For all of you readers who did not know, my first love as a budding historian—I may have been eleven years old—was ancient Greece. All those gods and goddesses, cavorting on Mount Olympus where they stayed forever young and had their food (ambrosia) and drink (nectar) brought to them by self-driving robots on wheels. The temples with their various capitals, one kind of which (the Corinthian) was said to resemble “a basketful of toys, topped by a marble plate, covering a child’s grave.” The marketplace where people met to vote on laws and ostracize those of their fellow-citizens considered a danger to the public. The heroic defense against the wicked Persian invaders. And the terrible civil war in which, sadly, the great and noble Pericles died.

What I did not know at the time, but learnt to appreciate a decade or so later when I was a student at the Hebrew University during the late 1960s, was how difficult, how impenetrable, Thucydides, the great historian to whom we owe 90 percent of what we know about that war, really is. Nor was I the only one to find him so. Here is what Dame Mary Beard, a retired Cambridge University professor and as good a classicist as they come, has to say about the matter:

The fact remains that [Thucydides’] History is sometimes made almost incomprehensible by neologisms, awkward abstractions, and linguistic idiosyncrasies of all kinds. These are not only a problem for the modern reader. They infuriated some ancient readers too. In the first century BC, in a long essay devoted to Thucydides’ work, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic and historian himself, contemplated- with ample supporting quotations, of the “forced expressions,” “non sequiturs,” “artificialities,” and “riddling obscurity.” “If people actually spoke like this,” he wrote, “not even their mothers would be able to tolerate the unpleasantness of it.” In fact they would need translators, as if they were listening to a foreign language.

Modern historians, Dame Beard adds, have not been much kinder to the Master. On one hand they never stop praising his utter realism and insight into strategy. On the other, they find him almost impossible to translate. As a result, misunderstandings abound. Often the simpler and more comprehensible the translation, the less faithful it is to the original; and the other way around.

Why Thucydides wrote the way he did we can only guess. One possibility, Dame Beard says, is that he was trying to do something no one before him had done. Namely, to provide his readers with “an aggressively rational, apparently impersonal, analysis of the history of his own times, utterly free from religious modes of explanation.” The other, which Thucydides himself hints at, that war was causing “words to change their ordinary meaning and take on new ones that were forced on them.” Whatever the reason, it was the changing circumstances that sent him in search of new style of writing to describe them.  

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Padman’s original given name, meaning the one her parents, presumably in the belief (which she later claimed was wrong) that she was male gave her, was Russel. Later, having undergone the necessary procedures, he/she (or was it she/he?) was turned into a woman. Thus it was how, claiming she had always “really” been a woman, she was able compete for the right to occupy a slot at a female college of the university in question. The upshot was a battle royal. In it Greer, herself what we today would call a second-generation feminist, argued that, since Russel/Rachel had “originally” been male, he/she (or was it she/he?) should be barred from joining the faculty as a woman. At the time, the University “resolved” the question by rejecting Ms. Greer’s arguments and going ahead with the appointment. Though whether a woman can be made a “fellow” or a “master” or a “don” (the term, incidentally, Prof. Beard likes to use in describing herself) remains a questionable right to the present day.

If this had been an isolated case, few people would have to get excited about it. The difficulty is that it is not. Wherever we look, we see transgender women/men (meaning, to put it in the most neutral way I can think of, such as have undergone a sex-change operation) winning competitions against “real” women (i.e. such as have not done so). So in sports such as tennis, swimming, cycling and running where “real” woman are proving no match for their transgender brothers/sisters. So, recently, in beauty contests where they have started winning one title after another. And this is just the beginning. “Transgender athletes are destroying [emphasis in the original] women’s sports,” runs one headline. “American crowned queen in Thai transgender pageant,” runs another. “Transgender wins female beauty pageant in Nevada,” runs a third. Surely Plato’s claim that, on the average, men are better than women in any field was bad enough; now it is beginning to look as if men are better than women even at looking like women, acting like them, and being like them.

Scant wonder feminists have been screaming their heads off. Nor are the implications limited to competitions of every kind. Suppose you meet a person you do not know. You are uncertain about his/her gender and consequently on what to think on him/her her/him and how to address him/her. Her/him. Trying not to offend him/her, her/him, you say, “could you please tell me your name?” That’s being polite, but it may not solve your problem; a growing number of names, are equally applicable to men and to women. E.g Jamie and Jamie, Robin and Robin, Pat and Pat, and so on. Saying “excuse me, what gender do you belong to?” is even worse.

Using terms such as father/mother, son/daughter, brother/sister, exposes one to similar problems. The worst offense is to try and make sure by using words such as “really,” “originally,” “previously” and “former.” People have been fired/hauled to court for less; and those who do not know it yet are the most likely to find out.

So what to do? I can only think of one answer: Unlike Thucydides, we are not geniuses. So let’s stop trying to write as he did.