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Comment by aestetix | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree with this article at all.

If we cannot judge a work without knowing anything about the author, then how are we supposed to judge works like the Iliad and the Odyssey?

Sometimes knowing the bias of an author can impact how our present biases color our own views. For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians. However, this does not change the quality of the work itself, but merely how we perceive it.

I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history. To me, that is trying to dismiss a work by attacking the character of the person who wrote it.

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The older I've gotten, the more I've become aware that history is simply a matter of trust. No matter who you're dealing with, a large group of people will ignore facts or historical details simply on the basis of deciding that they don't trust the source.

It's probably the main reason that people spend so much time attacking news outlets rather than the specific stories coming out of them (ie, Fox/CNN) to call out a specific bias.

It just means that if you actually want the entire picture, you're going to have to go look for it and then look up citations yourself. In theory, something like Wikipedia should be the ideal way to handle this but even then you end up with "edit wars" as people actively work to remove details with valid citations.

As a reader of a subject where you don't already deeply know the information, you have no way of knowing what's missing. This allows people to selectively include facts while leaving out others. All the "facts" may well be accurate, but the author has opted to skew the context.

I call it the Bob and Tim rule.

"Tim punched Bob."

"Bob punched Tim."

"Tim and Bob shook hands and made up."

If you only report "Bob punched Tim", you've shared a fact but entirely skewed the context and that's why knowing an author's bias matters. It can give you an idea of how much harder you need to look for what's missing.

The simple rule I've adopted when reading any headline or history that includes something bad that a person or country did is to ask, "What caused them to do that? Why?" Cause and effect works with history too. Read history with a lens where you assume people are good by default and ask "Why" when people do something that seems bad/evil. It will often point you in the direction where you need to be digging a lot more to get the complete picture.

>For example, most people these days who read Thucydides' Melian Dialogue would assume the correct conclusion is to side with Melos, and it's often a shock that Thucydides himself sided with the Athenians.

Can you please elaborate what you mean by this? Thucydides, being a native Athenian, obvious fought on the side of the Delian League/Athenian Empire; that isn't so much a choice as a natural course of action, the allegiance to your family/polis being a central part of the identity of the Hellenes. His history of the war was written after he went into exile, and written in a largely neutral way. In fact Thucydides went out of his way to paint certain Athenians, such as Cleon in a very negative light, and was very positive on certain Spartan generals such as Brasidas.

The placing of the Melian Dialogue is particularly interesting not just because it's the only dialogue in the whole work, but because it was immediately before the end of the book, and the following book deals exclusively with the disastrous Sicilian expedition of Athens. Readers going through the work in order would read about the arrogance of the Athenian delegates in the dialogue, directly before reading the absolute misery of the Athenians sent on the Sicilian expedition where they were eventually completely destroyed. It's easy to get the impression that the Athenians have been hoisted by their own petard, and it seems reasonable that is precisely what Thucydides the historian want us to take away from it. Not that the expedition was depicted without sympathy to the Athenian soldiers, the two battles of the Great Harbour of Syracuse contains some of the most gut wrenching scenes of battle ever written in a history, and it's painful to read even now because of the masterful way Thucydides records the despair that have taken over the Athenians by the end of the second battle when their fate was sealed.

Given this larger context, I don't think it is reasonable to say Thucydides "sides with the Athenians" in the Melian Dialogue. It is true he did not record his own moral judgement on the events in the work, but the structure of the history suggests that he certainly did not support what Athens did to Melos.

I was hoping for a response like this!

First, regarding Cleon. I think it's important to ask why Thycydides didn't like Cleon. I would argue that it had nothing to do with regret of Athenian Empire, and more to do with the fact that he wasn't Pericles. It is clear to me that Thucydides believes that if Pericles had still been alive, Athens would have won the war. I believe he viewed Cleon as sub-par and undeserving.

Regarding Brasidas, one argument is that he spoke more highly of him because he had more information about him, seeing as he (Thucydides) was exiled to Sparta. I'll be honest, it's been a few years since I read the book and I don't fully remember his accounting of Brasidas, so maybe I need to revisit it.

One important thing you don't mention is his treatment of Alcibiades. He is very harsh on him, treats him as a bit of a rich kid playboy, who uses his charisma and ego to bully the Athenians into the Sicilian expedition in the first place. I would argue that Thucydides blamed the failure of the expedition, and thus the downfall of the Athenian empire, on Alcibiades. This is especially clear to me if you look at how Thucydides treats Nicias, who in many ways was Alcibiades' counterpoint.

