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Introduction

Part 1. Subject and Method

In Thucydides’ Histories, the relationship between logos (plural logoi, Greek λόγος, cf. Thucydides 1.22.1) and ergon (plural erga, Greek ἔργον or “work, work of war, deed, action,” Thucydides 1.22.2) is of fundamental importance, since the book, which is also a logos, is concerned primarily with the life of the polis, and political life depends on logos to articulate political action. Thucydides presents in dramatic form two interdependent truths—that man is political and that he is endowed with speech.¹ He shows how these truths supplement one another and presents the various forms of the relationship between logos and ergon, from excellent to degenerate types. Using the opposition between logos and ergon as a key for examining the philosophical bases of different types of political arrangements, he reveals a distinctive political philosophy that has many points of similarity and some differences with Plato’s Republic and certain other dialogues, notably the Statesman, the Menexenus for its presentation of the origin of Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration, the Symposium for its depiction of Alcibiades, the Charmides for its discussion of sophrosune, and the Laches because Nicias takes part in the discussion of courage in it.² Plato’s Statesman provides a clear conceptual framework for understanding how we can think in general philosophical terms about what Thucydides presents in a mixture of facts, speeches, interpretation, narrative history, and speculative political philosophy.

In one of his most striking comments on the nature of the polis and war, Thucydides asserts: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει (3.82.4),³ which should be translated thus: “Men changed the customary valuation of words in respect to deeds in judging what right was.” This statement, occasioned by the civil strife in Corcyra in 427, is an important indication both of Thucydides’ view of the nature of political discourse and ultimately of his political philosophy. It applies not only to the degeneration of political discourse in Corcyra but also to the Hellenic world at large, and is exemplified in the Athenian speeches in the Histories. By comparing these speeches (including the speeches by Athenians, wherever they are, and the speeches of certain others in Athens) with one another, we can see how the use of common political phrases and ideas, especially when Thucydides has one speaker echo another, reveals a progressive degeneration in the value of logos in Athens. These points of comparison are like vertebrae that help to organize a picture of the whole political man as Thucydides sees him.⁴ This analysis intrinsically supports the view that no one speech in Thucydides can reliably represent for us what Thucydides thought. Thucydides’ narrative depends on his ability to address the actual facts he sees and uncovers. Here the insight of Friedrich Nietzsche that “courage in the face of reality” distinguishes Thucydides, who sees “reason in reality” and then hides his thought in the reality of the facts he tells us, reveals a difference from the Plato that Nietzsche emphasizes: Plato retreats, he thinks, into the ideal.⁵ Thucydides wills himself to see this “reason in reality.” Plato sees the elimination of the cares, concerns, and any influence of our bodies as an enabling step in the struggle to know. Since we cannot know anything purely when our souls are in our bodies, we find there are only two possibilities for knowledge, either we cannot attain it anywhere or we can only attain it when our souls separate from our physical selves (Phaedo, 66e–67a, cf. 107b–c). This then leaves us with the goal of purifying ourselves as much as possible in this life so that we can come closer to knowing.

While Nietzsche sees Thucydides as a representative of the older Sophist culture,⁶ Thucydides’ commitment to accuracy leaves him in the position of needing a measure or measures against which to test information and logoi that may represent facts or interpretations based on facts. This puts him in the tradition of Ionian science, including Anaxagoras and the medical writers, much more than in the tradition of Protagoras and his yarn about how Zeus made us so that we can be moral, as Plato presents him in the Protagoras (322c–d). The very idea that Zeus could encourage ethical conduct seems ruefully comic considering his violence and his conduct toward women in general and his wife in particular, though it is reasonable to conjecture that the gods whose tale Protagoras told wanted to have worshippers. Zeus would perhaps also appeal to the male audience that Protagoras acquires. On the other hand, Protagoras, like Socrates in the Meno and elsewhere, sees humans as having a divine allotment in them (Protagoras 322a, ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ ἄνθρωπος θείας μετέσχε μοίρας, πρῶτον μὲν διὰ τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ συγγένειαν ζῴων μόνον θεοὺς ἐνόμισεν, “since men got a divine allotment, [and] first through his kinship with the divine alone of living things worshipped the gods”). At the end of the Meno Socrates makes a similar point to Meno, who lives in a dim world of ignorance and popular opinions.⁷ First we need to be reminded that “he is talking to Meno.”⁸ Socrates concludes: “Virtue [or ‘excellence’] appears to be born in us by divine allotment, in those to whom it is born” (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἡμῖν φαίνεται παραγιγνομένη ἡ ἀρετὴ οἷς ἂν παραγίγνηται, Meno 99e–100a). The link here between the Meno and the Protagoras is the divine allotment to men, which starts us off aiming higher than ourselves. Protagoras, as the kind of teacher Meno wishes to have, though he does seem to have a particular preference for Gorgias (see Meno, 70b, 71c–71e),⁹ presents the idea of this allotment. Meno hears it from Socrates, who wishes to be nothing like Protagoras, who, it seems, shares a kind of opinion with Socrates. The fact that they in a way share an opinion, that we have a divine allotment, is a very good example of why it is hard to capture the Sophist and to know how he or she differs from the philosopher (cf. Plato, Sophist, 216c).

The Meno introduces the hypothetical method as a way of answering questions about what virtue is (ἀρετή, “excellence” or “virtue,” transliterated arete) and whether it can be taught (86e–87b),¹⁰ but Socrates performs his introduction or initiation by means of a difficult and somewhat obscure mathematical problem.¹¹ The point seems to be that just as Meno should have been abashed when he saw his slave learning geometry (85e–86d) but was not, he now must more fully face the question of whether he can be initiated or whether he will be turned away from philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular because he cannot rule himself (86d). He does not have the disposition to learn, so he himself turns himself away. This results in the final lesson of his execution at a young age after betraying his army’s interests in Xenophon’s Anabasis (II.6.21–29). At the very end of the Meno, Socrates again alludes to Meno’s difficulties in separating knowledge of arete from his desire for power carefully presented by Plato as his goal to find out first whether or not he can buy a teacher of arete. Learning the truth of the matter (τὸ σαφὲς) requires this separation (100b). Meno’s failure to learn is a failure of virtue, and what we would term moral virtue in particular. Indeed, his failures or weaknesses, that is, his physical beauty and the effect that it produces on men, his clear desire to dominate his wife at home and to rule men in his public life (Meno, 71e), and his troupe of slaves, all reflect deep conceptual weaknesses in Athenian life that are expressed in predictable and disastrous ways in the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides also asks us to accept his claim that “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge (τὸ σαφὲς) of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it” (1.22.4), can rely on his work. He reemphasizes this point in his second introduction (5.26.5).¹² In order to understand his work we must also ascend a kind of philosophical, and in his case also historical, ladder of understanding. It would seem that some of the notorious complexity and intellectual density of Thucydides’ conclusions, and also of the speeches, serve as an intellectual initiation while they also force the reader into a dialogue with Thucydides and some of his chosen speeches.

Understanding and possibly solving some or all of these political and social problems—all of which seem to derive from a desire for power over others and the complications that arise from the Peloponnesian War—requires that we start from clarity about what moral terms mean. Yet this is very hard during civil war (stasis) where suspicion and violence rule. In this light, we can see Thucydides’ reflections on changes in political discourse in Corcyra as an example of an incipient social science applying also to Athenian political rhetoric. In order to understand what went wrong at Athens we must consider that there are moral terms that reflect real moral and immoral conduct, and we must at least accept the principle that we can agree on what moral terms mean, or else there can be no real discourse. This then leads naturally to consideration of how the relationship between the description of stasis at Corcyra and the Athenian political speeches can help in the analysis of Thucydides’ political philosophy. In such discussions we must assume that Thucydides has given much care and attention to the dramatic and rhetorical coherence of his work, and that his arrangement and emphases carry a great deal of meaning.¹³ The goal here is thus primarily to understand what Thucydides has to say about the political sphere. In attempting to understand Thucydides, reference to Plato can be very helpful or perhaps crucial, since to start with at least many of Plato’s concerns explicitly relate to those of Thucydides, for example Athens’ greatness, her failure, the complex core of that failure in the spirit of Alcibiades, and the disappointing end of Nicias (7.86.5).

Friedrich Nietzsche made significant use of Thucydides in formulating his own ideas. Nietzsche also devotes an important part of his thought toward praising what he sees as Thucydides’ pre-Platonic, Sophistic virtues and condemning what he seems to believe was Plato’s soft rejection of ancient Greek masculine and even violent values in favor of what turned out to be in Nietzsche’s view a forward shadow of Christianity in Plato.¹⁴ Nietzsche’s contrast of Plato with Thucydides also serves as a useful interpretive tool for understanding Thucydides’ larger purposes.

One significant question that lies at the heart of the implied discussion between Plato and Thucydides on value or excellence arete in political life and its manifestation in deeds and in political speech (λόγος, transliterated logos) is whether there is in fact a measure for deeds and in language that exists and is important in allowing us to formulate what we think are abstract general truths. An important passage in Thucydides that bears on this arises in his discussion of the development of revolution or stasis (στάσις in Greek, i.e., internal revolution deriving from political faction) in Corcyra (3.82) and the way that development affects political speech. This discussion of stasis in Corcyra clearly applies widely in Thucydides to his presentation of stasis in Athens, as we will see.

Yet the development of stasis in Athens raises the further question of whether the same kind of decline in the value and valuation of discourse or logos in Athens occurs also in the larger Greek world during the Peloponnesian War. This then exposes differences between war (in Greek πόλεμος transliterated polemos) and revolution or stasis. The clearest Athenian discussion of the distinction between stasis and war in ancient Greek thought occurs in Book 5 of the Republic (470b–d) when Socrates and Glaucon are talking. Socrates speaks first:

“It appears to me that just as two different names, war and stasis, are discussed, so also there are two things, indicating two different things. I mean the two, on the one hand, that which is one’s own and kin, and, on the other hand that which is different and foreign. The name stasis is said for the hatred of one’s own, and war applies to the hatred of the alien.”

