The Father of History - A Landmark Achievement, the Western Arts of Binding & the Strange Afterlife of Thucydides

An exciting initiative for cultural revival fans. And the cultural significance & bizarre afterlife of Thucydides.

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If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction to the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and other topics have menu pages above. 

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Time for something a bit different. Some time ago, we posted about a prestige copy of Dante purchased from Castalia Library. High-quality bookmaking is something of a declining art in the carcass of "the West", so it was a pleasant surprise to see an initiative like this. Even more so to see the quality given the start-up nature of the project. We haven't commented since because Castalia works mainly on a subscription basis and while we are appreciative, we aren't subscribers. That's not a criticism, just personal budget priorities - we read very little fiction at all. If you're interested in quality books that are only getting better at an unbeatable price, that's the place for you. The Divine Comedy was bought out of interest - excess copies are sold individually, but prices are considerably higher and they do sell out. Prestige publishing is expensive because the materials are costly. Print on demand or large inventories aren't economically viable, so when a run is all sold, that's it unless there's a second edition.

Things changed with the launch of a second subscription line called Castalia History. This focuses on the sort of significant historical works worthy of prestige treatment. The books cost a bit more, but are larger on average, so the good value remains. And the content was something we were willing to commit to. Since the launch, the decision has only gotten better. 

A recent partnership with the Cambridge University Press gives access to their vast catalog - making them the only prestige publisher of serious scholarly volumes we know of. The construction of their own bindery circumvents a major global bottleneck, opens new revenue streams, and provides a workshop for reviving historical quality levels and lost book arts. 

We aren't prestige market collectors - as noted before, we have a huge library, but it was built for content volume. But book collecting is a real thing, and CH has sold out its first three volumes without any outreach or promotion in the collector market at all. The Cambridge deal came out of the blue as far as subscribers are concerned - and is really the first sign of mainstream exposure. And you don't have to be a collector to appreciate inevitable increase in the value of your possessions.

This post will look at The Landmark Thucydides, the first volume in the Castalia History series and the book that made us decide to sign up. It precedes the Cambridge deal but represents the same kind of enduring resource that never goes out of vogue. The goal this time isn't a big comparison, but what makes Thucydides culturally and historically significant - in reality and the House of Lies, an assessment of this edition, and thoughts about the arts of binding and cultural revival. The tl,dr is that as subscribers we’re not impartial, but are extremely happy with the books we've received. We also think the rule that reviewers have to find something negative as retarded as most other category errors. We'll share our opinions and trust our readers' sentience. 

Copy of the Bust of Thucydides in Holkham Hall bought to England in 1754, original dated to the early 4th century BC. 

Thucydides is one of those ancient names that swelled to almost mythic proportions in the post-Medieval West. Probably only Homer and Plato are comparable. And like most figures from Antiquity, robust historical knowledge is scarce. He was born around 460 BC - the noontide of Classical Athens - to an affluent family with Thracian holdings. An unsuccessful stint as a general led to exile from Athens from 424 or 423 to 404, and he died around 400.

Against this we have his epochal achievement - The History of the Peloponnesian War. A nearly-finished account of the attritive war of 431-404 BC between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens). The war concluded the Athenian Golden Age and ushered in the chain of events leading to Alexander. The book has long been considered the first serious work of history in modern or academic terms. And won the author the title "Father of History". 

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 16, 1st century AD fragment of the History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV, 36-41 in Greek from Egypt, ink on papyrus, University of Pennsylvania Museum

One of a vast collection of papyri discovered  by British archaeologists between 1896 and 1907. Tens of thousands of documents covering the millennium from the 3rd ccntury BC–7th century AD were found in a ancient dump. Among them, what we think is the oldest Thucydides fragment.

Oxyrhynchus Papyrus, IX 1180, fragment of the History of the Peloponnesian War, Book V, 60: 3-63

Later papyrus from the Oxyrhynchus trove with lines from Book V

If the texts weren’t sufficient to show Thucydides’ significance carrying into late Antiquity, here’s some visual evidence. This Jordanian mosaic is an example of his ascention into the canon of historical greats by this point.

Thucydides Mosaic from Jerash, Jordan, Roman, 3rd century AD, Pergamon Museum, Berlin

Not sure about the floridness. Focus on the fact that he’s appearing in mosaics ¾ of a millennium after his passing.

Thucydides' Greek reputation carried into Byzantium, where he became a fixture in their standard canon. The “outer” education of ancient authors, philosophy, grammar, astrology, epistles, popular or folk literature, etc. Non-explicitly religious intellectual and cultural heritage. We assume this is why classical art forms persist in ways they don't in the early Medieval West, despite a more stylized attitude to art. This recent fresco in a monastic church shows that enduring appeal of the classical legacy in Eastern Christendom. A string of ancient thinkers join Old Testament prophets in anticipating Christ - an Eastern variant on Western Christian humanism. It's a striking painting.

Vlasios Tsotsonis, Christ the King of Glory, 2008, fresco, refectory of the Great Meteoron Monastery, Meteora, Greece

It has a True Vine theme with Jesus as the centerpiece. The vine scrolls flow around him and the Old Testament figures. The philosophers are shown below in fill figure. Note the absence of halo to distinguish them from their Christian counterparts.

It's a modern version, but it shows how the weave of antique and Christian sources wasn't just a Renaissance humanist thing.

The Byzantine outer curriculum is how the text survived intact from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance. Continued circulation is the best preservation for ancient texts. Manuscript finds like the Oxyrhynchus Papyrii are critical for lost civilizations, but depend on luck and are rarely intact. When works are constantly being recopied, complete texts are always available and the fate of originals not relevant. Transcription errors are always a problem, but the more copies available, the better philologists can work around them.

The earliest extant full manuscript of Thucydides, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 69.2, fol. 513v., 1st half of the 10th century

It's hard to tell how a Greek manuscript of this date got into the Medici library. It could have travelled with Byzantine emigres after the fall of Constantinople. The Medici were actively supporting scholarly activity around that move. But it may have found a way over earlier, through the untraceable historic links between Italy and Byzantium. 

It's a good example of that copying tradition extending the life of texts long after the originals crumbled.

The Byzantine scholars who emigrated to Italy after the fall of Constantinople brought troves of hitherto unknown or fragmentary Greek texts. This is the last great wave of ancient manuscripts into the West and kicked off the later or Greek stage of Renaissance Humanism. We suspect this needs scrutiny we can’t do here. Maybe can’t do at all with internet resources available to us. It just occurred to us that the Irish monks and Abbasid scholars behind the earlier two waves didn’t come with their texts as the experts guiding their reception. The Irish were peripheral, but part of the Christian West, while the Muslims were totally theologically incompatible with it. Obviously, any cultural exchange comes with attendant ideas. The presence of Insular imagery in Ottonian scriptoria or Aquinas’ reading of Avarroes speaks to this intellectual dynamism. But this is different than turning them into intellectual mentors. The Greek expats were in a unique sweet spot – common classical and Christian heritages, but outside Western Christendom’s cultural sphere.

We have no evidence this is relevant - just one of those little glimmers of a potential pattern that suggests checking more closely. We've posted on the weird distorted Christian humanism that infested the Church around the turn of the 16th century. Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Pico della Mirandola and priscia theologia, Hermes Trismegistus, Osiris nonsense in the papal apartments, and all the other signs of ocultic inversion on the eve of the Reformation. Thucydides is hardly sinister, and most of the Greek wave was classic texts like the Latin ones the earlier humanists recovered. The inversive stuff developed out of this stuff in the kind of [exciting new thing] -> [satanic inversion] cycle we’ve seen many times.

Anyhow, the first Latin translation was produced in 1452 by Lorenzo Valla, the genius humanist linguist best known for exposing the Donation of Constantine as a papal fraud. A print publication followed in 1483.

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Lorenzo Valla and dedicated to Pope Nicholas V, miniatures attributed to Francesco di Antonio del Chierico, parchment, University of Valencia. Historical Library. BH Ms. 392. Click for a scan of the full manuscript.

This type of lavish manuscript is what’s called a presentation copy – a master version of a translation to serve as a template for later copies. The importance of the project is clear from the papal commission.

Lorenzo Valla’s preface to his Latin translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, dedication copy for Pope Nicholas V, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana 

Papal arms are visible at the bottom. The date puts this amonf the first Renaissance Greek translations - a generation before Ficino's work for the Medici. Nicholas was the first of the humanist popes, but is overshadowed by the more impactful Sixtus IV and Julius II.

Lavrentii Vallensis ad Sanctissimvm Nicolavm Qvintvm Pontificem Maximvm In Thvcydidis Historisi Translationem... opening page from the first printed edition of Valla's Thvcydidis Historiarvm Peloponnensivm, with handwritten annotation, Bartholomaeus Parthenius, Treviso, ~1483, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

The dissemination of Thucydides took time. Valla's text was corrupted by copyists and only one published edition appeared in the 15th century - Vercellensis' criticized 1483 version edited by Bartholomaeus Parthenius.

This early history is important because it was humanist Antiquity-huffing that laid the proto-foundations for all the ghosts of Great Books fetishes yet to come. Without which Thucydides' path to cultural relevance would have to be quite different. If we sound dismissive, it's towards the "timeless wisdom" canard that replaced foundational ontology with  lies about human ephemera. The Band is as staunch an advocate for the fullness of the Western heritage as exists on the internet. Our humanistic erudition exceeded any standard "Great Books" list (GBL) by our mid-20s and never stopped - as a blog for personal reflection shows. And it continues. But the more cultural content we uptake, the clearer it gets that the arts are no more ultimate foundation of Truth or Wisdom than numerology.

One advantage of actually reading beyond the landmarks of the GBL is the ability to assess the infinity of nonsense claims made in their name. Here's one GBL example - note the swerve around #31. The biggest initial shock is the mediocrity of most of the "thought" on the philosophic side of things. That recurring pattern where one absurdity after the other pompously intones [obviously insufficient cause X] as the nature of things before building a pointless and soon-to-be forgotten Jenga tower of "logic" atop [here's a sprawling post we aren't that happy with, but does lay out the GBL problem pretty well in the middle].

And here's a random Philosophy sub-list from the internet. We aren't singling it out for criticism - it's not egregious as far as these things go. In fact, we thought it would be easy to find a college syllabus, but it seems intro foundational reading courses have gone the way of "academic rigor". 

The problem is that being hard doesn't make a reading list valuable or true. It's the dance of secular transcendence, where spiraling complexity replaces a point. Like House of Lies Science! without the funding or social cachet.

This is something we've written on at length, so only the main points are needed here. The modern House of Lies is based on an ontological inversion we call secular transcendence. It's self-evident that material processes have no way to account for their own genesis (causal logic)  - hence the necessity of some notion of God or Ultimate Reality. Literally meta-physical. This never posed a problem in human history until a handful of auto-idolators realized doing what thou wilt was funner in the short term. 

The cumulative effect of the false claims bears a passing resemblance to deep layered wisdom. Stacks of complex and intricate tomes expounding on the same "eternal questions". One might question the utility of fetishizing questions a flawed methodology can’t resolve with that methodology, but that's...

