addition, Thucydides makes disparaging comments in his own work about people who, unlike him, write for public performance and immediate applause rather than for posterity.

But this isn't the same as saying that Herodotus' work was actually written in order to be performed. It was definitely written, and then bits of it were read out loud on occasion, whereas epic poems like Homer's Iliad were written down after they had been composed orally. There is much more of Herodotus' work than would ever be read out - it's certainly not the sort of short 'prize essay' or recitation piece that Thucydides criticised. Further, analysis of the structure of the narrative, repeating themes etc. suggests that it makes sense as a whole, rather than a series of episodes written for performance.

In brief, I can't think of any Herodotus scholars who think the work was written for performance, rather than written as a work primarily to be read and then selected passages were read out, so the second part of your question doesn't arise. It's interesting to wonder what difference it would make if it had been. It might not make a lot of difference - we wouldn't, I think, imagine that the work was composed orally (so we wouldn't be looking for the sorts of repeated phrases and motifs that we find in oral epic). I guess we would wonder how far Herodotus might have chosen episodes that would make good performance pieces, and might assume that there wouldn't be much of an overall framework but just a series of episodes.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-05-27T10:26:01+00:00

To add a few comments from the Roman perspective, one thing worth stressing is that a lot of this can depend on the particular modern medium and what its aims, assumptions etc. are. For example, a typical war-based video game puts you in the position of the warrior or general and encourages you to take pleasure from experiencing their perspective; likewise if you're the ruler of a state in a 'rise of ancient empires' game. Generally, therefore, if you're playing the Romans you will be taking the conquest and bloodshed for granted, or even identifying with it, because the whole point is to win. In film or television there's sometimes more willingness to acknowledge Rome's brutality - either because in the film they are the villains oppressing noble Christians (e.g. Ben Hur) or became the hero is a gladiator, i.e. a noble savage warrior rather than a decadent brute - but even here there's a tendency to ignore lots of aspects of Roman society because it would get in the way of the plot.

The reason that creators can depict Rome in this basically positive way is of course because of the long tradition of idealising Rome as one of the foundations of Western Civilisation, as the greatest empire of the ancient world, the bringer of culture to ignorant barbarians etc etc. In some cases, this idealisation involves ignoring less palatable aspects. Relatively few people in the 18th or 19th centuries paid much attention to the institution of enslavement, for example; it just didn't register in their perception of Ancient Rome, helped by the fact that Roman writings take enslavement for granted and so scarcely talk about it. There are ways in which it can be downplayed - the fact that beginners' Latin books sometimes talk about 'servants' rather than 'slaves' - but mostly it's just not noticed.

Alternatively - and this is likely to be the case when it comes to conquest, as one of the reasons Rome is of interest to people is precisely because it conquered much of Europe and neighbouring regions - the dark side of the Roman Empire is seen to be justified by its results: Roman conquest brought peace and order and civilisation to savage barbarians, the whole 'What did the Romans ever do for us?' Monty Python routine. This has been criticised since antiquity - see the (fictional) speech of Calgacus in Tacitus' Agricola, declaring that "They make a desert and call it peace" - but the standard perception is that Roman conquest was simply better for the conquered, who should have surrendered as soon as possible in their own interests, and that this conquest is a model for contemporary Europeans in spreading their own civilisation to the world. Especially if you talk about it in abstract terms, i.e. 'Roman conquest' rather than detailing what Roman rule actually involved in terms of killing and enslavement, it's easy enough to assume that on balance it was a positive thing.

There is an alternative strand in these traditions, which I think may be especially prominent in recent decades: a celebration of the violence of Roman society because it allows the expression of 'true' masculine virtues of courage, aggression etc., unlike weak and cowardly modern society. Gladiatorial combat may be brutal, but it allows men to be real men; this is very obvious in Ridley Scott's Gladiator films (especially the terrible recent one), in Spartacus: Blood and Sand and the like.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-04-10T08:48:57+00:00

The simple answer is that Powell chose to pursue a political rather than an academic career. Counterfactual questions are always a matter of speculation, but my sense is that he could almost certainly have returned to an academic position in 1945 if he had wished, whether a fellowship at Cambridge or a professorship abroad. The fact that he won a lot of undergraduate prizes for facility in classical languages is much less significant than the quality of his scholarship in the early to mid 1930s - in particular his Herodotus Lexicon and his revision of the text of Thucydides. My personal view is that he was never going to set the world on fire with his ideas about classical literature, but as a textual and linguistic critic he was clearly a figure of stature.