“And you are saying nothing,” he said, “off the point.”

“Now look if this thing I say is also to the point. For I assert that the Greek stock itself is kin to itself, and to the barbaric, foreign and different.”

“Yes,” he said, “fine.”

“Then Greeks fighting with barbarians and barbarians with Greeks, we will assert are at war and are enemies by nature, and this hatred must be called war; but Greeks fighting with Greeks, we will assert are by nature friends, but in such a situation Greece is sick and factious, and in stasis.”

This passage in the Republic suggests that from Plato’s point of view at least, the Peloponnesian War should be considered a kind of stasis and not simply or primarily a war. And in fact, one of the major differences between war and stasis is that in war the combatants usually do not seek to obliterate the other side, while in revolution the complete elimination of the other side often becomes the goal because there has been a breakdown of fundamental human relationships. To use Thucydides’ prime example, the stasis in Corcyra ends when there is nothing left of the aristocratic party (4.48.5). The sources of the breakdown can be deep-seated ideological differences, familial antipathies (especially in aristocracies), and racial, tribal, or nationalistic differences to name a few.¹⁵ At the very least, it seems reasonable to see the deteriorating and then sometimes violent relationship between Athens and her allies or subjects in the Delian League as some kind of internal conflict with many resemblances to stasis, whether we look at the violent convulsions of the Greek world during the Peloponnesian War as kind of stasis in every respect or not. Thucydides does call the conflict a war (polemos, 1.1), however, which means that the fighting between Athens and Sparta at least starts off as a war even if later it develops some of the awful characteristics of stasis. ¹⁶ In fact, the entire Sicilian Expedition resembles a civil war in that it ends in the destruction of one side, the forces of the Athenians, and the destruction is so complete that “few out of many returned home.”¹⁷ The great and famous war of earlier times, the Trojan War, engulfed all of Greece but homecoming and peace was the result.

What then is stasis? The most useful definition of what it is relative to Thucydides’ and Plato’s thought is what Thucydides says after the Spartans defeat the Corcyraeans at sea. The Athenian commander Eurymedon arrives with sixty warships (3.80.2). This prompts the “Corcyraean demos” (ὁ δῆμος τῶν Κερκυραίων, or the Corcyraean people and not their leaders, 3.80.1) to attack their enemies, who seem to include anyone whom they regarded as their enemies, whether the hatreds were private, based on debt, or more strictly political (3.81.4). Thucydides then announces what seems to be the cardinal characteristic of stasis for him, which is the extremes to which violence goes in it. This violence has no limit, which Thucydides shows us by the examples he chooses: Fathers kill sons and temple suppliants are dragged away and killed or even just walled up in a temple and left to die (3.81.5).

Stasis breaks down human conventions, whether they are of the most sacred type, familial and religious, or whether they are broader important conventions such as respect for public discourse, legal rules, social structures, or even the basic values through which people express praise and blame (cf. 3.82 generally). What underlies this is a psychological paradigm, as Thucydides presents it, part of which is a kind of “frantic movement or violence” (τὸ . . . ἐμπλήκτως ὀξὺ ).¹⁸ Today we might call a city or country in stasis a population that exhibits a syndrome or a collection of symptoms, if we follow Thucydides’ definition. He defines stasis as a set of behavioral characteristics in chapters 3.81.5 to the end of 3.83. Stasis is marked by a breakdown in norms, which the Greeks called nomoi, the plural of the Greek word νόμος, which means usage, custom, law, human statute, and even melody.¹⁹ Thucydides’ behavioral definition is very abstract in that it includes many abstract words,²⁰ but he does not offer a single complete political definition of stasis except to note a variety of political characteristics among other characteristics that we today might think are psychological such as an increasingly violent way of solving problems or a predisposition to favor extreme methods.

The observational focus in Thucydides’ definition, which is the definition of stasis we will use here, results from a confluence of factors. In the first place, the heritage of Ionian science emphasized observation. Thucydides himself was an observer and he takes up the position of an observer “at rest” (καθ᾽ ἡσυχίαν, 5.26.5) to pay attention to the war and then to draw intellectually vigorous and active conclusions. He is also reviewing some political phenomena in depth for the first time in writing that relies on what he attempts to determine is objectively true information. In addition to all of this he inherits the model of Greek Tragedy, which emphasizes showing difficulties through the interaction of word and deed rather than observing, describing, and stating conclusions. Plato too shares this approach deriving from Tragedy. Once one had seen the unfolding decline of a great empire that embraced or even invented many new and life-affirming arts and values (and of course failed to see its blind spots), it seems reasonable for someone like Thucydides to try to think about how to elaborate his program as stated in 1.22.4 and apply new types of thinking to this failure so as to help people prevent it from happening again. Political philosophy seeks to help us solve political problems in new ways that may include structural reforms, economic changes, and even changes in the relationship between external political values (foreign affairs) and internal political values. Thucydides’ research seems perhaps to have reached all the way to the idea of a mixing of the values of the few and the many (8.97.2), a problem that still affects us today in powerful ways.²¹ On the other hand, Thucydides famously offers only a few openly stated conclusions. One reason for this may be that conclusions we as readers reach for ourselves can be firmer and more sound, because we make some effort to reach them. Thus, the first efforts he is making in the development of the new field of history arise as a form of drama, which is a quite natural outgrowth of thought about how to present the human political predicament in a culture that first developed Western tragic plays. What this implies for understanding Thucydides is that the meaning of the work appears in our interaction with it through the questions we are trying to answer, our own preconceived ideas, and our place in history. This interaction occurs in the space that inevitably separates the knower from what we seek to know.²²

While Thucydides’ use of a scientific gathering of information and evaluation of the results clearly informs his work, he also introduces a significant moral dimension, which he represents descriptively as changes in nomoi, quite similar to the changes in the axioseis or valuations of words. An important subject here is one part of this moral dimension, the use of language in political and military contexts in the Athenian speeches. Those who would eliminate or reduce in importance the question of morality from Thucydides face a difficulty in particular in relation to his narrative and summary of the stasis in Corcyra. One of the clearest statements Thucydides makes on the subject is καὶ τὸ εὔηθες, οὗ τὸ γενναῖον πλεῖστον μετέχει, καταγελασθὲν ἠφανίσθη (3.83.1), “the simplicity of which nobility has the largest share, was laughed at and disappeared” (3.83.1).²³ The alternative translation here, favored by a number of commentators, is “the simplicity which is so large an element in a noble character, was laughed at and disappeared.” While the first translation seems more plausible for a variety of reasons, the second can seem correct too. Why would Thucydides write this way? It seems quite possible that we are to ponder both possibilities so that we consider very carefully a large number of questions, such as why simplicity would be laughed at in the first place, and what is nobility?²⁴ What types of leaders who are not noble rely on appeals to simplicity? How important is simplicity, if it is important at all, in political life? Where else is it important? The answers to these questions will have many ramifications, notably in considering Nicias, but use of this type of ambiguity as a rhetorical device focuses our attention and brings us into a dialogue with Thucydides and some of the figures in the Histories. We then return to the question of morality and nomoi or customs in public life. What are their roles?

In the first place, Thucydides would not necessarily see an understanding of morality and values as conforming to our modern distinction between facts and values. In other words, it is quite reasonable even today in our modern terms to see the values that people have individually and in groups as phenomena that may be investigated using means that approach the scientific method. David Hume, for example, begins his most well-known work with the point that moral philosophy is the “science of human nature” when he says that “MORAL philosophy, or the science of human nature, may be treated after two different manners; each of which has its peculiar merit, and may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind.”²⁵ The first manner of treating human nature is what Hume calls a consideration of “matters of fact” based on the observation that we are active beings. The second manner focuses on “relations of ideas” where we think of ourselves as reasonable beings who are the proper subject of speculative thought. While the basic distinction here has become a field of study all by itself, Thucydides begins his focus on facts, deeds, and words he observes and records. This then leads him to what some might call (and praise or deplore) speculative judgments about what is better and what is worse in human affairs. The continuity between these two modes of thought in Thucydides depends on measures and various types of standards, all of which can be observed or perceived in actions and then later reviewed in thought.

Thucydides anticipates Hume’s approach to considering human conduct scientifically by observing carefully first and attempting to record faithfully the things he sees and hears. Thus, for Thucydides, morals or habits of mind and conduct may be observed, classified, and reviewed in a way that is similar to any other set of acts and views of action. Thucydides as an observer works within the intellectual tradition of Ionian Empiricism, that is, the empiricist tradition in pre-Socratic philosophy including Hippocrates of Cos and other contributions to the Hippocratic corpus.²⁶ Of course, the empiricist tradition in Ionia was larger than one of its most famous aspects, medicine, as when Anaxagoras states that generally “appearances are a sight of the things that are unseen.”²⁷ If Thucydides gives the moral dimension of humans an additional position of importance in human life separate from a scientific interest in values and how they change, as many think that he does, then we may see his work as hypothesizing or propounding values and indirectly and artistically commenting on how those values change in revolutionary situations.²⁸ It is clear that Thucydides sees human nature as definable and a subject for understanding, but clearly not the only such subject since he also considers causes for natural phenomena, for example, surges in the sea, as subjects amenable to study and what we would call scientific understanding (3.89.2–5). Human nature appears in regular forms that are amenable to reason and that can be measured or understood through standards.²⁹ Whether his examination of acts, speeches, and values leads to a kind of moralizing is an interesting question.³⁰ One clear approach that Thucydides seems to foster is review and consideration of words and deeds in particular for their effects on the way we speak and act, which is, from the scientific point of view at least, a review of mores or conduct and character. What we can or should do with what we learn from that internal discussion is somewhat dependent on our circumstances and resources. It is quite possible that one effect of Thucydides’ sometimes difficult and elusive style, a never-ending discussion of what he means, is something he intended as a way to make his work useful (1.22.4). The technique engages our speculative habit of mind and entangles his readers in a conversation.

