Recently, the Herald Tribune published a moving story by Professor Hanson about teaching Thucydides in California.
The story is moving because it is not about a highbrow and super-prestigious (and, of course, super-expensive) private institution like Berkley or Stanford — it is about the ordinary, “state” (i.e., funded by the state) University of California, one of whose branches is located in the provincial town of Fresno amid farmlands somewhere along the highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Professor Hanson had no grounds to expect that Thucydides’ History of Peloponnesian War between the Spartans and the Athenians in the fifth century BC would stir lively interest among today’s students. “Most of them are from farmers’ and poor working class families, not really prepared for college. Only few know Cleon, the Athenian demagogue, but everyone knows Cleon, the Star Wars hero”.
I can vouch for the truth of that statement: a few years ago I worked in a similar university glorified by the invention of the concrete mixer and artificial cow insemination. I remember well the dead silence which fell upon the audience every time it was to answer who was Gogol, or Goethe, or Faust, or, at least, what was the baroque. The students wrote in their examination papers that today’s Ukraine borders Austria-Hungary in the west, Lithuania in the south and Yugoslavia in the north. They identified Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma as “Ukrainian Hetmans of the sixteenth century”, or even more — “Ukrainian dissidents of the sixties generation who fought against Russianization and were exiled to the Gulag”. And I could not give them Fs, for they had heard something about Lithuania, Yugoslavia, and even Austria-Hungary. Moreover, about hetmans, dissidents of the sixties, and the Gulag! (Even if all that did have something to do with Kravchuk and Kuchma in some sense, speaking rhetorically). Once, having read a report by the New York Times correspondent in Moscow (no doubt, a certified Russianist who had graduated from a posh university), who several times in his text “mentioned the play” At the Bottom by Gogol (sic!), I could not help sharing my impressions, gained for many months, with my colleague, a clumsy political scientist, whom I though if not a consummate cynic, then a person rather skeptical about the American way of life. It looked like I had underestimated his American patriotism or, just the opposite, his absolute cynicism. “Okay”, he said benevolently, probably, you make sense. But if you are so smart back there in Eastern Europe, why are you so poor?” There was quite a lot I could tell him, but since I do not like the bitter national lamentations over “the unfavorable historical circumstances,” “crafty neighbors.” and “clueless leadership,” all the time pointing its hetman’s mace in “the wrong direction” and failing to “agree between each other” and “unite,” I just swallowed the bitter pill whole.
Two years later, surprising everybody, Professor Hanson with his article answered the question which has been tormenting probably not only me, and to which the retort of many Ukrainians for the last two centuries had been something like the naХve “but we have higher spirituality” or “but we have better songs”. Professor Hanson recalled how they studied Thu cydides in prestigious Stanford, employing sophisticated methods of structural, psychological, linguistic, etc. analysis and noted that he liked much more the approach to Thucydides used by his students in provincial Fresno.
“Sure,” he related the remark of one of his students, “maybe he lied about something. But what do you want? A Thucydides with a reporter’s tape recorder?”
“I bet you,” he quotes another student, decorated with tattoos and scars from head to foot, “this guy must have bumped off quite a few to be able to describe it with such class” (meaning Thucydides’ description of the massacre by the Athenians in Delphi).
“If we want to keep the ideals of Ancient Greece living,” Professor Hanson further claims pathetically, “we must revive the Hellenic spirit. This spirit, which is probably lost in prestigious universities, was found living among students who work days at McDonald’s and attend their lectures in the evening and who, thrilled by the flesh and blood of Thucydides’ prose, appreciate the true value of his powerful thought. They regard him as a cool guy who shows them that their tedious daily life experience is universal, and subject to all-time abstract formulae... He shows students of different races and classes that we are much more alike than we think. And he shares with all of us his wise view of the situation which came to exist at a given moment, making the experience of the surrounding life less painful.”
Hanson proved to be more romantic than Thucydides: he juxtaposes, somewhat directly, his provincial college to prestige universities, and his simple-minded evening students, to highbrow intellectuals, forgetting that one of America’s strong points is that it has ALL, in particular, universities for prodigies, where tuition costs $20,000-30,000 a year (though poor prodigies can be enrolled free, and even granted a scholarship), and modest universities where tuition costs not more than a couple of thousand. However, the Professor incidentally said the most important thing: the country’s strength is the variety it can offer: everyone can find his or her university, his or her Thucydides, and his or her vocation. The social dynamics coexist there, miraculously, with the institutional hierarchy this is what we Ukrainians fail to combine. In this country good plant foremen become, for some reason, presidents, collective farm directors prime ministers, good-humored managers of municipal services, chairmen of art unions, diplomatic services, and various parliamentary committees.
As the Ukrainian saying goes, all wise heads went to fools. Thus, putting aside the Herald Tribune with Hanson’s article, I said to myself about the same the millions of my countrymen were saying at the moment, watching a new portion of TV news: “After all, our songs are better!”






