An increasing flow of research is inundating the field of reception studies. Thucydides is no exception, despite his work having already been thoroughly and variously investigated by classical scholars from different countries. This book focuses on a specifically British phase in Thucydides’ reception, in the first decades of the 20th century, as an important turn allegedly took place. In the aftermath of the South African and First World War, the approach to Thucydides changed. From an historian, studied for the most part in Greek by purely classical scholars, he became seen as a source and a form of reference book for institutions devoted to the study of international relations. This development, which began actually with Thomas Hobbes, bears some similarity to the transformation of Machiavelli or Gramsci into general models, stretching beyond their specific fields. Graham Allison’s theory of a ‘Thucydides Trap’ (in 2012, then in Destined for War (New York 2017)), is a well-known product of this trend (not necessarily the best), and the Greek historian is certainly studied now by political scientists and classical scholars, with their different agendas. The main thesis of this book is that this subject became important because of the 20th-century British ‘turn’, but Thucydidean studies in the 19th century were important, too. Earley focuses, vigorously, on the work of several British scholars. From Frances Cornford’s Thucydides mythistoricus (London 1907) to Georg Frederik Abbott’s Thucydides: A Study in Historical Reality (London 1925) and others, different contributions are scrutinized in detail (and with some repetition), with particular reference to the ‘labels’ that each scholar applied to the ancient historian (141): Thucydides was a ‘Realpolitiker’ for Powell, a ‘tragedian’ for Cornford, but a ‘psychologist’ for Zimmern and a ‘scientist’ for Cochrane; an actual ‘contemporary’ for Toynbee, but a ‘realist’ in Abbott’s vision. The positions of these scholars are presented by Earley as invariably path-breaking, a point which is more asserted than proved.
It was probably high time to write for those interested in international relations studies rather than for an audience of scholars. But for readers accustomed to the sophisticated approach of classical studies, some of Earley’s discussions might seem naive. He cites, for example, a scholar who writes on Thucydides as if human attitudes have remained unchanged through the intervening centuries. Another, on the other hand, accepts as literal truth some statements in the History which needed a cautious historiographic analysis (for example, the impact of the different layers in composition). In other cases, personal issues interfere with the interpretation of the ancient text. It is not easy to follow Earley in his choice of omitting the analyses of continental researchers, and of limiting the discussion to Thucydidean debates in the United Kingdom, then in the USA and Canada, which later became pivotal within the ‘realist’ school. Some attitudes ascribed to British scholars were neither new nor original: the search for analogies between ancient and modern times had been widely used in Europe, even in the stiffest German version such as, say, in Julius Beloch’s Griechische Geschichte (Strasbourg 1912–272). Not that this book is too succinct: the opinions of Cornford and others are exposed through long quotations. What is missing is a deeper and broader gaze, and a far better analysis of some phases in the debate, as of Enoch Powell facing the contemporary developments of Thucydidean studies, and especially the ‘fascist readings in the continent’ (133). The book explains the growing importance of Thucydides among the ‘realist’ school of international relations, after the Second World War. Yet, beyond this problem, recent questions such as the issues raised by global history remain unanswered. Is Thucydides’ analysis of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war still valuable, in the present context of crisis and military escalation with Russia, as the ‘Thucydides Trap’ implied in its explanation of the tense relations between the USA and China? If Thucydides is indeed ‘a writer for troubled times’ (2), is a new turn approaching, or is the old one still relevant to us?
The reader of this book meets a huge number of alarming typos. Some Greek words are misspelled. It is rather embarrassing to find the verb peítho, twice miswritten as the noun peithò (38, 71). German is equally brutalized. In the transcription of a manuscript paper (144), the well-known formula by Ranke becomes a nonsensical ‘wie es eigentlich gemesen ist’, and a bizarre ‘Fürher’ (134) leads to a certain lack of confidence in the author’s competence for research in these fields. Arnaldo Momigliano (whose papers should have been read and used) wrote in the sixties that a turn of ‘decolonization’ would definitely free the study of ancient Greece from the need to think in Greek or, alternatively, in German (Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome 1969), 47). Perhaps the actualization of this hope has been pushed too far.
