Professor Neville Morley (Exeter) Thucydides and the Politics of Truth

Post-truth. Populism. Democracy in crisis. Increasingly polarised rhetoric. These contemporary symptoms of a society in crisis were prefigured in the work of the fifth-century BCE Greek writer Thucydides – with the promise that anyone reading his account would gain a true understanding not only of past events but of the present and future. Thucydides is still treated as an authority today – but with radically different ideas about what we can learn from him. This lecture will argue that he does not offer maxims or laws, but a training in how to make sense of a complex world in which ‘truth’ itself is in dispute.