The method I have adopted here to test these theses is a literary and philological analysis of Thucydides’ use of speeches, in particular Athenian speeches, as a reflection of his statements in his discussion of stasis in Corcyra. The details of the method are philological and analytical in style. The goal, however, is philosophical in the sense that Thucydides clearly wanted to create a work of general use in relation to one of the most fundamental aspects of our species, our political conduct conceived very broadly to include most if not all our efforts to get along with one another in practical and productive ways. Some basic conclusions would inevitably follow from showing how this characteristic of degeneration of political discourse manifests itself in Thucydides’ Athenian speeches. No one speech or speaker speaks for Thucydides; this includes even Pericles, whose political discourse is subordinate to Thucydides’. In a catalogue of degenerate types of discourse, some measure or standard is both implied and necessary. This standard seems to be the same as what the Stranger calls “measure” in the Statesman (e.g., 284e), as we will see. Plato’s discussion of the adversarial approach of one side in a revolution calling in outside aid from ideological allies, that is, democrats calling upon outside democratically inclined populations and aristocrats calling for help from other aristocrats (Republic, Book VIII, 559d–560a), seems to derive partly from Thucydides’ observations. This adversarial approach in stasis distorts and then ruins political discourse in almost exactly the same way in the Republic (Book VIII, 560c–561b) as it does in Thucydides.

This may then lead to speculation as to what kind of epistemology lies behind Thucydides’ choice of a dramatic mode for presenting philosophical truth that arises from historical accounts. Here one likely conclusion is that for Thucydides truth is not relative as Protagoras is said to argue when he says that “man is the measure of all things” (Plato, Theaetetus 152a, Cratylus 385e–386a). Yet for Thucydides truth is still dependent on the observer or participant also and not simply abstract and separate from us.³¹ This makes truth something we believe exists, strive to reach and sometimes approach in contexts that are relevant to the type of truth being sought. Thucydides seems to agree with Socrates on this point: We should search out what we do not know and not accept that we cannot know or that we must not try to know (Meno, 86b–c). Thucydides certainly makes clear the effort required to ascertain the truth in both of his introductions (1.22 and 5.26) and by implication also in the pathos of his explanation of how he understood the plague both as a victim and as an observer of its effects (2.48.3). If the truth we wish to understand is social and political then we aim at that truth and approach it as social and political beings. If the truth involves a measurement, we are limited by the structure and moments of the measuring devices. In fact, the measurement of certain new kinds of military power depends on the action required to create such power. A significant portion of this action depends one techne (τέχνη, “skill,” “craft,” or “art”) or another. Military power, especially with the introduction of navies as important or even crucial parts of military power, results from the projection of various skills and arts. Such skills depend on measurement and measuring devices of various types. Pericles himself, as a general aiming to use military power to create political power, provides Thucydides and us with one example of this point. In his last speech, Pericles seeks to bolster the courage of the Athenians by showing them that their innovations in naval warfare have created a new type of power, a power that is constrained only by the will of the Athenians. Their navy can go anywhere ships can reach (2.62.1–3). This power is measured differently from power on land. Technology and training become the measuring stick, but the measure exists only after the idea of such a force has been put in place.³² Politics also depends on skill or techne. ³³ In this sense, a general, such as Pericles, works like a political leader. The complex revelation of the political leader or statesman in Plato’s Statesman sheds further light on the qualities of Pericles, as we will see, but prior to the discussion of the statesman Plato seeks the Sophist in the dialogue of that name and catches him in a web of reason by equating Non-Being with the Other (Sophist, 257b, 258e–259a).³⁴ This approach to Non-Being defines it as partly personal for each of us so that what we think does not exist is in fact what is other or different in relation to us.³⁵ This organizes and makes rational the confusions of relativity and relativistic thinking.³⁶ What we do not understand is other or different. Far from being a Sophist, Thucydides seems to anticipate the issue of the Other in political life at the very beginning of his Histories when he observes the same point that many young readers of Homer have wondered about, “Why doesn’t Homer call the Greeks Hellenes? And why are only some of them Hellenes?” Thucydides’ answer is that at the time of Homer the Greeks were neither conscious of themselves as a separate group nor conscious of foreigners as barbarians (1.1.3).³⁷ What is not us or ours is what is “other” in regard to us. That “other” can be categorized and quantified, which enables us to understand it. One of the most important applications of Plato’s assignment (in the Statesman) of Non-Being to the concept of Other occurs in the political world with the statesman serving as the type or model of the political being:

Ξένος (The) Stranger:

πότερον οὖν, καθάπερ ἐν τῷ σοφιστῇ προσηναγκάσαμεν εἶναι τὸ μὴ ὄν, ἐπειδὴ κατὰ τοῦτο διέφυγεν ἡμᾶς ὁ λόγος, οὕτω καὶ νῦν τὸ πλέον αὖ καὶ ἔλαττον μετρητὰ προσαναγκαστέον γίγνεσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἄλληλα μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ [284ξ] πρὸς τὴν τοῦ μετρίου γένεσιν; οὐ γὰρ δὴ δυνατόν γε οὔτε πολιτικὸν οὔτ᾽ ἄλλον τινὰ τῶν περὶ τὰς πράξεις ἐπιστήμονα ἀναμφισβητήτως γεγονέναι τούτου μὴ συνομολογηθέντος.

Νεώτερος Σωκράτης (The) Younger Socrates:

οὐκοῦν καὶ νῦν ὅτι μάλιστα χρὴ ταὐτὸν ποιεῖν.

Ξένος (The) Stranger:

πλέον, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἔτι τοῦτο τὸ ἔργον ἢ ‘κεῖνο—καίτοι κἀκείνου γε μεμνήμεθα τὸ μῆκος ὅσον ἦν—ἀλλ᾽ ὑποτίθεσθαι μὲν τὸ τοιόνδε περὶ αὐτῶν καὶ μάλα δίκαιον. (284b–284c)

(The) Stranger:

Then, just as with the Sophist we compelled that which is not to be, when the argument escaped us on this point, so now also the greater again and the lesser must be compelled to become measurable not just relative to one another but also to the genesis of measure. For, it is not possible, at least, for either the statesman or any other person to have become without dispute knowing of things concerning actions unless this has been agreed to.

Younger Socrates:

Then now too as much as possible we must do the same thing.

(The) Stranger:

This work, Socrates, is still more than that—and yet we remember the length of that, how great it was, but to set down just such a point concerning them is also very just. (284b–284c)

The Younger Socrates then asks what sort of thing the Stranger means. And the Stranger replies that he will need to explain more fully later but for now the answer is adequately and beautifully shown, that all the arts are in a similar state and our argument says that the “greater and the lesser are at the same time measured not only in relation to one another but also in relation to the coming into being of the mean” (μεῖζόν τε ἅμα καὶ ἔλαττον μετρεῖσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἄλληλα μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ πρὸς τὴν τοῦ μετρίου γένεσιν, 284d).

This crucial passage in the Statesman explains that what is better and what is worse can arise politically and that we can learn how to measure them. The epistemology derives from the Sophist, to which the Stranger makes a specific reference (“the Sophist” in 284b, cf. Sophist 235). The Stranger’s next step in the argument is to undertake a division between the sciences that rely on mathematics and measure with “number, length, depth, breadth, and thickness” (284e), and those sciences that measure in regard to “the moderate,” “the fitting, and the needful” and all the other standards that are situated in the mean apart from the extremes (284e).³⁸

What is the subject in Plato to which we apply these considerations of the standard of what is moderate, fitting, and needful? It is the character and action we see in human life and our broadly conceived political relations with one another. The analogous word for Thucydides that helps us supply the mean or the moderate is what he calls human nature, or the human, or nature (φύσις, transliterated phusis). He refers to “the human” (τὸ ἀνθρώπινον) in his discussion of his method (1.22.4) and to human nature when he explains the characteristics of stasis (ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, “as long as human nature remains the same,” 3.82.2). A number of times important speakers in the speeches he reports refer to “the human” and “human nature,” for example, the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta (1.76.3), Diodotus in his response to Cleon (3.45.7), Hermocrates at the conference at Gela (4.61.5), and the Athenians at Melos (5.105.2). Of course, in the last three instances, the speakers are emphasizing one part of human nature in one degree, but overall Thucydides presents a picture of human nature as something that can be known and characterized in our relations with one another even when we disagree. In fact, as Simon Swain has pointed out, the word phusis in Thucydides refers in “all but one” [case] to “man in human society” not to “biological man” or “to nature itself.”³⁹

Thucydides a not a Sophist nor is he like Protagoras. Thucydides aims at truths that may be unattractive to his readers because unlike Protagoras and other teachers searching for money and power, Thucydides aims at “the truth” (τὸ σαφὲς, 1.22.4) not popularity, political power, or money, like Protagoras in the Protagoras. He also gives no impression of doing his writing for money. His view of his work resembles Plato’s in spirit and in its goals, though the methods focus on historical events because he wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. The Statesman and its view of political life and leadership will be helpful when we consider Pericles’ role, which seems at first to be the apparently archetypal statesman in Thucydides’ Histories, though he later emerges as a more complex figure whose memory is tinged with tragedy.