The tomes don't actually cohere into anything beyond projected elite desire with come isolated insight. It's the fake narrative pattern we see everywhere once we made note of it. Strings of things that look like they form a coherent, integrated, reality-reflecting sequence but actually don't. The coherence comes from the context - "Philosophy", "Theory", "Human Sciences", etc. as parameterized 'disciplines" within the larger House of Lies "education" or "scholarship". Apologies for all the ironic quotes. It's important to stay focused on exactly how inverted the entire apparatus of late-stage beast culture actually is.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance, 1740-50, Norton Simon Museum, Anaheim

We suspect most of the timeless truths shills haven't read quite as extensively. Ignorance != stupidity, but opining on the value of books unread actively refutes the argument that you need to read them. So the old liar, stupid or both framework holds. In reality, the books themselves are often very wise, informative, or otherwise impressive in some way. Some are brilliant. Others are woeful disappointments. The problem emerged when Enlightenment materialist rationalism required a secular transcendent foundations so they could enjoy the fruits of the West & pretend there's no God. Enter the timeless wisdom...

The amazing thing about Thucydides is how he's stayed au courant. Cicero was more popular with Renaissance Humanists, but he's relegated to the personal interest in the classics crowd now. Serious hobbyists and professional academics mainly. While Thucydides has contemporary political columnists holding him up as some sort of key to universal human understanding.

This tells us that there are a lot of different "meaning of Thucydides" out there. Every reader brings their own take or understanding to a book. And that's conditioned by whatever factors and circumstances make up their lives. Hermeneutics 101 - meaning is the intersection of book and reader. It's how interpretations change and a book stays the same. Or how an old book becomes popular again when it fits the current context. To stay relevant for centuries like The History of the Peloponnesian War means resonating in lots of different contexts. Just think of the sweep of the last 600 years. It's not timeless constant wisdom that stays atop that torrent. It's the ability to keep finding homes in the changing landscape.

So what makes Thucydides so appealing?

Hans Schäufelein, Representatives of Athens and Corinth at the Court of Archidamas, King of Sparta, from the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, 1533, woodcut

The initial burst ties into humanist antiquity-huffing - where any significant ancient author was treated as an "authority". Given how few Greek texts came down complete, there's no way an intact pioneering work of this magnitude didn't attract attention. As we've posted before, the Renaissance is a pivot in Western history. For the first time, Christendom mass elevated pagan sources to ontological and cultural authority. Not that useful ancients weren't important in the Middle Ages. Aristotle, Euclid, Virgil, and others were significant cultural presences. But within a metaphysically-coherent world view.

Susan Herbert, Persian Sibyl (Michelangelo), Sistine Chapel, watercolor with bodycolor on paper, from Cats Galore: A Compendium of Cultured Cats, London: Thames & Hudson, 2015

Renaissance antiquity-huffing is actually bizarre when you consider it. A handful of culturally-connected outsiders claim some forgotten books are Wisdom on no logical grounds at all, and within a century, Western intelligentsia  took it as True!. To the point of mixing pagan sibyls with Biblical prophets in the heart of the papacy. The delusion then hangs around into the eve of modernity, where the Enlightenment tosses it along with religion. 

We can recall learning the platitudinous claim that Renaissance rebirth of ancient knowledge revitalized a moribund Middle Ages and jumpstarted the path to modernity. An early introduction to the House of Lies came with the realization the "revival" included no significant technical advances, and that the 13th-14th centuries were more practically innovative.  Mechanical clocks, for example, being a 14th-century invention.

Miniature with Wisdom, Suzo, and Eight Mechanical Clocks for Heinrich Suzo's Horologium Sapientiae,  (c. 1334),  Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels MS. IV. 111, fol. 13v., miniatures around 1450

An assortment of 14th and early 15th -century devices - an astrolabe, a clock which chimes by pulling a rope through the ceiling, a big mechanical clock with five bells, and four smaller ones on the table.

The ultimate achievement was to elevate human authority alongside God's - which turned out to be a precursor to replacing it. Do what thou wilt and so forth. The motivations were personal cultural capital and justification for "expanded" morality. The argument was that since the Bible and classical myth posit a "Golden Age" in deep antiquity, older = Truer as a universal heuristic. Seriously. It's how "Hermes Trismegistus" slime-trailed his way back into vogue. And he wasn't even that ancient.

Renaissance Thucydides was ambiguously understood. According to one article, he "has been repeatedly translated by successive generations of translators, each working in quite different historical, cultural and political contexts across Europe from the Renaissance onwards." Another good recent source on his early English reception describes

a Reformation Thucydides who counselled avoidance of war and cultivation of moral virtue and rhetorical ability; a reason of state Thucydides who sounded the trumpet of war; and Thomas Hobbes’s Thucydides, who was critical of both rhetorical politics and military aggression.

It's really only in the 16th-century that vernacular translations are widespread enough for real influence. But the 1550-1620s period was a boom time for Early Modern interest in Thucydides and Greek thought in general. 

Thucydides, The Hystory, Writtone by Thucidides the Athenyan, of the Warre, Whiche was Betwene the Peloponesians and the Athenyans [The History of the Peloponnesian War], London: William Tylle, 1550.

Thomas Nicholls’ 1550 translation was the first English Thucydides, but overreliance on Seyssel’s first French language edition rendered it unsatisfactory. 

It's Thomas Hobbes’ - yes, that Thomas Hobbes - 1629 version that is considered the first real English translation of the Greek original.

Thomas Cecill, frontispiece toThucydides, Eight bookes of the Peloponnesian Warre written by Thucydides the sonne of Olorus. Interpreted with faith and diligence immediately out of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes secretary to ye late Earle of Deuonshire, London, Hen: Seile, 1629. STC 24058 (B), Houghton Library, Harvard University

Thucydides' growing prestige is obvious in Hobbes' citation of Justius Lipsius, a philologist, neo-Stoic philosopher, humanist, and towering figure in 16th-century European humanism. Lipsius considered Thucydides a preeminent authority in military, diplomatic, and historical matters.

Lastly, hear the most true and proper commendation of him from Justus Lipsius, in his notes to his book De Doctrina Civili in these words: ‘Thucydides, who hath written not many nor very great matters, hath perhaps yet won the garland from all that have written of matters both many and great. Everywhere for elocution grave; short, and thick with sense; sound in his judgments; everywhere secretly instructing and directing a man's life and actions.

What's historiographically interesting is how this was used as political theory or method more than a source of historical fact. 

Frontispieces are revealing, and perfect for a blog post. The whole thing is framed by representations of Sparta and Athens on either side of a map of Greece at the top and a scene of the Athenian navy confronting the Spartan army below. 

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Three columns of images are in between. The title and author portrait are in the center. Below Sparta is a large figure of King Archidamos over a scene of him surrounded by aristocratic advisors -  the hoi aristoi or the best. Under Athens, democratic leader Pericles appears above a picture of him orating to a citizens crowd - the hoi polloi or the many.

Archidamos and Pericles with an indication of Hobbes’ leanings in their systems of governance.

Take a closer look at the leaders in action – especially the productivity difference between elite strategy and council and oratorical rhetoric.

The king and his hoi aristoi look thoughtful and engaged. They gesture emphatically as a sign of discourse, some consult texts, and no two look the same. The king is shown as first among equals, but he is paying attention and considering what’s being said.

Pericles is set apart from the hoi polloi and is the only one contributing anything. Many of the crowd are lame – unlike the Clowns to come, Hobbes seems aware of who wins. They’re basically interchangeable, NPCs hanging on whatever the big-headed demagogue lies. Hobbes’ own monarchial leanings aren’t hard to pick out.

Finally, it’s worth a close-up of the picture of Thucydides. It’s so fantastically of it’s time and place.

 

Even before Hobbes, Pericles had picked up some specifically English interest and relevance as a proxy-justification for imperial aspirations. The source quotes Elizabethan occultist and royal advisor John Dee on Pericles as someone wisely vnderstanding, that no other means was so easy, so ready, and so sure, for Athens to atteyn to their wished for Souerainty, among their freends and foes, dwelling about them: But if, they were Lords and Maisters of the Seas, nere and far about them. The most notable Pericles of the era has to be Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre - first published in 1609 and five more times by 1635. Here's the title page to the first edition.

William Shakespeare, The late, and much admired play, called Pericles, Prince of Tyre... London: William White and Thomas Creede for Henry Gosson, 1609, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC,

According to the Folger Library, there's a possibility Shakespeare collaborated with George Wilkins who has written a prose novel on Pericles the year prior. The extent is unknown, but Wilkins cites his connection on his own title page.

Facsimile of the title page, with a woodcut of John Gower (c.1325-1408) to George Wilkins, The Painfull adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Being the true History of the Play of Pericles [by William Shakespeare] as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet Iohn Gower, Oldenburg: G. Stalling, 1857, original published in London, 1608. 

The story retells the tale of Apollonius of Tyre from John Gower's medieval Confessio Amantis. It's less the historical or theoretical relevance than the sign of general public interest. These were popular writers.

The consensus seems to be that it was  Thucydides as historian of empire that motivated Hobbes to translate The History. The emphasis on philosophical theory over historical source supported contemporary arguments around developing concepts of the law of nations or ius gentium. Thucydides became an unlikely cornerstone of a developing legal-political attitude made up of real colonial encounters with other peoples and humanistic study of historical, theoretical, and literary sources.

It's worth noting that the great sixteenth-century poet Philip Sidney had earlier praised Xenophon’s "portraiture of a just empire” under Cyrus, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia was popular with Hobbes. That it was the same Cyrus as in the Bible must have burnished his appeal. And we saw Hobbes favored just Christian kingship.

William Marshall, Title Page of Cyrupaedia, a translation of Xenophon by Philemon Holland, 1632, London, The British Museum

Sidney wrote his The Defence of Poesy, around 1580 but it wasn't published in 1595, after his death. He uses Cyrus as an example of poetry's superior creative power to nature, and an archetypal just ruler. Here, Charles trues to claim the same. Speaks to the resonance of the association, if not the specific use here.

and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagenes; so constant a friend as Pylades; so valiant a man as Orlando; so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus; so excellent a man every way as Virgil’s Æneas? 

For Xenophon, who did imitate so excellently as to give us effigiem justi imperii—the portraiture of a just empire under the name of Cyrus

Hobbes' Thucydides found common cause with the philosopher’s famous conception of human nature. The “most politic historiographer that ever writ” could justify colonial suzerainity with ethical and legal parameters to keep encounters from sinking into that natural barbarism.

Theoretical authority Thucydides seems to goes the way of the antiquity-huffing in general with the Enlightenment. But he morphs into his new role as Father of History in the 19th century. It's not surprising - in the heady days of positivist materialism epistemological priorities had shifted to "scientific" facts. The History became the totemic methodological foundation for the discipline of Classical History. First a prelude, then couple of quotes from some central figures. 

In 1777, John Adams wrote the following paean to secular transcendence and prefiguration of clown world to his son, John Quincy Adams... [note - "prefiguration is precise. The clowns will deliberately use language and figures associated with the founding of the Republic for their globalist inversions].

John Singleton Copley, John Adams, oil on canvas, around 1783, Harvard University Art Museums

Painted after the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Perfect Enlightenment secular transcendence - Abstract Reality Materially manifest. Raised laurel and lowered torch as treaty and settled territory.

I wish to turn your Thoughts early to such Studies, as will afford you the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be allotted you to act on the Stage of Life.

There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides, an Author, of whom I hope you will make yourself perfect Master, in original Language, which is Greek, the most perfect of all human Languages. In order to understand him fully in his own Tongue, you must however take Advantage, of every Help you can procure and particularly of Translations of him into your own Mother Tongue.

We shouldn't have to point out that Greek clearly isn't "the most perfect of all human languages" but secular transcendence seems as powerful a spell as boomerism. Looking back to early disillusionment with Great Books era "timeless wisdom" - absurdities like this presented without comment - are what we're talking about. Not that the wisest don't have strong feelings. But that this is the level of understanding that revered foundations of public belief were really operating on.

