Today our class (in the Western Tradition, Part I) discussed Thucydides' accounts of speeches made during the height of the Athenians' war with much of the rest of Greece in the 4th century BCE. Thucydides' work has always seemed almost frighteningly relevant across two and a half millennia, especially given his aim to reveal a basic human nature. Its fruits? Genocide, unprovoked military aggression, imperial callousness and pride, sham democracy, and desperate religious travesties.
Perhaps aptly, we were hosted today by New College, founded in the 14th century as Oxford emerged from its bout with the Black Death; Thucydides also gives us an excruciatingly detailed account of the plague that (along with the Spartans) nearly wiped out both him and Athens. Also, our rooms this morning commemorated Sir Chris Cox, who taught at New College after serving as Director of Education in the British Sudan in the 1930s. I know almost nothing else about Sir Chris (as the Porter who handed me the key to the room called him), except that his biographer calls him "an imperial patrician of a different kind." An intriguing phrase, one that together with a reading of Thucydides fairly fires the imagination. Just now, though, I wonder if he has a ghost, and what it might have made of our conversation this morning.
But we had a laugh before we got down to business, and it was a warm, sunny day after long bouts of drizzle and wind. Life goes on.
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