The Wise Adviser Trap: Catastrophic Decision-Making in Herodotus and Thucydides.

This paper reads parallel scenes in Herodotus and Thucydides to find a shared emphasis on flawed deliberation as the cause of catastrophic defeats for imperial powers. Both texts question the foresight and rhetorical strategies of self-styled wise advisers who ironically advance the very decisions they seek to forestall. Yet both authors also suggest that better strategies of advice could have altered the outcome. In contrast with those who read Herodotus and Thucydides as fatalists showing the futility of wise counsel in the face of imperial aggression, we find that they evince a belief in the constructive possibilities of advice.

Meeting the Sphinx.

Here I present a close re-reading and creative expansion of Richard Rusbridger's (2004) clinical work with a patient who reported a dream of a hybrid woman. Building on W. R. Bion's reading of the Oedipus myth and Melanie Klein's theory of the combined parent figure, and drawing on imagery ancient and modern, I re-interpret the patient's dream as an encounter with the Sphinx. Why does this enigmatic figure, threatening annihilation, emerge at this particular threshold in the patient's analysis? To explore this question, I return to Sophocles' Oedipus the King and offer a new translation of the exchange between Tiresias and Oedipus as they debate the king's famous victory over the monster. Where (and when) do we meet the Sphinx today? What form does the ancient monster take in modern life? In this paper, I ask us to consider what it means to meet the Sphinx-and how we might respond.