One further way to consider the issue of what the truth (τὸ σαφὲς) is for Thucydides and how it relates to what the truth is for Plato is to consider what each of them appears to present as the claim writing can have on reaching the truth. That issue is complicated in both cases as both Thucydides—rather obviously—and Plato—not quite so plainly—aim to relate what they experienced and learned through their experience of the people around them. They have differing modes and approaches, Thucydides seeking to discover facts, deeds, and words in the lives of many figures, and relate them to one another, and Plato seeking to learn from Socrates and to convey in a dramatically convincing way, who Socrates was and what he thought and believed. Yet for both writing is both an opportunity to express complex truths and a tool that can be used to reveal various different points of view about the same words and deeds. Plato presents this theory of writing most clearly in the Phaedrus (275d–277a), while in Thucydides the force and meaning of what he writes—especially when he writes in his own voice directly to the reader—can be just as elusive as it is in Plato. Formally, they have some differences in that Plato does not speak directly to his readers (outside of the “Letters”), while Thucydides does occasionally address his readers directly, but with intense ambiguities that still remain challenging even after they are parsed.

Part of the reason for Thucydides’ elusiveness seems to be that he was a participant in the war (5.26), which led to his position as an Athenian exile that gave him a broader view (5.26.5). He does seek to know the “exact truth” (Crawley, ἀκριβές τι), on which to base his conclusions, but he is remarkably restrained in his direct statements as to what that truth is, seeming to prefer that his readers learn by going through the deeds and speeches for themselves rather than by being told the correct viewpoint, if indeed there is only one, which seems doubtful in a number of cases. He wants us to believe that he has worked diligently to get the facts but his readers all inevitably feel that understanding the meaning of major and minor events and speeches is difficult as he drives us to ponder what he presents.

To return to Thucydides’ method at a more everyday level, I have made certain assumptions about the speeches in Thucydides. While Thucydides does not knowingly report anything false, he has selected rigorously from what must have been an enormous amount of material in order to further his philosophical and artistic goals. For instance, he apparently thought that it was important to emphasize the destruction of Melos (5.84–5.116) and not the depopulation of Scione (5.32.1). To understand what Thucydides thought about the conduct of the Athenians at Melos, it will be assumed that for him the events there were more important than those at Scione, and that his rhetorical and dramatic emphasis is a sign of this.⁴⁰

More generally, Thucydides’ well-known statement of his method of presenting the speeches allows him latitude in their actual wording (1.22.1). He says that he stays as close as possible to “the general sense of what was actually said” (τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης τῶν ἀληθῶς λεχθέντων), but that he could not record the exact words, and hence made his speakers say what was necessary in the given circumstance (ὡς δ᾽ ἂν ἐδόκουν ἐμοὶ ἕκαστοι περὶ τῶν αἰεὶ παρόντων τὰ δέοντα μάλιστ᾽ εἰπεῖν, “However each speaker seemed to me concerning the circumstances at the time to say doubtless what was required”).

While Thucydides certainly does not misrepresent speakers, he did choose which speeches to include. He also composed them in such a way that they illuminate his general themes and concepts.⁴¹ It also appears to be the case that what he is saying here is that, as it seemed to him (i.e., Thucydides), each one doubtless said what was required in each circumstance, so he wrote it, keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of what they actually said. While his memory is not perfect, his world was a world of speech and not many books, so his memory was practiced and he tried to pay attention to what he remembered, what others told him, and what was required in each circumstance.

Part 2. The Development of Stasis at Athens

Thucydides says that many terrible things happened because of stasis in the cities during the war, things that occur and always will occur, as long as human nature is the same. These experiences will be harsher or milder and will vary in their forms in accordance with the difference in the individual cases (3.82.2). Thucydides’ description of stasis in Corcyra covers a number of phenomena, including the change in the ἀξίωσις or axiosis of words, and he himself indicates that this applies not just to Corcyra but to all states that fall into stasis.⁴² We are justified in thinking he meant this description to include Athens, although some dissent from this. In fact, there is apparently a parallel decline in the level of discourse of the Greek world at large during the war, which finally crushes the ideals that united the Hellenes during the invasion of the Persians,⁴³ though this decline is not the main focus here. Before we turn to the subject proper, however, it will be useful to review the status of political discourse at Athens as Thucydides presents it, and to show in outline how Athens declined into stasis.

Directly after Pericles’ third speech (2.60–2.65), Thucydides mentions the stasis that engulfed Athens after the Sicilian Expedition (2.65.12), although traces of the disturbance appear at least as early as the first visitation of the plague. Thucydides represents prewar Greece as embodying a respect for logos, and in Athens this respect reached a very high form, as revealed most clearly in the Funeral Oration of Pericles. In a broader sense, this aim at an ideal logos appears in Athens with the birth of tragedy and the growth of philosophy through Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and Socrates. While Thucydides has Pericles use a number of apparently traditional themes to glorify Athens and to praise those who have died for her, the use of these themes should in no way be seen as reducing the impact of his words.⁴⁴ On the most basic level, Thucydides has only praise for Pericles, his plans, his words, and his deeds (e.g., 2.65), although he presents a number of disquieting themes and indications that foreshadow eventual defeat and raise questions about the depth of Pericles’ statesmanship and some of the qualities of his rhetoric. In Pericles’ Athens word and deed are almost equal (2.42.2), and logos is a vital preparation for action (2.40.2). Logos is essential for spiritual prosperity, and freedom is the precondition for the exercise of political speech. Since it is as a political being that man reaches his highest level, and freedom is the basis for the political life, freedom is happiness (2.43.4). Courage guarantees freedom (cf. 2.43.4), and true courage depends on the free exercise of the mind (2.40.2), which reveals itself publicly as responsible political discourse.

While she does not always reach these high ideals, Athens is an education for Hellas (2.41.1), that is, her very existence both as a force and as an example raises the entire level of Greek culture. This is bold and, as we will see, hubristic, but as Thucydides presents the war, there is truth in the claim. Two sentences later in the Funeral Oration, Pericles says that Athens’ subjects cannot complain that they are ruled by those who are unworthy of rule:

For Athens alone of her contemporaries is found when tested to be greater than her reputation, and alone gives no occasion to her assailants to blush at the antagonist by whom they have been worsted, or to her subjects to question her title by merit to rule. (2.41.3)

The hubris here is quite clear. Pericles professes that freedom is the highest value but we wonder, not for everyone, not even for all Greeks? Political freedom that depends on the submission of others is an expression of power. Athens did not gain the leadership of the Greeks by enslaving her subjects but within forty years more some of her Greek subjects were chafing under her rule. Euboea and Megara revolted in 446 (1.114), Samos and Byzantium in 440 (1.117). There is also dramatic irony in Pericles’ statement that Athens’ subjects accepted her worthiness to rule, because Athens’ defeat inevitably raises questions about why Athens lost. Socrates’ serious criticisms of Athens underscore these questions.

Pericles’ eloquent invocation of the political life in Athens shares a respect for freedom, participatory democracy, and equality at law, unwritten laws, friendliness toward foreigners, free political speech, and open borders among other crucial aspects of a free society that is thoroughly modern.⁴⁵ The ideas of parrhesia, isonomia, isegoria, and koinonia lead to these more complete political ideals. One important flaw, however, in Pericles’ political ideas was obviously that he did not see the danger that an aggressive and even destructive foreign policy that fostered manipulation of the Delian League from an alliance in to an empire would pose for the internal political life of Athens. As Madison (or possibly Hamilton) explains in Federalist #63,

An attention to the judgment of other nations is important to every government for two reasons: the one is, that, independently of the merits of any particular plan or measure, it is desirable, on various accounts, that it should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy; the second is, that in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world may be the best guide that can be followed. What has not America lost by her want of character with foreign nations; and how many errors and follies would she not have avoided, if the justice and propriety of her measures had, in every instance, been previously tried by the light in which they would probably appear to the unbiased part of mankind?

Yet however requisite a sense of national character may be, it is evident that it can never be sufficiently possessed by a numerous and changeable body. It can only be found in a number so small that a sensible degree of the praise and blame of public measures may be the portion of each individual; or in an assembly so durably invested with public trust, that the pride and consequence of its members may be sensibly incorporated with the reputation and prosperity of the community.⁴⁶

Madison’s argument here is that the proposed new Constitution of the United States would remedy some inherent shortcomings in legislative government by a “numerous and changeable” body, an Assembly, if it had a Senate composed of members who were more permanent and more deeply connected to the “reputation and prosperity of the community” than an Assembly or House of Representatives. While most citizens in republics today would not want the original form of election of U.S. senators by selection of state legislatures, Madison’s argument is that a smaller body than a House or Assembly with longer terms and deeper connections to the long-term interests of the nation would more reliably lead to a spirit of honor and wisdom in relation to the judgments of other nations. The tension between a single Executive and a larger and very popular House or Assembly would more often lead to a failure to observe the need for the respect of other nations. Whether or not we agree with the solution as presented in the U.S. Constitution, the point seems well taken that some mediation of the inherent conflict between the one and the many is needed in regard to this issue as well as a number of others outlined in Madison’s essay. Pericles’ rule lacked a mediating representative chamber, a Senate. This then led to various suppressive acts by Athens toward her allies, which then weakened the fundamental appeal of Athens that Pericles proclaims rests on her many virtues.