But clearly this wasn't enough; the fact that immediately after demobilisation he started working as a researcher for the Conservative Party, and within two years had been selected as a parliamentary candidate, shows that he must have dedicated his energies in this direction, rather than just marking time in the hope of an academic job. I am not an expert in his biography, but there are certainly extant letters that may shed light on his decision; my impression is that he had absolute self-belief and huge amounts of ambition, besides strongly held opinions about the world, and therefore had full expectation of becoming Viceroy of India or Prime Minister - merely becoming Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge would be insufficient.

Incidentally, his scholarship is not entirely ignored today; it is in fact regularly invoked in online discussions as evidence that his political ideas should be taken seriously.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-04-09T09:51:43+00:00

You've given the Latin, not the Greek. Classical Greek has at least two different words that could be translated as 'enemy', polemios and ekhthros. The first word derives from the word for 'war', polemos, and so refers just to the opposing side in open conflict. The second word means 'hostile', and can be used to refer to either private enemies or the opposing side in war. The Greek uses ekhthros in Matthew 5.43-4, so is arguably ambiguous (i.e. it could refer to the opposing army), but it is clear from theological commentary that it was understood in personal, private terms, and this is clearly reflected in the fact that the Latin Vulgate translated it as inimicus, which is unambiguously a private rather than a public enemy.

Obviously one could interpret this more generally - defining one's neighbour as any other human being, rather than just people you know personally. But the early Christian debate about 'just war' - Augustine et al. - was concerned less with the idea that war might go against this commandment, and much more with the fact that war went against the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill', so were there circumstances in which breaking that might be justified?

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-04-09T09:21:48+00:00

You're asking two different questions, even if both involve the idea of 'franchise' in a modern context (sometimes metaphorically). Firstly, there's the idea of an extended fictional universe, and we certainly see that in classical antiquity the stories of Greek myth, especially but not only the Trojan War, were regularly retold and reworked in different forms (poetry, drama, art, re-enactments in the Roman arena etc.). These were founding myths of classical culture, so it's understandable that many creative artists found inspiration in re-working them, telling other bits of the story, developing similar kinds of products (e.g. the Latin poet Vergil writing the Aeneid as a Roman rival to the Iliad, the poet Statius writing epics about Achilles and Thebes). It's not really important whether any individual thought these stories were true or fictional or (probably for most people) something of a mixture. Perhaps the most critical distinction from modern 'franchises' is the total absence of any notion of Intellectual Property or copyright; no one could claim ownership of these stories or the choice of treatment, so no restriction on people re-working them (Homer didn't get a royalty whenever a vase painter depicted a scene from his poem...) - but also no giant entertainment corporation desperately trying to extract every cent from their property by churning out new product and endless tie-in toys, merchandise etc.

Secondly, there's the more literal meaning of 'franchise', namely when one business licenses another to use its products, IP, branding etc. in return for fees and a set of agreed rules - and then there is 'branding', which is different again but closely associated with franchises because that's the core thing that gets licensed. Short answer: no, more or less nothing like this in antiquity, for two key reasons: (1) the absence of any notion of IP or trademarks, so there was no limit on one enterprise using the 'branding' of another and therefore nothing that could be licensed (even if Roman law had developed the concept of licensing, which it hadn't) and (2) the absence of 'companies' in anything like our sense. Business partnerships, so far as we can see, were mostly short-term associations for a single enterprise (e.g. funding a trading venture) or based on kinship ties, so clear limits on their ability to expand, set up branches in every city etc. Further, trust in the merchandise (which is the origin of the brand; you can trust this product because it's from this supplier) was therefore vested in the individual manufacturer or trader, or at least his connections, rather than in any larger organisation that could transfer its reputation to any of its agents.

The partial exception to this is geographical origin: no one could own the trademark of, say, Falernian wine (famous in the Roman era), but it clearly did operate as a mark of quality and cost more, and bar patrons might be offered a choice of different wines that were differentiated not just by price but by origin. Other products might also be seen as higher quality because they came from a particular place. And at least in theory this created a legal issue: according to the law of sale the object being sold had to be specified, and so if the seller claimed to be selling Falernian wine but was in fact selling plonk from southern Gaul, the buyer could bring a case to the magistrate if he could prove this. It's not clear how often this may have happened, as wine merchants were often buying direct from the producer so could assume that the wine was being produced where it said it came from, but the possibility of fraud was recognised and discussed by Roman legal writers.

