Imagining One's Own Non-Existence

I want to bring up a point that I think I mentioned in passing when we read the first part of Book I of the Peloponnesian War in Western Civ. I.  It has to do with  I.10.1-2, where Thucydides, reviewing the evidence for why the Trojan War is ultimately not comparable in magnitude to the Peloponnesian War, notes that the size and layout of a city is not necessarily the best predictor of its military power and political influence.  As a kind of thought experiment, he asks the reader to imagine Sparta or Athens desolate and abandoned, with only the temples and foundations of buildings bearing witness that there once existed a city and a people on this spot.  Future generations would never believe that such a modest locale -- in the case of Sparta -- would ever have been able to dominate the Hellenic World as they did.  He is clearly thinking of the ruins of Mycenae (which he mentions at the beginning of the passage), and those among his contemporaries who must have surveyed the palace grounds and tried to imagine the great Achaean host described in Homer commanded by such a modest state.

It's easy to skip over what Thucydides has just done here, since it has become (for the most part) a conventional way of thinking for us.  Quite simply, he has just imagined the non-existence of his own civilization.  He projects himself into a possible future where all that will remain of Athens are the crumbling columns of the Acropolis, with the living memory of the city now extinguished, leaving people to wonder what mighty civilization had erected itself on those foundations.

Thucydides' ability to entertain the death of his own civilization represents, for me, an incredible leap forward in human self-consciousness, and yet another reason why the Greeks are so fascinating.  As culturally chauvinist as the Greeks could sometimes be, they (taking Thucydides as representative for the moment) also had an incredible sense of their own contingency in the grand scheme of things.  They did not see themselves as the hinge on which the door of the universe swung.

You could make an argument that a similar sense of humility also pervades the Hebrew prophetic tradition, through which the Ancient Jews -- having elevated the divine omnipotence to such a remarkable degree, and understanding their own election as essentially a matter of divine caprice -- are constantly confronted with the possibility (or even fact) of their own precipitous downfall.  But to even the most caustic denouncements of Jewish betrayal of the Covenant there is always appended the possibility of redemption and restoration, and a future where his people will in some fashion return to the center of history.  This is especially true once we get to the Messianic tradition.

Historical memory and the historian's craft will be a constant theme as we move through the various writers of Antiquity.  Keeping all of this in mind, for our next meeting to discuss Book 1 and the first part of Book 2 think about what Thucydides sees as the purpose of history, and also the duty/obligation/method of the historian who recounts it.