And this is relatively mild. The mid-19th-century "scientific" German historians that founded modern History are ridiculous. The meta-problem is presumption of false choices – binary thinking from metaphysical confusion. When we think of sound historical methodology, the only “ideologies” are honest assessment and weighing of all the available evidence and comprehensive logical coherent argument. 

Frontispiece to the Battle of the Books in the 1710 edition of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub ... To which is added, An Account of a Battel between the antient and modern Books in St. James's Library, fifth edition, London: John Nutt, 1710

The Germans were trying to establish “Scientific History” on a false dichotomy. “Ancients vs. Moderns” as a choice between mythopoesis and secular transcendence  is a fool’s gambit. To their credit, the German emphasis on objectivity is far more conducive to building a usable historical record. As we’ve seen in many contexts, it takes time for fake foundations to bear poison fruit. Claiming impossible standards means commitment to the unreal. And that’s the first step to subversion and inversion.

Leopold von Ranke had some odd beliefs for one of the most influential figures in historiography. His approach was pure secular transcendence - transposing a religious framework onto secular history and rejecting objectivity for moral judgment. There's some real verbal legerdemain around his oft-cited charge to "show how it actually was” - considering how often it's used as a call for objective accuracy. His ideology was a mix of what we think of impartiality and materially impossible judgmental certainty within the perspectival and evidential limits. Secular transcendence. The rhetorical effectiveness of split meanings comes from openness to interpretation. Actual historians can look at the objectivity. Modern fantasists can look at the fake certainty, and Postmodern projectors contextual perspectives.

The illuminated vellum document declaring Ranke an honorary citizen of Berlin in 1885 visualizes this as well as anything we've seen.

Ernst Albert Fischer-Cörlin, Seiner Hochwohlgeboren Herrn Wirklichen Geheimrath Leopold von Ranke in Berlin, 1885, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries

Two personifications on the left preside - Clio, Muse of History and Justice - taken together history as Ranke understood it. Opposite are a slate of historical worthies accepting ultimate judgment by... a guy in 19th-century Berlin. With no compelling argument at all. And yet it changed scholarship, won the guy honorary citizenship when that really meant something, and became the subject of eternal critique, revisiting, and re-evaluation.

Note the discrepancy between the wording and the pretense of materialist accuracy. We can't repeat it enough times - most Enlightenment "thought" is emotionally-wrought garbage. We assume it's the reverence properly accorded the metaphysical retardedly transposed to the material. whatever the cause, it can take a bit to accept when first noted. From Christine Lee's A Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, an excellent source with an awkward full-text link...

... is with Niebuhr, and also with Ranke, that the glory of Thucydides is reborn. So the Moderns, giving themselves the task of founding historical science, erected Thucydides as a supreme model, projecting onto him a kind of apotheosis: the  immortal Thucydides, as Niebuhr said, before whom I kneel, as Ranke admitted. [p. 154]

As it was... 

Fetishism, engraving from Picturesque History of Religions, by Clavel, 1844, private collection

Niebuhr is Barthold Georg Niebuhr, another pioneer in 19th-century German scientific history "who showed how to analyze the strata in a source, particularly poetical and mythical tradition, and how to discard the worthless and thereby lay bare the material from which the historical facts could be reconstructed." Or knelt before. Lee adds that Ranke beleived Thucydides, like Homer for epic or Plato for philosophy, could certainly be ­glorified as “the genius” of (the writing of ) history, which, through him, attained perfection". In a hold by beer moment, Niebuhr discarded the worthless and laid bare some material:

The first real and true historian, according to our notion, was Thucydides; as he is the most perfect historian among all that have written, so he is at the same time the first: he is the Homer of the historians [and] the Peloponnesian War … is the most immortal of all wars, because it is described by the greatest of all historians that ever lived.

One might be inclined to ask The Fathers of Scientific History how one can be the pioneer and immortal standard of... anything really. But this was actually commonplace in first wave secular transcendence in the arts. Some shadowy Greek genius was proclaimed the greatest ever, immortal, the all-time standard, etc. on no coherent critical grounds at all. In the case of artists, their work was often completely unknown. Neoclassicism...

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Apotheosis of Homer, 1827, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum

The whole painting is designed to single out and elevate Homer from the crowd of historical worthies. Fame crowns him and personifications of the Iliad and Odyssey form a pyramid echoed in the equally eternally ideal architecture of the Parthenon.

Paul Delaroche served up a far more ambitious version focused on artists for the Academie des Beaux-arts. Here, the immortals are a triad with Parthenon architect Iktinos on the left, painter Apelles in the center, and sculptor Phidias on the right. The most famous names from the Periclean zenith of Athenian Classicism. Delaroche gives painting primacy - following Neoclassical Academic ideology on the hierarchy of media. He’s central, and at the peak of his youthful powers in a Three Ages of Man configuration. Keep in mind that no non-ancient art writer has ever seen an Apelles painting. Or a copy by someone who saw one. He’s just that good.

Paul Delaroche, Hémicycle des Beaux-arts, 1841-1842, oil and wax on wall, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris

Fame crouches in the foreground – a skillful display of anatomical skill about to start slinging laurel crowns like frisbees. The four standing personifications are four ages of art – Medieval, Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and Renaissance. There was no need for Modern art because once reason shows you which random Greek artist is the eternal One, there’s no need for further innovation. If historians painted, they'd be putting Thucydides the thrones and podiums. 

Unfortunately, failure was baked into the real guy-timeless ideal oxymoron no matter how hard the Fathers knelt. Because they were real guys – pantheon-tier artists and innovators, but still real guys. With all the limits and foibles that follow.

Gaspare Landi, Pericles and his Lover Aspasia Admire the Works of Phidias at the Parthenon, 1811-1813, oil on canvas, Museo real Bosco di Capodimonte. Naples 

Landi is on the far right. Phidias only wears the undershirless white toga when timeless idealing.

The art can be lovely. But all the dolts hand-wringing over post-structuralism really should have hitched their self-images to more robust thought. You can see the issue. On the one hand, a discipline predicated on objective consideration of the evidence believing that a guy could be perpetually exemplary. That path to deconstructing the "Western tradition" depended on absurd absolutist claims that couldn't possibly withstand serious logical or empirical scrutiny.

The modern academic discipline of History was founded on the detritus of Enlightenment secular transcendence on the eve of its collapse. It's an essentially religious need for Ultimate or first principles. colliding with rigorous commitment to material truth. There's a period from mid-18th-century Neoclassicism to whatever this is in the mid 19th where everyone pretends historical innovation and timeless ideal can be the same. It's basically Renaissance antiquity-huffing with better archaeology and philology. Much legitimate 20th-century history has been exorcising this nonsense and trying to understand what the ancient world was really like.

Double portrait herma of Herodotus and Thucydides, Roman era, Farnese Collection, National Archaeological Museum of Naples

It was at this time when the split with Herodotus crystalized. The earlier historian was Thucydides' most natural rival as originator of the genre, but has significant formal differences. His History belongs to the older tradition of rooting historical accounts in the mythic past. His first four books in particular seemed ridiculous by the terms of the secular transcendentalists' own ridiculous mythology. Universal history being "unscientific" proving pattern recognition is a problem. Thucydides became the model for "objective" historical writing.

There's an interesting study that shows this shift from Hobbes era Philosophical Thucydides to Ranke & Niebuhr's Historical Template Thucydides reflects in the history of translation. At least ten full translations followed Hobbes’  [Smith 1753; Bloomfield 1829; Dale 1848; Crawley 1874; Jowett 1881; Smith 1919–1923; Warner 1954; Blanco 1998; Lattimore 1998; Hammond 2009]. The argument is that contemporary historical assumptions appear in the translators' choices. Before Dale, the text is presented without any reference to external sources of fact - treated like a self-contained work of philosophy or literature, as you'd expect. Afterwards, the account is treated as a rational analysis of objective events that can be accessed through other means. Crawley - the basis of the Landmark translation - puts the strongest emphasis on Thucydides self-conscious committment to objectivity. One example, but consider the date. Right at the peak of the model scientific historian era. More on the translation later.

The 20th-century chucked reverence for timeless models in academic history and Thucydides seemed headed for an afterlife in classical studies. That field has been presented along the tired old/new camps line that brings unpleasant flashbacks of the Hudson River School critics. In this pantomime, the traditionals are pitted against the moderns - same as it ever was. The eminent historian J. B. Bury - a lovely stylist that the Band quite likes - sums up the first view in his engaging The Ancient Greek Historians, a set of Harvard lectures given in 1909 [click for a link to the whole volume]. He notes 

He does not consider moral standards ; his method is realistic and detached ; he takes history as it is and examines it on its own merits. This detached analytical treatment is illustrated by the earliest political prose pamphlet we possess, written by a contemporary of the historian in the early years of the war ; I mean the short tract on the Athenian Constitution. The author was an oligarch and declares without reserve his personal hostility to the democracy ; but it is not a polemical work. He detaches himself from his own feelings, places himself at the point of view of democrats, and examines democracy exclusively in this light. Applying his acute logic, he demonstrates that the institutions of Athens could hardly be improved upon. The writer is intellectually allied to Thucydides in the detachment of his attitude and the logical restriction of the issue under a particular point of view [p. 141].

Basically an objectively minded professional historian by modern standards. Note the absence of adulation, genuflection, or all-round lickspittleing. The difference between Bury and the likes of Ranke is that he doesn't believe incontinent emotional desire grounds timeless ideals. He acknowledges Thucydides' positional bias as he would any historian. Pretending he's as flawless as a Canova statue is how your position goes the way of Ranke. 

Antonio Canova, Dance of the Children of Alcinous, 1806-1808, plaster, Museo Correr

Academics love names. Humanities discourse is an endless conga line of them. Which it becomes more incestuously self-referential and detached from reality over time. Founding figures are essential in this thinking, because they start the conga. Treating Thucydides as a human being allows for proper recognition of his limits and his originality. Father of History as the first guy we know of who made a sustained effort to give a thorough and factual historical account. Focused monographic subject, contextual considerations, and evidentiary standards don't have to be flawless to establish a new paradigm. 

The avant-garde in the pantomime would be the more recent readings of The History as more literary or rhetorical than a historical source. Analysis of the text as a artistic composition looks at internal structures, tropes, and inventions like the speeches. The irritating things is that both approaches are compatible and synergistic. 

Franz Sedlacek, Das Narrenschiff (Ship of Fools), 1930, color print, title page of Jugend, vol, 6

Any written work is representation. It doesn't literally make the events happen again or propel the reader bodily through time. And any textual representation uses abstract linguistic signs to communicate. This should be obvious from "translation". Whether or not Thucydides attempts to represent the war accurately is independent of the authorial devices he uses. Given that no text string is mistakable for a civilization-altering historical event. There's only a conflict if some dolt really believes representation is reality. Apropos to nothing, the caliber of modern academic mind is why cultural renewal can't come from there.

The way the fortunes of canonical texts ebb and flow on the tides of societal priority is informative. But academics didn't turn out to be Thucydides' only modern home. In one of the weirder developments in recent ideology, a certain segment of American Cuckservatism rolled back the clock to theoretical Thucydides. The old Hobbes era model of human affairs, with less depth. We're talking about the era of intellectual flyspeckery that served up such pearls as standing athwart the tracks of history and the shining city on the hill. "Principles" pulled from the aeather by "intellectuals" demonstrating sub-[intro to basic logic]-tier reasoning. Growing up endlessly subjected to this facile vapidity from self-parodic pomposities left us with an abhorrence that's only sharpened with as its consequences have materialized.

