The unexpected consequences of war. Thucydides on the relationship between war, civil war and the degradation of language

Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 The Unexpected Consequences of War. Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language1 Las inesperadas consecuencias de la guerra. Acerca de la relación entre guerra, guerra civil y degradación del lenguaje en Tucídides Dino Piovan2 Università di Verona (Italia) Recibido: 30-11-16 Aprobado: 15-01-17 Abstract In this paper I intend to provide an analysis of Thucydides’s account of war in the third section of his historical work (3.82-83). Despite some of his early commentators accused him of a certain obscurity, the notions of polemos and stasis he introduces in this text deserve to be discussed and can give a number of insights into the problem of civil war in Western history. My core argument is that there is a clear analogy between Thucydides’s concept of stasis, from one hand, and Simone Weil’s reflexions on totalitarianism and Klemperer’s notebook on Nazi language, from the other hand. In this perspective, not only violence but also propaganda as a manipulation of language are important characteristics of stasis. Key-words: Thucydides, Political Violence, Civil War, Totalitarianism, Fascism. 1 Different drafts of this text were read in the conference series Classics Against 2015: War Theatres, the first one in Venice at St. Margherita Theater and the second one at the University of Trento; a shorter Italian version is now being printed (Piovan 2017). I thank those who organized both conferences and in particular Giorgio Ieranò for his wonderful welcome and for the stimulating debate in Trento. I also thank my friend Lucy Simonato for helping me to revise the English text and both the editors of this monograph section on Thucydides, Carlo Marcaccini and Antonis Tsakmakis. 2 ([email protected]) Dino Piovan got the national scientific qualification as an university professor in Greek language and literature in 2013, after studying in Italy (University of Padova, Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici of Napoli, University of Pisa) and abroad (Wien, Münich in BayernLMU, London-UCL). At the moment he is teaching Greek at the University of Verona. Among other things, he published a commentary to Lysias’ speech 25 (Padova, 2009) and the book Memoria e oblio della guerra civile (Pisa, 2011). 182 Dino Piovan Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 Resumen En este artículo pretendo aportar un análisis del relato de Tucídides de la guerra en la tercera sección de su obra histórica (3.82-83). A pesar de que algunos de sus primeros comentadores le acusaron de cierta oscuridad, las nociones de polemos y statis que él introduce en este texto merecen ser discutidas y pueden proporcionar ideas nuevas sobre el problema de la guerra civil en la historia de Occidente. Mi principal argumento es que existe una clara analogía entre el concepto de stasis de Tucídides, por un lado, y las reflexiones de Simone Weil sobre el totalitarismo y el cuaderno de Klemperer acerca del vocabulario Nazi, por otro. Dentro de esta perspectiva, no sólo la violencia, sino también la propaganda como manipulación del lenguaje son características importantes de stasis. Palabras-clave: Tucídides, violencia política, guerra civil, totalitarismo, fascismo. ὁ πόλεμος βίαιος διδάσκαλος: “war is a violent teacher”, and also (more to it below) “war is a teacher of violence”. So Thucydides writes at 3.82 in a sentence where the verb is elided, which gives an authoritative tone to his style. Chapters 82-83 of the third book have a particular importance in Thucydides’s xyngraphe, the term that he himself uses to define his work and which is normally translated as “history”3. As only rarely happens, Thucydides suspends his usually stark and sober narrative of events in order to draw an impressive outline of the consequences of stasis, “civil war”, in many Greek cities. Before those chapters Thucydides describes the slaughter in Corcyra, caused by the violent conflict between democrats and oligarchs, triggered, or at least fostered, by the growing trend to bipolarization that invaded all the Greek world during the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC). The detailed account of those murders becomes a classical example of the general unrest in Greece, therefore it inevitably becomes a subject of the historian’s meditation. It is a part of that ktema eis aiei, the “possession for ever”, which Thucydides wants to deliver to his readers (cf. 1.22.4). His writing is here so hermetic and dense that even Greek native speakers in antiquity found it difficult to understand; even Dionysios of Halicarnassus, the famous rhetor and literary critic of the Augustan age, found it obscure4. This is probably the reason why this piece is hardly present in school books; one can find just some passages which are normally isolated from their 3 To be true also chapter 3.84 deals with the negative consequences of stasis, but since antiquity most scholars have not considered it as original, even if someone tends to believe it as authentic, e.g. Polacco 2000-2001, whose general argument that Thucydides composed these chapters as a selfdefense from the charge of treason does not convince at all. 4 See Dion. Hal., On Thucydides, 28; cf. to it the accurate analysis of Macleod 1979, 60-64, who argues that the rhetor of Augustean age did not understand Thucydides’s critical passages. Dionysios’s judgement is however shared by Polacco 2000-2001: 293. 