New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

158 The New Imperialists
nevertheless. Thucydides’ reflections on the Hellenic war come to have a
contingent or qualified historical status. By grounding the discussion of
the war transcendently he assigned an air of untruthfulness to his
worldly observations about the misshapen, woe-begotten life unfolding
before him – those hardships of war captured so poignantly in Aristophanes’
Acharnians, especially the close of the play when a Megarian
trader attempts to sell his daughters, disguised as piglets, only to use the
proceeds, sadly, to buy cloves of garlic, a well-known Megaran export
before the outbreak of war. Thucydides deliberately forges the impression
that the world he held before him, one where the Hellenes were tearing
each other apart, was not a world lived truthfully in the sense of being in
step with the proper order of things. As we might say more colloquially,
for Thucydides the Peloponnesian war was very real but all wrong. The
measure of the war is never war itself; through its idiomatic tragic
framing we learn that the whirling events that constituted the Peloponnesian
war were outside the pale of a properly lived life, and that the
war exacts an accounting precisely because it was but should not have
been. What was true about the Peloponnesian war – those contemporary
thoughts, behaviours, and events discussed by Thucydides with so much
richness and perspicacity – was also false in so far as the tragic outline of
the History advises the reader that those same behaviours etcetera fail to
conform to the requirements of a world unfurling as it should. Therefore,
to cash in Thucydides at the level of his rich, empirical observations, that
is, to take him at his empirical face value and nothing more, leads to a
limited appreciation of this magisterial work by necessarily missing the
accidental or contingent status of the world he supposed before him.
Moreover, the foregoing discussion also advises us to be sensitive to
the richness of Thucydides’ empirical side or sociology. 64 Thucydides
does speak of human nature in the manner of the Hippocratics, a nature
that responds to certain stimuli in predictable ways. 65 However, the
qualities of fixity in our natures are not played up, but it is clear
that Thucydides’ notion of human being establishes the importance
of sitting on our “natures” through rational deliberation. The concept of
a fixed human nature seems too limiting given the breadth and richness
of Thucydides’ thinking; the concept of a human nature must give way
to a notion of human being as discussed above. Things like the plague
and stasis can unleash our natural and somewhat unsavoury natures