For these reasons, I would actually argue that Thucydides viewed the Athenian empire as great, the Melians as indignant peons, and was very sad to see the collapse of the empire.

Very interesting points! I admit that my interpretation is very much coloured by the excellent introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of the Histories written by P.J. Rhodes. I believe Thucydides was far too cynical to buy into the propaganda, and was less than wholly enthusiastic about the way Athens conducted the war, as the placing of the Melian Dialogue directly before the Sicilian Expedition showed. The prominence of Pericles' funeral oration certainly showed that he did not lack pride in his native polis.

The animosity towards Cleon is definitely related to the stark contrast with Pericles, and there's no doubt Thucydides mourned Pericles' death. On the other hand the capture of the Spartans on Sphacteria was due to Cleon, whether it was up to luck or not, and although his attempt on Amphipolis was unsuccessful he paid with his life. These two events largely ended the first phase of the war on grounds more or less favourable to the Athenians, so I would say Cleon doesn't deserve the extra ire directed at him by Thucydides, Athens certainly had worse generals.

Speaking of which, the portrayal of Alcibiades is indeed also very negative (and in my opinion well deserved). Whether or not the presence of Alcibiades himself in the expedition would have changed the outcome is an open question, but his removal was due to political intrigue (democratic politics is always messy) and hardly his own fault. Anyway he carries the family curse so can't be too harsh on him :).

The point of your original post was that historians biases colour our own views. I think the fact that we spent all this effort here trying to guess what Thucydides might or might not have felt about certain things is in itself a testament of the neutrality of his work. It is very difficult to paint him as a partisan purely from the text in his own works, so in this case I believe Thucydides is actually a counterexample to the original argument.

My argument was that the Sicilian expedition would not have happened without Alcibiades.

Also, the point of my original post was that a bias might color our views, but that's different from doing a character assassination like I believe the article did on Gibbon.

BTW, happy to discuss this more via email, nobody reads Thucydides anymore :/

I personally wanted to thank you both for opening my eyes a little. It has been a while since I questioned my own assumptions when it comes to literature.

This is basically why I visit HN.

I think this deserves a better response.

I remain convinced that Thucydides remained siding with the Athenians, even after his exile. I have a few reasons.

First, the question of why he even wrote the history in the first place. He starts the book by saying that he started writing it when the war broke out (not after, as you said before), because he believed it would be greater than any war before it. Not because he thought the Athenian empire had gone too far, and not because the Spartans (or the colonies) deserved better treatment. Now much ink has been spilled about why the war (specifically Corcyra) happened, and whether it could have been prevented, but even if he were asking that question, that's again different from saying the Athenians went too far.

Second, while it is true that the Melian Dialogue is the only dialogue, it is not the only place where grand speeches are made. In fact, you could consider the Corcyra drama (between Athens, Sparta, and Cocrya) a dialogue of sorts, it's just not presented that way. So while it is true that he changed the format of delivery for the Dialogue, I don't think it's reasonable to assume he offered it more importance, and thus sided with Melos.

Third, the work is not only unfinished, but it ends mid-sentence. To carry through until the actual end of the war (404 BC), you need to pick up Xenophon. We have no way of knowing if there would be another dialogue, or if Thucydides would come out explicitly taking a side one way or another.

Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war. Most of the colonies were quite happy with Athens protecting them from Xerxes, and it wasn't until Athens moved the treasury away from Delos that things got bad. And consider all the great things that came out of Athens: greek theatre, philosophy, mathematics, etc. Sparta offered none of this. In fact, most of the things we know about Sparta come from Athenian sources.

Therefore, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that Thucydides generally sided with Athens, and if anything, his issues were not with the empire, but with people like Cleon and Alcibiades, who (I imagine) he'd argue were not deserving of their titles, and dragged the wonderful empire into ruin.

However, I have not read the piece by P.J. Rhodes, so I will check that out.

You have some very detailed reasons why Thucydides would side with the Athenians; I appreciate that.

> Finally, if you want to argue that he'd say the Athenian empire was dangerous, I'd need a good reason as to why. Consider how it came into being, as a result of the Persian war.