And never more so than among the satanic, genocidal Trotskyite Neoclown movement - or Clowns for short. This is the metastasized version of the oxymoronic Neoconservatism - the interventionist contemporary counterpart to Cuckservatism. Cucks and Clowns are the symbiotic terminal end states of the inherent flaws in the respective ideologies. Think of them like rotting barns - collapse is inevitable from the start, but the appearance of decay is slow and subtle. Things don't seem to change much from the outside until it suddenly can't support itself anymore and falls down.

Georgia Jarvis, Abandoned Farm, before 1990, oil on canvas board, unknown location

We have to confess a life-long animus for these turds as well. In a world filled with poseurs, the intellectual flaccidity of the mouthpieces - and the self-indicting morons who gushed about them - seemed especially contemptable. This is irrelevant to their influence - the House of Lies is unraveling for a lot of reasons, but the geopolitical wing of the implosion is all Clown.

Britannica's description of the pre-Clown larval state suggest a thought experiment. Imagine a contest to design a moral, sustainable, reality-based replacement for the House of Lies. The kind of global transformation the cucks permitted the clowns to do, but morally reversed. Applicants are asked to demonstrate the requisite intelligence and knowledge base by submitting a list of eight historical thinkers they consider best suited to advise in this task, and why each was chosen. Take a moment to consider your preferred names...

Now, how many of you came up with this tool shed?

Among their intellectual ancestors neoconservatives count the ancient Greek historian Thucydides for his unblinking realism in military matters and his skepticism toward democracy, as well as Alexis de Tocqueville, the French author of Democracy in America (1835–40), who described and analyzed both the bright and the bad sides of democracy in the United States. More recent influences include the German-born American political philosopher Leo Strauss and several of his students, such as Allan Bloom; Bloom’s student Francis Fukuyama; and a small band of intellectuals who in their youth were anti-Stalinist communists (specifically Trotskyites) before becoming liberals disillusioned with liberalism. The latter include Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz, among others. 

From the sublime to the ridiculous...

The historical summary is that "experts" decided Thucydides was a magic 8-ball for the entire gamut of human and state behavior. Why? They never say. His authority is simply posited a priori - telling us we're squarely in the world of fake faith in secular transcendence. The larger pattern suggests a few factors in play here. 

The reason we turn topics like this into big historical and logical presentations is to get at what we're really dealing with. There are so many pieces of disconnected information swirling around that popular ideologies and arguments ignore big picture framings and their necessities. Consider that the clowns manipulate and invert older forms of impossible cuck wish projection. This includes pretending the cuck-postmodernism clash was based on commitment to truth and not two fake stops on the road to ontologically-impossible auto-idolatry. Not just bizarrely transposing religious reverence to flawed temporal things like “The Western Tradition” [note - refer to this shabby pantomime as TWT to distinguish it from the historical and cultural reality of the West] and GBLs. All the connotations from commitment to fake onto-epistemology that that seep into the collective unconscious. And that's before MPAI...

The incoherence of the House of Lies means all the contradictory interpretations that make up TWT echo forever in "the history of the discipline". Readers are shaped by the sources they’re forced to read. And Thucydides’ reception history added a lot of appealing connotations for monodimensional fabulists. All the humanist and Neoclassical association of Greek antiquity with the already eternally perfect dawn of Progress! lent a foundational aura. The pre-Enlightenment idea of philosophical Thucydides still lurked in the cultural DNA like a recursive virus. And the German positivists who dreamed up the cuck’s weird notion that university departments were arbiters of Truth endorsed him with a fervor more suited to private engagements. Philosophical Thucydides the ideal guide to human behavior and Historical Thucydides the ideal guide to human history meet at ideal. Questioning him questions the epistemology of very House of Lies they were building. And questioning a particular interpretation would mean reading something more challenging that a National Review article.

Or American Cuckservative

The date is 2021. We start with aa false binary before sinking into a string of words.

The subtitle - "Pericles' famous funeral oration shows how civic pride and historical awareness point toward the common good" - is ironic given the content. Picture this garbage if, say, it had to start by laying out the coherent definition of "nation" being used.

Thoughtful, you see…

It appears one reason the original Neocons liked Thucydides was because of his generally negative take on populist democracy. This makes sense from a power-seeking psychopath perspective because there are no guiding principles – just reactive moves in a power game. The Band has noted how objective morality is deontological – clearly defined rights and wrongs. One of the clearest tells that the movement was fundamentally evil was the total relativism. The willingness to lie to the face of any group of believers with their own jargon to subvert them into destroying their own civilization. The Neocons slime-trailed their way into Chateau Cuck by shedding their old Trotskyite skinsuit and now claiming to oppose “communism” and 60s progressivism. Losers like Engles, Gramschi and Trotsky were out, but new intellectual hosts were needed. Thucydides had all the assets we mentioned and could be purposed to carry the viral load.

This chart is worth a look. The commentator actually illustrates the mistake we're talking about that ensorcelled the West - acting as if the publicly-narrative surface differences between “movements” was real and ignoring the onto-epistemological fraud that both manifest. What the chart catches are the real metastatic pathways beneath deceptive self-representation.

And we aren’t being hyperbolic when we dismiss the intellectual quality of this pap. Readers understand that “what we can know and how we can know it” isn’t just a motto. And that logically coherent truth claims take a bit of substantiation. It’s the only way to adjudicate contradictory rhetorical claims. Here’s the American Conservative again - this time back in 2012 - with a description of Neocon doyenne Leo Strauss that makes the Band seem almost charitable. It’s worth a closer look because it’s as good a succinct summary of our own impressions as we could write. Actually take a moment and consider what it means to have this as a pole star...

The shapeshifting is summed us as assuming "a certain right-wing style without expressing a right-wing worldview". Neoconservatives serve to popularize the Straussians’ mythical account of American politics by “drawing their rhetoric and heroic models from Straussian discourse.” It's a incestuous union that the article notes has flown under the radar on account of its vacuity. A philosopher’s work should be "intrinsically interesting or compelling in some way" to merit attention. But Strauss is a weird exception - almost universally considered to be without intellectual importance, but with a powerful pseudo-intellectual following and influence.

Strauss is simply a vastly less intelligent Derrida for a different strain of Postmodern, do what thou wilt, cultural pathogen. Where constant reinvention is not only allowed, but definitive. It's easy to see through if you can read, understand "time", and can hold more than one data point in your head at a time.

Alternatively... 🤡🌎

What the cucks and boomers still can’t grasp is that clowns didn’t believe any of it. Neocons literally couldn’t have cared any less about Thucydides, the Constitution, law and order, free enterprise, or any of the incoherent drivel that bedazzled the intersection of affluent, arrogant, and stupid. Tradition and Christianity were things they actively hated as obstacles to their world vision. What weaponized ideology they use doesn’t matter to them at all. They’re driven only by the ultimately impossible  overlap of parasitism, totalitarianism, and atavism. International Bolshevism looked promising until it didn’t, so a new skinsuit was donned. And as American culture degenerated into self-terminating sludge, they morphed again – championing a [democracy] that’s actually [satanic inversion of morality with subversive, ruthless authoritarianism and Orwell-tier language flipping]. Cuck → Con → Clown as the reverse of social-cultural improvement.

Nicolas Guibal, Socrates Teaching Pericles, 1780, oil on canvas, Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart

Making up mythic histories around Periclean Athens is nothing new though. This is an Enlightenment perpetual ideal era painting. Unfortunately Pericles was about 25 years older than Socrates, but the great thing about secular transcendent "timeless ideas" is that facts are irrelevant.

Thucydides "human condition" is a big selling point with the globalist crowd. It can counter reason and observation in support of any universalist claim. It gets more focused though. Consider the Athenian thesis - a blast of do what thou wilt to the full extent of your power mainly based on the Melian Dialogue. 

Keep in mind that the speeches were among the most criticized parts by the old scientific historians as obvious fiction. The clowns and cucks aren't claiming they're literally true. We're actually back to Hobbes, Lipsius, and the other pre-moderns who bent the knee to a secular transcendent Philosopher's Name.

Jean-Baptiste Regnault, Freedom or Death, 1795, oil on canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle

Which brings us to another insight into the House of Lies. As a youth, we bent ears to many an outraged cuck bleating about Postmodernism denying "truth". At the time, it did seem outrageous. They were denying the ontological validity of "the Western metaphysical tradition". Even claiming that the Just! and True! society we grew up in was like just your opinion, man. When we actually read the texts, what turned up was more nuanced. They do deny truth - hence the subtitle of this blog. But they were right about the arbitrariness of sign systems and representational nature of communication. They're definitely what sent us down that path towards a logically coherent being-in-the-world. And the reality is "the Western tradition" went down like a house of cards.

Because the reality wasn't truth deniars vs. truthtellers. It was liar's poker. The old timeless truth frauds had built self-beneficial sincures on vacuous epistemological claims about old books. Which was itself a self-deifying swap of human desire for ontological reality. The new liars knocked out the old ones because they were more with it and piñataing hapless pomposities is way more fun than it should be. So the old-guard cucks and fulminating boomers waving their New York Review of Books and The Western Canons weren't actually crusading for truth. What they wanted was the old fake paradigm, where their preferences were on top.

We will point out that this return of the repressed was, like most historical second acts, a farce. 

Carl Gustav Carus, Faust's Dream, 1852 gouache on charcoal

The Band is rightfully critical of Enlightenment "thought" as the necessary precursor to the House of Lies. But it is also true that that the early phases produced incredible culture. Cultural momentum and implicit traditional Western standards unleashed a torrent of epic creativity from Romanticism to Tolkien.

It takes time to coalesce a full-spectrum House of Lies...

It's a historical truism that ideologies harden and sharpen in hostile competitive environments. The Clown backlash that slipped in behind Reagan had pumped the Classical Humanities to a near-reverential status. Regilded totems to beat down the apostates and reconsecrate the temple. It appealed the same way the humanities always did - they're seminal cultural artifacts overflowing with thought-provoking ideas and real beauty. But it ultimately fizzled for the same reason that it always did. Secular transcendence isn't real. Those "timeless truths" seem increasingly less relevant in the late stage House of Lies. 

Viktor Oliva, The Absinthe Drinker, 1901, oil on canvas, Café Slavia, Prague

That didn't stop the Clowns though. They never bought their own mythology, but preyed on fundamental incoherencies in American civnat faith. That's the recurring pattern. [Total belief and commitment to empirically false and logically impossible things] is an epistemological deformation of faith as a form of knowledge. Faith picks up where reason and evidence fall short - it's not a provably false counter-factual. The way the dogmatic parts of Christianity align with logical and empirical necessity is one of its strongest arguments. Just not a useful one, given the percentage of people able to see ontological necessities is fractional. We've posted a lot on the inverted nature of American faith in civic nationalism and other false premises. The pattern is the same as the Enlightenment rationalists or Great Books huffers in the face of modernist or poststructuralist critique. A clever enemy can exploit foundational incoherence to degrade or collapse organically successful entities that believe in it.

The poststructuralists and modernists were looking to tear down what came before and take over the "intellectual" captaincy of the ship of fools. The Clown tack was different - agree and amplify the fake dogmas into nonsense land by pushing them to logical collapse. The old cucks seem to have really believed their impossibilities. The Clowns are simply amorphous liars - champions of the working man in the Soviet era and champions of Freedom! in the American one. Their goal never changes - satanic dissolution of Created structure, order, and especially Christian faith and society. The cucks could claim the stupid half of the stupid-evil matrix. The Clowns have no such ambiguity. They're demonic. Unfortunately, MPAI, and mass degradation is constant and cumulative. The same slack-jawed credulity that bought all the civnat secular transcendence was equally unable to see through Clown subversion. Just the same disgraced secular transcendences resonating with the same de-moralized idiot masses. Only deformed into Grade 3-tier intellectual complexity and elevated to fetish status.