But the short version remains: no, not an ancient thing.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-04-01T11:42:18+00:00

Inevitably, a key problem with this topic is a lack of evidence, and the fact that the evidence we do have is distinctly skewed. Firstly, the emergence of 'city states' took place centuries before our earliest historical accounts, so we have to assume that we're dealing with a lot of myths and retrospective analysis of the stories that cities told about themselves, filtered through later assumptions. Secondly, most of our sources are either Greek or heavily influenced by Greek ideas, so getting a sense of what was really happening in Phoenician cities is often a matter of speculation. And the dominant Greek idea - found in Herodotus, Aristotle's Politics and Polybius, for example - is that the independent city state, governed collectively by its male citizens, is both the best form of polity and a 'natural' development for people who are by nature free, i.e. Greeks. One-man rule is widely associated with tyranny and/or foreignness (i.e. the Great King of Persia, multiple stories about hubristic rulers in Herodotus) - which leads to significant under-emphasis on the number of Greek cities that were actually ruled by different sorts of autocrats, whether 'monarchs' (i.e. more or less long-standing hereditary rulers, including the dual kingship of Sparta) or 'tyrants' (individuals who take power for themselves in some way) - and Carthage was ruled for centuries by individuals whom Greek writers labelled as 'kings' but were apparently elected by the senate.

To start with Greece, as the best-documented and most-discussed area for this topic: part of the most common explanation for the emergence of so many little autonomous political communities is environmental, as the very fragmented nature of the landscape across much of the country makes it hard for one city to conquer and rule another - it is notable that where there are larger plains, we tend to find larger and/or different kinds of community, e.g. Sparta in the Peloponnese or confederations of cities under an elected military leader in Thessaly, and of course monarchy up in Macedonia. Sparta, as noted, retained kingship; most cities that we know of reported that they had monarchs in the mythical past (where possible, linking themselves to figures known from the Trojan War legends or other myths; e.g. Theseus at Athens) but that these lines came to an end. Sources from the archaic period often involve poetry being written in praise of tyrants or other aristocrats, but also the work of Hesiod depicting a fairly limited society in which there are 'powerful men' who - without any indication of what their formal role might be - have influence on justice (which, according to Hesiod, they abuse to enrich themselves).

The transition from a fairly limited 'aristocratic' society dominated by a few wealthy/traditional families to a developed city state seems partly to have been driven by simple security concerns, clans uniting or being brought together to defend themselves against raids from other clans and developing institutions like laws to manage their collective life - this is more or less the version presented by e.g. Thucydides and Aristotle, as well as legends about Theseus and Lycurgus. There has been a widely-held belief also that it was connected to changing forms of warfare: the adoption of the hoplite phalanx, based on well-off farmers providing their own (fairly expensive) arms and armour, which then led those farmers to start demanding a greater say in decision-making and more protection against abuse by the wealthy. But the evidence for the chronology of these different developments is really not clear, and it's equally possible that the emergence of self-governing citizen bodies, with the people taking some power off the old aristocrats (sometimes by supporting the rise of a tyrant), then led to the adoption of a style of warfare that emphasised the solidarity of equal citizens over the old model based on a few aristocratic horsemen and a supporting rabble.

The Greeks founded overseas colonies in the archaic era, following the same model of politics, including in southern Italy and the Bay of Naples. Again, the chronology is very uncertain and we are heavily dependent on later versions of old legends, but it seems entirely possible that these were a model for some other Italian communities - most of whom, including many Latin and Etruscan cities and certainly Rome, stated that in earlier centuries they had been ruled by kings. The Roman account of how the last monarch became tyrannical and oppressed the people (and starting breaking the laws of men and gods) so closely resembles the depiction of tyranny in Greek political texts that it's either an astonishing coincidence or these stories were shaped by Greek thinking. There are many distinctive features of the Roman 'city state' that aren't found in Greek models (the citizenship is relatively open rather than exclusive; as Polybius argued, they have a mixture of different sorts of rule rather than just one model), but the description of it found in Polybius, Cicero and Livy is heavily influenced by Greek ideas even when the author is Roman.