This weakness in the structure of the government, if we consider Madison’s theoretical argument, developed historically as the strength of democracy grew in the late sixth and early fifth century BC. The complicated history of the development of the organs of representative government before Pericles’ rule, and the outcome of that development, fostered democracy but it also had the somewhat unplanned result of a very powerful role for the “generals,” the strategoi. After the major democratic reforms of Kleisthenes, the Assembly or ecclesia decided on proposals brought to it by a “random and representative cross-section of its own members.”⁴⁷ The senior council had been the Council of the Areopagus since the time of Solon. Kleisthenes’ democratic reforms in 508–507 had reduced the powers of the Council of the Areopagus and moved them to the Council of the Five Hundred, or the boule.⁴⁸ But the boule was either originally chosen by lot or switched from election to choice by lot shortly after its formation by Kleisthenes.⁴⁹ The democratic forces in Athens promoted the reforms of Ephialtes in 462/461 that further reduced the power of the Council of the Areopagus, which was composed of former government leaders, the archons. The archons themselves had earlier been reduced in power when the method of choosing them for office was changed to election by lot in 487/86, though the precise motivations for this change in electoral procedure are unclear.⁵⁰ In addition, the boule or Council, whose function was to initiate and propose legislation, had a membership chosen by lot from the citizens with a term of office of one year.⁵¹ Each of the ten tribes contributed fifty members to the boule, which meant that it represented the people (and not the elite) more than it had in the constitution under Solon. As power of the boule increased after the reforms of Ephialtes in 461 when it took over many of the functions of the Council of the Areopagus, the entire government became more democratic.⁵² The boule originated legislation by proposing it to the Assembly (the eccelsia), but because of its composition, it was inherently democratic and did not introduce (by design at least) a concern for the long-term values of the state that could curb the initiatives of the radical democrats or the leader of the city.⁵³ Pericles was either opposed to continuation of the power of a mediating representative chamber, which the Athenians had had in the Council of the Areopagus, or did not have the foresight to see the need for such a power, or, if he did, he seems not to have had the ability to open the debate on such a subject. What Pericles did was to become a strategos, which was the position that rose in power starting with Themistocles’ policy of a large fleet in 483/482. This newly powerful force in Athenian government, the office of the strategoi, oriented the forces of democracy toward military power in the hands of one leader, who turned out historically to be Pericles. This change was the result of the need for a large fleet that Themistocles saw and persuaded the ecclesia to implement along with the fortification of the Piraeus (Thucydides 1.93.3).⁵⁴

Thus, the Athenian government was complicated both in form, in the mid-fifth century BC, and in its history. It lacked a Senate but had as a substitute a formally very democratic body, the boule, to propose legislation and thereby to control the tendencies of the demos. This then, as we saw, left the government without a representative body that could promote the long-term, moderated, general interests of Athens as a whole. The office of the strategos took on that role, but inappropriately in some ways, as generals solve problems with war and weapons of war. This Pericles himself attempted to do in response to the growing power of Sparta. What Athens needed was a second reform of its government to moderate the powerful democratic forces in Athens and to control the powerful navy, which had the port, Piraeus, as its center, and the expression of military power as its goal. The central contradiction of the Athenian Empire thus became the confluence of powerful forces in the Piraeus, which was a center for resident aliens, commerce, and democratic politics that could be exported across the Mediterranean. But since the time of Themistocles, it had also been the center of Athenian military power. Athens exported an ideal of democracy, but its military power arose in the same place and grew without formal moderation. Pericles did not attempt a second reform on a level with Kleisthenes’ to make permanent some long-term perspective in the government and to control the military. Pericles himself became the control of the expression of Athenian military power, and though he did fulfill the role of general admirably and honorably, his death unleashed forces that had no institutionalized control. As the Stranger says in the Statesman, the art of the statesman is to decide whether something should be done or not (304d) while the art of the strategos is to wage war (304e). The art of the general is to subordinate the art of the statesman (305a). The art of the statesman also decides whether the citizens ought to learn or not and controls the art of what is learned or taught. In Athens, the basic political principle is democracy; the statesman decides what is to be learned or taught. The politicians rely on the art of rhetoric, which includes telling stories or myths (304c–d). This can hint at why Socrates disturbed the Athenian government so thoroughly. He implicitly and sometimes openly challenged the controlling ideas of the entire state.

Plato’s Republic begins with Socrates’ visit to the Piraeus, the home of the democratic forces in Athenian politics and a place that trade and the navy dominated (327a–b). The Piraeus was the location of great contradictions in Athenian public life as it was the center of Athenian expansionism in political power, the navy, and in trade. This is where Socrates was free to pursue his ideas but constrained by the dynamic, dangerous contradiction between Athens as she was and Athens as she aspired to be. So in the Republic Socrates goes down to the Piraeus where he discusses a just state. One Platonic irony here is that the Piraeus was the seat of commerce, the home of many foreigners who were attracted to the sense of commercial equality and concomitant financial opportunity, and also general human equality and freedom of Athens. It was also the center of the democratic movement in Athenian politics.⁵⁵ The Piraeus was theoretically the safest place for Socrates to present his view of human justice, since the largest degree of apparent freedom resided there, but one freedom that was not allowed in Athens generally, as it turns out, was to question the underlying principles of that freedom and the nature of the Athenian Empire that generated all the political freedom and the time and means to pursue it.

In the first speech in Athens that Thucydides reports, the debate in Athens in 433 between the Corinthians and the Corcyraeans, the central facts that control the decision in favor of Corcyra are the recognition or simple belief that war was inevitable and the sense that Athens should not sacrifice the naval power of Corcyra to the interests of Corinth (1.44.2). In addition, as Thucydides notes, the island of Corcyra was conveniently located on the way to Sicily (1.44.2). Even as the war is beginning, the Athenians focus on practical, material advantage, an approach to life that war encourages. Here we see the war in one view: Naval and commercial expansion to Sicily are enabled by Corcyraean and Athenian support for the aristocrats (the ruling party) in Epidamnus, while the Corinthians supported the demos in a civil war. Athens here acts against the general direction of her broad social and political force for democracy (cf. 1.24.5–1.25.1). She acts for her imperial power. Corcyra, a naval power, offers more naval power to Athens, and, since war is the chosen method for solving problems of state here, Corcyra receives support.

In the first debate at Athens, both the Corinthians and the Corcyraeans implicitly acknowledge the force of logos or argument as such. The fact that there was a debate at all, and indeed a rather complicated one in which both sides appeal to justice (1.32.1, 1.34.1, 1.37.1, 1.40.1, etc.) in addition to expediency, shows that even at this late period just preceding the war there was among Greeks and especially the Athenians (to whom these speeches are addressed) a respect for discourse even if the Athenians’ decision is for military and economic advantage.⁵⁶

The war eroded respect for logos, however, and pushed the Athenians toward unsafe and radical actions, most notably the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides shows this process beginning among the Athenians with his account of the plague following directly upon the Funeral Oration. After describing the various aspects of the attacks of the plague (2.47.3–2.50), Thucydides turns to its effect on the morale of the people (2.51), and then to the way it upset the rites of burial (2.52, and especially 2.52.4). The rite of burial had provided the occasion for the Funeral Oration (2.35.1), in which Pericles praises the ideal of Athenian adherence to written and unwritten nomos (2.37, and especially 2.37.3), while the rite itself symbolizes this adherence. The plague, by disrupting this most important nomos, led to a general anomia: πρῶτόν τε ἦρξε καὶ ἐς τἆλλα τῇ πόλει ἐπὶ πλέον ἀνομίας τὸ νόσημα (“Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague,” 2.53.1). The plague marked the beginning of the lawlessness that survived it.

There are many parallels between the effects of the plague and of stasis.⁵⁷ Both were violent. Both decreased respect for religion (2.52.3, 2.53.4; cf. 3.82.8), and both were lawless (2.53.1, 2.53.4; cf. 3.82.6). In both situations, people thus became more daring (2.53.1, 3.82.4). In general, each of these phenomena destroyed established nomoi, that is, customs, rules, and laws. The swiftness of the plague caused a swift revolution in values so that people, thinking of their bodies and wealth as ephemeral, considered what was pleasurable, and what would lead to pleasure, as both honorable and useful.⁵⁸

The plague, together with the first invasion of the Peloponnesians, changed the spirit of the Athenians (2.59.1–2), and for the first time in the war broke the unity of the polis of Athens. Pericles’ third speech was only partly successful in restoring the mood of the people, as they gave up the idea of settling their disputes with the Spartans, but also fined Pericles for his conduct of the war (2.65.2). In the chapter after Pericles’ last speech Thucydides details the political failure at Athens that followed his death. He had told them to be patient, to pay attention to the fleet, not to try to extend the empire, and not to risk the fortunes of the city during the war (2.65,7; cf. 1.144.1). The Athenians did the opposite of this. They allowed private ambition and private interests to lead them into activities unrelated to the war. When these projects were successful, they profited individuals, when unsuccessful, they injured the state (2.65.7). Thus, the desire for power arising from greed and ambition led to stasis. Thucydides’ analysis of the causes of decline in Athens corresponds to his general portrait of stasis in 3.82.

While Pericles was alive, he led the people rather than being led by them (2.65.8). But his successors, being roughly equal to each other, and desiring to be first in the city handed over the affairs of state to the whims of the multitude. Since the popular leaders after Pericles were interested primarily in their own advancement rather than in the prosperity of Athens, they brought the city into many blunders, in particular the Sicilian Expedition.⁵⁹ Because they were ambitious, they recalled Alcibiades. For the first time, the city fell into civil discord (2.65.11).⁶⁰ By 411 the city was already in stasis, which finally cost it the war.

Stasis is an organic development in a city and does not arrive full grown in one day.⁶¹ Because of his method Thucydides does not call attention to each stage of the emergence of stasis at Athens, although he does indicate, as they occur, certain incontrovertible signs of the political degeneration there. Once he has described the stasis at Corcyra and drawn out its general features, he assumes the effect of his description on the remainder of his narrative. He “state[s] the general character of an event in its first appearance and thereafter assume[s] it as the underlying condition of his narrative.”⁶² For him, the chief characteristics of stasis are its lack of moderation (3.82.3), its violence (3.82.2, 82.8), its emotional concentration on swift, thoughtless action (3.82.4–3.82.8), the overthrow and abuse of nomoi in order to further those actions (3.82.6), and the ultimate disregard for the political discourse that Pericles saw as the essential preliminary for all successful action (2.40.2).