Laurance A. Campbell, Study In Blue #2 - Wall Street, oil on board

The appeal of American secular transcendence is how it managed to piggy-back onto an organic Christian culture. Christianity warped into occultic materialism where lands are intrinsically blessed, and civnat lies woven into Christian moral imperatives. Until the current Clown-Cuck "right" - an incoherent, indefensible self-detonating slurry powering a rapacious and atavistic rampage into collapse. Notice how each wave of idiots and liars gets dumber. The current state doesn't happen without the boomer epigones metaphysically frozen in the past.

That's some modern context for Cuck-Clown Thucydides (CCT). The basic gist is that human nature is natural and therefore not a "moral" issue. Keep in mind the default cuckstitutional, moral superiority posture when reading this. It's hardly a reveal, but some people find it easier to grasp the magnitude of deceptive evil when it's laid bare. This distortion of "human nature" reduces agency to automata. The position requires the rejection of free will, and by extension, moral choice. The relevance of anyone supporting Clown World and professing Christian beliefs has already self-erased any ontological relevance. 

Quick thought experiment to see if you're smarter than a Clown "thought leader". Just using simple first-year logic, explain how "cuck-Clown Thucydides says" is a general argumentative proof. We'll wait. 

Beating a dead horse, but even decades later, the manifest stupidity defies comprehension. 

Play along. Pretend magical human nature could take the place of Ultimate Reality in a foundational ontology. Since morality is manifest alignment with Ultimate Reality, whatever the Clowns declare "human nature" is right. Here's a "syllogism". CCT tells us people and states exert power and grow by nature. And CCT is a priori Truth. Therefore aggression cannot be condemned morally or logically. 

The Melian Dialogue is not the only foundation for this Athenian thesis but the the one we know of without digging. Since we have minimal awareness of Clown gibberish, we assume if we're aware of it, it must be a main one. From Book 5, Chapter 17, Landmark version

Athenians. For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

We are not arguing either way for morality in foreign policy or the necessity of strength in hostile environments. Simply that there is no way to be a Christian and live in the [Cuck-Clown] formula. Words have meanings and history is real. Regardless of desire.

Apparently Thucydides ascended in the aftermath of World War Two - along with all the other societal inversions that accompanied that epochal blood sacrifice. The framing breaks down as [Aphoristic human nature] + [morality of force] = "classical realism". Which surprisingly isn't a totally oxymoronic, given CCT is classical and violence and entropy Fallen material conditions. According to the link, it was given the “Athenian thesis” name in the '60s by ... Leo Strauss. New hagiographic spin, but really the philosophical Thucydides of Hobbes and the pre-historians. This quote from the link is the sort of declaration of true intent that the idiot masses never pick up on, but seems required in some way...

“Thucydides sympathizes and makes us sympathize with political greatness as displayed in fighting for freedom and in the founding, ruling, and expanding of empires.”

This sentence sound like the sort of Braveheartian idealism that sets boomercucks aflutter. But consider the entire Athenian thesis. Expansion and force are human nature. So this can't be Freedom!-the-virtue. Because there are no virtues other than do what thou wilt. Not that freedom as a virtue can exist - click for a post on that category error.

Cuck-Clown "freedom" is situational in essentially a zero-sum game. Freedom carved from someone else by force, then applied forcefully on others. The Clowns are final-stage House of Lies. Everything about them is consciously inverted and dishonest. Of course their word magic and replacement of meanings wouldn't work if the idiot masses cared to understand what they're supporting. But then we wouldn't have champions of the Great Books that haven't read them. Fair to say that exporting "freedom and democracy" takes on a very different tone with awareness of what the words actually mean. Likewise Clown blather in the '90s about “benevolent global hegemony". Again, not discussing the wisdom of any particular foreign policy direction. That's a separate issue. One that can't even come up when the dialog is lies, sycophancy, and suppression.

Stephen Jackson, Seward’s Pole, installed 2017, wood, Saxman, Alaska

The search for a totemic liar led us to “the Liar’s Pole”. The original came from Tongass Village, where it had been erected in the 1880s to shame Secretary of State William H. Seward. Seward had been received by the Taant’a kwáan Teikweidí with gifts and honors, but never repaid the generosity. Vital totems are replaced as they decompose – this is the third iteration.

If the previous Neocon link is correct, Strauss's Thucydides is a cornerstone of American neoconservative foreign policy. It seems sound and we're not reading further - mix of stupidity, lies, and self-righteous morons seal-clapping as the West collapses is irritating without payoff. The whole shift from "containing Communism" to New World Order without a ripple doesn't help our natural contempt for mass degeneracy. Proof? The absence of the fate of Athens from the discourse. 

The quotes tell the story. Like when Irving Kristol, the “Godfather of Neoconservatism” and host organism for gelatinous polyp Bill called Thucydides’ History “the favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs”. Remember that, next time cucks or Clowns attempt to strike a serious or intellectual posture. And lest we be called overly harsh on account of antipathy for weak, stupid, ugly, bloviating cowards, let's get impartial and simply judge by the fruits. CCT was wheeled out in the 2000s to justify invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Consider how the application of the Clown's self-described "favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs" played out in reality. 

Time to carve another totem.

Of course, it doesn't actually stop in the House of Lies. Boomer revenant the New York Review of Books published an article in 2018 telling us...

In Thucydides’s morally coherent universe, moral action is also, inevitably, practical action, and immoral action is inevitably impractical, no matter how insistently short-sighted strategists pretend that it isn’t. In the two years since the 2016 US election, it seems ever more clear that Thucydides is the greatest historian not only of empire but also of contemporary politics.

The rest is paywalled, so we can't comment on the specifics. But an intro like that indicates set sails for logic isn't the order.

Summing up, Thucydides' amazing career comes from an ability to be whatever the auto-idolators need at the time. The modern version deserves special mention for the toxic blend of vapidity and real-world influence. We could go on, but we find these House of Lies landscapes tedious because the fake narratives don't cohere. It's nearly impossible to summarize or make a thought diagram of the structure because there isn't one. Just a cluster of random thoughts and associations that sometimes even contradict. But together make up the illusion of a fleshed-out world view. Literally the NPC functionality of FTS-2. Each unit's cluster is personalized, so slightly different and made up of way too many figments to list. But there are consistencies.

What does it take to uncritically accept "Thucydides" as the eternal ideal of rightly-guided human action? Pretty much the boomer upload package. Deep conditioned and unquestionable faith in civic nationalist institutions as committed to truth. Superficial but easily triggered reverence for the Western Tradition as manifest in the Great Books. Profound laziness, especially when it comes to intellectual effort or growth. The self-righteousness and defensiveness that comes when identity is based on faith in the unknown. That's a few big ones. Enough to see the inevitability of disaster.

William Bell Scott, The Eve of the Deluge, 1865, oil on canvas, Tate Britain  

The irony is that there's value in an honest intelligencia. Most people can't resolve their curiosity about Neoplatonism or Deconstruction by just reading The Enneads or Of Grammatology and assessing what has value and what's nonsense. That doesn't excuse mental laziness, but even that isn't terminal when truthful people are employed to distill useful insights. In theory, the value in supporting a limited scholarly class outside of historical record keeping is to sift value from the constant churn of speculative ideas. Then a functional system can adapt them for public utility. The thinkers earn trust, which keeps the system going. The problem is when the intelligensia are one-dimensional liars and the public are too dim or deluded to care.

Here's some irony. Among his other enduring qualities, Thucydides tracks the decline of Western auto-idolatry, from the erudition of a Valla or Hobbes to the pit toilet on the Potomac. 

So why read Thucydides? 

Joachim von Sandrart, Thucydides, c. 1670, oil on canvas, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

The point of the long exploration of Thucydides in the post-Antique world was to show why he's so famous and what he isn't. We can confidently rule out eternal font of Truth and perfect historiographic ideal. 

Leaving Thucydides the man and author.

We've already tipped out hand. It's not a long pitch. The History of the Peloponnesian War is a fundamental piece of the real Western tradition. Thucydides does does introduce the concept of history as an impartial, fact-based account of what really happened. It doesn't matter whether such a thing can be perfectly realized. It's the attitude - serving the truth as priority one - that defines a new genre. It's illustrative to compare him with Giorgio Vasari, his Renaissance counterpart as the "Father of Art History". They both traveled to gather information and confirm facts - foundations of modern research. But Thucydides is much more objective and ideologically driven. A better historian. He's also a good prose stylist, with moments of brilliance. And a fascinating look into the society and culture of Classical Greece on the downslope. The enduring influence adds him to the canon of essential texts for understanding the trajectory of Western culture. 

The History of the Peloponnesian War isn't challenging like Plotinus or Aristotle. It's one of those Great Books most people can get through. And it's one of the most significant intact pieces of the Classical tradition pillar of the West. Our advice to anyone who likes to read - we assume our readers tend to - is check out the canonical books. Read Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, and the others so that you understand what they actually say and how they compare to each other. If you care about western culture, revivifying it starts with knowing what it is. It's also total proof against the likes of CCT.

Bringing us to the Landmark Thucydides. 

As noted, it was this edition that initially triggered the decision to subscribe to Castalia History. It's a tremendous resource. The real strength - other than the clean, readable text - is the wealth of supporting materials. The maps are excellent and make the narrative flow of the war easy to follow. It's a large book in area because the text is accompanied by extensive parallel notes. It's remarkably efficient to read - more than footnotes or especially those execrable endnotes. The text is followed by a fantastic timeline showing the sequence of events in parallel regions. Afterwards, eleven appendices provide scholarly essays on relevant aspects of contemporary society. It's comprehensively indexed as well. The result is a tour de force of information and organization unparalleled in Thucydides' publication history. 

A look at the interior resources. 

Everything a casual reader would want for the best experience and a gold standard foundation for any kind of researcher. It had been a curious absence in the Band HQ library - Castalia History is something we'd have subscribed to anyhow, but this as first offering made it a no-brainer. 

Robert Strassler is an interesting fellow. He was a Harvard History major and MBA who made his money in business but had ancient Greece as his passion. Thucydides was the first of his Landmark volumes, and despite some inevitable quibbling, they really are ideal editions for most readers.

The overall quality of the Landmark presentation is a leader in the treatment of any period - any quibbling a matter of personal taste. The one place that is open to discussion is the same with any classical text - the issue of translation. This was a centerpiece of out older Castalia Dante post where we compared three versions we like. Poetry is different though, where aesthetics and fidelity create dueling imperatives. With prose non-fiction, questions of accuracy become paramount. Because translation is converting between non-identical representational systems, perfection is impossible. And because literacy is limited enough to need translation, few readers can asess the finer points of disagreement for themselves. The practical questions are how well does the translator convey the total meaning, and how accessible is that to the English reader.

Landmark uses Robert B. Strassler's revision of the 1874 Richard Crawley translation. Crawley is very well regarded - the main quibble seems to be with his translation of the famous speeches. This is interesting, because the speeches are the area where Thucydides most obviously uses his authorial license. This is a fair complaint for certain specialists likely to review Thucydides. People interested in aesthetic complexity, literary criticism, or those philosophical readings of him. But for the historical reader uninterested in pretending a flawed man is an eternal icon, Crawley is a fine choice. Criticism goes the other way too. Strassler's decision to modernize and Americanize the Victorian language can irk purists. But it effectively conveys the meaning to the contemporary reader more interested in information than academic arcana. There's clearly a market...