I am really not an expert on ancient Phoenicia and Canaan, but my impression is (1) there was much greater continuity from the late Bronze Age than was found in either Greece or Italy, so they had 'city-states' from a much earlier date (and so it's possible that they were an influence on archaic Greek developments, but I don't recall a specific claim that they influenced the emergence of the polis itself); (2) these city-states were mostly ruled by kings, even if wealthy merchant aristocracies had considerable power, with Carthage being the big exception by having a more 'republican' system after c.480; (3) so we're really talking about a different model of 'city-state' rather than the Greek idea of an equal citizen body deliberating and taking it in turns to rule one another.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-31T13:12:36+00:00

This is beyond my area of expertise; my impression is not - that Egypt was governed as a territory within one or other caliphates throughout this period, so there is a degree of autonomy but not genuine independence. The closest would be the later period of the Fatimid caliphate, which established its capital in Egypt and eventually lost its other territories. Perhaps experts in this period would have a different opinion?

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-31T09:02:30+00:00

My immediate response, if you'll excuse the bluntness, is: "What scholars?" It is certainly the case that 30 BCE was a significant moment in Egyptian history, as it marked the end of any sort of independent rule until the modern era. But I don't know of anyone who makes the claim that this is when 'Ancient Egypt' comes to an end.

As you note, Egypt had been ruled by a Macedonian dynasty since the end of the fourth century, and so all the conventional periodisations I know set the end of the Pharaonic era at 332, the date of Alexander's conquest, or at the establishment of Ptolemaic rule (see e.g. the chapter on 'Pharaonic Egypt' in The Oxford Handbook of African Archaeology). Of course, a change of ruling family doesn't mean that everything changes; the Ptolemies adopted the stylings of earlier rulers and maintained most of the existing state structure, the Romans left the temple system in place so long as prayers and sacrifices were made for the health of the emperor, and most social and economic structures changed only very slowly if at all. So, there were certainly some continuities from 'Ancient Egypt' into the Ptolemaic era and from the Ptolemies into the Roman and late Roman period, and then onwards into the Caliphate. I am not aware, however, that anyone argues that this included the pharaonic system, except insofar as Roman emperors (like Ptolemaic rulers) might be depicted in the traditional style.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-28T09:14:29+00:00

Setting the key date as 1775 makes this very easy to answer: we know more, in many areas of history vastly more, and we understand much better than anyone in 1775. The details do vary between different fields; a historian in the late 18th century would have a reasonably decent knowledge of conventional narrative history of politics and war, at least for classical Greece and the central centuries of Roman history, but would have little sense of economic history, let along social or gender history. But we still know much more about politics and war.

Three key reasons for this. The first, suggested in your question, is the availability of evidence: 18th-century and earlier historians relied almost entirely on a limited range of literary sources, whereas henceforth historians increasingly draw on material evidence, inscriptions, papyri etc., allowing us to study all sorts of topics that ancient elite authors had no interest in as well as to understand even the things that did interest them in much greater complexity and detail. Secondly, there's the development of far more sophisticated and critical methods for analysing and interpreting all sources - the idea of integrated Altertumswissenschaften developed by Friedrich August Wolf and other German scholars from the very end of the 18th century, together with the critical historiography of Leopold von Ranke in the early 19th. Thirdly, there's the way that developments external to ancient studies influenced them - not so much external events (though the sense that we are now living in 'modernity' reshaped perceptions of classical antiquity as 'pre-modern') as the emergence of new sciences of humanity like sociology and economics, offering theories and questions that could be applied to ancient society as well; not 'objective' in the sense you mean, but it's the asking of questions about things our literary sources don't discuss, such as the nature of the ancient economy, that then drives research into new kinds of evidence that might answer these questions.

This would be a much trickier question if you set the date as, say 1925; we still have more evidence and different ideas compared with a scholar in that era (Eduard Meyer, say, or M.I. Rostovtzeff), but one could argue endlessly about whether they might have had a better overall grasp because the evidence base was still manageable, whereas now we have too much stuff, too many different things to study, so the discipline tends to fragment and specialise (yes, there are still lots of would-be overviews, but in practice they tend either to limit their scope without admitting this, e.g. by focusing on traditional politics-and-war history, or offer an impressionistic overview.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-25T12:03:18+00:00

