Free The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern by Victor Davis Hanson Page B

with a warrior race in Star Trek and think the Spartans are a rival San Jose football team, not dour foot soldiers from the Peloponnese.
    At Stanford, where I did graduate work, Thucydides was an entirely different historian from the one I came to know in Fresno. The Thucydides of the graduate seminar is often now Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hayden White all rolled into one. His book is the subject of many pages of jargon in which, for example, Pericles’ funeral oration is discussed as a dry rhetorical exercise that reflects subjective, not absolute, “truth,” or that can serve as a valuable “construction” that reveals the gender, class, and ethnic biases of Thucydides himself.
    I prefer the analysis of the text offered by a Fresno State student I taught in a night class. “Sure, he might have lied a little,” he said. “Who doesn’t? And what do you expect? Thucydides with a tape recorder?”
    Scholars and graduate students talk grandly of Thucydides “the realist,” whose bleak assessment of human nature was a valuable antithesis to romanticism. But this remote, literary language takes us far from the actual Thucydides, a hardheaded admiral whose judgments derive from firsthand experience and profound career disappointment. As a working mother at Fresno put it, “Thucydides might like Carter better, but he’d want Reagan dealing with the Russians.” Another student, an immigrant, agreed: “Be trusting with someone else’s life—not mine.”
    Students in Fresno come to savor Thucydides as the disgraced commander too late to save the Athenian outpost at Amphipolis. In time they soak up the street fighting at Plataea, where the women and slaves “yelled from the houses and threw stones and tiles,” and root for the blood-hungry Athenians at the slaughter near Delium, who in their fury “fell into confusion in surrounding the enemy and mistook and killed each other.”
    “I bet he killed a few himself to write like that,” observed one student, tattooed and scarred, in a humanities class. “It gets crazy like that in a free-for-all,” another added. When we discussed the slaughter of the Athenians on Sicily, which brought a pathetic end to the greatest generation of the greatest Greek city in its greatest age, one student urged me on: “Check it out. Don’t be afraid. Read it to us out aloud.” So I did:
    The Peloponnesians also came down and butchered them, especially those in the water, which was thus immediately spoiled, but which they went on drinking just the same, mud and all, bloody as it was, most fighting to have it.
    If we’re to keep the ideas of ancient Greece alive, we must first rekindle the Hellenic spirit, for the two are inseparable. That spirit, though it may already be lost in the Ivy League, thrives here among students working at Burger King and among night-school returnees, who, once hooked on Thucydides’ blood and guts, then—but only then—begin to appreciate the power of his thought.
    Students working off their tuition in places like Fresno, of course, don’t need the university to tell them how unique their own lives are and how richly diverse their past experiences are. But they welcome a tough guy like Thucydides, who shows how their brutal experiences are universal, even banal, and thus explicable through abstract canons that exist “for all time.” He is a storyteller first, an obtuse philosopher a distant second.
    In an age like ours, in which setbacks and disappointments are often dealt without acceptance of the tragic nature of our existence, Thucydides’ honesty comes as a welcome touch of realism. With him there is no “feeling your pain,” no pretense of cheap compassion, and no easy apologies for what we are and what we have done. His description of the horrific plague at Athens is both scientific and gruesome, as he chronicles the social chaos in the manner of a physician reviewing symptoms, formulating a diagnosis, and offering a bleak