tragos

"History does not repeat itself. It rhymes"

It was Mark Twain who gave us this vital and necessary spin on the cliché.

A friend of mine was giving a talk on Thucydides this morning, and quoted Twain as a gloss on the following passage from History of the Peloponnesian War:

“It will be enough for me…if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever.” (Penguin ed., transl. Rex Warner)

I am neither a historian nor a neuroscientist, and so eminently unqualified to judge Thucydides’ confidence in the deep grammar of human events. But reading the account of the war between Athens and Sparta does make me wish I could organize a symposium (in the old sense, of course…with tons of beer) where the scientists and theorists of history could duke it out, and maybe even construe new questions about the ways we reconstruct our past.

I can say this, though: for anyone interested in the events leading to the Iraq War, you could do worse than sift through the debate at Sparta and declaration of war in Book 1 of Thucydides’ History.