183 The Unexpected Consequences of War Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 context and incomprehensible to young readers. This is in sharp contrast with the influence that the passage had on later authors, like Plato, but also non-Greek ones, like Sallustius5. Certainly this page demands a slow reading, or rather more than one reading only. In this paper only some of the most significant paragraphs of this famous section will be read in order to enlighten the relationship between polemos, ‘war’, and stasis in Thucydides’s thought6. (1) So the savage strife proceeded, and, because this was the first example of it, it seemed even worse than it was; later, practically the whole of the Greek world was in commotion, because in every state quarrels gave occasion to the democratic leaders to ask for aid from Athens, to the oligarchs to ask Sparta. In peace time, without the excuse and indeed without the readiness to summon them <they would settle their differences without fighting>; but in war and with an alliance at hand for either side, to injure their enemies and get more strength for themselves, request intervention were easily made by those ready for revolution. (2) Many were the calamities which befell the Greek states through this civil strife: they happened then and will happen again so long as human nature remains the same, with greater or less violence and varying only according to the changing conditions in each state. In peace and in prosperous times, both states and individuals are better disposed because they are not oppressed by inescapable wants; but war, destroying the ease of everyday life, is a violent taskmaster; and assimilates most men’s tempers to the conditions around them (Thuc. 3.82.1-2). Here each word is carefully thought and chosen, from the beginning: Οὕτως ὠμὴ <ἡ> στάσις προυχώρησε, “so the savage strife proceeded”. The adjective ὠμὴ, “savage”, literally “raw”, rarely used in Thucydides, refers to the opposition between raw and cooked that is a part of the food code of the Greeks and has had a highly symbolic value since the Cyclops passage in Odyssea IX, that is to say the opposition between barbarians and Greeks. This fact suggests that stasis is a decisive landmark to barbarity. The verb προυχώρησε, “proceeded”, usually means “to go ahead”, “to move forward”, and appears also at the beginning of Thucydides’s work (1.16) in the so-called archaiologia, the “ancient history” of Greece, to denote the material progress of early Hellas, a progress that now has revealed itself as misleading. As to stasis, this is a noun which does not find an appropriate equivalent in any of the modern languages, so that it is 5 Cf. Pl., Resp. 560 d-e; Sall., Cat. 52.11; see Müri 1969: 73-77, for a wide overview of the reception of this Thucydidean passage. 6 This quotation is from Gomme’s English translation (Gomme 1956: 383-385). Incidentally, Gomme’s commentary is still fundamental when reading and understanding Thucydides; a very useful updating is Hornblower 1991. Recent English translations are Hammond 2009 and Mynott 2013. Translations in other languages have also been consulted: the French one is Weil, de Romilly’s 1967, the Italian ones are Cagnetta’s, included in Canfora 1986, and Moggi’s 1984. The bibliography on these Thucydidean chapters is vast so this paper has focussed on the most relevant essays; besides the already quoted commentaries of Gomme and Hornblower, Edmunds 1975; Macleod 1979; Connor 1984: 95-105; Loraux 1986; Orwin 1994: 175-182; Price 2001: 6-78; Hawthorn 2014: 96-101. 184 Dino Piovan Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 often improperly translated as “sedition” or “revolt”, or even “revolution”7. It may seem paradox that stasis is derived from a verb that indicates a state and not a movement, namely histemi, “to make to stand, to set up” and “to stand”; consequently stasis is, literally, the stance that splits the citizens in two opposite parties to be involved in a conflict, an armed clash, or even a civil strife as in this case8. πᾶν ὡς εἰπεῖν τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐκινήθη, “practically the whole of the Greek world was in commotion”: here the verb is ekinethe from kineo, “to move”, that unavoidably recalls kinesis, ‘motion, movement’, a key term of Thucydides’s proem (cf. 1.1.2). Maybe it is exactly this passage from the third book that makes a proper understanding of the phrase in the proem possible: kinesis, the ‘motion’ which his work is dedicated to, does not concern only the military dimension of the city-states in war, that is battles and deads, victories and defeats, but it is a phenomenon that permeates society as the whole and the