Even before Pericles’ death, there are other serious signs of disturbance in Athenian politics beyond the fine that he suffered.⁶³ After Potidaea capitulated, the Athenians, apparently because of their growing bitterness at their situation, blamed the generals for accepting the terms (2.70.4). They did this even though the generals had what appeared to be good reasons (2.70.2), thus providing an example of the Athenians’ punishment of their leaders, which reaches a crisis in Thucydides with the recall and condemnation of Alcibiades in absentia.⁶⁴ The dangers of democracy are manifold, but in Thucydides’ narrative two of the most serious problems with this form of government are, first, that the people are fickle (2.65.4) and inclined to choose as leaders those who pander to their desires and reward them with money and, second, that democracy leads to tyranny by demagogues. In this respect, Thucydides’ ideas come close to Plato’s in the Republic (562c–d, 564e–566c). This raises the question of how comparing what Plato writes with Thucydides’ work can be useful in understanding Thucydides. One clear way of understanding Plato’s work as being related to Thucydides will be in the idea that both came into a world in which religious plays, that is, Greek Tragedy, provided Athenians and others with an important way of understanding the world in which they had lived, their current world, and perhaps what the future might hold. Plato’s dialogues are unusual in format in Western philosophy. He was clearly influenced by Greek Tragedy in many of the earlier dialogues such as Meno and Euthyphro and also the relatively later dialogues like Phaedo, Symposium, and Protagoras.

Plato openly addresses the failure of the Athenians to educate their children well. Thucydides implies a variety of concerns in this area in his discussion of Athenians’ incorrect beliefs regarding the affair of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. His portrait of Alcibiades, while recognizing Alcibiades’ capabilities, suggests deep problems in his character.⁶⁵ Aristophanes’ Clouds presents a comic version of the general case of Alcibiades and his failed education.⁶⁶ This famous case of a failure of education links the two thinkers and Aristophanes. Both Thucydides and Plato, presumably like many in Athens, identified Alcibiades as the young man who could show that democracy could produce good leaders. Their views of eros as Alcibiades’ deepest problem are quite similar. Alcibiades desperately wants to be erotically attractive and to be loved, at least as Plato presents him in the Symposium, and as Thucydides presents his efforts, but he has no vision at all of what he would want to do with an Athens that loved him. He is the signal failure of the wealthy Athenian patriarchy.

Another way in which Plato’s work can be helpful is that Plato defines a way of living in the world as centered on knowledge or at least the belief that we may attain it (Meno 86a–c). This serves as a culturally relevant counter to the relativistic thought of Thucydides’ contemporaries in attempting to educate the Sophists. Plato thus serves as a philosophical point of comparison who can help readers understand both what Thucydides was attempting to respond to and how he attempted to create his response.

The position of Pericles in Thucydides’ estimation is somewhat more puzzling than it seems at the first reading, as several scholars have noted.⁶⁷ While much of what Thucydides says supports the portrayal of Pericles as a very superior leader, there are some strong disquieting aspects and views of his leadership in the narrative and in some of the speeches, for example, the emergence of the plague right after Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration, a plague that subverts many of the most sacred human customs related to burial. Even in his last speech in Book 2, he explains the contradiction between the active life of power politics that animates an imperial state and the incompatibility of this life with the quiet life of a person at home.⁶⁸ Professor Martha Taylor writes an extensive and persuasive analysis of the conflict between the idea that many Athenians had of Athens as a particular geographically located place and Pericles’ ideal of a city that exists primarily in the minds and hearts of her people as an extended domain that could be an empire of all the world and a tomb for her famous men (Thucydides 2.43.3).⁶⁹ This conflict shows itself as a kind of hubris, in which the Athenians aspire to rule the known world but in doing so lose their sense of who they are as their ideal of democracy becomes a reality of the very powerful democracy of Athens attacking another important democracy, Syracuse.⁷⁰ Thucydides presents this conflict as a tragedy in which many moments of dramatic irony create a sense of foreboding that is realized in the great practical mistake of recalling Alcibiades.

One powerful example of the contrast between Pericles’ idealistic view of the city aspiring to become a city residing in the minds and hearts of its citizens instead of in Attica is the movement of people back into Athens from their own local city (πόλις or polis, 2.16.2).⁷¹ This movement, necessitated in many ways by Pericles’ war itself, intensified a tension at the heart of Athenian civilization, a tension that Thucydides presents as going as far back as Theseus, who abolished the magistrates of the local cities in Attica and relocated them in Athens proper (2.15.2).⁷² Indeed, Theseus prefigures Pericles in that his intelligence was a match for his power (2.15.2). His earlier relocation of the seat of government from the small cities of Attica to Athens presents Pericles with an opportunity, when the need arises at the start of the war, to complete the task by moving the people themselves. Edith Foster’s elegant description of the power of the country establishments for those who live there is understated and powerful: “Such attachments [to their local country homes] would tend to make them satisfied with what they have.”⁷³ But Pericles’ failure here is a want of moderation. Theseus the king had moved the power of the local magistrates and council offices to Athens, but the people were allowed to keep their homes and live in them (2.15.2). This established the political center. Pericles moved the people themselves, which was a necessity in war but immoderate as the long-term step it turned out to be. It was too costly emotionally for the people and then imposed the dreadful practical problem of concentrated population in Athens, which aggravated the difficulty of the basic living situation during the plague (2.52.1). The crowding together from the countryside into the city (2.52.1) echoes very similar wording in the description of Pericles’ transport of people from their farms into Athens (2.14.1).⁷⁴ This then is an example of dramatic irony as the ritual celebration of the first glorious deaths of the war is transmogrified into the horror of dead bodies piling up from the plague. Thucydides emphasizes the ominous danger of Pericles’ crowding of people into the city by quoting a Pythian oracle that portends great danger to the city from inhabiting a special area below the citadel, the “Pelargikon parcel” (2.17.1–2). Thucydides himself says that the oracle referred not to danger from the unlawful habitation of the area but rather to the risks associated with inhabiting the area as the result of the war (2.17.2).

In a broader way, Thucydides implies by the parallel actions here that Pericles serves as a sole ruler or king like Theseus. But Theseus was wiser than Pericles in this all-important matter of homes for his people. While moving the residents of rural Attica to a place of safety was advisable, here also we may think forward to Thucydides’ later and more famous comment on Pericles’ rule: ἐγίγνετό τε λόγῳ μὲν δημοκρατία, ἔργῳ δὲ ὑπὸ τοῦ πρώτου ἀνδρὸς ἀρχή (“what was in word a democracy was becoming in deed rule (arche) by the first man,” 2.65.9, translation mine). The connection between Pericles’ arche or rule and Athens’ tyranny (τυραννίδα 2.63.2) is close but not exact, and also clear, but to ascribe to Thucydides here a complete criticism of Pericles’ government makes too strong a point.⁷⁵ Pericles was working with the structure he had, but he did not do very much to change it if he found it wanting. He certainly did not revive the power the Council of the Areopagus, for example, or arrange for a different method of selecting members of the boule. This may provide an insight into how to read Thucydides. Pericles lived the active life. Events pressed in and limited some of his choices. Then in war he faced necessity regularly. On the other hand, he chose war or at least did not seek either to delay it or to set a power in the middle between the main executive of the government the strategos, Pericles, and the democratic Assembly. Though he did tell his people to “wait quietly” in the war (ἡσυχάζοντάς, 2.65.7), he seems to have lacked something of Archidamus’ “moderation”: “Archidamus their king . . . was held to be both an intelligent and a moderate man” (Ἀρχίδαμος ὁ βασιλεὺς αὐτῶν, ἀνὴρ καὶ ξυνετὸς δοκῶν εἶναι καὶ σώφρων,” 1.79.2, translation Crawley, modified so as to render σώφρων as “moderate” and ξυνετὸς as “intelligent”).⁷⁶

Archidamus believed at that point in 432/431 that invading Attica was unjust and that the gods would not support this injustice.⁷⁷ The attack appeared to be unjust because the Athenians were prepared to submit to arbitration, and to proceed against a state that has taken that stance does not conform to “legal usage” (νόμιμον, 1.85.2). Archidamus remains moderate. Although Pericles believes war is inevitable and is not as moderate as Archidamus, he argues strenuously against adopting a militarily aggressive campaign.⁷⁸

While Cleon embraces the opposite of this type of moderation, his relationship to Pericles’ ideas is not as clear. The growth of Cleon’s power marks for Thucydides the rise of the demagogue in Athens. Cleon transcends his historical role and becomes the type of the violent demagogue who appeals to the passions and self-interest of the people.⁷⁹ He was the most violent of the citizens and the most persuasive with the people (3.36.4). But this does not at all mean that Cleon was only a foil for Pericles or only a type and not a particular person. While Thucydides does have overriding themes and concerns, he also emphasizes the importance of individual leaders to determine the path of the Peloponnesian War. Thus, Pericles’ particular way of responding to what he believed was an inevitable war enabled him to restrain the worst impulses of the people that can arise in wars.⁸⁰ Cleon, on the other hand, exploited those impulses.

The debate between Cleon and Diodotus suggests political division within the state. Two opposing points of view divide the people almost into halves (3.49.4). Furthermore, since Cleon takes over the high ground with his simplistic appeals to justice, Diodotus is forced to retreat to the argument from expediency. He does this because he must gain the trust of a people who are somewhat “hardened” to the crude appeals of Cleon.⁸¹ The debate also illustrates Thucydides’ statement that in stasis the violent, angry man was trusted, and the one who spoke in opposition was suspect (3.82.5). Cleon himself argues that the one speaking against his point of view (3.38.1) has too much confidence in his own rhetoric or has been impelled by his hope of gain (3.38.1–3.38.2). He even hints that those who have reopened the debate are serving Mytilene’s interest, thus encouraging suspicion, which is one of the clear signs of political decay for Thucydides (3.83.1, cf. 3.82.5). It was absent from the Athens of the Funeral Oration (2.37.2), but by the time of the mutilation of the Herms, it had overcome the Athenians, particularly in their attitude toward Alcibiades (6.53.2, 6.60.1, 6.60.3, 6.61.4).

