This Has Happened Before

A First Look at How Plato and Thucydides Provide Perspective on the Contemporary West

What exactly is it that has happened before? The essays that follow will focus on an historical process, a change in the culture that has come about as an older ethical order, based in an old religion, disintegrates. Specifically, our contemporary situation has profound similarities with fifth-century BC Athens.

I began to notice this as I wrote and then published a book over the first two decades of this century. It was an academic book, a close reading of three classical Greek texts, and so I did not expect a huge number of sales (in this I was not disappointed). Something unusual had happened as I wrote it, however: while the material seemed to be relevant to our own time in a vague and general way when I first encountered it in the late 90’s, as the years passed I found myself confronted with increasing frequency by direct connections between the ancient Greeks and ourselves. Considered in their fundamentals, many of the controversies and problems that confront us today began to seem like replays of things that had happened in ancient Athens – indeed, the similarities sometimes seemed eerily precise. As time passed, I began to think that these connections to an earlier era might be of interest to other people, and further, that by virtue of the perspective they grant upon our own time, they might help us better to reflect upon it. This and the posts that follow are my attempt to set all this out in a manner accessible to the ordinary reader.

What kind of similarities could our modern world have with a city in ancient Greece? The Athens of the late fifth century BC was a time during which the basic ideas by which people live their lives, their norms, were becoming controversial. Fundamental notions that everyone had long taken for granted started to seem questionable, poorly thought out or even oppressive.

It is not difficult to find examples of this sort of thing today. Take the question, what is marriage? Until fairly recently, there was a generally accepted answer to this question that had simply been taken for granted as long as anyone could remember, a set of rules that everyone followed concerning the conditions on which one could enter a marriage or leave it. In recent decades, however, these old rules began to seem arbitrary and excessively restrictive. Why should it be so hard to get a divorce? Were there not a good many circumstances in which it was cruel to compel a couple to stay together? There did not seem to be a compelling answer to such questions, and so the old ways were left behind. More recently, people began to ask why homosexuals could not marry. Again, there seemed to be no justification for established norms, and so a change came about.

This is the sort of process we see in the Athens of the fifth century BC. The specific matters at issue are sometimes different (though not always), but both today and in ancient Athens the basic story is the same: an older ethical order finds itself unable to justify the demands it has long placed on its adherents, and thus begins to dissolve. There is a further aspect common to both the ancient and contemporary versions of this situation: the release from the older ethical rules was experienced as a kind of liberation. It should be clear enough how this is true in the case of the norms surrounding marriage today: a woman released from an abusive marriage is likely to understand the change as a liberation from something oppressive, as are people able to marry today who were not allowed to according to the old ways. Indeed, one might ask how an escape from arbitrary restrictions could be anything other than a liberation?

The book I mentioned above concerns Plato and Thucydides, and it is with reference to the two of them that I draw a comparison between our own time and ancient Athens. Each gives us a window onto this process as it unfolded in the Athens that they knew. Thucydides, the second historian whose work we still have, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.), fought between the empires of Athens and Sparta, which was taking place as Plato was growing up. Two Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the first book of the Republic, give complementary views of the development that Thucydides saw taking place in his history. Taken together, these three works provide a sort of distant mirror of our own time. My aim here will be to set out some of the ideas most fundamental to these texts, and make clear their contemporary relevance, in a manner that I hope will be accessible even to people who have not read them. (This aim may prove too ambitious, especially in the case of Thucydides, but I am determined to try; the reader may judge whether or not I have succeeded.)

The casual reader of Thucydides is not likely to come away from his history of the Peloponnesian War with any significant impression of the developments I have in mind. Thucydides, however, can be a very careful and precise writer indeed; in subsequent posts, I will try to bring out some of what can be seen when one follows Thucydides with some attention to detail. For the present let us consider a single example to give the flavour of the sort of thing I have in mind: the case of patriotism in Athens. At the start of the war, Athens is dominated by Pericles, who continually reminds the Athenians of how their security and prosperity depends upon the city, and of the consequent need to make sacrifices for it. He can also invoke his own well-known patriotism (philopolis) to brush aside any reproaches concerning the possibility that his own private interests might affect policy (ii.60.5). A few years later, after Pericles has died, Thucydides gives us another view of the Athenian assembly, and a change is noticeable: speakers who disagree about many things are nevertheless united in their concern that the interests of the city are falling from view, as citizens are beginning to focus on merely private interests. Later still, when we are given a view of the assembly debating an expedition against Sicily, Thucydides makes it quite clear that private interests are moving to center stage, and one influential member of the assembly goes so far as to suggest that, rather than his interests depending on the city, the city depends on him. Before long, we find him redefining patriotism: it is “what I do not feel when I am wronged, but what I felt when secure in my rights as a citizen.” (Readers may find themselves thinking of contemporary occasions on which words are redefined, a phenomenon to which we shall return in a future post.)

Thucydides, then, shows us a gradual disappearance of patriotism in Athens as the war progresses; citizens are progressively less moved by faith in their country, turning increasingly to focus on their own private interests instead. More than this, we see a structured progression focused on characteristic realities, in which patriotism declines in three logical steps: present, disappearing, gone. This three-step progression is repeated in many other aspects; the interested reader is invited to refer to my book, pp. 13-15, 85-86, for a summary.

This example from Thucydides can profitably be compared with our own time: do we not see a similar case today as regards patriotism? No matter where you live in the West, would you really be prepared to argue that people are, in general, as patriotic as they were three or four decades ago? I don’t think you could, as recent decades have seen the rise of a view that Western countries are, as such, simply evil. This view is to be connected to a confrontation with the legacy of colonialism, as thus to the question of liberation, mentioned above – but I am getting ahead of myself. For now it is sufficient simply to note the similarity between what I have said of Thucydides and our own time. The real issue here is not the specific matter of patriotism so much as the gradual falling-away from an initial set of dominant norms; patriotism is an instance of this.

The casual reader of Plato should have a much easier time seeing the basic progression I have in mind, because it is present in the progression of characters in each of the two relevant dialogues. In the dialogue known as the Gorgias, Socrates speaks with three different characters: first Gorgias himself, then a young man called Polus, and finally Callicles. In the first book of the Republic, Socrates speaks with Cephalus, then Polemarchus, then Thrasymachus. In each case, we can see in the progression of three characters a development in three steps that parallels the three-step development in Thucydides.

To give the reader an idea of the sort of progression one can see in Plato, let us focus on the Republic. The first character, Cephalus, is an agreeable and decent man, as well as a pious one: we get the impression he spends a good deal of time sacrificing to the gods. He is not, however, a thoughtful person, leaving the conversation the instant Socrates poses a critical question. The next character, Polemarchus, is Cephalus’ son, and while he is clearly more thoughtful than his father, the conversation with him is not conspicuously pleasant – in fact, it is more an argument than a conversation. Thrasymachus is by far the most thoughtful of the three, and is able to respond to Socrates’ criticism by adjusting his own position repeatedly, but he also proves to be an abrasive, even violent, character. He praises a life of injustice, and he admires tyranny. In contrast to the piety of Cephalus, Thrasymachus speaks of being able to steal all things, sacred or profane, from others.

In this and other aspects, the first book of the Republic provides us with a clear and consistent development from beginning to end. Within it we can see moments that remind us of certain aspects of our own time. For example, everyone has met characters like Cephalus, such as those Christians today who go through the motions of their inherited religion, but are struck dumb the moment anyone presents them with a critical question about it. I suggested above how certain aspects of our inherited ethical order have proven unable to sustain themselves in the face of criticism, and how they have therefore been abandoned, and we can see something similar reflected in Plato in the increasing thoughtfulness of the characters, together with their decreasing allegiance to the older order, as we move through the progression. Plato is also showing us the collapse of an older ethical order, and here, too, the notion that there is a kind of liberation in all this is present: Thrasymachus describes his preferred kind of life as “more free” (344c).

As the terminus of the development we see over the first book of the Republic, Plato’s presentation of Thrasymachus points to another reality about the changes he saw in his own time, one I have not yet mentioned: the collapse of the older order is not simply a matter of liberation, but also has a negative aspect. It leads to the rise of a new state of affairs characterised by brutality, and clearly linked, in both the Gorgias and the Republic as well as in Thucydides, to tyranny. Many readers will immediately recognise a parallel in this to our own times, having noticed how Western societies are swiftly becoming less liberal than they once were, how people are now regularly fired, debanked, ostracised or otherwise destroyed – ‘canceled’ is the word these days – as they were not only a decade or two ago. The increasing similarity of aspects of our own time to the final, brutal and tyrannical stage I saw in Plato and Thucydides has been a sobering and dispiriting aspect of working on this project over the years. There will be more to say about the new brutality today as it is appears through the lens of antiquity, and cancellation is by no means the only form it now takes.

This, then, is the basic picture that I’m going to be filling out in what follows. This substack, which I conceive of as a sort of limited edition publication (i.e., I will publish a certain number of posts and then stop), will treat specific events or ideas of our own time in their relation to the work of Plato and Thucydides, in the hope that our contemporary situation and that of ancient Athens can be mutually illuminating. That is, using ancient Athenian writers as a lens through which to see our own time might allow us to understand our own situation better. The discussion might also allow some people better to appreciate Plato and Thucydides, and might even persuade others to read them.

I am not going to be concerned with justifying my interpretations of Plato or Thucydides in any detail here, as I have already done that for about 120,000 words in the book. Instead, I am going to assume those interpretations, and focus on how the picture they give us provides us with insight into our own time. I have also already published a piece attempting to treat Plato and Thucydides in relation to three particularly interesting English writers of our own time, Paul Kingsnorth, Theodore Dalrymple and Mary Harrington.

New posts will appear every two weeks. I would like to thank Eddie Beloiu (in Germany), André Bernier (in Canada), Zahira Patel (in England) and John Leen (in the US), each of whom provided valuable feedback on earlier versions of this and / or subsequent posts.

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If anyone wants to look at the text of Plato or Thucydides in English, here are my thoughts on translations. I recommend The Landmark Thucydides for three reasons: it sets the text amid a collection of maps in which little-known ancient Greek place names are set out, it is the only English edition I’m aware of that allows the reader to look up exact citations (e.g., iii.37.2 – when writing about Thucydides I tend to pepper my text with such references), and it contains the classic 19^th-century Crawley translation which, if it cannot be said to be the most precise rendering of the Greek, is nevertheless to be recommended for the elegance of its English. For Plato, I can recommend Irwin’s translation of the Gorgias because I used it while doing my own work, but I have yet to find a translation of the Republic that I really like (e.g., one that gets the highly significant word agathos – ‘good’ – right throughout book i). Still, any translation with the Stephanus page numbers running down the side (e.g., 337b) should do.