Clifford Orwin (Toronto) opened his plenary lecture at the Thucydides our Contemporary? conference with the question of what it might mean to consider Thucydides as a contemporary, or at least as a writer with contemporary relevance. To make him familiar is to make him irrelevant, simply a means of legitimating present approaches through a spurious appeal to classical authority. He is not a sympathiser but an antagonist, someone whose ideas are always useful because he always stands outside his and every other era (a reading that of course echoes Nietzsche’s idea of “untimely knowledge”, a means of standing outside the present in one’s imagination in order to examine and criticise it).
Orwin then focused on the theme indicated by his title,’The Political Role of the Human Body in Thucydides’. Thucydides has little to say about bodily suffering – his characters generally endure hardship, war and even injury and death with little comment – except when it is extreme, above all in his accounts of the Plague at Athens and the civil war at Corcyra. This is in contrast to a long tradition of concern with suffering in political thought; Thucydides, however, pays attention only when the body screams. This could simply be relegated to the rag-bag of evidence for the general superiority in physical as well as mental qualities of the Greeks, particularly popular in the late eighteenth century, but in Thucydides, Orwin argued, it is a consciously-worked them. Pericles’ funeral oration in the first half of Book II offers a vision of bodily transcendence; Pericles calls on the Athenians to pay no attention to the possibility of suffering or death so long as they are serving the city, and in contrast to the limited afterlife of the soul in Homer (it survives the body only as a shadow) he offers everlasting glory and remembrance.
Insofar as they believe these exhortations and promises, citizens’ bodies become a resource for the polity that can be exploited to the point of exhaustion; the Athenians will simply keep fighting. But Thucydides’ narrative undermines such aspirations by moving immediately to the Plague, where the experience of disease and death leads to the abandonment of social and cultural norms and the near-collapse of Athenian society; it becomes clear that most people pursue honour for future advantage, not for posthumous glory, because the fear of immediate death leads them to abandon such things. Contra Pericles’ claims, bodily suffering actually strips the Athenians of their virtues. The stasis at Corcyra likewise shows the limits of transcendence of the body or of absolute submission of the citizen to the city: in normal times, people generally set limits on their behaviour, but it is clear that they are cautious rather than decent.
Orwin’s lecture concentrated on the exposition of Thucydides’ account, rather than drawing out its implications – about the fragility of social order, for example, and the limitations of the ideals of citizenship when confronted with harsh reality. One might offer a less pessimistic, or at least less absolute, reading: Thucydides undoubtedly problematises the relationship between city and citizen and emphasises the impossibility of wholly transcending the body, but at the same time he depicts the resilience of the Athenians despite their bodily suffering – after the Plague, and even after the disaster in Sicily, they keep fighting, and something must be motivating this. Is it simply their restless nature as depicted by the Corinthians and others, or an overweening lust for power, or a genuine commitment to the ideals presented by Pericles? Any of these would serve to show that, while complete transcendence of the body is impossible, bodily suffering does not constitute an absolute barrier either. Between the extremes of Periclean ideals and the misery of plague or civil war, we find the more normal attempts at balancing the physical and the ideal, the community and the individual.
This does raise questions about the use of passages from the Funeral Oration in war memorials (including the new Bomber Command memorial in London), for precisely the purpose of justifying deaths and physical suffering through reference to communal benefit and the promise of eternal remembrance. Such quotations, in other words, echo precisely the rhetorical approach of Pericles, and can be seen as equally problematic; the reality of what such suffering entails is erased even as the sacrifice is commemorated. Thucydides, we may suspect, would have been more comfortable with the relentless physicality and rejection of transcendent ideals in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 – and, given that he was certainly an influence on one of Heller’s later books, perhaps that depiction of the absurdity, tragedy and sheer misery of war is another legacy of Thucydides’ account.