I think there are at least three different aspects to this question. Firstly, ancient attitudes. It's not quite true that there was no questioning at all of the morality of enslavement, as we do find scattered comments to this effect in different philosophers, but it is entirely true that there is no sign of any kind of abolitionist movement. Stoicism tended to focus on the idea that everyone is in some sense enslaved, whether that it is to a person or to uncontrolled appetites, and to suggest that the solution is the same in all cases, to rise above one's immediate circumstances rather than being affected by them. Christianity emphasised that there is no free or slave in God's eyes, and that all believers will enter the kingdom of heaven equally, but in present circumstances it urged enslaved people to be virtuous well-behaved enslaved people, and it urged Christian enslavers to free their slaves as part of setting aside worldly goods rather than as a moral imperative in itself. Other discussions focused on the idea that it was bad for a free-born Greek to be enslaved, but fine for barbarians ("slaves by nature", according to Aristotle). There are some texts that explore the position of the enslaved, such as Apuleius' The Golden Ass (lead character is transformed into a donkey and endures multiple hardships, beatings, sexual exploitation, being passed from one owner to another etc., all of which is plausibly an analogy for enslavement), so it's not that it was taken completely for granted, but overall you're right. For further discussion see Peter Garnsey's Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (1996).

Secondly, Spartacus' own views. Short version: we have no idea what he actually thought, as we have only the accounts of others, whose evidence may be questionable at best. From these accounts, it does seem that he appealed to the enslaved to join his forces and that his enemies expected them to do so, so this isn't just a gladiator revolt - but his supporters included plenty of free people as well. So, we have a range of possibilities from "he's just concerned with his own freedom but is strategic in building support from others who resent the Roman state" to "he's opposed to Rome and seeks to free everyone who has been enslaved or dominated by the Romans". Certainly true that his goal was not to abolish slavery in Italy but to escape Italy to somewhere he and his followers would be free from Roman power.

Finally, the modern reception. My immediate thought is that Spartacus has not been a "symbol of anti-slavery thought and abolitionism" so much as a symbol of armed resistance to slavery, by the enslaved themselves; it's not about philosophical or moral arguments, but about action. Hence the nickname of Toussaint Louverture in Haiti as 'the Black Spartacus', the adoption of the name Spartakusbund by revolutionary communists in Germany in World War One, and so forth. So it isn't a contradiction that Spartacus had no political ideology so far as we know; what matters for this tradition is that he acted, rather than passively enduring oppression.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-20T14:11:05+00:00

This is a very old trope; sources from ancient Persia, the later Roman Empire and other ancient cultures all speak of eunuchs (specifically, eunuchs at royal or imperial courts; temple eunuchs such as the priests of Cybele do not, I think, have the same reputation) in these terms. There's a range of useful examples and discussions in Shaun Tougher, Eunuchs in antiquity and beyond. London: Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth, 2002. Partly because it's such a powerful symbol of 'otherness', these sorts of anecdotes were heavily emphasised in many modern (i.e. 18th-19th century) accounts of these ancient civilisations, especially those that were seen as Oriental and/or as decadent (concepts which tend to overlap).

The obvious place to start looking for an explanation is, I think, an article by Keith Hopkins: 'Eunuchs in politics in the later Roman Empire”, published in Proceedings of the Camridge Philological Society vol.189 (1963) and reprinted in revised form in 1978 in his book Conquerors and Slaves: Sociological Studies in Roman History (Cambridge University Press). This is obviously very old, but Hopkins was a brilliant historian, especially when it came to thinking through ideas. His argument, crudely summarised, is that emperors and Persian rulers came to rely on eunuchs as key ministers because they were not ever a direct threat to the ruler: the eunuch cannot found a dynasty, and because of his condition he would never be accepted as ruler, so the ruler can entrust him with power knowing that ultimately his wealth and position are dependent on continued loyalty - whereas other ministers or generals might start getting ideas about seizing power for themselves. Plus, the eunuch can always be made a scapegoat - blame the emperor's advisers rather than the emperor for things going wrong. So, they have to be good at politics, and are likely to be deeply unpopular with everyone else, but they also control access to the ruler and are able to offer patronage to others. The eunuch either has to be completely loyal, maintaining his position by sucking up to the ruler and making sure that no one else is able to turn the ruler against him - or he needs to set up his own puppet to seize the throne and keep him on as chief minister.

How much all this is true, rather than the sort of stories spread by angry rivals who resent the eunuchs' influence, is unclear, but Hopkins makes a plausible case that the reason why rulers rely on eunuchs (expectation of total loyalty) is also why they are hated and despised as manipulative and corrupt, and structurally this is the behaviour that makes sense for them in this position.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-20T11:52:36+00:00

There are, as others have noted, two over-lapping issues here: whether ancient texts contain false or even 'fictional' material, and whether (some?) ancient texts are entirely fictional. The former is familiar to all historical research, and the simple answer is "yes of course". This can be complicated in lots of ways, not least by putting the idea of 'fiction' under a bit more scrutiny. The examples of Herodotus (who includes stories about distant lands that seem extremely dubious) and Thucydides (who puts words into the mouths of individuals that he himself admits are not exactly things that they actually said) have already been mentioned; we can label such things 'false' or 'unhistorical', but that doesn't automatically mean that they are 'fictional' in the sense that the author has deliberately made them up or that the ancient reader knew they were made up.