This is supported by the translation study mentioned earlier on. It argues Crawley stands out among English Thucydides for emphasis on historical objectivity and coherence. If one is interested in Thucydides as primary source window on Classical Greece, this is perfect. The wealth of Landmark extras build off that perspective. It treats him not as sage or poet, but as the type of writer he invented. A historian. Doing his best to provide a truthful representation of events that really happened. 

The irony is that the CCT and other "theoretical" Thucydides mark a structural return to the absurd secular transcendent self-deifications that plagued pre-rigorous history. Where objectivity is subservient to a mythical world view. Thucydides as eternal archetype of human action is no less ridiculous than Alexander's claimed descent from Apollo. Anything that helps cauterize that suppurating abscess can only be a blessing. As for enthusiasts with specific literary or linguistic interests a more recent translation by Steven Lattimore does a better job capturing the rhetorical intricacy of the speeches. There's no overall advantage to that text as far as we can tell, but it's a worthy supplement in specific cases.

Why Castalia History Thucydides? 

From what we can gather, Castalia House is in the process of expanding and improving its technical capabilities, building from a new, private bindery. This has major downstream implications that we'll close with. What it means for this book is that it is supposedly a quality floor. That is welcome news to a long-term subscriber, but all we can do for readers here is describe the book we have. And that's fine, because if this is the floor...

First of all, it's quite beautiful. Big without being ponderous and bound in high-grade burgundy Italian cowhide, it looks like it belongs in a serious aristocratic library [unless noted, all photos are of our copy].

Of particular note is the gold stamping on the cover. Band readers are well aware of the heights book arts can hit. Most think of manuscript illumination, calligraphy, etc., but binding is an art of its own. Impressing gilt in leather in intricate patterns so that it sticks without marring the surface is a skill. The artisans here managed to recreate the form of the printed dust jacket cover of the original Landmark Thucydides in two-tone gold on burgundy. This is itself an act of translation. The text is really clear, even the smallest font. We are not bookmakers, but the cover immediately jumped out as particularly refined. And a sign that these guys know their game [this comparison uses a Castalia History image from the internet because it's perfect for it].

The spine is also well done. Razor-sharp gold stamping that pops against the burgundy background. Looking really closely, the last E in the third line of text on our copy is slightly unresolved. It's not noticeable on a shelf, even when aware of it, and does not detract from the overall quality assessment. Tiny imperfections are signs of human craft and this is well within the acceptable range. We do find the CH logo at the top a bit oversized, but that's really just aesthetic preference. The present design is harmonious and well balanced. Given the similarity in warmth between the two colors, it's surprising the contrast is so sharp. The net result is an attractive mix of legibility and chromatic harmony. 

Internet photos again to show the difference between the Castalia Dante & even bigger Thucydides. And how much we care about the E on ours. The Dante remains a lovely book and well worth the purchase. But  refinements are also visible. The design is more complex and harmonious and the sharper corner crimping makes the leather conform to the corners more tightly. Positive signs of growth despite high initial standards.

Can't judge a book by the cover, they say, and when actually judging books it's accurate. Looking inside, this one is built to last. 

The first experience opening the cover.

It's printed on 90 gram archive-quality paper for strength and to eliminate acidification over time. The pages feel substantial - they're not going to tear accidently or wear with use. It's Smyth sewn - the most durable mass binding and one where the pages naturally lay flat without stress.

With Smyth sewing, individual signatures are actually stitched over and across to eliminate the problem with adhesives breaking down over long periods. They also fold open flat and don't crack with use.

We've leafed through this Landmark Thucydides multiple times and read some sections closely. There were some creaking sounds when first opened, but no visible cracking or pulling on the binding that we can see. It’s hard to see in my amateurish photos, but there is no gap between the endpaper and the cover or binding. Leather is folded tightly around the cover with no unnecessary lumps or gaps.

It would be interesting to see inside, but this book is much too nice to try anything invasive. We don't have to - basic use is enough to confirm our impression.

We haven't had it long, but there's no sign of the cover creasing along the spine with the use it's had. The creaking sound appears to have been natural breaking in and not anything structural, even after close examination. It closes as flatly as when it came out of the package. The gilding stood up to some travelling in a shopping bag and show-and-tell sessions. Obviously we treat it with care, but it appears as impervious to normal use as the construction would imply. As rugged and well-made as it is attractive. Clearly designed as much for use value as aesthetics. Some surface wear in inevitable with hard copy knowledge preservation designed to last millennia. The Band is familiar enough with old books and incunabula. They're insanely durable. This is a reminder that there is no reason such things can't be again.

Since The Landmark Thucydides was announced, Castalia entered the Cambridge University Press partnership. The next two books in the History series that arrived are the two-volume shorter Cambridge Medieval History. They're more conventionally sized, but the aesthetics, ruggedness, and overall quality are comparable. The stamping and leather are of equal quality This indicates that the Thucydides was not a lucky strike, but the result of a replicable process. 

As a stand-alone purchase, the Castalia History Landmark Thucydides gets an enthusiastic and unreserved thumbs up. Had we had any doubts about subscribing, they'd have been instantly dispelled. It's an unfortunate reality that any start-up tends to be plagued with unforeseen challenges, and prestige book publishing in the 21st century seems like it would be especially prone. That said, initial delays were explained and rectified, and customer service and shipping have been outstanding. The book came double boxed and wrapped in plastic without a flaw. It's easy to see the bugs getting worked out and a smooth-running machine clicking into place. The uncertainties mean there is always an element of risk when jumping in at the start of something. But there are also always signs whether these are natural growing pains or a nascent clown show. In this case, the Dante experience eliminated any real reservations, and receiving the books closed the case.

We should also mention the price. Just the description of the Landmark Thucydides is enough to show that quality publishing is an expensive undertaking. As subscribers, we receive 4 books per year for a $40 monthly fee, meaning each averages $120. This is very low for the nature of the product. Castalia is a fledgling entrant into the small but discerning world pf prestige book publishing and collecting. It’s a timely entry, since the established players have suffered the typical modern diminishment or dissolution of quality culture. The Folio Society is a has been producing high-end editions since 1947 and enjoys a strong reputation for consistent quality. They've done a few Thucydides editions over the last 30 years. But only the current one is leather bound. We suspect Castalia is already raising the bar.

1994 Folio Society Thycydides in one-quarter leather and cloth

You can see the emphasis on appearance here. The cloth parts are covered by the slipcase.

2007 Folio Society Thucydides is entirely cloth-bound.

It is attractive, especially the spine - the only part uncovered by the slipcase. But we also suspect an element of coasting. A market doesn't usually implode overnight without technological obsolescence-replacement.

In what could only be a coincidence, the new Folio Society Thucydides - the first post Castalia -  is all leather. This is currently on offer until the print run sells out. They're using the Hammond translation - considered good, but recent. It's the new Oxford Classics one. There are attempts to add some of the extras – illustrations, five maps, and a scholarly introduction and notes. Less than the Oxford Classic original, and way less than Landmark. We assume they’re good quality, but even so, the Landmark delivers way more, and we know that material is good.

It’s a nice looking book. It’s also $580.

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Martin Hammond, illustrated by Nick Hayes, introduced by Katherine Harloe, 2024, Folio Society 

It is signed by the last two contributors, but not the translator. Even if you take off $80 for the slipcover, it’s still four times the cost of our Castalia version,

The internet photo of the binding shows a deeper groove along the spine and no ridges. Stamping is much more basic. More concerning, the binding seems to be pulled up and back by the open cover. Not proof of anything, but a possible indicator the book won't wear as well as the Castlia. Corner cutting and folding look comparable, but can't say more without a hard copy to look at.

In terms of quality, they look comparable, with some possible advantages to Castalia. We can’t assess feel, smell, etc., but what we can see suggests same ballpark with the likely edge to Castalia. The caveat being we are not that knowledgeable about the collector market and don’t know what an illustrator signature adds in value. But from the Band’s knowledge-keeper perspective, there’s no comparison in value. 

Then there's Easton Press. It was founded in 1975, and along with the now-defunct Franklin Library - founded two years earlier – was the best-known publisher of this kind in American households. Click for a link on them and the Folio Society. We planned a comparison when we saw a tweet announcing an Easton Landmark Herodotus and Thucydides set. 

They look handsome enough. These gold stamped leather bindings look closer in concept to Castalia, if less refined. Castalia's spine design is vastly superior, but the overall package calls for a closer look. Hats off to the Castalia designers, by the way.

So we clicked on the link and…

Undeterred, we tried a search...

Run must be out. Easy comparison then.

In our opinion we're looking at unbeatable value for huge collector-tier, scholarly tomes. As noted, we aren't prestige collectors ourselves - price having been the pattern-setting factor by necessity. But this comes under under our price ceiling, and when [the only prestige publisher of academic masterpieces] is thrown in... just look at what ordinary academic books cost. Cuckservative Liberal Arts bastion Hillsdale College will sell you a paperback Landmark Thucydides for $63. 

If we gave Folio Society $80 for an attractive slipcase, what's full prestige binding and publishing worth?

Though to be fair, the comparison is a bit disingenuous. Hillsdale endorses a cuckservative text string called "the free market", where predatory finance and unfettered oligopoly do something. To the extent of putting on an annual roadshow of travelling cucks to pimp this nonsense. Given the absence of foundational ontology or logical consistency in their ideology, it’s probably not surprising that the same book can be had on Amazon for < 1/3 of the price. Hard to find a more concise demonstration of the difference between Cuck-Clown bleating and the actual things they bleat about. By the fruits.

Sticking to paperback for comparison, but we could pick up a new hardcover for around $40-$50. On the other hand, Hillsdale offers an endorsement from clown panjandrum Donald Kagan…

To be fair, academic publishing is a disgusting racket and Hillsdale appears to conform to the standard House of Lies educational model of institutional profligacy, flacid secular transcendence, and hollow self-aggrandizement. And Clowns fleecing cucks with self-righteous vanity and easy lies has become a tried and true part of that “Liberal Arts tradition” - at least on the nominal right. Castalia History’s value is obvious in comparison to quality peers and free-market squeakers. Ironically, the Amazon paperback may be the most comparable bargain – way less money for just the content in way less quality an object.

The final point is the future. Readers know that cultural preservation and revival are causes dear to our hearts. High-end bookmaking was well on its way to becoming a lost art. To our knowledge, there are few commercial bindaries of that caliber in operation, and none of them are capable of apex 19th or 20th-century quality. There are specialists and artisans who will work with prestige books or rebind in prestige formats. But these tend to be individual shops working on small scales with hand tools. Here's a skillful repair guy with a good description of his process. This isn’t vital tradition though, but a sign of transition from vital culture to antiquarian interest.

This is different.

Castalia Library already hit the preservation part by opening a new line of prestige books at a time when the future was dimming. The aforementioned Dante is one of these - the old model of subscription + individual sales until the run is gone works if the product is good and costs controlled. Not just another Great Books series to roost on a shelf, although those are there. They should be - a lot of them really are great, like Dante again. But never more than when part of a lively assortment of new and classic works that will keep a reader engaged long-term. No sign of the dumbed-down populism that drove Castalia to resurrect the venerable Junior Classics - and seems to be a necessary part of the death ritual for moribund luxury marques in general.

What literary subscriptions used to be. Cultural preservation.

The Junior Classics deserve special mention for establishing the trustworthiness of Castalia’s commitment to cultural preservation. The vast anthology of well-adapted stories is an informative foundation for a life of reading and knowledge. Progressive “progressive” alterations left the series unfit for purpose. These are the originals, in clean modern volumes.

