Frederick Nietzsche seemed to have the ancient Greeks figured out: “During the period of their greatest strength they kept a tenacious hold of their unhistorical sense.” What does this mean?
The unhistorical sense simply describes an unencumbered way of living in the present. For Nietzsche, the unhistorical “constitutes the foundation upon which anything sound, healthy, great, and truly human can grow…it is like an atmosphere within which alone life can germinate.” Opposite to this is the historical sense, which describes an encumbered way of living where the past and future cloud a clear and creative view of the present. Both the unhistorical and historical are “necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people, and of a culture,” but it is this later sense growing out of control that poses the greatest threat to ensuring a future: “With an excess of history man again ceases to exist, and without that envelope of the unhistorical he would never have begun or dared to begin.”
In the early centuries of the Archaic period, Nietzsche tells us that the Greeks found themselves facing a danger we moderns are all too familiar with: being overwhelmed by what was past and foreign, of perishing through ‘history’:
The Greeks never lived in proud inviolability: their ‘culture’ was, rather, for a long time a chaos of foreign, Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, Egyptian forms and ideas, and their religion truly a battle of all the gods of the East…And yet, thanks to that Apollonian oracle, Hellenic culture was no mere aggregate. The Greeks gradually learned to organize the chaos by following the Delphic teaching and thinking back to themselves, that is, to their real needs, and letting their pseudo-needs die out.
Imagine if the men of Western civilization today could achieve such a feat! To overcome the tyranny of history and take hold of themselves — to become something, a new beginning, a destiny — to even begin thinking of such things unironically would be incredible. Perhaps someday soon, the unhistorical sense will strike-back and spring-forth a generation of Sensitive Young Men from the old decaying soil — to heroically take stock of our real needs and let all other pseudo needs die out. But all of this is a subject for later!
Getting back to his Untimely Mediation, Nietzsche continues with an interesting thought experiment. If a modern man were magically transported back to ancient Greece, he would probably begin documenting, collecting, and analyzing everything he ran into. He would study the Greeks scientifically like some sort of strange “specimen,” and tour the ancient world as if it were a museum filled with exotic exhibits – specialized showcases of places, peoples, laws, religious rites, cultural customs, military conventions, economic arrangements etc.
Believing himself to be a great man of “culture” after having gained first-hand experience of the ancient world, the modern man would probably consider the Greeks very “uncultured” by comparison: Where were their museums? Where was their historical sense? Here the secret of modern culture exposes itself. We moderns have nothing that is genuinely our own: “Only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice.” Nietzsche says that if ancient Greeks were instead transported to our modern age, they would take us for nothing more than walking encyclopedias. The Greeks actually had a culture! It was something real and not just a decoration to their lives. They were not strolling spectators to history:
[Instead] they took possession of themselves; they did not long remain the overburdened heirs and epigones of the entire Orient; after hard struggle with themselves and through protracted application of that oracle, they even became the happiest enrichers and augmenters of the treasure they had inherited and the first-born and models of all future cultured nations.
While the Greeks remembered the adventures of their heroes and the civic courage of their forefathers, their capacity for creating culture at this time was never inhibited. Whatever historical sense these Greeks possessed remained in service to life, and their culture was ascending to infinity until that fateful conflict between the Athenians and the Spartans brought everything to a crashing halt. Thucydides opens his history trying to articulate the gravity of what had unfolded:
Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation.
Indeed this was 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. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately precede the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters.
The Peloponnesian War was a great convulsion that brought an end to Classical Greece. Between how the war was fought, its long duration, and the severity of its outcomes it screwed the Greeks up culturally. Such convulsions have a way of knocking civilizations off their trajectory and brining time to a temporary halt. Notions of “fate” and “destiny” roll in like storm clouds hanging above entire peoples — thundering awaiting resolution on the battlefield. Winston Churchill has a very nice saying here:
Battles are the principal milestones in history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.
For peoples, their cultures, and their civilizations, the great convulsions of war can bring on different seasons of either ascendancy or decline. War can provide one people with a great boon, and another with total annihilation. Sometimes these wars do not have clean endings and the wounds received by the belligerents can be so violent that a people never quite recover and perish shortly thereafter. How could these classical Greeks have known what they were doing and where they were headed? Oddly enough, plunging headlong into the Peloponnesian War may have been a sign of their cultural vigor!
The striving for infinity, the wingbeat of longing, that accompanies the supreme delight of clearly perceived reality, reminds us that both states are aspects of a Dionysiac phenomenon: over and over again it shows us the spirit that playfully builds and destroys the world of individuals as the product of a primal pleasure: similarly, dark Heraclitus compares the force that builds worlds to a child placing stones here and there, and building sandcastles and knocking them down again.
As the Peloponnesian War slogged on, the ground that constituted these Classical Greeks sunk away — and they ultimately lost that “tenacious hold of their historical sense.” By the time the war was over, they were over. The irony of their comedians, the retreat inward led by those “venerated” philosophers; for Sparta in particular, the realities of simple demographic math — by the war’s conclusion how could any Sensitive Young Greek not see himself as living in the final act of a tragedy? Nietzsche explains that such a self-conscious and historical view of oneself:
Is inimical to all new planting, bold experimentation, free aspiration; it resists all flight into the unknown because it loves and hopes for nothing there. It allows what is becoming to force its way up only with reluctance, and then when the time is ripe it sacrifices it or sets it aside as a seducer to existence, as a liar as to the value of existence.
Thucydides’ history was, in a way, a testament to this new post-Classical Greek attitude. When compared to Herodotus, Thucydides comes off as heavier, more focused, melancholy, and intentionally historical. An earthquake dubbed “the greatest movement yet know in history” had just occurred. Thucydides was not going to let his chronicle get lost on detours through Egypt or take us on a tangent up to Hyperborea. We will not hear any stories about a carefree Hippoklides gesticulating on his head or a clownish Megakles stuffing his mouth full of gold dust when King Croesus of Lydia allowed him to take as much from his treasure room as he could carry – Thucydides is a serious historian! His history of the Peloponnesian War is no mere inquiry; the great Victor Davis Hanson acutely described his work as an autopsy. The Greeks were literally ripped open by this war, and “for the diagnostician Thucydides”, there was much to assess:
Nature and culture, word and deed, pretext and candor lead to larger corollaries of land power and sea power, oligarchy and democracy, commerce and agriculture, wealth and poverty all for a purpose. The war between Athens and Sparta offers profound human knowledge in the extreme variance between what a man says and what he does between the jealousy of ambition and the contempt for docility, between the dream of a people and the reality of their experience, between innate discomfiture with the good and the human attraction toward the base, between the burdens and responsibilities of power and the necessary acknowledgment of impotence, between democracy at home and imperialism abroad between the Athenian thesis that they are powerful but reluctant players in a brutal cosmic order, and the Spartan notion of free will, which hinges on the gods' punishment of the guilty and aid of the virtuous Athens and Sparta are states in a real war, but they are also metaphysical representations of opposite ways of looking at the universe, whose corollaries are often emphasized in a variety of contexts.
These are the insights that make Thucydides’ history a “possession for all time, and not just an essay for the moment.” Herodotus too declared a historical aim: “So the deeds of great men are not forgotten with the lapse of time.” The works of both historians certainly have “value”, but this varies in relation to the audience. Consider that there was no heroic victory for Thucydides to take as his subject and venerate. Herodotus possessed the story of the Persian Wars where the Greeks triumphed against the grand ambitions of two Achaemenid kings. The victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea (alongside those most beautiful deaths at Thermopylae) put a great wind to their backs. The citizens of these small city-states could see themselves unironically as living heroes; an Apollonian dream of a greater, united Greece could dazzle the minds of the leading men. Growth, expansion, future conquests and far-off adventures – the world was truly theirs! This is history in service to life!
If Herodotus’ history could be for the Greeks – to foster the good conscious requisite for all their future strivings – to whom does Thucydides write? The Peloponnesian War was a much less inspiring ordeal. Whatever dreams the Greeks may have had for themselves after the Persian Wars were forever dashed. There was no thrill of victory, only the exhaustion and agony of defeat. Many have speculated why Thucydides’ just ends his history abruptly in 408 BC — most people assume he died and never got around to finishing it, but I think it may have been deliberate. The history of the Peloponnesian War is like watching a train wreck – you can’t look away! But after the disastrous Sicilian expedition you can see Classical Greece beginning to sunset for good. Imagine trying to continue chronicling events past this point! You have had enough. Yes, there will still be events taking up space on the timeline leading to the end of the war, but these unfold like bureaucratic formalities; events that are just checking boxes required by the necessary forward flow of history. They do not really matter: fates have already been sealed. But all of this is digression!
Returning to the question: to whom does Thucydides write? It should be obvious that his “possession of all time” would be of no value to his contemporary Greeks. What were they going to do with all the themes, parallels, and contrasts which Victor Davis Hanson so eloquently organized in the passage quoted above? Thucydides analytical autopsy of the Peloponnesian War “strips away the veneer of culture and shows us for what we really are.” A Greek that wasn’t already dead would never want to do this to himself or his people. For the living, culture is not a decorative covering. To strip away culture would be to murder and annihilate life. Herodotus has the “veneer of Greek culture” on full display and valorizes it for all time. But many modern scholars seem to use Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War to deconstruct and de-mythologize the particular greatness of the Greeks.
But I have looked, and I have found no “real” or “true” human form hiding behind the “veneer of Greek culture.” Thucydides does not use his history to “show us what we really are.” He shows us “how much the Greeks had to suffer to become so beautiful!” The moral is not to deconstruct the Greeks, but to build ourselves up. The treasure within this “possession of all time” is not the grey caricature of the human being that results once the “veneer of Greek culture” is stripped away. Perhaps we often use and abuse the ancients like this because we can better relate to boring grey caricatures! With his history Thucydides wants us to overcome the Greeks, not have them leveled down to appease our weaker modern perspectives. Let that be my final digression.
Thucydides writes for us – to the Sensitive Young Men. Today we are very much overburdened by our sense of history, and we might very well perish by it. Like a tree bending to the weight of an over-ripened fruit, what are we to do with all this history? Are we going to snap and splinter into pieces? Or can this over-abundant historical sense, the likes of which no other people have ever possessed, be turned, and used to our great advantage? Perhaps we can be the happiest enriches and augmenters of the treasure we have inherited from the Greeks and become the first-born and models of all future cultured nations! If you have doubts, they are not ill-founded. Few, if any, have overcome the pride of modern man and his ironic view of himself: “His awareness that he has to live in an historicizing, as it were a twilight mood, his fear that his youthful hopes and energy will not survive into the future.”
Despite whatever burden our historical sense may bring upon us, the sea has never been more open. By taking possession of Thucydides, we can begin to take possession of ourselves. Our good-conscious will return — we can take stock of our real needs and let all pseudo-needs die out. History will no longer make us feel like we are living in the final season of some Spenglerian “world process.” History will once again become the nourishing food for us first-borns. Yeah! I think we are back. This is history in service to life — our life.
For many years now, we have been afflicted with a great backward-lookingness, a deep melancholy that senses nothing good in the future. Even our science fiction is nothing but reboots and retreads of old ideas, an endlessly resampled retro soundtrack. But when we look back - and by we I mean our culture in the widest sense - we do not see heroism or greatness, only oppression, prejudice, injustice, raycism. We are caught between the rock of an abhorrent past and the hard place of an intolerable future, grinding our culture-soul into dust in an eternal present.
To open the future again, we must rehabilitate the past.
So, given that the Spartans and Greeks allied against the Persians before the Peloponnesian war, is the big takeaway: Brother wars destroy your culture and civilization(?).
Because it looks that way from this armchair...