The sufferings of the Athenian democracy during the first few years of the war promoted the Athenians’ weakness, their pleonexia or the desire for more, which is one of the chief characteristics of stasis (3.82.6). After the Athenians’ good luck at Pylos and the armistice of 425, Spartan envoys came to Athens and proposed peace. But the Athenians, led by Cleon, refused the offer and “grasped at something more” (τοῦ δὲ πλέονος ὠρέγοντο, 4.21.2).⁸² This pleonexia hardened during the aftermath of the Pylos affair when the Spartans kept sending emissaries to try to recover the prisoners, while the Athenians would not accept their proposals and continued to grasp at something more (4.41.4). Pleonexia thus developed into an important factor in Athenian politics and eventually led to the Sicilian Expedition (6.24.3–6.24.4).⁸³ In the Republic, Socrates ascribes this general development toward pleonexia in democracy to an original focus on the acquisition of money in oligarchy as that regime replaces a regime based on the love of honor, a timocracy (553b–c). In the oligarchic regime those who rule become rulers through their money, but they are unwilling to control their children by managing their spending (555c). In the case of orphans, the oligarch’s worst characteristics would come into view, their lack of restraint (Republic, 554c). While Alcibiades was not an orphan he was turned over to Pericles when his father Kleinias died (Alcibiades I, 104b). Plato does not even mention Alcibiades’ other protector, Ariphron.⁸⁴

In 424, the Athenians banished the generals Pythodorus and Sophocles and fined Eurymedon for having taken bribes and for not having subdued Sicily. They had left Sicily, as Thucydides makes clear, because the Sicilians had taken the advice of Hermocrates and ended their conflicts (4.65.1–4.65.3). But the Athenians blame their generals anyway because, as Thucydides says, the people had let their success confuse their strength with their hopes (4.65.3–4.65.4). They had already this early in the war lost their sense of what was rationally possible. The frustration with the generals recalls both the earlier criticism of the generals who had accepted terms at Potidaea (2.70.4) and the fining of Pericles (2.65.3). The Athenians’ growing severity toward their leaders bespeaks increasing irrationality and political disunity, which Thucydides reinforces by implicitly contrasting the Athenians’ attitude with the unity of the Sicilians (4.65). The freedom the Athenians feel to take part in public debate is perverted into contempt for leaders, revealing an inherent weakness of democracy, which Plato too sees when he has Socrates describe the democratic city in Book 8 of the Republic. There the democratic city thirsts for freedom, and when it gets bad wine pourers as leaders it becomes drunk, punishing its rulers for not indulging the people (Republic 562c–d). Plato’s account of the succession of regimes, from oligarchy to democracy and from there to oligarchic tyranny, parallels what seems to have been the general historical flow of internal conflict in Athens and what is the flow of internal conflict in Athens according to Thucydides. The last stage in that particular sequence involves ostentatious expense in Plato’s account and a kind of seemingly religious procession (560d–e). Plato names hubris first at the start of a parade of vices (560e1). This befits Alcibiades’ presentation of himself in the debate regarding the Sicilian Expedition where he claims that his expenses and Olympic victories show the power of Athens (6.15.1–3) and his extraordinary superiority to others puts him above them (6.15.4).

Thucydides’ view of democracy has important implications for how we are to understand his portrait of Pericles. It seems clear that for him democracy is not the highest form of government (8.97.2). Under Pericles, when the city was ruled in name by a democracy (2.65.9), there was rule by the first citizen, and Athens reached her peak. For Thucydides, the question of the highest form of government may not be the same as an enquiry into his view of the highest historical manifestation of the political life in the polis in the middle to late fifth century BC. He differs from Plato in that, for him, in a democracy a very high-type leader such as Pericles may emerge, although such an emergence is almost an accident, not dependent upon the institutions of government. He sees the same forces in the decline of democracy that Plato sees, however, as in the end Athens falls into an internal war of factional passions.

Plato and Thucydides experienced the collapse of Athenian political life at the end of the fifth century in very different ways but they share a sense of catastrophic loss. For Plato the crux of the loss is the death of the most profound thinker of the age, which then comes to symbolize the uncertain and sometimes fateful relationship between philosophy and political life. Plato’s apparent solution is to conclude that until philosophers rule as kings or kings philosophize and at the same time political power and philosophy occur together, there will be no end of ills in cities and among humans generally. This presents us with what seems like a similarity between Plato and Thucydides in that they both appear to see a deeply thoughtful ruler as one possible solution to the political problems that human life presents. But Pericles is far from a philosopher in Plato’s or Socrates’ view, and in reading Thucydides we must ponder the ways in which he presents the Athenians’ catastrophic loss in Sicily as inevitable. This leads the reader back to the text to see what causes the impression of impending tragedy.

The Menexenus, which includes a parody of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, is most likely Plato’s, although the authorship is still disputed.⁸⁵ Socrates questions Pericles’ raising of children in the Protagoras (320a) and states that Pericles was the author of Athens’ troubles in the Gorgias (519a). In the Menexenus Socrates delivers a speech that he attributes to Pericles’ courtesan and companion Aspasia (236b), composed of remnants of the speech she wrote for Pericles, his famous Funeral Oration. The attack on Pericles is purposeful and relentless.⁸⁶

Although stasis as a fully defined condition or syndrome may not have developed until 411, the recall of Alcibiades represents the beginning of very dangerous stasis in Athens.⁸⁷ Thucydides had said this in the chapter on Pericles’ successors. He repeats this judgment in the introduction to Alcibiades’ speech at the assembly held to consider the best way to equip the ships bound for Sicily. Alcibiades’ indulgence of his desires had much to do with the ruin of Athens:

ὢν γὰρ ἐν ἀξιώματι ὑπὸ τῶν ἀστῶν, ταῖς ἐπιθυμίαις μείζοσιν ἢ κατὰ τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν οὐσίαν ἐχρῆτο ἔς τε τὰς ἱπποτροφίας καὶ τὰς ἄλλας δαπάνας: ὅπερ καὶ καθεῖλεν ὕστερον τὴν τῶν Ἀθηναίων πόλιν οὐχ ἥκιστα.

For the position he held among the citizens led him to indulge his tastes beyond what his real means would bear, both in keeping horses and in the rest of his expenditure; and this later on had not a little to do with the ruin of the Athenian state. (6.15.3)

The people, fearful of the magnitude of his paranomia and ambition, thinking that he aimed at tyranny, became his enemy. Although he was the best general Athens had, the people entrusted others with the affairs of state. This soon destroyed the polis (6.15.4). Soon after the Sicilian Expedition the city fell into a formal condition of stasis during which, although she held out for a number of years, her power declined (2.65.12). Athens finally gave in and lost the war as a result of internal disputes among the citizens. Thucydides implies a medical model for understanding stasis as a disease. Plato explicitly calls the class warfare of stasis a disease in the Republic (νόσημα, 563e), and in the Sophist (228a–b).

In general, Thucydides depicts a decline in political life in Athens during the war. This movement is not a straight line, however, but full of peaks and valleys. Alcibiades, for instance, stands out for his ability, and once even for his service to Athens (8.86.4), yet he appears late in the Histories. Cleon, on the other hand, has his most significant moment in Book 3 in the debate over Mytilene. The Melian Dialogue, which as we shall see, represents a serious falling off from the tone and substance of speeches near the beginning of the war, occurs near the middle of the Histories.

Although the dramatic progress of political degeneration at Athens does not follow a straight line, there are two overriding factors that support such an overarching interpretation of how Thucydides presents political discourse in Athens during the war. In the first place, we have Thucydides’ explicit statements in 3.82 of the effect of war on men’s emotions and their ways of using logos during political revolutions. Second, the dramatic force of the Histories is such that Thucydides’ portrayal of the war has a sense of inevitability about it. Thucydides presents various aspects of the decline in Athens’ fortunes. He describes the plague and the loss of Pericles, then he shows us Cleon, who serves as the form of the demagogue. After this we have the Melian Dialogue, and finally the Syracusan adventure, which seems doomed from the start. All this contributes to a general impression that Athens will lose the war.⁸⁸ The decline in political discourse or rhetoric during the war forms part of this picture. The resolution of the apparent conflict between Thucydides’ high praise of Pericles and the feeling we have as readers of the Histories that Athens will lose the war represents one of the most important intellectual challenges that Thucydides sets for his readers.

Thucydides selects and emphasizes in order to develop his own philosophical account of the Peloponnesian War.⁸⁹ The decline of political discourse at Athens plays, as we shall see, a significant role in this account. This decline mirrors several other movements in the Histories: from political power to pure violence; from arche or “rule” to tyranny; from being to becoming; from orderly rest combined with moments of rest to disorderly and then frantic political and military motion; from trust to suspicion; from public to private; and from a polis presented as an organized one in the Funeral Oration to inhabitants of Athens each pursuing their many dreams and recoiling from their many fears at the start of the Sicilian Expedition (6.30.1–2).