individual man in his soul; it is a civil, moral, psychological and even linguistic turmoil, as it will be soon seen. There are some repeated words in the original Greek text as the syntagma ἐν εἰρήνῃ, “in peace”. In peace, it is said, the leaders of the opposing factions do not dare to call for help from the foreign powers, Athens and Sparta, because they had no ground nor they were ready, that is to say they did not think at all about that. Here Thucydides refers to what was happening inside the Greek city-states; it does not mean that all went well in peace time or there was no conflict at all inside the poleis, but that it was just the war that created the conditions which brought internal divisions to deteriorate, to the point that tensions became overwhelming and violence erupted. Thucydides’s focus extends beyond the space of to hellenikon, the world inhabited by Greek people, so to include the human condition in its entirety: ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, “so long as human nature remains the same” (a sentence which will be discussed further late on). In peace and prosperity times the poleis and the people are better, the Greek expression sounds so: they have better gnomai. The word gnome can be translated in different ways, as “intelligence”, or in a less abstract way as “judgement”, “opinion”, even “intention”, but not any judgement or any kind of intention, that is the important point. Gnome is what has been examined in a thoughtful way, the fruit of reasoning, the result of a rational 7 Cf. Bertelli 1989: 53-55, who rightly invites to distinguish ancient stasis from modern revolution that aims at an epochal change in society and a new start in history, both purposes which are unknown to ancient stasis. It is therefore misleading to translate stasis with revolution without any clarification as does e.g. Zagorin 2005: 89-95. 8 Cf. Radici Colace, Sergi 2000 for a deep semantic analysis of the word stasis. There is an ample bibliography about stasis in ancient Greece; some essential references are here quoted: Lintott 1982, Gehrke 1985 and Rhodes 2015 from a historical perspective, Bertelli 1989 and Bertelli 1996 from a philosophical one, Manicas 1982 and Berent 1998 from an anthropological one. Eventually Loraux 2006 is a book which collects many of her contributions, in which philological, historical, literary and philosophical analyses cross. 185 The Unexpected Consequences of War Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 proceeding. In peace times what prevails are the intentions arisen out of a rational process, because according to Thucydides men do not fall in anankas akousias, “involuntary necessities”. Ananke is what cannot be governed by human will, the inescapable; ananke and relative words recur in the first book (cf. e.g. 1.23.6) when the historian maintains that the Peloponnesian war is not so much the result of the different reasons for conflict, but is rather the unavoidable outcome of a more and more stretched competition for leadership between the two biggest state powers, Athens and Sparta. The point is that war cancels the euporia, the “wellness” of daily life, and conforms the orgai of most people to temporary situations. Orgai are emotions, feelings, uncontrolled drives; they are in antithesis with peace-time gnomai. Therefore polemos becomes biaios didaskalos, that is a “violent teacher” but also, I would say, “a teacher of violence”, or both at the same time: war is violent teacher who teaches to use violence9. Thucydides does not affirm that war unveils which the real human nature is, as it is sometimes interpreted10. It is true that the historian says that atrocities caused by stasis “happened then and will happen again so long as human nature remains the same”. However the meaning of this sentence is not so much that human nature is rigid, fixed, immutable, but that it is used to react to some situations in a similar way but with different expressions according to the metabolai ton xyntychion, the “changing conditions”. Therefore war is not a teacher who unveils the real core of human nature, but who rather forces it into a definite direction, a state of necessity which is opposite to the rational will. It is well known that stasis is frequently execrated in Greek literature both before Thucydides and in his age, too11; examples abound so that it may be sufficient to refer to the significant association between stasis and phonos found in both Theognis and Herodotus12. However stasis usually appears in antithesis to 9 Many scholars translate ‘violent master’, e. g. Haase 1894: 134: “violentus est magister”; Weil, de Romilly 1967, ad locum: “maître aux façons violentes”; Moggi 1984, ad loc.: “maestra dal carattere violento”; Hornblower 1991: 482: “violent schoolmaster”; Rhodes 1994, ad loc.: “violent teacher”; Mynott 2013, ad loc.: “a violent master”. Other people however prefer “master of violence”, so e.g. Classen-Steup 1892: 165: βίαια διδάσκει; Gomme 1956: 373: “teacher of violence”; Cagnetta 1986, ad loc.: “maestra di violenza”. It seems something in-between the translation of Hammond 2009, ad