Full disclosure - we backed the crowd fund and are just waiting on the last two of the ten, which are currently in productio. So a satisfied customer endorsement.

And they’re doing them in prestige leather as well. We settled for the conventional hardcover.

Acquiring their own bindary moves into revival. It’s structurally the functional part of the Renaissance humanist model – study the arts of the past as a pathway to new creativity in the old mode. Real revitalization of something lost. 

Consider the art that bookbinding was prior to the 20th century...

The idea that a book was valuable enough for a special cover goes way back. Medieval treasure bindings were works of art in their own right, with gold, gems, enamels, ivories, and other precious materials arranged into essentially relief sculpture. Not a viable mass market option, but historic proof that the book arts have as high a ceiling as any other. There’s no theoretical limit to what is appropriate.

Limoges binding with The Crucifixion of Christ, around 1200, champlevé enamel on gilded copper, Louvre Museum 

Here’s a really nice enamel treasure binding from the early Gothic era. It’s hard to say where book arts end and sculpture begins.

The idea that books are valuable things is hardly a new one.

Keeping it relevant, we’ll look at some leather binding highlights. Starting with the oldest one in the West. Good photos of high quality antiquarian books aren’t as common as one might think.

St Cuthbert Gospel of St John, 7th-century binding in molded, tooled and gilded goatskin, British Library

The oldest intact European book is also the oldest Western leather binding. The decorative media – molded or tooled leather and gilded patterns – are standard today.

Bindings start to look familiar by the Renaissance and the designs reflect widening awareness of the world. The printing press is a game changer for binders as well as writers. Mass production of books created incentive to speed up quality binding. Work of art bindings never go away. But a whole art of high-end larger-scale binding grows up.

Heures à l’usage de Romme, bound for Agnes Polus in calf leather, with gilt tooling, Paris, around 1517, The Morgan Library & Museum

This pattern called an arabesque and derived from Islamic decoration known through Spain. Arabesques became very popular in early 16th century Europe, and were associated with humanist erudition.

The Fanfare Style is an elaborate later 16th-century style not derived from arabesque, but reflecting the same love of ornament. It was big over Europe from around 1570 until into the 17th century but only named by a 19th-century revivalist. It’s a difficult style requiring high skill – showing the positive effect healthy competition has in the arts.

Hallmarks include geometric compartments bounded by a ribbons with a larger center compartment.  (which is larger or otherwise distinguished). The rest of the space is filled with foliate patterns like laurel. Also note the gauffered edges. These are page edges decorated with heated finishing tools that indent patterns. 

Horae beatissimae Virginis Mariae with Ève brothers style fanfare binding and gauffered edge, 1570, pub. Christopher Plantin, Antwerp, Library of Congress.

Here’s another Fanfare Style binding with the gauffered book block and molded hubs on the leather spine visible. It's only a few years older than the previous. 

Psalmista monasticum, iuxta ritum Monachorum Nigrorum obseruantium Ordinis s. Benedicti,Venise: Lucantonio Giunta, 1573

Gauffering flourished in the 17th, late 18th, and latter half of the 19th centuries. It works best on hard gilded paper blocks. As once the technique is established, a few variations develop. Stippling right on the gold, or layering different colored golds and impressing the pattern in new gold on the original. Sometimes parts of the gold are scraped off and the exposed paper stained. 

Here's a comparison between the gauffering & fanfare details from our two above. 

We can’t be comprehensive – just a few tendencies to give a sense of binding as a respected art for a long time. Modern leather binding decoration has two distinct aspects that have been around for centuries. Contrasting metallic patterns on richly colored leather is one. The other is manipulating the shape or surface of the leather. “Sculpture” to the gilded “”painting”.

Andro Hart is the most significant pre-Restoration Scottish book merchant and printer with a distinct binding style. Elaborate gold stamping and tooling, a large central ornament, and flat ornate spine are typical and show the transition to modern bookmaking. Artists still handcraft descendants of treasure bindings, but these are unique and special creations. Mass production – even small batch and extreme quality – needs to mechanize some of the decoration process to match scale. Hart and his contemporaries were using stamps and presses instead of hand tooling and gilding in the 16th century. Here are 1611 and 1635 printings of the Psalmes of David in meeter – the first by Hart, the second by the Heirs of Andro Hart (his widow Jonet and sons John and Samuel, who carried the business into mid-century). The consistency suggests binding was a family affair as well).

The psalmes of David in meeter, with the prose: wherevnto is added prayers commonly vsed in the Kirke, and private houses... Edinburgh, Printed by Andro Hart, 1611; The psalmes of David in prose and meeter : with their whole tunes in foure or mo parts, and some psalmes in reports: vvhereunto is added many godly prayers... Edinburgh, By the heires of Andrevv Hart, 1635, St. Andrew's University Library

The battered condition of the psalters is a sign of heavy use – there’s no significant visible accident damage. But this shows the durability of leather binding. If the paper isn’t prone to acidification, they can take centuries of constant wear.

Textured gold stamping on the 1635 edition. The gold will wear away long before the cover smooths out. A reminder to attend to the proper storage of even the toughest volumes. These books are valuable to us now, but at the time were utilitarian objects, like a hymnal in a church today. The West used to put care and beauty into things that mattered. It’s where that legacy we’re digging up came from.

Gauffering on the 1635 edition. The worn corner lets us see the leather is stretched around a board of some sort. Refinements of ancient technique.

We can't pass through the 17th century without mentioning the "Le Gascon" style – the work of an anonymous French artist active from the 1620s. He (or they, in the case of a shop or team) are only known through his work – the most splendid bindings of the era. Le Gascon mastered pointillé style – drawing with fine dots instead of lines. Not that different conceptually from the Pointillist modern art style. The result was something like the complex interlaced bands and geometrical compartments of the Fanfare Style with unprecedented refinement. 

Processional for the use of the Dominican sisters of St. Louis, Poissy, 1510-1540,  bound by Le Gascon, in 17th-century gold-tooled red morocco with clasps, Special Collections and Archives, University of Missouri Libraries

Le Gascon shows how art and technology move together. Just as presses allowed mass stamping, the development of finer finishing tools let artists reach new heights of custom delicacy. According to the link, Le Gascon was active between 1620 and 1653 and favored red morocco for his bindings. Thucydides is in good company.

The detail of Le Gascon’s work has to be seen up close to be appreciated. Countless tiny dots, sometimes stretched and shaped into curves and forms, all with flawless harmony.

A scallop shell border, inner lace work panel, pointillé corner and center compartments with fleurons, dots and curls... The repertoire of pre-modern decoration.

It’s worth a quick look at a couple more Le Gascon. His all over designs best show the intricacy and elegance he was renowned for. This is an early one – a Roman Missel or liturgical book with materials for celebrating the liturgy and Mass.

Le Gascon, gold on red morocco binding, Missale romanum, Anvers 1621

Le Gascon, gold on morocco binding for René de Bruc, marquis de Montplaisir, Temple de la gloire, 1646, Chantilly, Musée Condé, 

His work is so precise. Pity we don’t know who he is.

The pointillé style lingers after Le Garcon. Florimond Badier appears a generation younger, but had nearly the skill set. This Greek New Testament came out of his shop. We couldn’t find higher res photos, but it’s so stunning – the imagination can do the rest.

Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗKΗ. Novum Testamentum, ex Regiis aliisque optimis editionibus... Greek New Testament, Leyden, Elzevier, 1633, binding attributed to Florimond Badier workshop, gilded red morocco, polylobed interior frame with corner fleurons, four large sheaves of in pointillé, ribbed spine decorated with dotted lines

Badier was best known for the sheaf type of decoration after his fanfares. It was once proposed he was Le Gascon, but he's too young.

New finishing tools brought English Restoration era binding to new heights as well. Gold-tooled leather bindings on intricate patterns proliferate. The end of Cromwell's rule brought an overall celebratory spirit to the English arts.

Richard Allestree, The Art of Contentment, Oxford, 1675

According to the link, the is an example of the all-over drawer-handle pattern. The shape derives from Greek Ionic columns.

Note how many different intricate patterns there were. We are not book collectors ourselves, but interest in the historic arts of binding is a different matter. It belongs with stained glass and fine oil painting in the aesthete wing of the Band.

Nicolas Denis Derome or Derome le jeune is a major name in 18th-century binding. He became a master binder in 1761, and died about the year 1788. Derome is best known for his dentelles,- lacy pattern borders that generally point attention to the center. Which distinguishes him is the delicacy and variety of his designs. He used very refined stamping tools and mixed and matched them instead of repeating the same forms.

A look at Derome's tools with some discussion of the problems with binding historical scholarship. His famous bird with outstretched wings -  dentelles à l'oiseau - isn't here.

The best way to appreciate the effect of this process is to look at Derome’s work. We tried to find the information on this book - a Derome-bound edition of the Grandes Chroniques de France vol. 3 – beyond the site where we found it. Unfortunately the British Library link is dead on account of ongoing cyber attacks... Clown World’s gonna clown…

Les Grans Croniques de France, Paris, Antoine Verard, 1493, Derome binding in red morocco with gilded dentelle border, British Museum

Here’s a closer look at the dentelle pattern.

Derome and his circle are hard to find hard data on with quick online searches. The arts of the West arbitrarily self-limited to painting, sculpture, and architecture for several centuries after the Renaissance, totally skewing historians’ attention. Since Art History formed as an independent discipline in the 19th century along with the rest of the academy, it’s generated a staggering amount of material on those arts. All the other forms – including binding – were relegated to craftwork and outside the attention of of serious scholars. It’s slowly changing, but there’s a lot of ground to make up and institutional attention has shifted from knowledge to nonsense politics.

Here’s an assortment of Derome dentelle patterns in different sizes and colors. The images are to scale.

Intricate gilding and stamping aren’t the only ways to decorate leather. Mosaic binding uses pieces of different colored leather to make a lively pattern. This can then be stamped and gilded in the usual way.

Michel Boutauld, Les Conseils de la Sagesse, ou Recueil des maximes de Salomon… (1677), seventh edition, Paris, les libraires associés, 1736.

Mosaic binding by the Tulip workship [L’atelier "à la tulipe”] in green, red, and ochre morocco, gilded with tools that include a sun, bird and pierced heart. The tulip workshop was active from 1740-1785 and has stylistic ties to Derome.

Part of the art here is to synchronize the leather mosaic pattern with the stamping tools so the two levels of decoration harmonize.

Moving into the 19th century, we realize we’ve only looked at French and English binding. There’s too much to be comprehensive – this is already way longer than planned. Plus the French did push the envelope in the 16 and 1700s and the English were early adopters after the Restoration. Castalia History is operating in a mainly English tradition anyhow – the books are all English, and the prestige marques like Easton that directly inspired them are Anglo-American. In the 19th century, England becomes the world literacy capital, so wrapping with them makes sense.

The refinement of mass binding in the Victorian Era is an extension of the wealth, average intelligence, and aestheticism of that society. There was a publishing explosion as a swelling middle class and rising literacy created an insatiable appetite for printed material of every stripe. It’s easy to think of the Industrial Revolution in terms of cultural destruction and globalism, but it created the biggest pool of affluent people ever. Enough middle and upper classes for the first affluent pop culture. But with social status and morality tied to aristocratic and Christian norms, and an IQ 10 points higher than England today, reading and refined taste played the roles of glowing screens and "coolness".

Robert Dudley, designer, Cover for Wilmott's Sacred Poetry, ound by Leighton Son and Hodge, 1863, gold-stamped brown cloth

Artful binding wasn’t limited to leather in this environment. Even regular hardcovers could be tooled and stamped with real beauty. The link as an assortment of “ordinary” bindings from the 1860.