Thucydides himself would have been very close to the halls of power in the conflict against Persia, if sources are correct that he is related to Miltiades, the Athenian general whom was one of 10 strategoi at Marathon. (how he is related is uncertain; wikipedia seems to suggest his father Olorus also had a daughter (so Thucydides had a sister) who married Miltiades, making Miltiades his brother in law. But this is uncertain; it could very well be that Thucydides father and great grandfather, or uncle etc were named "Olorus". Nonetheless the sources about Thucydides being from a well to do family with interests in mines and being from Thrace are agreed upon)

Thucydides, like many of our learned in the past few thousand years, attempts to present himself as a "just the facts" narrator (a counterpoint to his crazy other, Herodotus, who unabashedly presents the will of the gods, oracular prophecies, dreams, etc all intertwined in a tale seemingly spun by your drunk grandfather). As to your question why he thought the Athenian empire was dangerous... Leo Strauss, who in City+Man noticed that Thucydides has a habit of detailing the aftermath of the Sicilian Expedition in terms of all the "natural destruction" (floods, earthquakes, famines etc) that befell Athens after the Expedition, thought that the timing was not incidental.

I'll argue that knowing the author's life may only color our judgement of a poem, but can drastically alter our judgement of a history.

I think of this essay by Bret Devereaux a lot, where he talks about the propaganda behind Roman histories. If you read Tacitus's Germania without any context, you might never know that's just a bad, second- or third-hand description of the Germanic peoples, and that he very likely never traveled there.

https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

The research on the oral transmission of epic poems should meaningfully affect how you read/think about the Iliad and The Odyssey. Further, the absence of knowledge about Homer himself is useful information (you might even try to use the text itself to make inferences about Homer but that is complicated by the oral transmission).

I agree that there are limits though (what the author had for breakfast on his/her third birthday is probably uninteresting wrt to the text). Drawing the line is necessarily hard.

This article is a book review, so it seems what you are saying is you disagree with the author of the book, Cohen.

As for your comments about Gibbon, I don't recall this review mentioning his sex life, unless you mean him getting reject for marriage? The main idea was that he was short, fat, and unappealing, what with his enlarged scrotum and such. As for why this might impact his history, it is said in this review:

"And what about the poor fellow’s body and its sad infirmities? Cohen thinks (as Woolf did) that his unattractiveness provided Gibbon with an impenetrable cloak of irony. He learned to keep his emotional expectations in check, and this made him a cool analyst of religious zeal."

In my opinion the article seemed to agree with the book. So while I obviously disagree with the book, I also disagree with the book reviewer.

And regarding the comment about how he kept emotions in check, are there other reasons he might have done so? David Hume also wrote a famous history book, how did the author compare Gibbon to Hume? And did Hume have similar sex issues?

I don't want to know the answers to those questions, I am simply saying that I think the author of the book is allowing personal opinion to get in the way. Which is rather ironic, considering the topic at hand.

> I would agree to the extent that knowing the authors bias might color the text, and that we could infer a more nuanced and realistic picture from that knowledge. But I see no way that Gibbon's sex life (or lack thereof) should influence how we approach his history.

This.

The example that’s used in the article seems extreme and the author of the article is not elaborating on how this connection is made. Could be true could be not.

Also, I can add from personal experience that you don’t need to know the author to judge an artwork but knowing the author helps you connect to the art on a whole different level. As another example, first listen to Beethoven’s symphony No. 5 and then read about his personality traits and struggles in life, etc. it is fantastic. This is art of course and history might be another matter in which the artist’s credibility is in question.

I strongly agree with you. I find it disturbing that, in approaching their work this way, critics put themselves above their subject (the texts and the authors). I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who engage in literature and history like this produce inferior work.

> I don't think it's a coincidence that the people who engage in literature and history like this produce inferior work.

yo HOW is this not "put themselves above their subjects" right here?? You drop it as just granted and accepted by all that these works (which works, even?) are inferior.

You've got a lot of work to do if this line is to be taken seriously.

For those who have downvoted me, could you grant the courtesy of explaining why?

Looks like a quality comment to me.

But some will reduce it to:

vote(-isProblematic(wokePerceptualHash(“separate art from artist”)));

So we can't understand the writing without a writing about the writing?

You see how that goes.

When I write, I strive to deliver a complete package with zero dependencies.

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