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Thucydides, amended: religion, narrative, and IR theory in the Peloponnesian Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 February 2012

STEFAN DOLGERT
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Abstract

Most of our knowledge of the Peloponnesian War comes from the text of Thucydides' History, yet IR scholars are strangely credulous when evaluating Thucydides' pronouncements. I explore what Thucydides does not tell us, and suggest that his text obscures important information regarding the outbreak of the war. Thucydides has a secular bias which leads him to discount the Spartan religious self-narrative, but by attending to this schema, in which Sparta sees itself in the role of the pious defender of moderation pitted against the corrupt Athenians, we gain a richer understanding of the chain of events that led to war. Contemporary scholars have too readily adopted Thucydides' perspective on this issue, but by assessing Thucydides' data using insights drawn from contemporary cognitive theories of narrative and image we see that misperceptions based in the conflicting Athenian and Spartan narratives played an important role in the escalation of the crisis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 661 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

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11 Even the title of this article continues the cottage industry pattern, reaffirming Thucydides' authoritative presence even as it attempts to move away from the exclusive focus on the figure of the author. While this enacts a kind of performative contradiction, I think it defensible to the extent that ‘the Thucydides Function’ continues to be an important aspect of contemporary IR scholarship.

12 Narrative in Thucydides has not been ignored, but scholars have emphasised the way in which Thucydides as author employs narrative to convey his purposes rather than the narrative scripts that influence the actions of his protagonists. See Cornford, Francis, Thucydides Mythistoricus (London: Edward Arnold, 1907)Google Scholar; Connor, W. Robert, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Bedford, David and Workman, Thom, ‘The Tragic Reading of the Thucydidean Tragedy’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 51–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heilke, Thomas, ‘Realism, Narrative, and Happenstance: Thucydides' Tale of Brasidas’, American Political Science Review, 98 (2004), pp. 121–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 The two primary candidates are: (1) his political and ideological loyalty to Pericles and the Athenian Empire, and (2) his basic secularism that is hostile to the ‘superstitions’ held by ‘the vulgar’. See Ste. Croix, Origins; de Romilly, Jacqueline, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963)Google Scholar; Jordan, ‘Religion’, Hornblower, ‘Religious’.

15 This is not to say that religion is the only factor that Thucydides misses or slights, but it is one that has become particularly salient for contemporary international politics.

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21 Pericles, in his speech to the Athenian Assembly on the occasion of the final Spartan embassy before the beginning of hostilities, says plainly that ‘no concession to the Spartans’ should be contemplated because ‘war is a necessity’ (I.140, I.144).

22 ‘This interval was spent in sending embassies to Athens charged with complaints, in order to obtain as good a pretext for war as possible, in the event of her paying no attention to them’ (I.126). The term usually translated as ‘pretext’, prophasis, is more ambiguous than is generally understood, however, as I will discuss later in the article.

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28 Hermann et al., ‘Images’, p. 406.

29 Ibid.

30 We should also be careful not to create a fixed divide where the terrain is much more fluid. Psychological research into the reasoning of international decision-makers that distinguishes between integrative and cognitive complexity, for instance, is methodologically rigorous but also incorporates qualitative insights. See Tetlock, Philip, ‘Good Judgment in International Politics: Three Psychological Perspectives’, Political Psychology, 13 (1992), pp. 517–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tetlock, Philip and Tyler, Anthony, ‘Churchill's Cognitive and Rhetorical Style: The Debates over Nazi Intentions and Self-Government for India’, Political Psychology, 17 (1996), pp. 149–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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33 Delahanty and Steele, ‘Engaging’, pp. 523–40.

34 Ibid., p. 525.

35 Steele, ‘Making’, p. 911.

36 Delahanty and Steele, ‘Engaging’, pp. 523–40.

37 Tetlock, ‘Judgment’, pp. 517–39.

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40 Alkopher, ‘Social’, pp. 715–37.

41 Weaver and Agle, ‘Religiosity’, pp. 77–97; Fernando, ‘Reconfiguring’, pp. 19–35.

42 Chernus, ‘War’, pp. 844–73; Silliman, ‘Old West’, pp. 237–47.

43 Hermann et al., ‘Images’, p. 403–33.

44 Steele, ‘Making’, pp. 901–25; Duffy, Gavan and Frederking, Brian, ‘Changing the Rules: A Speech Act Analysis of the End of the Cold War’, International Studies Quarterly, 53 (2009), pp. 325–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 Laing, R. D., Self and Others (London: Tavistock, 1969)Google Scholar.

47 For this additional data I will rely on a number of historians who have sifted the non-Thucydidean evidence, including: Hornblower, ‘Religious’, Jordan, ‘Religion’, and Ste. Croix, Origins. I will also argue that the inclusion of this additional data casts the religious evidence Thucydides does provide us in a very different light.

48 It has been noted that Thucydides' narrative has a generally tragic quality – see Cornford, Thucydides; Bedford and Workman, ‘Tragic’, pp. 51–67; Lebow, Richard Ned, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar – and that this in itself makes his History implicitly religious despite Thucydides' overt rationalism. While I agree with the first observation, the second does not follow. Thucydides' tragic vision is a secularised version of an originally religious tradition, but this does not mean that it is still ‘really’ religious (Crane, Thucydides).

