Lessons from Ancient Fools
How the Peloponnesian War offers strange comfort in our own fraught times
As noted in my last essay, I’ve been finishing revisions on my next novel, currently titled A Fertile Source of Ruin: a space opera trilogy-opener that renegotiates key elements of The Peloponnesian War, along with contemporaneous texts that support or complicate Thucydides’ view of history. I’m currently at the slow re-read portion of my edits. Some folks whip out a draft and send it off right away, but I need to “hear” the cadence of the whole work before I’ll let it go. And that can take a maddeningly long time if I trip over something in re-read.
When I finally let it go, though? Unless my beta reader really thinks I’ve stuck my foot in it, it’ll be off to the agent soon—and thank goodness, because I’m already behind on my 2024 tasks (but what else is new?).
I mentioned in my last piece, though, that reading Thucydides as a teen was quite instructive, and that’s a concept I’d like to revisit today for paid subscribers. Reflecting on my past is frustrating, because I was a precocious child—I’d read both the Christian Bible and On the Origin of Species in full before the age of 10, and I was on to Feynman and Hawking, Kant and Mills, by an insufferable 12, before devouring behemoths from Russian- and English-language lit as a teen, and becoming the morose nuisance who was always pressing Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago into the hands of confused teens who… maybe just wanted to go out instead?
(What, reflecting on historical atrocity together isn’t a good first date?)
But as the above perhaps suggests, all the reading in the world couldn’t stop me from living the misery of my moment. So even though I remember how much The Peloponnesian War struck me on first read, as a reminder that humanity has not much changed in the last 2,400 years, it was very difficult to apply that knowledge to the achievement of any greater inner calm, let alone personal agency. What did it matter if one was reading in ways that connected one to deeper histories, if one still had to deal with the volatile mess of other human beings heaving in their own misery, too?
I was the know-it-all, the person who “thought they were better than everyone else”, the person who kept trying to “psychoanalyze” all my angry family members—and from their perspective I probably was. But not out of malevolence. I was closer to an apprentice wizard fumbling through spell books, trying to find the right words, the right incantations, to try to fix something that simply could not be fixed by me.
Knowledge and wisdom differ immensely. As a kid, I had plenty of the former, but very little of the latter—and even worse, I knew I had very little of the latter, which just made me feel even more useless. All those histories, and nowhere to put them.
My first shock to this end came terribly young, as I’ve mentioned before: while reading the Old Testament and coming across the haunting repetition in Judges, a book filled with horrific violence, that there was no king in Israel in those days, so people just did what they felt was right in their own eyes. I’d started the Christian Bible at six—not my first book by a long shot, but it did take me a little while; and yet, when I arrived at that section it troubled me deeply, because it described a world where people believed in a god, and yet belief was not enough to stop them from slaughtering, raping, enslaving, and otherwise dehumanizing one another. Only a wise king could pull off the feat, the text suggested—except that hasn’t work out, either.
I was an old man of a young child, in other words, because even though I didn’t have anywhere near the emotional intelligence required to manage my immediate stressors, I grew up perfectly aware that no human order has ever helped us to overcome our worst human behaviours for good. I just didn’t know what to do with that knowledge. I couldn’t stop the misery in my own home. How could I do anything to help a world that so routinely cycled in and out of such terrible periods of cruelty?
We manage, of course. We who are fortunate to survive miserable childhoods with some semblance of better emotional intelligence find our communities, our corners of the world where we can make a difference, and try to lean in. We build our own families, and nurture the best of the most terrible stories we’ve been given about ourselves and our collective past. We try to forgive ourselves for not being able to do more, and for messing up so often. We try to forgive others for doing their best, too—even if it doesn’t feel “good enough”—in an equally difficult world.
And so help us, some of us also still try to bring history to bear on the present: to offer some semblance of comfort and clarity in the middle of hard days. Maybe for ourselves. Maybe for others like ourselves: people also in pain at the sight of how small our species so often is, for all its grand stories of itself.
The anonymous compiler of Judges—the person who tried to make sense of so many terrible histories of Israelite tribes through a later, pro-monarchy lens—was doing the work of most writers when we sift through older texts and try to carry their core elements forward. When he (and here I’m assuming it’s a he, since the balance of probabilities suggests as much) tried to offer an explanation as to why these chosen people of YHWH were so cruel to one another, he was crafting a history to edify: to provide some semblance of order amid chaos.
He could have left out the analysis, and just allowed the book to be filled with unconscionable tales of brutality befalling any tribe that allowed others to live among them, or that permitted themselves to live under other cultures’ rule. But whoever he was, this author wanted to lend some measure of coherence to our most self-destructive ways. He repeated that key phrase about amorality before Israel had a king to drive home the possibility of learning from our mistakes, and in time pursuing something better.
So too did Thucydides. He never got to finish his history of the Peloponnesian War, sadly. Whether he died in exile, or was assassinated, or simply fell off the main record before the war’s end (all conjecture drawn from different texts written about him later on, since his work wasn’t widely read at the time), his war record closes before the end of the third major movement in this decades-long affair. Still, in what he left us you can certainly see a person striving to contextualize the traumas of his own era, and to ensure that important histories weren’t lost to the wartime rhetoric of the day. He despaired not only at local ignorance, but also at the ease with which nuance was lost, and tried to preserve many details that complicated each side’s story of itself.
So, for all readers of this little newsletter:
Thank you for everything you do against such difficult odds—to reclaim stories in your communities; to lean into the best of your respective narrative traditions; and to make your own realms kinder, somehow, despite every bit of human cruelty working against our best efforts, and with our worst natures.
Like the unknown compiler of Judges, and like Thucydides, we often find ourselves tasked with making something constructive out of horrific human action.
And we might not succeed, but the mere effort still binds us to a long history of others doing likewise. We are not alone with the people who do great harm, in other words; we also have each other, across ever so many periods of human striving to improve.
That said, for my paid subscribers:
Let’s take that thought a little deeper now. Let’s dive in to some of the lessons that Thucydides can help us to (re)learn.
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