Every Picture Tells A Story

What images does Thucydides call to mind? His name evokes some powerful abstract concepts like power, war, justice, freedom and truth; pictures, not so much. Serious publications in search of an illustration for the header or cover resort time and again to the same tiny repertoire of portraits, ancient and modern – I would guess that the statue outside the parliament building in Vienna appears in at least a third of cases – or that very familiar mid-C19 painting by Philipp von Foltz of Pericles orating on the Pnyx that also gets trotted out for pretty well any discussion of Athenian democracy that doesn’t just show a picture of the Acropolis.* Social media, meanwhile, has seized the opportunity offered by AI to generate phantasmagoric mash-ups of ancient Greek warriors, Chinese and American symbols, chessboards, ropes and the kitchen sink, whether to illustrate the Thucydides Trap or the Melian Dialogue. Interesting as an insight into GenAI’s rendering down of human culture, but art…