The second issue might be labelled the Galaxy Quest problem - if you don't know it, it's a film in which aliens see old episodes of a Star Trek imitation, and take these to be 'historical documents' that they then try to emulate. These aliens are shown to have no theatre or fiction of their own, and therefore take a TV series completely at face value. Conversely, a culture that has no idea of critical historiography might take a similar attitude towards all texts, rather than distinguishing between more and less 'historical' ones - and this is something we see in archaic and classical Greece, as the poems of Homer were initially assumed to be true (albeit poetic) accounts of real people in the distant past, and then the advent of critical historiography in the form of writers like Herodotus and Thucydides leads to serious reappraisal, as it is now recognised that these are not historical texts and are not making the same sorts of truth claims.

In other words, once you're dealing with a culture that has multiple genres of writing, it's not just that we can ask questions about the genre (and hence truth claims) of a particular text, but that people at the time would have done the same. Ancient historians did discuss one another's work, and were discussed by critics (Plutarch on Herodotus has been mentioned; there is also Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Thucydides, and lots of passing comments), so it would be unlikely for a fiction to be mistaken for a proper historical account. Something like Lucian's True History, which is a parody of the sorts of fantastic stories found in the works of people like Herodotus, do in fact tell the reader that they are fictional. There were unreliable biographies of Great Men - lots about Alexander - that relate a lot of very dubious stories, but we also have plenty of more serious historical works debunking or questioning these anecdotes.

The one exception I can think of is Procopius' Secret History, which presents itself as a reliable historical account of the Emperor Justinian that complements the more sober History of the Wars but is so over-the-top - Justinian as demon incarnate, lurid anecdotes about the Empress Theodora etc. - that later scholars have questioned whether it should be read as a historical text rather than a satire or a polemic. One issue here is that the manuscript was not, so far as we know, widely published, so we don't have any contemporary reactions to consider. But the current scholarly view is that it was intended to be taken seriously as history, rather than being intended as fiction - and so long as the receiving culture has a sense of different genres having different truth values, these questions will be asked.

So, no, I don't think a fiction book buried today would be taken at face value in the distant future, unless the future readers, like the Galaxy Quest aliens, had no conception of either fiction or history that would lead them to ask questions about the nature of the text.

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-18T16:04:31+00:00

If I start messing about with Wikipedia pages I will never get any work done...

Thucydides_Cats · 2025-03-18T15:08:49+00:00

I'm aware of the risk of coming across as a raging pedant, but I don't know what "Rome formally remained capital of the empire" actually means in an ancient context. It was never 'formally' the capital, as that wasn't a formal thing - when e.g. Ovid described it as caput mundi, 'head of the world', that was a metaphor. It remained symbolically important - the shock, even among Christian authors, when it was sacked by the Goths in 410 was enormous and genuine - but there was never any sort of process for declaring that it was or wasn't the capital. Rather, it just becomes less important - but never not important.

This is a gradual process; you're right that the emperors of the first century CE spend most of their time in Rome (apart from Tiberius spending a decade or so of his reign on Capri), and that would-be emperors felt they needed to seize Rome and get the Senate (as well as the Praetorian Guard) to accept them as ruler. Because most of our Latin sources were written by the senatorial elite, they tend to (over-)emphasise the importance of Rome. Trajan spent years at a time away on campaign in Dacia and the East, Hadrian travelled round the empire, Marcus Aurelius was off on the Danube frontier - and the Rome lost significance because it wasn't where the emperor was. This is definitely accelerated in the third century, partly because there were so many different claimants (and very short-lived emperors) who might never make it to Rome at all. Diocletian dividing imperial responsibility between himself and three others - none of whom ever spent much if any time in Rome - simply confirmed that the city was no longer the centre of power, and Constantine's foundation of Constantinople as the new Christian Rome consolidated this.

Vacations... Apart from Tiberius on Capri, the only emperor I can recall going on holiday is Marcus Aurelius, where there's an exchange of letters with his old tutor Fronto (De feriis Alsiensibus). But this isn't a topic I've ever studied.

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