loc.: “war […] runs a violent school”. Even modern lexica disagree: according to Liddel-Scott-Jones, s.v. βίαιος, it means “teaches by violence”; for Montanari s.v. “maestra violenta”. Mazzocchini 2002 compares this Thucydidean expression with other passages in Greek literature and in particular one in Teognides’s corpus (1.649-652) in which πενία, “poverty”, is said that it “teaches vile things by violence”, so he argues we have to exclude the interpretation “master of violence” for “violent master”. The analogies he suggests are really interesting but why should scholars rule out the possibility that Thucydides uses poetic tradition in an original way, giving a new meaning to an expression which is anyway only partly present in this tradition? If one looks at the general context of this passage, in which war is seen as a factor that provokes violence, it is easier to feel more in agreement with Connor 1984: 102, n. 57, who sees a deliberate Thucydidean ambiguity. 10 So for example Wassermann 1954, and MacLeod 1979. 11 Cf. the passages quoted by Loraux 1986: 97-98. Also Il. 9.63-64 could perhaps be added: the word stasis is not present, but the situation can be assimilated: “A clanless, lawless, hearthless man is he that loveth dread strife among his own folk” (the translation is by A.T. Murray). 12 Cf. Thgn. 1.51-52 (ed. Young): ἐκ τῶν γὰρ στάσιές τε καὶ ἔμφυλοι φόνοι ἀνδρῶν· μούναρχοι 186 Dino Piovan Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 polemos, the war against the external enemy of the polis13, the only conflict which can give the glory of immortality to the soldiers fallen in battle. This is the famous theme of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which recurs also within Thucydides’s work in the famous speech delivered by Pericles in the second book14 for the Athenian dead in the first war year. However, if the historian seems indebted to the literary tradition by painting the effect of stasis15, the connection between stasis and polemos appears as an entirely Thucydidean peculiarity. It is now opportune to make some broader points about this historian. The modern age has often celebrated Thucydides as the historian for excellence, the most objective, able to reveal the true nature of international relations based on force and not on right. Consequently the dialogue between Athenians and Melians in the fifth book (5.85-115) is one of the most quoted and admired Thucydidean pages; the arguments Melians advance there, based on justice, respect for tradition, and gods’ protection, are mercilessly torn to pieces by the relentless logic of power claimed by Athenian imperialism. Thucydides is still today considered the ancient master of political realism; so it was for Thomas Hobbes and later for the German historical school between XIX and early XX century, from Leopold von Ranke to Eduard Meyer. In international relations Thucydides is regarded as the founder of realism. Sometimes he has been raised to a forerunner of Machiavelli by going to the real truth of the matter rather than the imagination of it, to use a Machiavellian expression16, someone adverse to any insane utopia17. Thucydides has been admired as a model historian, looking at reality, the ugly reality, as it is truly, without any veil linked to moral or religious concerns. In conclusion Thucydides is viewed as an amoral thinker, if not immoral, someone far from traditional morality, so he is evoked as such by Nietzsche in his work Twilight of the Idols: δὲ πόλει μήποτε τῆιδε ἅδοι; and Hdt. 3.82: ἐξ ὧν στάσιες ἐγγίνονται, ἐκ δὲ τῶν στασίων φόνος, ἐκ δὲ τοῦ φόνου ἀπέβη ἐς μουναρχίην. The two passages are similar but monarchy is abhorred in Theognis whereas in Herodotus the speaker Darius, the future Persian king, considers it the best possible government. 13 A famous case in which stasis and polemos are opposite each other is in Aesch., Eum. 858-866; cf. also Pl., Resp. 470b-d; Leg. 628b-629d. 14 Cf. in particular 2.42.4, where it is said that the fallen in war “in the briefest moment, at the turning point of their fortune, they took their leave not of fear but of glory” (Hammond’s translation). This theme is also present elsewhere, for example in Lysias’s Epitaphios: cf. Lys. 2.25; about this topic Meier 1990. 15 So in particular Edmunds 1975, who, however, tends to bring back Thucydides to literary tradition too much, especially to Hesiodus, whereas Loraux 1986 evidences how complex the relationship between the historian and the tradition on stasis is: if he has truly a debt towards that, he also shows a meaningful variance. 16 Machiavelli’s famous expression so sounds in the original: “mi è parso più conveniente andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa, che alla immaginazione di essa” (Il principe, cap. 15.3). 17 Reception studies on Thucydides have been prospering in the last years; there are now three volumes reserved to this subject: Fromentin, Gotteland, Payen 2010; Harloe, Morley 2012; Lee, Morley 2015. In particular about Thucydides and Hobbes cf. Iori 2015; about Thucydides and modern realism cf. Marcaccini 2015 and Johnson 2015; about Thucydides and the German XIX-century historians cf. Piovan 1995 and Meister 2015; on Thucydides and the international relations see Gustafson 2000; Lebow 2012; Keene 2015; on Thucydides and Nieztsche cf. Zumbrunnen 2015: 301-308, where there is a quite original interpretation of Nieztsche as a constructivist reader of Thucydides. 