The Tragedy of the Athenian Ideal in Thucydides and Plato
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John T. Hogan’s The Tragedy of the Athenian Ideal in Thucydides and Plato assesses the roles of Pericles, Alcibiades, and Nicias in Athens’ defeat in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War. Comparing Thucydides’ presentation of political leadership with ideas in Plato’s Statesman as well as Laches , Charmides , Meno , Symposium , Republic , Phaedo , Sophist , and Laws , it concludes that Plato and Thucydides reveal Pericles as lacking the political discipline ( sophrosune ) to plan a successful war against Sparta. Hogan argues that in his presentation of the collapse in the Corcyraean revolution of moral standards in political discourse, Thucydides shows how revolution destroys the morality implied in basic personal and political language. This reveals a general collapse in underlying prudential measurements needed for sound moral judgment. Furthermore, Hogan argues that the Statesman ’s outline of the political leader serves as a paradigm for understanding the weaknesses of Pericles, Alcibiades, and Nicias in terms that parallel Thucydides’ direct and implied conclusions, which in Pericles’ case he highlights with dramatic irony. Hogan shows that Pericles failed both to develop a sufficiently robust practice of Athenian democratic rule and to set up a viable system for succession.
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The Tragedy of the Athenian Ideal in Thucydides and Plato
Series Editor : Gregory Nagy, Harvard University
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3 For the convenience of the reader this and almost all subsequent references to Thucydides (and in most cases to other Greek authors) will be in the body of the text. The translation of this sentence is the subject of a large scholarly controversy. We will return to it, but for now, the meaning of the sentence καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει should be taken as I have done on the text and not as “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” This is the more popular translation of Richard Crawley, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D82%3Asection%3D4, accessed July 24, 2019. Thomas Hobbes’ translation is better for ἀξίωσιν: “The received value of names imposed for signification of things was changed into arbitrary.” (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0247%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D82, accessed July 24, 2019). Hobbes is clearly more correct than Crawley or the standard Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones ((LSJ), 9th ed. With a Supplement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), which follows Crawley’s way of looking at the issue of how to translate ἀξίωσις, which is a very rare word in Greek before Thucydides.
4 While inclusive language might be more appropriate for modern egalitarian ideas, some of which derive directly from Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles, the fact that Athenian political life was almost exclusively male has some important bearing on its successes and failures. This was a type of weak psychological strength for the men, but generally a political deficiency of the highest order.
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