Insolence and Blindness

Every day more darkness comes to light. We weep, we rage, we steel ourselves against the cold. And I can't stop thinking about a tiny, insignificant island and what happened there twenty-four hundred years ago.

Once upon a time, a great Empire was stopped in its tracks by a ragged, squabbling mob. But that isn't the story of the island. The story is a part of what came after. After the Greeks beat the invading Persians, two cities emerged as the most powerful. And then, as is too often the way when the number of powers appears to equal two, Athens and Sparta ripped their world apart.

Their struggle forced every other Greek city to choose sides. Or nearly every one. Melos, a city with family ties to Sparta, but surrounded by Athenian allies, decided to sit the war out. It didn't work out so well, as Thucydides tells us in one of the oddest little bits of literature in the entire history of the world.

The Melian Dialogue has been considered the founding text of the "realist" school of international politics. It has been interpreted as endorsing the view that self-interest is the one law of the State and that might-makes-right, as well as a savage critique of that same view. To cut a long story short, Athens, beacon of democracy, fertile soil of genius, imperial power, came to Melos and said, "If you are not with us, then we will consider you to be against us". The Melians wondered if this choice between slavery and death was a true choice. In a debate with the Athenians, they decided that it was not.

Athens overran Melos, put all the men to the sword, and sold the women and children into slavery.

Writing about the Melian Dialogue, Francis Cornford, in his Thucydides Mythistoricus, asks an intriguing question about the form of the dialogue:

" We have already remarked that, as an incident in the Peloponnesian war, the Melian expedition was a trivial affair; the population of a small island was wiped out, and that was the end of it. The significance of the event is only moral, and it is meant to be studied from that side. Our first question is: Why has Thucydides abandoned his practice of writing public speeches, and preferred the dramatic form of conversation? "

Cornford begins directly addressing his question a few paragraphs later:

" Thucydides' first reason for choosing the dialogue form is that this pathological state of mind cannot be directly unfolded in a public speech designed to convince a large audience. Another motive which may have influenced him is that this form is better suited to dramatic irony. "

It is worth noting that the irony to which Cornford alludes here is that in Thucydides' History the Melian Dialogue is placed just before the description of the Sicilian Expedition, the folly which more than anything cost Athens any chance at victory over Sparta. The "pathological state of mind" to which he refers has been outlined in the preceding paragraphs and it is this particular understanding of Melos and Thuycidides' rendering of the atrocity which has been in my thoughts (emphasis in what follows mine, and I can hardly think of a more fitting way to describe most pro-war blather):

" Dionysius, as himself a Greek, feels that the language which Thucydides assigns to the Athenians is 'fit only for an oriental monarch', and that no Greek could have used it;--except, we will add, on one condition: that the speaker be mad. And, in fact, as we read the dialogue, the impression deepens that the Athenian spokesman is out of his right mind. We can, moreover, put a name to the special form of his madness, which shows the peculiar symptoms of a state classed, perhaps rightly, by the Greeks as pathological. The two notes of it are Insolence and Blindness. 'Insolence' is a weak translation of the Greek term, which covered two types of insane exaltation, distinguishable, but closely allied. One is exuberant, sanguine, triumphant, fed by alluring Hope, leaping to clasp hands with unconquerable Desire. The other is cold-drawn, masked, cruel, cynical, defiant of the gods, self-assured of its own worldly wisdom. The former type we shall meet with presently; the latter is portrayed with finished art in the dialogue which leads up to the Melian massacre. Both are blind,--blind to the doom towards which the one speeds exultingly, blind to the vengeance which the other impiously denies. [...] The speaker [...] has lost all sense of the difference between honour and success, dishonour and defeat. He is already smitten with the blindness by which insolent cruelty brings vengeance on itself. "

. . .

In its strategically foolish pursuit of unachievable goals of dubious value, the war in Iraq is shaping up to be America's "Sicilian Expedition". It may, in its ruin of our values and our reputation - and perhaps even our restraint - turn out to be our Melos as well.

Posted by Martial