I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can't find it. Surely it's a thing. What would you call it?

EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses

  • Vncredleader
    ·
    6 months ago

    Thanks for the recs. I got my start in the subject from Victor Davis Hanson who in hindsight is a fucking maga nut. So I need some less.....um fashy reading on the matter. Much as War Like No Other is well written and he does interestingly frame the Aegean islands as "Greek third world". I got super into this era of Greek history and Hanson unfortunately is the one who sparked my love for reading history that never stopped. Finding out what he really is killed my momentum on the specific subject matter.

    • Wertheimer [any]
      ·
      6 months ago

      I feel your pain. Don’t tell anyone, but Leo Strauss and his crowd were a major influence on the way I’ve approached Greek texts, and when they let their mask slip it’s a serious buzzkill. In his lectures on the Symposium Strauss discusses the atmosphere in Athens after the mutilation of the Herms and says something like “It was a lot worse than McCarthyism, because McCarthy did nothing wrong.”

      Hanson has a hilarious essay in which he insists that the Iraq invasion wasn’t going to be the U.S.’s Sicilian Expedition, because it was a reasonable response to September 11.

      Donald Kagan was a huge neo-con but was probably the most influential American classicist of recent vintage who made a special study of Thucydides. I don’t know of any reason to distrust his military analysis but on matters of political interpretation I’d default more to Croix, de Romilly, or scholars who prioritized legal and literary texts, like Douglas Macdowell or Nicole Loraux, the latter of whom had wonderful books on amnesty and an account of the funeral oration as a genre. Finally, it’s not composed entirely of winners, but the Brill Companion to Thucydides has some very helpful essays providing both contemporary context as well as Thucydidean exegesis.

      Perhaps also of interest - Page duBois’s Trojan Horses: Saving Classics From Conservatives, which discusses Hanson specifically.