The leathers hit the sort of heights you’d expect. Hard to pick one. This stunner in green morocco isn’t a bad choice…

John Ramage, Scottish Wheel binding for Palgrave's Golden Treasury edition of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lyrical Poems. Selected and Annotated by Francis T. Palgrave. London: Macmillan and Co., 1899, olive green crushed morocco, central wheel pattern, blossoms, florets and stipples

Ramage is a celebrated name of the era. That Victorian medievalism comes through in the Rose Window design of the central wheel.

It's so delicate. As machining kept improving, more precise tools became available. 

And because light has such an effect on photos of objects, here's the same in different conditions.

We’ll leave the Victorians with a gallery of precise, tasteful designs. The variety is tremendous [all photos by Edward Nudelman on The Victorian Web. Full information at each link].

No real commentary here, so if you’re uninterested in Victorian bindings, skipping to the end won’t miss any points. If you are interested, this is, in our opinion, the direct forerunner to what Castalia is doing. Society as a whole is intellectually degraded, but a subscription base and an affiliated organic community creates a literary-minded microcosm that’s not so different. The volumes have a similar look – this is the standard the Easton-type founders had in mind, so it’s in the DNA. But more interestingly, Castalia has characteristics that can push back artistic decline – we’ll wrap with that – and early returns look as if the vision is this level of binding. Don’t bet against them…

Captain Gladstone, Binding for Andrew Lang, Grass of Parnassus. London: Longmans, 1888, dark blue gilt tooled morocco with all-over shaped circle and oval motif, bluebell blossoms, onlaid flowers, and wide gilt decorated dentelles

Thucydides shows Castalia is already thinking paratextually. Victorian bindings often commented on, framed, or foreshadowed the interior content in some way. This book has antique poetic subject matter, so the binding depicts the kind of ancient ornament the Neoclassicists developed from real archaeological finds. It creates a light, poetic classical vibe that fits what’s to come.

Riviere & Son, crimson crushed morocco binding with gilt foliate motifs and dots for A. C. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon. London: Moxon, 1865, bound around 1895.

This one isn’t paratextual but is really attractive. The link connects the style to the Arts & Crafts movement, which fits with the quasi-medieval design and pure quality. You can see the Art Nouveau in here as well – nice window on an aesthetic change.

Frank Garrett, tan crushed morocco Arts and Craft style binding with leaf, vine and blossom pattern for The Sonnets of Shakespeare. Birmingham & London: G. Napier, 1895

This one really is Arts & Crafts – note the Tudor roses for that English neo-medieval flavor. It’s also beautiful work. Garrett was an absolute master. The way the understated but suburb cover stamping offsets the heavily decorated spine is innate artistic talent.

Sangorski and Sutcliffe, crushed navy blue morocco binding with over 130 morocco onlays stamped with gilt flower and leaf patterns for Percy Bysshe Shelley. Rosalind and Helen. London: C and J Ollier, 1819; bound circa 1895.

Speaking of exquisite understatement… Sangorski and Sutcliffe weren’t exactly flyweights either. Note how all these are coming out the same year. This many shops running at this level of skill is the clearest sign of Victorian literary culture. Stamping over colored leather with this clarity was the province of royal masters, not commercial print houses.

Miss Le Lacheur, brown leather  binding with gilt floral and dot pattern for Geoffrey Chaucer. The Prologue to the Tales of Canterbury. Chelsea: The Ashendene Press, 1897.

Le Lacheur was an extremely gifted binder who little is known about. She may have been connected to the Guild of Women Binders – a training organization that produced some elite-tier artists. The big florals forming a dentelle that isn’t overpowering is another example of innate vision. As always, note the skill of the actual binding beneath the decorations.

P. A. Savoldelli, dark brown crushed morocco binding with 465 ochre, red-brown, olive green, turquoise and light brown inlays, gilt highlights & shapes, for Skelton’s Charles I, 1898

Signerd The Hampstead Bindery. Some designs swing for the creative fences. This one is radical and aggressive while remaining attractive. The sheer complexity of the leather inlay and synchronized stamping is stunning. 

Sangorski & Sutcliffe, crimson morocco binding with gilt designs, & bust of Dickens & green morocco onlays, alternating gilt busts of Samuel Pickwick and Sam Weller on the spine panels for Charles Dickens.The Pickwick Papers, London: Chapman & Hall, 1837, bound around 1900

More really high-level ornament and tasteful restraint. The consistent quality and precision across such a range of designs is what makes the era a gold standard.

Most of what we’ve shown is around 1895-1900 – here’s a later Edwardian one where the artist lets the color go while keeping the usual precision. Something for everyone.

Riviere & Son, gilt-blocked blue morocco binding gilt-tooled geometric and floral designs for Arthur Quiller Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912

We could go on, but time and space are finite. We’d recommend any reader who enjoyed this to check out the links. There’s endless examples and information. So we’ll sign off with an almost treasure binding by Sangorski & Sutcliffe with jeweled highlights.

 

Sangorski & Sutcliffe, jeweled binding with mother-of-pearl for John Milton, Paradise Regained, bound 1910s-1920s, The Newberry Library

It’s so ornate, but compare it to their earlier Dickins. The floral boundary is like the dentelle and contrasts with the denser spine decoration. Much more detailed, but similar control over harmony. All the techniques are here – the gems complement the colored leather inlays and gilded stamping.

And a look at the endpapers.

There’s one more thing we wanted to mention about artistic 19th-century binding. Large family Bibles form a sub-group of very ambitious, creative, and even sculptural bindings that fly under the critical radar but can be absolutely beautiful. Given our profile, it seems inappropriate to leave them out.

Because of this parallel existence, there’s even less information around than the other bindings. This is the sort of deep dive cultural knowledge that would be perfect for a reality-based “higher education”. When material isn’t findable on the internet, the home autodidact with a computer model hits a limit. The idea behind paying scholars to be scholars is so that they can spend the time and travel doing primary information gathering and mapping out the real history. Careful gathering and synthesis that gives guys on the internet the data to piece out the bigger picture. We’ve given the information we have and linked to the site it came from.

Embossed leather bound Bible with gold tooling and engraved brass mounts with black and white plates, 1878

This one is relatively simple and in need of restoration. It’s a nice example of the 3D texturing, clean stamping, and use of other materials that makes this category so impressive. The damage is indicative of the function – these were constantly used in ways most prestige volumes aren’t. Not just reading – they were also had year and scrap book functions.

Antique family Holy Bible, E. Gately, 1881

This one isn’t relatively simple. What it is is a great example of what this artform was capable of. According to the link, it’s 4 1/4" thick, weighs 14lbs, and includes over 2500. Note that the Castalia Thucydides pushing the current envelope on size is another pointer towards possibilities of revival.

This is the back cover –  the front is the same design, but the gilding is more worn. There are lots of photos in the link. A close-up shows the detailed stamping in representations of the Temple and Jesus Christ the King.

And a nice look at the spines. Binding on this scale presents technical challenges, but every component gives the artists a large canvas to work on.

It achieves a similar harmony to the Victorian books in a more Baroque idiom. The 3D texture of the front and back is balanced by a more typical ribbed spine. 

Holy Bible with gilt leather binding, W.L. Richardson & Co., Boston, 1882

One more sculptural binding with intensive gilding. This one includes figures and scenes from the text, a beautiful decorated cross, and ornate clasps.

The size and heft of these two books comes through on the edge. There are structural problems with this much weight stressing the binding. Metal clasps support the integrity of the tome by “binding” it on a second side. 

With this background, we can contextualize what we see as the most exciting potential in the Castalia Library initiative. Consider the functional part of the Renaissance humanist cultural production model. Put aside all the gateway drug to secular transcendence stuff we’ve traced in exhaustive detail for practical outcomes. Start with an awareness that cultural standards have slipped in some way. Note that this requires abandon fake myths about eternal progress and bathing in the light of one’s intellect for honest situational awareness. At that point, it becomes possible to identify what’s wrong and study what was better. The first phase is preservation-recovery. Relearning lost art with the past as a teacher. The next phase comes after the lessons have been learned and the artists have internalized the skills to the point where fresh creativity is possible. A back to the future pattern, where old tools empower new visions.

Apollo Belvedere (Belvedere Apollo, Apollo of the Belvedere, or Pythian Apollo),  120–140 AD, white marble, Vatican Museums

One of the most influential artworks in history. It’s thought to be a Hadrianic era statue and was rediscovered on the eve of the High Renaissance in 1489. Placement in the Vatican collections ensured maximum visibility, and it became an icon of a smooth idealized classicism.

Antico, Apollo Belvedere, 1497/98, bronze, partially gilded, eyes inlaid silver; Marcantonio Raimondi, The Apollo Belvedere from the Vatican..., 1510–27, engraving

Renaissance art has a humanistic attitude to antiquity. Not total imitation but learning from the examples that were being dug out of the ground. Antico made small luxe bronze copies for rich collectors, and Raimondi was a famous printmaker who spread Renaissance ideas around Europe.

Michelangelo, David, 1501-1504, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence

Michelangelo shows the transition from learning from to original creation. His famous David departs from the dynamic classicism of the Apollo Belvedere and winds up in an original place. The pose isn’t exactly the same, the subject is different, and there’s more anatomical and psychological refinement. But look closely at the design. It’s something new out of a revived tradition.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-1625, marble, Galleria Borghese, Rome

A century later, Roman genius Bernini goes back to the character of Apollo but turns the original into a dynamic narrative presence. It’s clearly based on ancient traditions, but the illusionism and movement are totally new.

Classical aesthetic possibilities have been reinstalled into the Western artistic vocabulary. And reach a level of techne never before seen in any era. Once the intellectualized study of the past are internalized by artists as creative processes, there’s no ceiling on what’s possible.

The relevance of this to Castalia becomes obvious with the news that they have constructed their own bindery. One of the big factors in the decline of binding in the modern era is a lack of venues to ply the art. We mentioned earlier how few people can even publish prestige leather books. And how their business models don’t allow for emphasis on that kind of artistry. Dependency on external producers means accepting their ceilings. Consider all the shops and studios running at the same time in Victorian London – vast opportunities for creative development. 

Castalia has just stepped through the veils of time and set themselves up with the sort of facility that seemed lost to the past. 

We aren’t predicting this is what they’re going to do. But it’s on the table if they want, and given the demonstrated commitment to the art… They can prioritize whatever aspects they want to the level they want. They already have talented designers – as good as anywhere today. Now there’s nothing stopping them from refining tools, experimenting with patterns, and coming forward instead of picking up fragments.

Take another look at The Landmark Thucydides after this little tour of Anglo-French binding. It’s really good. The design is fantastic for any era. What’s lacking by historical standards is the refined delicacy. That’s expected – the physical plant isn’t there anymore. The design is such an optimistic step though. It’s the aspect of the art that is accessible regardless of available tools. 

With that intention behind them, we expect their own bindery will close the technical gap with time. 

The cover translates the original picture in a way that hints at the Greek architectural landscape and the tremendous supplementary materials. Artistically, it requires working within the limits of the available tools to calibrate the design to the line width. The map functions like a sort of dentelle and the type is up to historical standards.

Having your own machines makes an artistic workshop possible and resurrects lost possibilities. Artisans can push limits back in ways not possible elsewhere. The stamping is an early sign – consider that the bindery is not yet open. We are thoroughly satisfied with Castalia and recommend either their Library or History series to anyone feels they want to be part of what we just described.

We’re curious to see where it goes.