09 February 2017
The Ancients Exiled
The West’s heart proposes to cut off its own blood supply
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, the Chinese press referenced the Athenian historian Thucydides (460 BC – 395 BC) when reporting on Sino-US relations. The official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, The People’s Daily, warned that the two countries are at risk of escalating confrontation in the South China Seas and elsewhere into a disastrous war, but added that “there is no ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ in the world”. ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is a theory that a rising power and an established power will inevitably find themselves at war with each other in order to establish dominance. Nevertheless, The People’s Daily went on, less reassuringly, to say “But if major countries make strategic misjudgements again and again, they might create a Thucydides Trap for themselves.”
Coincidentally, Shaw Sheet referenced Thucydides when commenting on China and the Chinese press’s reaction to last July’s verdict from the UN-backed Permanent Court of Arbitration that ruled against China’s territorial claims to various islands and waters in the South China Seas, a verdict which China refused to accept. We described this as a classic case of might makes right, and compared it with classical Athens’ claims on the little island of Melos, quoting Thucydides’ report of the Athenian general’s brutal speech in which he declared “The strong do whatever they will, and the weak suffer what they must.” (Might or Right, Shaw Sheet issue 63, 14 July 2016.)
An interesting coincidence, but of course no more than a coincidence. We wouldn’t claim that China’s official press follows Shaw Sheet (though you never know), let alone takes a lead from it.
The comments of The People’s Daily are certainly worth considering in a week that saw Stephen Bannon, the alt-right figurehead and Trump’s chief strategist who recently declared that war with China was inevitable, gain a place on the National Security Council, an unusual privilege for a political advisor (and doubly concerning, as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence have at the same time been excluded from the NSC, an equally unusual move). In the same week, General James Mattis, the new US defence secretary, toured US allies in East Asia on his first official trip abroad, and confirmed that the US will continue to back Japan’s claims to the Senkaku islands, also claimed by China. Meanwhile, work began on the building of a new US Marine Corps base in Henoko on Japan’s Okinawa island; the US military calls the marines in Okinawa “the tip of the spearhead”, i.e. the first into battle should conflict break out in the region.
But it’s another coincidence this week which is of real interest and deserves greater consideration; in the week that China harnessed the power of classical Greece to give its voice strength and resonance in global debate, Greece itself rejected and surrendered that power.
Tsipras’ government has just announced plans to drop the compulsory study of classical Greek tragedy from the high school curriculum. The work of Thucydides, including Pericles’ funeral oration, has already been dropped. Dropping Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides would be the equivalent of dropping Shakespeare from secondary school education in Britain; dropping the Funeral Oration is the equivalent of dropping the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from high school in the USA. But even those comparisons don’t do justice to the magnitude of it; Greek tragedy is unique and incomparable in achievement and importance; without it, there wouldn’t have been any Shakespeare (or, probably, any New Testament), just as without the Funeral Oration there probably wouldn’t have been a Gettysburg Address. Classical Greek culture isn’t simply Greek; it is of course the foundation stone of European – indeed Western – civilisation. It’s an incredibly potent tool for anyone to wield, inside Greece or outside, inside Europe or outside, as Alexander the Great, not a Greek but a Macedonian, found when he harnessed it and took it to new worlds beyond the Mediterranean. It got as far as China; the latest theories about the Terracotta Warriors insist that they were made by Greek artists, or by Greek-trained craftsmen at least, working in China for its first emperor in the late third century BC. Historians such as Thucydides and the dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides are the heart of classical Greek culture, but now modern Greece is threatening to cut out that organ and throw it away; when poor Greece – battered, beaten and broken – is being asked to cut off and throw away so much (in its annual report on the state of the Greek economy published this week, the IMF said that Greece will fall out of the Eurozone unless a more severe program of austerity is adopted) it seems perverse that the government is proposing to chuck out the cultural crown jewels which no one is asking it to abandon.
The government says that it wants to free up the curriculum to give more time and space to new subjects and modern topics such as gender equality, race, same-sex marriages and sex education. Admirable aims – but what better way to achieve them than to study Antigone, The Bacchae, The Suppliant Maids, The Trojan Women, Lysistrata or, well, take your pick of any work by the ancient Greek dramatists? And it would give you a timeless view of these eternal human considerations, to boot.
But the issue is greater than that. At a time when the West is worried about becoming eclipsed by rising powers in the East, when Eurexit – Europe’s departure as a power or influence from the world stage – threatens, the ditching of classical Greek drama by the modern Greek government is a potent symbol of this perilous position and its causes, a sign that Europe and the West is forgetting or cutting itself off from the ancient values and strengths at its foundations.
At a time when Europe is mired in stagnant paralysis, and the US has an administration which may well turn out to be as mean-spirited, narrow-minded and short-sighted as many fear, the historians and dramatists of classical Greece are worth studying more than ever. They themselves were threatened by giant, monolithic, unfree empires to their east; but they had confidence in their own values (freedom of the individual, self-reliance, self-responsibility, tolerance, intellectual curiosity, commercial enterprise, open minds and open hearts, justice, respect for the law) and in their world which nurtured those values (a collection of small, free, independent and diverse states with shared values, often in competition, sometimes in conflict, but always ready to co-operate with each other for protection against an outside threat – a rational and outward-looking world which was never defeated but lost potency only when it allowed itself to be coerced into political unity and imposed a rigid cultural orthodoxy on itself). And they knew that those values and that world were more than a match for anything or anyone that threatened them.
If you enjoyed this article please share it using the buttons above.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet
