Thucydides (ca. 460 – ca. 400 BCE) > Likes and Comments

Thucydides wrote one very famous work. It was untitled, but it is probably correctly referred to as The Peloponnesian War. Although the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta began in 431 BCE and ended in 404 BCE, Thucydides evidently did not write an account of the years 410-404. Because his reflections transcend political and military history, this work is properly considered a classic of political philosophy as well as ancient Greek history.

I first read The Peloponnesian War in 1965 or 1966, apparently (I don't remember exactly anymore) in connection with a college humanities course I took at that time. More precisely, I read at that time most of the first half of the 1874 Richard Crawley translation, as it appeared in the 1951 Random House Modern Library College Edition edited by John H. Finley, Jr.. I later acquired the Loeb Classical Edition (Harvard University Press), which contains the Greek text and an English translation by Charles Foster Smith on facing pages. Although my Greek remains rudimentary, I am able to follow along, to some extent, in comparing English translations to the Greek original. Richard Crawley and Charles Foster Smith prepared these translations at a time when it was assumed that all serious readers knew Greek. Accordingly, their translations did not prize accuracy as the supreme value of translation.

David Grene was a classics professor at the University of Chicago from 1937 until his death in 2002. Although I never officially took a course from him when I was there, I attended one or more of his classes (on Homer, if I recall correctly). Additionally, he and I would regularly (albeit separately) appear at the same Hyde Park coffee shop for Sunday brunch. He always read the Sunday New York Times. We never spoke to each other. He was a founding member of the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought , with which many illustrious scholars and literary writers have been associated, including T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, and many others.

In 1959, Grene edited and published the Thomas Hobbes translation of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War. I have the two-volume 1959 hardcover edition. A 1989 paperback edition and a Kindle edition are currently available. Hobbes's translation appears, for the most part, to be quite accurate. In a prefatory note, Grene stated that he has commented on "passages where Hobbes has mistranslated the Greek. These are rare but they do occur." Citing an example, Grene states that "[t]he mistranslation comes from a decision by Hobbes that Thucydides means something which he didn't say and which Hobbes says for him. There are also instances scattered up and down the history where Hobbes condenses a passage slightly, where through impatience or forgetfulness he omits a name on a list or a detail such as 'and they camped on the shore.' These are unimportant and I have only commented on them where it appeared to me that the reader's understanding of the passage was seriously diminished by the missing detail." 1959 ed., xix-xx. See also David Grene, Greek Political Theory: The Image of Man in Thucydides and Plato (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1950).

The most accurate English translation of The Peloponnesian War is the 1998 translation by Steven Lattimore Steven Lattimore is a son of the renowned classicist Richard Lattimore (1906-84), whose translations of Homer and other ancient Greek literary works are superb. In his introduction to his translation of The Peloponnesian War, Steven Lattimore states: "My priority has been fidelity, and although I have not always been entirely literal in reproducing Greek syntax or idiom, I have tended to be most literal where I felt that Thucydides is at his most distinctive and idiosyncratic; in particular, I have resisted subdividing his unusually—and intentionally—long sentences. When I am not sure that the results are clear, I have had recourse to the footnotes. I felt that some Greek terms were better left untranslated and have listed these in a glossary (sometimes with a reference to a note giving additional information)." Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. with introduction, notes, and glossary by Steven Lattimore (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), xix-xx.

For a modern edition explicitly oriented toward students and general readers, see The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, rev. ed., ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Free Press, 2008). This edition has a wonderful array of maps, notes, and historical essays that will be of considerable value to those who are not classical scholars. The only problem is that it primarily relies on the 1874 Richard Crawley translation. In an Editor's Note, Robert B. Strassler states: "It was necessary . . . to update some of Crawley's Victorian English usages, to revise his outdated punctuation, and to replace terms he used whose meaning has shifted or been lost entirely. . . . After much deliberation I decided in the interests of clarity to break up a few of Crawley's longest and most complex sentences (which often mirror the original Greek)." Ibid., xxx. The editor would have been better advised to obtain permission to use the Steven Lattimore translation or to start fresh with a new literal translation of Thucydides.

Accordingly, in my view, the best way to study Thucydides would be to read the Steven Lattimore and perhaps Thomas Hobbes translations, along with the maps, notes, and historical essays of The Landmark Thucydides.

There are innumerable secondary sources on Thucydides. I believe that one of the most valuable of these is Mary P. Nichols, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). In the course of analyzing The Peloponnesian War, Nichols discusses much of the extant literature on Thucydides. Although a Straussian, her interpretation of Thucydides differs to some extent from the standard Straussian view. Ibid., 13-14, 22n24.

Thanks for your insight. It is very helpful. I just received a copy of The Great Books series printed by Britannica in 1952 from my mother. It was previously my great-aunt's. I believe she read many of them, but otherwise they have just been sitting around since 1980. I started at the beginning with The Illiad and The Odyssey. Now I am moving on to Plato.

I found the translations of Homer odd, but interesting. They were prose translations so they were more understandable than the poetic translations that I read in school.

Thucydides is included after Aristotle, I am not sure what translation it is. I look forward to reading it and I will also be sure to read the Lattimore translation.

Thanks again!

Cynthia O'Donnell wrote: "Thanks for your insight. It is very helpful. I just received a copy of The Great Books series printed by Britannica in 1952 from my mother. It was previously my great-aunt's. I believe she read man..."

I wish you the best in your continuing reading. I'm glad that I can be of some assistance with regard to translations. When I went to college and grad school, very few good translations were available. Now there are many additional translations of classical works, but it is difficult to ascertain which are the most accurate. Although I am far from being an expert in such matters, I have gradually become aware of which translations of many works in the history of political philosophy are more accurate than others. So if you or others have any further questions along this line, I might be able to make some recommendations.

I finished the Landmark edition a few weeks ago. It was excellent. The maps were indispensable for someone who is not a classicist - which few people are anymore. I have no basis of compassion for the text, but I had no issues with it either. Highly recommend.

Not sure about translations but I can certainly recommend Kenneth Harl's Peloponnesian War an audio lecture series by the Great Courses audio book company.
Not just a great review by a major scholar but a refutation of the "fascist conservative" Sparta myth so popularised by scholars British, French and US since the 1800's who valorise Athenian democracy because it helps justify their own imperial ambitions.
Brilliant, controversial, restorative.

Question: does Kenneth Harl tackle the question of why Sparta's youth were taught to thieve? :)

How about Rosseau's assertion that the Athenians were not valorous at all, but that they were decadent and irresolute thanks to their advances over the Spartans?

He doesn't comment on the thievery charge but he does try to show a much more dynamic and artful Sparta. It is his contention that the Spartan story that has come to us is actually a part of Sparta's own making. It was in part political theatre.

With regard to Rousseau, I think I'd like to see that quote in it's context before I could comment. Not valorous on the battlefield? In their diplomacy?
The Athenian's were certainly excellent soldiers. The only hoplite phalanx capable of standing up repeatedly to the Spartan's and besting them repeatedly, though not finally.

Hi Gerard. Thanks for the clarification. Its sounds like a fun book.

Rousseau--please nevermind my paraphrase above--that's just my secondhand encapsulation. Go to the source when you can. His analysis is not lengthy at all, perhaps just 125 pps? Anyway, I encourage anyone to pick it up and absorb it. Not a great impact on one's time. The discussion it could yield (around here) would be fascinating. He basically points out that the more 'sophisticated' Athenians (advanced in the arts and sciences, advanced in culture) did not --in his view--retain their civic virtues as did their Spartan neighbors. He reminds us of the decadence of Athens. According to Rousseau, there is a link between the Spartans remaining somewhat dowdy and backward, and their concomitant tight hold on ideals of family life, religious values; and notions of community service. I found it an audacious treatise, very savory reading which still resonates with life today.

In the preceding post, Feliks is referring to Rousseau's Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (see posts 4-6 in the Rousseau topic). I last read this essay about fifty years ago. It was for a college course. The professor, who seemed to like Rousseau's small-town values, joked about growing up in "that little town, Brooklyn [New York]." In fact, he, like many others who glorify small-town life, never lived in one. I did. I grew up in a small, rural town (less than ten thousand in population and about two hundred miles from the nearest city). My home town was a lot like Sparta, and I detested it. When I read Rousseau's essay, I immediately drew the connection. Although Athens had its faults (its democratic imperialism and its execution of Socrates being among the worst of them), I would have preferred Athens to Sparta any day. Apparently so did Socrates. When given the opportunity to escape the Athenian jury's judgment of execution by fleeing to Sparta (or elsewhere), Socrates declined (see Plato's dialogue Crito). Sparta was no place for a philosopher. Athens had allowed Socrates to philosophize until the age of seventy; he wouldn't have lasted a minute in Sparta. Similarly, in my home town, no bookstore existed. Although the town didn't (thanks to the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution) impose Rousseau's scheme for a governmental religion, it did have twenty-six churches (twenty-five Protestant and one Catholic). If you didn't attend church regularly, you were considered an atheist, and it was assumed that all atheists were Communists (this was during the 1950s and early 1960s). Strangely, all that religion didn't make the inhabitants any more moral. An upstanding member of my church's congregation was a bank vice president, and he was convicted of embezzlement. The editor-in-chief of the local newspaper was a well-known pedophile who was protected from prosecution as a result of his family and political connections. During high school I resolved to go to college in the largest city I could find, so I ended up at the University of Chicago. I was shocked when I found my professors—who had lived in big cities all their lives—extolling the supposed virtues of small-town America.

On the other hand, what is New York City remembered for if not Boss Tweed? It seems likely that there are at least a few decent persons in most small towns, and that corruption flourishes wherever there are institutions that offer it a fertile soil.

M wrote: "On the other hand, what is New York City remembered for if not Boss Tweed? It seems likely that there are at least a few decent persons in most small towns, and that corruption flourishes wherever ..."

There are also decent persons in big cities. And small-town organizations and institutions can foster corruption as well as hypocrisy. One thinks of the astute observations of writers like Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis.

I agree. What occurs to me is that, though the social and political dynamics of small towns differ in many ways from those of cities, human nature remains unchanged and merely adapts to its conditions. Tweed would likely have been as corrupt in a small-town setting, and there must have been many towns that had their now-forgotten versions of Thomas Nast.

M wrote: "I agree. What occurs to me is that, though the social and political dynamics of small towns differ in many ways from those of cities, human nature remains unchanged and merely adapts to its conditi..."

Exactly. Before my retirement as a litigation lawyer, I often represented public officials or private individuals in small towns—both in suburbs and in outlying rural areas. Without going into details, I can attest that human nature—both the good and the bad—is the same everywhere.

But small towns do not have the decadence that Rousseau is alluding to when he draws his conclusion. Wouldn't you all agree that's so?

Small American towns in the 1800s were oriented towards hard work and farming. No large profit-bearing firms; no sophistication, nothing cosmopolitan. No arts, no sciences; no modern ideas about the world. No foreigners. No discourse. If one disagrees with the rest of Rousseau's theory (re: Sparta), one ought to at least recognize the traditional community traits he is calling out, if we extend the analogy to America.

If you have an American town which does contains some big business --as Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, or Upton Sinclair usually describe, that's really a later variation on a theme. Those authors delineate the shift in living patterns between the 1800s and the 1900s. Of course, 'Elmer Gantry' satirizes evangelists, but in that story it is Gantry himself who is 'worldly', not the people he preys upon.

Are there flawed small-towns in Twain, Cooper, or Hawthorn? In Whitman? In Arthur Miller? Yes, certainly. Flaws like "small-mindedness" and "rigidity". "Conformity". But no especial 'decadence' that I can recall. Compared to what Henry James, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald, or John Dos Passos later show us? Pretty wide gap. I suggest that it's pretty safe to say that the parallel to what Rousseau outlines arose in earnest in the Gilded Age and the rise of big business thereafter; the era of titans like Rockefeller. We started with 'gentleman farmers' (so admired by Thomas Jefferson) and wound up with things like the teapot-dome scandal and the successive Wall Street crashes of the 1870s ...onward, until you reach the drastic disparities described by John Steinbeck.

Even so--even in these very modern times-- you can find the virtues of American small town life very well narrated by writers like Garrison Keillor. It still exists to remind us. The issue recurs every political yr with bizarre experiments like 'Great Divide, retro vs metro'. (I definitely don't like the crude reduction-ism of that theory, mind you..)

Feliks wrote: "But small towns do not have the decadence that Rousseau is alluding to when he draws his conclusion. Wouldn't you all agree that's so?"

Since I have not read Rousseau's essay for about fifty years and don't have time to reread it right now (I'm preoccupied with other reading), I cannot recall in detail what he said about Athens and the modern Enlightenment in Europe (which he opposed for the same reasons). But, as you acknowledge, decadence is not the only vice. Small, rural towns have their own vices. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay persecuted religious dissenters—whipping Baptists, executing Quakers, and banishing Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others, all on the ground of religion (this was decades before the Salem witch trials, and witchcraft was not the issue). Williams, a deeply religious and ethical Christian minister, founded the town of Providence and later helped found what became the colony of Rhode Island on the basis of separation of church and state and complete freedom of conscience. But he was confronted, even in his own colony, with land-grabbing men whose greed knew no bounds, including breaking faith with the Native Americans. Williams had to deal with many people who can only be described as scoundrels; some of them were original settlers with him in Providence. These people were not city slickers; they were rural men who were originally quite poor. For further details about these developments, see my book The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience.

The nineteenth-century American farmer did not lead an idyllic life, especially on the frontier. Life was very hard, particularly for the women and children. I have read one or more books on this, but I can't remember which ones they are right now. And this way of life was based on the appropriation of Native American land and the wars that resulted from such theft. Not to mention slavery, which was described so well by Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn.

Feliks wrote: "Even so--even in these very modern times-- you can find the virtues of American small town life very well narrated by writers like Garrison Keillor."

Lake Wobegon never existed. To the extent, if any, that it was modeled on an actual Minnesota town, any such town is long gone and will never be resurrected. I know, because I grew up (1950s and 1960s) in a small rural Minnesota town that, for all practical purposes, would have been Lake Wobegon (Keillor is four years older than I). In reality, my town was more like Peyton Place. It should be noted that Keillor never actually lived in a rural small town. He grew up in Anoka, which is a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul (my sister lived and taught school in Anoka for more than a decade). That said, Keillor is one of my favorites. He did get many things right about Minnesota culture. His radio program included many inside Minnesota jokes that no one other than a native Minnesotan like myself would get, though his program was widely listened to by people around the United States. And his character sketches were hilarious. But his fictional town was a gentle, idealized vision of small-town culture. Keillor is now retired from his program. I saw him a few months ago, when he did a presentation in western Pennsylvania. He is a remarkable artist for whom I have a great deal of respect.

Keillor performed his weekly radio program at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, and he greatly admires Fitzgerald, who grew up in St. Paul. The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel, and I think this may be because Fitzgerald and I had a similar Midwestern background. Notwithstanding Fitzgerald's wild, alcoholic, artsy, metropolitan life in the 1920s, I think that he represented his own essential soul in the character of Nick Carraway in Gatsby. Carraway came from a "Middle Western city . . . ." The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), 2, 177 (1995 Scribner Paperback Fiction "Authorized Text" edition: 7, 184). Carraway is the ultimate moral observer of all the insanity of 1920s excess. Near the end of the novel, Carraway remarks that one of the unseemly characters in that novel was "rid of my provincial squeamishness forever." Ibid., 181 (188). But Fitzgerald saved the best for last: the final page is an exquisite commentary on American history and culture that I have read perhaps a hundred times.

Yes, Fitzgerald contrasted New York decadence with "provincial squeamishness," though he portrayed "the Middle Western city" (certainly his home town of St. Paul) as having Midwestern values. It was not urban versus rural for him as much as it was moral values. All the main characters—good and bad—in the novel came from the Midwest. Ibid., 177 (184). Moreover, as the last page of the novel reveals, the acquisitive passions that were so evident in the 1920s have always been part of American culture, including rural American culture. As I noted above, Roger Williams experienced the same issue in seventeenth-century Rhode Island.

Feliks wrote (post 14): "We started with 'gentleman farmers' (so admired by Thomas Jefferson) . . . ."

These "gentlemen farmers" were slaveholders. Similarly, the Spartans enslaved (and brutally treated) the Helots. Plato referenced this brutality in The Laws. As a antidote to Rousseau's rosy picture of Sparta, I suggest you read The Laws. Sparta was an authoritarian regime similar to one of the dystopian regimes (I can't remember the name) depicted in Star Trek. Plato knew whereof he spoke.

Actually, Jefferson admired "yeoman farmers," though it's not clear to me whether any such farmers actually existed in Virginia in his time. There were a few smaller farmers in Virginia, but most of them owned at least one or two slaves.

Just a few comments because I haven't read the piece and I don't have the time at the moment.
Decadence as a word generally meant simply "to fall back" or "recede" in Rousseau's day and the word didn't tend to have attached the moral implication of moral decay and turpitude that it has now. That moral connotation arrived in the mid to late 1800's. So if Rousseau used the word 'decadence' he would have meant it to mean to "return to an earlier position". I suspect that the the use of 'decadence' is from a more contemporary translator of Rousseau into English. Which version describes Rousseau's intention I don't know. I will say that Rousseau was a lot better at evoking sympathy and 'sesnsibilite' than he was at factual accuracy and he showed himself politically to be cloth eared and naive.

With regard to Harl's book it looks at the war as a whole and he certainly wouldn't agree with a charge of decadence as the reason the Athenian's lost the war. I'd characterise his view as there being two reasons for the Athenian loss. One strategic and one tactical.
Strategically because of where Athens was placed the smartest things to do was what Pericles advised. To wage limited war and rely on the empire to keep Athens stocked and the long walls to keep the hoplites out. They did this for the first half of the war (roughly 15 years) and they were winning. Look at the terms of the peace of Nicias. Once the second 15 years of intermittent war started up the Atenians got greedy and started to look to control of Sicily (previously Spartan influenced though not ruled). The Sicilian adventure was the tactical cause. The Athenian's lost over two thirds of their navy along with 30,000 oarsmen and suffered a terrible defeat at Syracuse where they lost 10,000 hoplites after a two day forced march and a slaughter. Without those ships, hoplites and crews the bolder, disaffected city states in the Athenian empire quickly switched sides.

So the Sicilian expedition was the proximate cause but the ultimate cause was in abandoning a defensive war they were winning for an aggressive war they couldn't.

Again with regard to Sparta's social construction Harl is not convinced of the Big Bad Sparta mythologising. His view is that it was certainly a conservative place but much of the more dramatic tales are just that. All that stuff about a period every year where the Spartan youth could murder any 'helot' with impunity and husbands having to go awol from the barracks to steal their wife from her parents home. All good Spartan propaganda. "Nobody is as tough as us!". "We eat glass!" They were conservative but like all Greeks they were master story tellers and propagandists.
Probably a lot like Alan's hometown. Rigidly conservative in religion and civic virtue but more relaxed in other ways and certainly not free of self mythologising and seeing them selves as the virtuous regardless of practice.
With regard to the Helots we have to recognise that all Greek states were slave states and I don't think being taken by Athenian's after a battle would have been any less traumatising than being taken by the Spartan's. We also know of many Helots who gained the status of free men within the Spartan state so again while I'm sure the original subjugation was awful, by the time of the Pelopennesian war the situation was no different and for many would have been better than being a slave in Athens.

Lastly Alan touched on the fact that Socrates was a big admirer of Sparta at least in his speech as it comes to us through Plato. As was Plato himself. As was in fact a significant part of the Athenian leadership group. The mercurial Alcibiades (a "student" of Socrates) led armies for Athens and then later for Sparta and lived in Sparta as other disaffected Athenian's did.
Spartan's were admired for being traditional, solid chaps! The suggestion that so much of the Athenian leadership admired some kind of proto fascist state doesn't really make a lot of sense. I can't imagine party boy Alcibiades there for more than a week unless a lot of the stories about gruel and black bread for dinner every night were more in the showing than in the doing. We know he had time to seduce King Agisus' wife while there so he was certainly not sleeping down the barracks with the boys. And I don't think Socrates refused to go to Sparta as much as he just wanted to be a martyr. But that's a different argument.

Gerard's preceding post contains some interesting points, especially about Athenian strategy and tactics in the Peloponnesian War.

I question, however, the conventional wisdom that Socrates and Plato were admirers of Sparta. See generally the text and commentary in The Laws of Plato, trans. and ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and the commentary in Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato's "Laws" (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 ). Although I read a different translation of the Laws decades ago, I am only part-way through the Pangle translation and commentary and have only read part of Strauss's commentary. My intention a few months ago was to complete my study of the Laws and related secondary materials before proceeding to other writings, but this resolution has changed: I am now focusing on studying ethics, reason, and (practical) logic in preparation for a substantial revision of my earlier book on ethics. After I finish the second edition of that book, I will return to political philosophy, in general, and the analysis of Plato's Laws in particular. For now, all my statements about that work are highly provisional.

With regard to the Helots, the Spartan character Megillus states at 633b-c in the Laws (Pangle translation):

"Then too, there is a practice called the 'secret service' [κρυπτεια], which is amazingly full of the sort of toils that instill endurance; they go barefoot and sleep without blankets in winter, and they have to take care of themselves without any servants as they wander by night as well as by day through the whole territory."

With reference to this passage, Pangle notes: "This krupteia was a practice which seems to have involved a systematic terrorism exercised over the enslaved Helot population. The details were kept secret, partly out of a sense of shame, for the cruelty brought opprobrium from other Greeks. See Plutarch Lycurgus xxviii . . . ." Pangle, in Laws, ed. Pangle, 515n31.

By the way, Plato's dialogues show that Socrates was highly critical of Alcibiades. The fact that certain people hung around Socrates does not mean that Socrates approved of them. The dialogues are full of evidence to the contrary.

I was under the impression that Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average" was more irony than admiration. "The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." It's called "illusory superiority."

Mimi wrote: "I was under the impression that Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon 'where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average' was more irony than admiration. 'The little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve.' It's called 'illusory superiority.'"

Exactly! Keillor was a master storyteller, and he did not pretend that Lake Wobegon was anything more than his fictional creation. Although his sketches revealed many things about Minnesota culture, they did not attempt a historical portrait of an actual town. Indeed, since Keillor never lived in a remote rural Minnesota town, he wouldn't have had sufficient knowledge of what life was actually like in one. And even if he had researched the matter, the gory details wouldn't have been sufficiently entertaining to put on a popular radio program. He loved to poke fun at the fictional inhabitants of Lake Wobegon, and he was successful at many levels in doing just that. But it must always be kept in mind that Lake Wobegon was fiction, not historical fact.

Time for some gentle sarcasm. Its the only answer possible to the above.

To begin: small town America is a complete myth. There are no such midwesterners and Keillor is an utter fantasist. His musings carry no resonance with anyone. Keillor makes up his stories out of whole cloth. You can't tune in PBS radio any Sunday and hear his popular live shows, where audiences in places like Red Cloud MN, join in with him (completely impromptu) and sing hymns with him anytime his skits call for it. No one was ever raised that way. The voices of hundreds of audience members, as they sing obscure fundamentalist hymns, must be faked sound effects. Or they were hired voice artists. No one could know the words to such out-of-date, religious-tinted, middle-American songs. No one identifies with what he portrays. Not even Lutherism or Unitarianism or Calvinism, really exists. There is no modesty or reticence at all in American life. It has always been an entirely cosmopolitan and sophisticated country. William Saroyan, James Thurber, Bertrand Brinley, Willa Cather, Ferrol Sams, Owen Johnson, Ivan Doig, Kate Chopin, Harriet Arnow, Carson McCullers, Reynolds Price, Owen Wister, Thornton Wilder, Vilhelm Moberg, Meredith Wilson --all these authors who ever documented middle-America-- are complete fabrications. America never had a homespun rural life.

Okay...

Feliks wrote: "Time for some gentle sarcasm. Its the only answer possible to the above.

To begin: small town America is a complete myth. There are no such midwesterners and Keillor is an utter fantasist. His mu..."

It's St. Cloud, not Red Cloud. Yes, of course, we old-time Minnesotans (and most of Garrison Keillor's audience were old-timers) know all the hymns. They were drilled into our brains throughout our youth. My wife and I (both raised Lutherans, though she is not a Minnesotan) go to church every Christmas Eve with her mother. We don't need a hymnal; we know all the hymns by heart even though we have only gone to church once a year (if that) for decades.

There was, indeed, such a thing as rural culture, and I knew it very well, having lived there for the first eighteen years of my life and for several summers after I started going to college in Chicago. But it is not the idealized utopia of the fiction writers (who mostly wrote in earlier decades). It is the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the kind of rural culture in which I grew up and especially the kind of rural culture in which my parents grew up hardly exists in that form anymore. In my work as a lawyer, I often represented public officials and others in rural areas. The rural culture that exists today is different from the rural culture of my youth and probably vastly different from the rural cultures of my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents. The rural culture that exists today elected Donald Trump as president. During my youth, Trump would have been considered the antithesis of rural and small town values and would never have received the votes of the people who lived in such areas, let alone their religious leaders. But times have changed. By their fruits ye shall know them, as Jesus famously said.

“Trump and His Advisers Clearly Haven’t Actually Read Thucydides”

The foregoing is the title of this May 18, 2026 column (gift article) by Lydia Polgreen: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/op....

A few months back I bought the Landmark Thucydides on sale, mainly for the apparatus. I have disliked the Crawley translation since I read it, or tried to read it, in a standalone Modern Library edition in High School, circa 1967-68. I got ambitious after reading the de Selincourt translation of Herodotus (Penguin Classics). I expected Thucydides to be harder, but not to resist understanding on the level of English. I eventually got a Penguin Thucydides, which was easier going but not well supported by aides to the reader: later Penguin printings seem to have added some.

I have sampled the Hobbes translation; his English is much more vigorous, but my classes in seventeenth-century English literature, including Leviathan, may be helping.

Glad to see a fresh mention of Thucydides in these troubled times