49 The religious variable that I argue for will not be relevant in many cases – it is probably irrelevant in the case of World War I, for instance – but this is unsurprising given that actors’ differing cognitive schemata will involve distinct evaluative criteria. Religiously-inclined actors will need to enact roles in a sacred drama (Weaver and Agle, ‘Religiosity’, pp. 77–97) since that is the way they see the world (Kaplowitz, ‘National’, pp. 39–82), but agents with more secular worldviews will have no such motivation. This does not lessen my general claim for the importance of narrative, and it heightens the salience of understanding what kind of narrative one's opponent possesses, since narratives with differing evaluative criteria are prone to lead to misunderstanding and conflict (Lebow, Between, p. 199).

50 Just what Thucydides means by ‘cause’ is subject to debate. The Greek term prophasis has a number of connotations that differentiate it from the scientific sense of cause and effect, though at some times it can have this more narrow meaning. For a useful discussion of this point, please see the second appendix to Clifford Orwin's The Humanity of Thucydides.

51 All references to Thucydides' History will take this form: Book X. Chapter Y. The History comprises seven books, and breaks off abruptly in the twenty-first year of the war, in 411 BCE. The war continued until 404 BCE, when Athens was compelled to surrender to Sparta.

52 There is one peculiarity about Thucydides' pronouncement on the ‘truest cause’ being the one least seen/discussed. If we were to use just Thucydides' text to evaluate this statement we would have to conclude that it was absolutely false, or at least that Thucydides himself does not believe it. The Corinthians allude to this cause in both of their speeches, Archidamus obliquely refers to it before the Peloponnesian Congress, the Athenians themselves try to play on the Spartans’ fear in their speech at Sparta, and the Corcyraeans’ reference the coming war and the need for Athenian power to deter Sparta. In short, it seems that everyone is talking about the growth of Athenian power and the fear that it engendered in the Spartans.

53 Hornblower, ‘Religious’, pp. 169–97.

54 Lustick, Ian, ‘History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias’, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp. 605–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Hornblower, ‘Religious’, p. 170.

56 Romilly Thucydides; Kagan, Donald, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Ste. Croix, Origins; Jordan, ‘Religion’, pp. 119–47; Hornblower, ‘Religious’, pp. 169–97; Zumbrunnen, John, Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides' History (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

57 Badian, Ernst, ‘Thucydides and the Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War’, in Allison, J. (ed.), Conflict, Antithesis, and the Ancient Historian (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1990), pp. 46–91Google Scholar; Hornblower, ‘Religious’, pp. 169–97. Though one scholar contends that for Thucydides ‘religion is the underlying fabric which holds human society together’ (Jordan, ‘Religion’, p. 147), this is distinctly a minoritarian position. Even Francis Cornford, who highlights the connections between Thucydides' narrative and Greek religious tragedies, considers him to be a basically secular thinker (Cornford, Thucydides).

58 Hornblower, ‘Religious’, pp. 180–2.

59 Ibid., p. 180.

60 Ibid., pp. 195–6.

61 Ibid., p. 197.

62 Ian Lustick (‘History’, pp. 605–18) provides a quantitative approach to correcting for the biases of historians, though in Thucydides' case the peculiar status of his text makes this more difficult to apply. Given that Thucydides is the primary source upon which so many secondary sources rely (almost exclusively), it may not be possible to correct for the systematic biases this causes by quantitative means alone. That said, such a venture is worth pursuing as a corollary to the approach I am using here.

63 Bagby, ‘Use and Abuse’, p. 134.

64 Hornblower, ‘Religious’, p. 170.

65 Jordan, ‘Religion’, pp. 124–5.

66 Forde, Steven, ‘Thucydides on Ripeness and Conflict Resolution’, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), pp. 177–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Orwin, Humanity; Crane, Thucydides.

68 Weaver and Agle, ‘Religiosity’, pp. 77–97; Kinnvall, ‘Globalization’, pp. 741–67; and see Chernus, ‘War’, pp. 844–73, on the religious narratives of the Bush administration.

69 Lebow, Tragic, p. 158.

70 Orwin, Humanity; Crane, Thucydides.

71 Steven Forde, ‘Thucydides’, pp. 177–95.

72 Jordan, ‘Religion’, pp. 142–3.

73 Kagan, Outbreak, pp. 322–56.

74 Ibid., pp. 251–72.

75 Ibid., pp. 265–6. For the primary interpretation of the decree as an economic measure, see F. M. Cornford's Thucydides Mythistoricus; he argues that the war can be understood as the result of the commercial competition between Athens and Corinth for the markets and resources of Italy and Sicily. According to Cornford, Corinth goaded Sparta into starting the war because it was losing its quest for economic hegemony in the central Mediterranean.

76 Ste. Croix, Origins, p. 254.

77 Ibid., p. 255.

78 Ibid.

79 Kagan, Outbreak, pp. 251–72.

80 Charlick-Paley and Sylvan, ‘Use and Evolution’, pp. 697–728.

81 Kaplowitz, ‘National’, pp. 39–82.

82 Ste. Croix, Origins.

83 Jordan, ‘Religion’, pp. 119–47; Cornford, Thucydides.

84 Weaver and Agle, ‘Religiosity’, pp. 77–97.

85 Alkopher, ‘Social’, pp. 715–37.

86 Forde, ‘Thucydides’, pp. 177–95.

87 Ibid.

88 See Crane, Thucydides. Though as I have also noted, there is a religious Athenian narrative as well (in the actions against Megara, for example). This is not Pericles’ version of the Athenian national narrative, but it attests to the plural political traditions upon which leaders may draw for mobilising constituents and justifying their actions.

89 Alexander, Michele, Levin, Shana, and Henry, P. J., ‘Image Theory, Social Identity, and Social Dominance: Structural Characteristics and Individual Motives Underlying International Images’, Political Psychology, 26 (2005), pp. 27–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hermann et al., ‘Images’, pp. 403–33.