Book Two, Letter Nine

Part 5 of 6

To Thucydides, on men, women, and democracy.

I think I might now understand why you don't write about women. I found this towards the end of your book, in the seventeenth year of the war. The city of Athens was being directly besieged by the Spartans, and it had gone on for a whole year. You say this of the people of Athens:

“They were deprived of the whole of their country; more than 20,000 slaves, the majority of whom were skilled workmen, had deserted, and all the sheep and farm animals were lost”

“Every single thing that the city needed had to be imported, so that instead of a city it became a fortress.”

“...yet now in the seventeenth year after the first (Spartan) invasion, having suffered every kind of hardship already in the war, here were the Athenians going out to Sicily and taking upon themselves another war on the same scale as that which they had been waging all this time with the Peloponnesians” (Book 7, Chapter 2)

You don't have to mention women. Athens, emptied of the men who were away fighting, emptied of slaves who had deserted, emptied of all but the women and children and elderly, locked in their homes in a siege lasting more than a year. I think, Thucydides, that you don't want to mention women because their story is simply too terrible to relate. I'm not even going to talk about the early plague years, long before the siege. By Book Seven, you seem disgusted by the ongoing futility of this war of attrition, so disgusted that you actually relax from your cool, mostly objective political narrative, to tell us the tragedy of Mycalessus.

The Athenians, occupied with the simultaneous invasions of Sicily and Lacadaemon (Sparta), hired Thracian mercenaries to conduct raids along the coast through the Euripus. When they came to the city of Mycalessus, they “...at daybreak assaulted the city, which is not a big one, and captured it...”

“The Thracians burst into Mycalessus, sacked the houses and temples, and butchered the inhabitants, sparing neither the young nor the old, but methodically killing everyone they met, women and children alike, and even the farm animals and every living thing they saw. For the Thracian race, like all the most bloodthirsty barbarians, are always particularly bloodthirsty when everything is going their own way. So now there was confusion on all sides and death in every shape and form. Among other things, they broke into a boys' school, the largest in the place, into which the children had just entered, and killed every one of them. The disaster fell upon the entire city, a disaster more complete that any, more sudden and more horrible.”

“It was a small city, but in the disaster just described its people suffered calamities as pitiable as any which took place during the war.” (Book 7, Chapter 2)

                                                       Thracian Swords

                                                    Thracian warriors

So I've found my answer. Where are the women? They are in their homes being killed and raped and kidnapped and sold as slaves, just as they have been in every war. I think now that you didn't write about women because there was little more to say about them, other than what you describe in this tragedy of Mycalessus. I can forgive you this omission. What need is there to say what everyone already knows about war? Instead, you restrict yourself to the political facts, the military manoeuvres, the speeches and the chronology of calamity. These specific names and details are unique to your time, to your war, to your culture, the rest is too common, and too terrible to bear mentioning.

This Peloponnesian war seems driven by a very masculine nationalistic pride, in defence of the honour of a warrior code. In reality, it is driven by greed and ambition and fear and any claims to virtue made by the combatants seem ridiculous. Pretty words and clever speeches whitewash over the grim truth. Men are not the stronger sex. They never have been, and if the news reports of my own time are any evidence, they never will be. Men seem so insecure as to be easily manipulated by pride and shame, and in their insecurity, commit crimes of violence in order to save face. The ideologies we men believe in are all too often the result of momentary politics, and the wars we fight in so often seem more like crimes of passion, than quests for justice.

If for you, Thucydides, you believe that the greater glory of women is to be least talked about by men, whether in praise or criticism, then their glory is in written all throughout your book in their undocumented endurance.

The women survived, they prevailed with glory to tell their story in stoic silence, while all the praise that could be heaped upon the military and political leaders of your time, will never cover over the shameful crimes they committed in the name of honour, courage, valour, democracy, freedom and justice. All of those words feel hollow now, like propaganda slogans.

Sometimes I get carried away, I know. I'm looking at this through a very modern a lens. I tend to look at history with a feminist filter, and I know that it clouds my vision, like any filter does. Is there really anything implied by your choice to not document the lives of prominent women during the war? I don't know enough about ancient Greece, but it seems that stories of prominent women should have been worthy of your attention. Is your choice, your very careful choice, to include that little detail about women in Pericles speech, your way of saying, through the absence of any other mention of women, that you thought them worthy of the glory of not being inferior to what God made them?

What did God make women, Thucydides?

I think God made them strong.

*

I found this in “Earth Abides”, a post apocalypse science fiction novel written in 1950, by George R Stewart. In this scene, the male protagonist is silently contemplating the strength of his female partner, particularly her courage in wanting to bring children into the world.

“Yes, he thought humbly, that strong courage was his only at great moments - with her it was part of daily life.”

Man's courage seems fleeting, momentary. A valiant charge against the enemy, the stoic endurance of hardship while on the march. Women's courage is displayed every day, in every living moment and activity. Their daily lives require the kind of courage that men generally do not recognise. Perhaps that is a one sided a way of looking at the issue. I think that men and women often do not recognise the courage and virtues of the other gender, we misunderstand each other, we are ignorant of the other's struggles. I wonder what gains might be made if men learned more of women's history, and women learned more of men's? For all too often their stories run parallel, and learning only of one, can leave the student nescient of the other.

*

Oh, another thing Thucydides, I have also been reading the Richard Crawley translation of your book, and in his version of the speech of Pericles, he does not use the word God in the above statement about women. (Book 2, Paragraph 45) Instead, Crawley writes:

“On the other hand, if I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will all be comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character...”

What is the natural character of women?

I think that the message is the same.