History Without Romance

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To understand why Marshall Sahlins feels the need to apologize to Thucydides, one has to understand the central role of the ancient Greek historian in creating our idea of what history is. His older contemporary Herodotus may have been the “Father of History,” the first writer to analyze oral traditions and conduct research expeditions, but Herodotus’s roots remained in poetry, and his tales draw on the mythical and marvelous. Thucydides, when he set himself the task of writing the history of the Peloponnesian War – “the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world – I had almost said of mankind” – firmly rejected all such fictions. He meant to write what we would now call scientific history, based on reason and evidence: “With reference to the narrative of events,” he promised in his first chapter, “far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.” With a contemptuous glance at Herodotus, Thucydides declared, “The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content.”


For Mr. Sahlins, an eminent anthropologist and expert on Polynesian cultures, this boast is the beginning of the trouble with Thucydides. For in his certainty that the future “must resemble” the past – in his very claim to writing objective history – Thucydides implies that the men of fifth-century Athens present examples of “human nature” itself, which must be the same in every time and place. And the mainspring of that human nature, as Thucydides sees it, is power and the lust for power. He explains the Peloponnesian War, which tested and finally broke the Attic dominance over ancient Greece, as a pure power rivalry between Athens and Sparta. The motive Thucydides finds at the root of all politics is the one the Athenians proclaim in the famous “Melian Dialogue,” when the powerful Athenians demand the surrender of the helpless island of Melos. “Of the gods we believe,” the Athenians declare, “and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do.” It’s no wonder Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides.


The goal of “Apologies to Thucydides” (University of Chicago Press, 334 pages, $30) is to challenge this doctrine, which Mr. Sahlins finds at the heart of Western historiography to this day. “One may conclude that Thucydides is still very much with us,” Mr. Sahlins writes, “not only because he raised the important questions about society and history, but because he begged them in the same fashion as we do: by resorting to the universal practical rationality of human beings, born of their innate self-interest.” Mr. Sahlins sets out to undermine this claim, not directly, but with a sort of anthropological bank shot.


Drawing on his deep knowledge of Polynesian culture, he narrates in detail the mid-19th century war between the Fijian kingdoms of Bau and Rewa, which resembles in several respects the famous war of Athens and Sparta recounted by the Greek historian. In doing so, he hopes to show that the power-hunger of Athens, which Thucydides construed as a constant in human nature, was in fact motivated by its particular geopolitical circumstances. It is a fascinating but tenuous argument, and it never arrives at the full confrontation with Thucydides that the book seems to promise. Still, Mr. Sahlins has much to teach along the way, about Fijian history and culture, and about the ways individuals and societies make history.


Most of the book – more, indeed, than is strictly necessary for the argument – is taken up with an account of what Sahlins calls the Polynesian War. In the 1840s the islands of Fiji were drawn into a prolonged struggle between Bau, a naval empire akin to ancient Athens, and Rewa, a land-based power analogous to Sparta. The conclusion of the Polynesian War was the opposite of the Peloponnesian – Bau defeated Rewa, while Athens was overcome by Sparta. But Mr. Sahlins argues that the political behavior of Bau can be explained by the fact that, like Athens, it was a “thalassocracy,” a state that drew its power from its control of the sea.


Examining the political and economic structures of both cities, Mr. Sahlins concludes that it was the dynamics of maritime empire, and not any fundamental human nature, that made the Athenians and the Bauans alike obsessed with power and conquest. If, as Thucydides writes, the Athenians “were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others” – and if, as Sahlins says, the Bauans were so notorious for their scheming that Fijians commonly spoke of “conspiracy a la Bau” – the reasons were finally local, cultural, and political, not universal and metaphysical.


This is only the foundation of Mr. Sahlins’s complex book, which goes on to address questions of historical causation and agency using a wide variety of examples – including, at one point, Elian Gonzales and the 1951 New York Giants. The complete ramifications of Mr. Sahlins’s argument will be appreciated best by anthropologists and historians. Even for the general reader, however, “Apologies to Thucydides” has much to offer, as an introduction to an unfamiliar culture and as a new perspective on our own.


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