187 The Unexpected Consequences of War Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 Thucydides as the great summation, the final appearance of that strong, strict, hard factuality that was a matter of instinct for the older Hellenes. Courage in the face of reality is, in the final analysis, the point of difference between natures such as Thucydides and Plato. Plato is a coward in the face of reality— consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control over himself— consequently he also has control over things . . . (Nietzsche 1997: 88). However this rereading would like to suggest doubt that things are really so, or not completely so at least. In this passage, one of the very few in which the historian directly speaks with his own voice without the unfathomable filter of an impersonal narration, almost every line seeps a wounded morality, which is shocked by the perversions of which it is a powerless witness18. The perversion of language is one of the most powerful. We have to turn now to 3.82.3-4: The customary meanings of words were changed as men claimed the right to use them as they would to suit their actions: an unreasoning daring was called courage and loyalty to party, a prudent delay specious cowardice; moderation and self-control came to be reckoned but the cloak of timidity, to have understanding of the whole to be everywhere unwilling to act. A capricious cunning was added to the brave man’s portion; to deliberate for long so as to avoid mistakes was supposed a well-thought excuse for avoiding action (Gomme’s translation). Thucydides is not saying that the meaning of words simply changed, as it is often interpreted; this would be anyway a normal phenomenon in every language for many words. What Thucydides seems to say is that the words kept having their normal positive or negative meaning but what they described began to change19. The successive examples do not let doubts to begin with the first one: tolma alogistos, “unreasoning daring”, was considered andreia filetairos, “courage and loyalty to party”. Tolma alogistos means hazard before logos (here “reason”) has pondered all factors, that is to say the courage lacking in the awareness that situations are complex. It is this behaviour that is praised in stasis times and considered as andreia filetairos, literally “courage in favour of one’s own group”, that is of one’s own 18 According to Edmunds 1975, Thucydides would be imbued with an ethic traditionalism which goes back to Hesiod; the analogies with the poetic tradition are further analyzed by Mazzocchetti 2002. Maybe the bitter morality that pervades this Thucydidean passage and many others has less to do with the literary tradition and more to do with the political, military, intellectual and civil setback of Thucydides own generation which had lived the endless series of Peloponnesian war disasters, from plague to Sicilian failure to the final capitulation. However the expressive forms can be related to a literary tradition Thucydides does not ignore. Against the thesis that Thucydides “betrays a regret for the certainties of an old hierarchical order” see Hawthorn 2014: 100. 19 About the meaning of this sentence see Hogan 1980 and Wilson 1982, followed now by most scholars, among whom also Nussbaum 2004: 751, n. 24. However Orwin 1994: 177 n. 11 is against their interpretation. 188 Dino Piovan Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 faction or, to use a modern term, party20. On the contrary the use of logos, the wisdom that refuses rushed action for thoughtful decisions, is accused of lacking courage, of concealing itself behind nice pretexts; the intelligence that tries to understand the complexity of the whole is qualified as ineptitude. A little further it is explained that (3.82.8): “The cause of it all was love of power (arché) to gratify greed (pleonexia) and personal ambition (filotimia); from that came the eagerness to quarrel which appeared once strife had begun” (Gomme’s translation). To sum up, stasis consists in the triumph of a rabid activism driven by greed and ambition which, to use a Nietzschean expression, could be called Wille zur Macht, a “will to power” that is unrestrained by traditional moral values and actually perceives them as a useless obstacle. Family bonds, for example, become “more foreign than party” (82.6), which predisposes one even more to unreasoning daring; and the bond within a friends’ group gets stronger by trespassing both human and divine laws. Of course, the officially declared reason of this struggle is not power; faction leaders publicly use “fine-sounding names” (82.8) as “equality for all free citizens” and “prudent government by the best”; they pretend they care a lot about ta koina, “the public interest” (one would say “res publica” in Latin), understood