Tweeting the War (TtW) 
Herodotus, Thucydides and
War in Ukraine on Social Media

 A CNN Tweet (now X) quotes the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy ‘I don’t want Ukraine’s history to be a legend about 300 Spartans’. The quote alludes to the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE), recorded in Herodotus (the ‘Father of History’ according to Cicero) and is a recent example of the ancient past’s power over the present.  

 

• Why and how do the earliest surviving historical works (fifth-century BCE Greece) inspire responses on war and politics in modern media?  

• How are ancient war narratives and symbols mobilised in the digital age? 

 

Tweeting the War: Herodotus, Thucydides and War in Ukraine on Social Media (TtW) is an innovative pilot study, which examines tweets on the war in Ukraine inspired by the ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, two of the most influential histories ever written. Experts from Cardiff University, Maria Fragoulaki, PI, ancient historian and Tereza Spilioti, Co-I, sociolinguist and digital discourse analyst, joined knowledge and methodologies to explore the modern reception of ancient historical texts in the techno-social spaces of digital communication.  

 

The project was supported by the 2022/23 Building Cross-disciplinary Communities Seed corn Fund, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Cardiff University. 

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Using methods from applied linguistics and media discourse analysis for data collection and analysis, the project studied the (re)appropriation and (mis)use of ancient war narratives on social media against the background of the modern conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Taking as a starting point the CNN tweet, where the ancient Spartans who fought and died at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) were used as a historical analogy for the modern-day Ukrainians whose country was invaded by Russian forces on 24 February 2022, Tweeting the War set out to explore: 

 

• How do digital technologies interact with the past and shape understandings of the present?  

• How are the meanings and forms of ancient historical texts (re)configured in the digital age?  

• How can digital technologies inspire new applications and illustrate the relevance of ancient history in education?