as both “the common good” and “the state”, but to be true it is just the prize of a competition in which what mostly matters is prevailing over one’s own opponents at any price, without being restrained by what can be considered right or useful for the community. And ta mesa ton politon, “those citizens who were neutral”, who did not want to take side for one of the two parties, those who refused extremism, diephtheironto, “were destroyed”. If reading classics today makes sense when it stimulates thought and is not an occasion for a ritual homage that is often a prelude to a sepulchral, intellectual dismissal, it is hard to resist the temptation to collocate side by side Thucydides’s sharp and severe remarks with other, not less sharp and not less severe, remarks written in a much more recent age, in the middle of the Second World War, by Simone Weil, the French thinker who reflected so originally and intensively on the Greek heritage. During that war Weil dedicated a short and pressing essay to contemporary political parties’s ideology21 in which she described its three basic features in this way: 1. A political party is a machine to generate collective passions. 2. A political party is an organisation designed to exert collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members. 3. The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit (Weil 2013: 24). 20 As it has been argued elsewhere, it is not possible to speak of ‘parties’ in classical Athens using the contemporary meaning; see Piovan 2015. 21 This essay was originally written in London in 1943 some time before Weil’s premature death and firstly published in French seven years later. 189 The Unexpected Consequences of War Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 “A machine to generate collective passions”: does not the expression “collective passions” sound maybe as an equivalent of the Greek orgai that annihilate the gnomai? “Collective pressure upon the minds of all its individual members”: here it is easy to think of the drive to conformism that orgai inevitably create when they are collective but also of the threat to those who do not follow the tolma alogistos and are branded as coward, weak, not virile, and also of the tendency to make party ties prevail over all other ones (family, polis, religion). Weil’s last and basic feature of a political party: “The first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth, without limit”, refers in other words to a “will to power” which, as suggested above, is a possible modern translation of the Greek pleonexia. Pleonexia becomes eventually the struggle for power without any other aim, in which ta koina, the res publica, are reduced to a prize for winners, without any limit formed by a sense of fairness and common good. There is also another essay by Weil which can be compared to the page by Thucydides on stasis. In 1937 Simone Weil was meditating on the causes of contemporary war after having personally experimented the Spanish Civil War as a volunteer. Her basic idea is that conflicts are unleashed by fake, empty but murderous words as the following passage makes clear: For the clear-sighted, there is no more distressing symptom of this truth than the unreal character of most of the conflicts that are taking place today. They have even less reality than the war between the Greeks and Trojans. At the heart of the Trojan War there was at least a woman and, what is more, a woman of perfect beauty. For our contemporaries the role of Helen is played by words with capital letters. If we grasp one of these words, all swollen with blood and tears, and squeeze it, we find it is empty. Words with content and meaning are not murderous… However when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they mean nothing. In these conditions, the only definition of success is to crush a rival group of men who have a hostile word on their banners; for it is a characteristic of these empty words that each of them has its complementary antagonist. It is true, of course, that not all of these words are intrinsically meaningless; some of them do have meaning if one takes the trouble to define them properly. But when a word is properly defined it loses its capital letter and can no longer serve either as a banner or as a hostile slogan; it becomes simply a sign, helping us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity. To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis - to do this, strange though it may appear, might be a way of saving human lives (Weil 2005a: 241-242). There is here a kind of assonance with Thucydides 3.82.8: “The leading men of either side in the cities armed themselves with fine-sounding names, equality for all free citizens or prudent government by the best, but all alike made a prize 196 Dino Piovan Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades, año 19, nº 37. Primer semestre de 2017. Pp. 181-197. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 doi: 10.12795/araucaria.2017.i37.09 Meier 1990: C. Meier, Il ruolo della guerra nell’Atene classica [in M. 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