For Thucydides, a well-ordered polis and freedom from internal contention provide the essential bases for political achievement and power. Therefore, an examination of his description of the development of stasis and how it relates to other movements in the Histories is vital for a full understanding of his political philosophy. Faction or stasis is the opposite pole to the well-ordered state. Thucydides presents a view of stasis as generally spreading from the early clear instance of it in Corcyra to Athens and the Athenian Empire and eventually to the entire Hellenic world (3.82.1).⁹⁰ In modern times, James Madison in Federalist #10 rightly sees faction or stasis as perhaps the most serious problem facing all types of popular government:

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.⁹¹

While Thucydides’ account of stasis certainly details many of its horrors, one of the more terrifying outcomes is that it leads to a desire for the elimination of the other side. Thus, in Corcyra the revolution ended when there was nothing left of the aristocratic party (4.48.5). For many it is impossible to stay neutral, which is another kind of finality (3.82.8).⁹²

Two of the clearest signs of stasis are the overturning of established nomoi (“customs” and “laws”) and the loss of faith in reason and discourse. These two phenomena converge in the effect of stasis on the language of political debate. Thucydides discusses this effect in his chapters on stasis in Book 3. Thucydides’ idea here anticipates Socrates’ clear point in the Phaedo that hatred of reason (misologia), which parallels hatred of humans, is one of the worst fates that can befall us (89d–90c). Socrates and Plato locate reason in speech or logos specifically because it is in spoken discourse that Socrates locates reason and the attempt to understand the Good and live in it.

NOTES

1 Aristotle, Politics, 1253al–18. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 9–10.

2 Currently, the Menexenus is believed by scholars to have been written by Plato. See George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 158. The argument relies on the fact that Aristotle refers to the speech twice in the Rhetoric, 1367b and 1415b. In the second instance, he says, “For as Socrates says in his funeral oration, it is not difficult to praise Athenians among Athenians, but it [is difficult] among Lacedaemonians [i.e., Spartans].” The mention of Socrates’ “Funeral Oration” (ἐν τῷ ἐπιταφίῳ), seems conclusive barring some new evidence. For a recent and important review of the Menexenus, see Frances Anne Pownall, Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 38–64.

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.

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated with introduction and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” 2 (New York: Penguin 1968), pp. 106–107.

6 Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” Twilight of the Idols, 2, p. 107.

7 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 211.

8 Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, p. 255.

9 For a review of some of the complicated relationships between the Meno and the Gorgias, see E. R. Dodds, Plato Gorgias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 23, and pp. 359–60, commentary on Gorgias 516e9.

10 This is of course a vexatious passage mainly (but not only) because of the complicated mathematics involved. The clearest exposition of the mathematics can be found in Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), pp. 298ff. (This is a republication with corrected errata of the 1921 edition published by the Clarendon Press.) One very clear point is that Socrates’ explanation is somewhat obscure and seems to leave one or two points out. See also the thorough and very helpful discussion of this passage and most of the preceding scholarship in G. E. R. Lloyd, “The ‘Meno’ and the Mysteries of Mathematics,” Phronesis 37, no. 2 (1992): 166–83.

11 For the interpretation of the exchange as an initiation, see Lloyd, “The ‘Meno’ and the Mysteries of Mathematics,” pp. 178–83. The best translation is literal, and Heath’s cannot be bettered: “When they are asked, for example, as regards a given area, whether it is possible for this area to be inscribed in the form of a triangle or a given circle. The answer might be, ‘I do not yet know whether this area is such as can be inscribed, but I think I can suggest a hypothesis which will be useful for the purpose; I mean the following. If the given area is such as, when one has applied it (as a rectangle) to the given straight line in the circle [. . . it cannot, I (Heath) think, meaning anything other than the diameter of a circle] it is deficient by a figure (rectangle) similar to the very figure which is applied, then one alternative seems to me to result, while again another results if it is impossible for what I said to be done with it. Accordingly, by using a hypothesis, I am ready to tell you what results with regard to the inscribing of the figure in the circle, namely, whether the problem is impossible’” (from Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. 1, pp. 299 ff). For a very clear account of the logic of the passage and its application to epistemology, see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 paperback reprint of 1996 edition), pp. 309–13.

12 See June W. Allison, Word and Concept in Thucydides (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press for the American Philological Association, 1997), pp. 192–93, who argues that τὸ σαφὲς characterizes logoi “only when Thucydides determines that the attribution is true.”

13 Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 34–72, reviews the entire subject and comments that there is a “fluctuation between massive subjectivity and massive comprehensiveness, or perhaps between extreme subjectivity and extreme objectivity” in both the narrative, the recounting of deeds, the erga, and the speeches or logoi. See also Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 141–144.

14 See: “But the struggle against Plato, or, so to speak more clearly and for the ‘people,’ the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia—for Christianity is the Platonism for the ‘people,’—has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit, the like of which has never yet existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.” Translation Walter Kaufman, “Preface” to Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 193 in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library, 1968).

For a thorough review of Nietzsche’s thoughts on Thucydides, see Scott Jenkins, “What Does Nietzsche Owe Thucydides?” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42, no. 1 (2011): 32–50. doi:10.5325/jnietstud.42.1.0032.

15 Jonathan J. Price, Thucydides and Internal War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 71–73. Price compares in substantial depth partisans’ psychology and actions in factional disputes with the conduct of soldiers and their state of mind.

16 A. W. Gomme et al., Historical Commentary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1950, 1956, 1940, 1981), 3.82.l n., say that the clause διαφορῶν οὐσῶν ἑκασταχοῦ τοῖς τε τῶν δήμων προστάταις τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἐπάγεσθαι καὶ τοῖς ὀλίγοις τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους, which explains the clause ἐπεὶ ὕστερόν γε καὶ πᾶν ὡς εἰπεῖν τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐκινήθη implies that “formally at least . . . Athens is not included among the sufferers from stasis.” He does, however, refer the reader to 2.65.11–2.65.12. But this is not right, as the clause διαφορῶν οὐσῶν ἑκασταχοῦ τοῖς τε τῶν δήμων προστάταις τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἐπάγεσθαι καὶ τοῖς ὀλίγοις τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους merely explains how it happened that stasis disturbed all of Hellas. Thucydides does not mean that stasis did not occur in the states that did not call in the Athenians as allies of one party or another, but that the availability of the Spartans and Athenians as allies helped to cause and perpetuate stasis in many states. For descriptions of stasis at Athens, see John H. Finley, Thucydides (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1963 reprint), pp. 186–87, and Felix Wassermann, “Thucydides and the Disintegration of the Polis,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 78 (1947): 46–55.

17 The translation is by Richard Crawley from the 1910 edition of his earlier translation, Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War (London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton), available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu (accessed July 27, 2019). All subsequent translations of Thucydides are Crawley’s except where I have relied on Hobbes or modified the translation somewhat in accordance with a modern scholarly correction or argument. In those cases, I have indicated the fact of an alteration.

18 τὸ . . . ἐμπλήκτως ὀξὺ means literally “the strikingly swift or sharp.” See LSJ s. v. ἔμπληκτος II, “frantic.” ἔμπληκτος derives from the verb ἐμπλήσσω, which means “to strike.” One very clear delineation of the characteristics of a society that is fracturing along revolutionary lines can be found in Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 71–74.

19 LSJ s. v. νόμος.

20 See Allison, Word and Concept in Thucydides, pp. 167–69. Prof. Allison notes that Thucydides indicates that theoretical nature of his discussion by eliminating specific singular terms referring to concrete things and replacing those sorts of nouns with abstract singular terms, many of which are conceptual words in Greek ending in “-sis” or abstract concepts composed of a neuter nominative adjective together with an article so that we have an abstract concept like τὸ δ᾽ ἐμπλήκτως ὀξὺ, “the strikingly swift (or sharp) or the plain τὸ ὀξὺ “the swift” or “the sharp.”

21 See Josiah Ober, “Thucydides and the Invention of Political Science,” Version 1.0, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, November 2005, https://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc/pdfs/ober/020702.pdf (accessed July 1, 2019).

22 On this subject the work of James V. Morrison in his Reading Thucydides (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006) is invaluable. See, e.g., pp. 3–15.

23 See Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003, reprint of 1997 paperback edition): 3.83.1n. See also his further comments on this subject in Thucydides, pp. 186–90, in particular p. 186n.100. Hornblower here follows Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 507f. and n.24. I follow Gomme et al., Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 3.83.1 n., on this point. Hornblower’s and Nussbaum’s translations, while quite reasonable grammatically, make Thucydides say that “simplicity [is] so large an element in a noble person or nature.” But this would mean that Thucydides is here asserting that a word that can include a sense of contempt for the person so characterized in it, especially if the person who is doing the characterizing is an ambitious, aggressive person like Thrasymachus (Plato, Republic, I.348d), contains an important characteristic of a noble character, more important than sophrosune, courage, honesty, and the beautiful, which seems hard to accept. See also the comment of E. C. Marchant: “πλεῖστον μετέχει—‘in which nobility of character is the chief element.’ Or, less probably, ‘which is a very important element of a noble mind.’” Cf. I. 84, 3, for a parallel grammatical usage (Commentary on Thucydides Book 3 [London: MacMillan & Company, 1909], 3.83.1 n.) For this type of simplicity as a kind of weakmindedness, see Plato, Republic, Book 3 400e.

In ethical terms, one important point that is not modern about the ancient concept of the person of virtue is the sense that that person’s actions are beautiful (kalon). See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100b–1101a.

24 This is in effect the somewhat hesitating suggestion of Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I: 3.83.1n. See also Morrison in his Reading Thucydides, p. 25.

25 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995 [based on the original edition of 1777]), p. 5. For a more recently edited text, see https://davidhume.org/texts/e/1 (accessed November 21, 2019).

26 Simon Swain, “Man and Medicine in Thucydides,” Arethusa 27, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 303–27.

27 Patricia Curd, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: A Text and Translation with Notes and Essays by Patricia Curd (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 2010), p. 29 (Fragment B21a) and pp. 75–76, where Curd notes that “the workings of our understanding hint at the nature of Nous.”

28 See L. Hau, “Thucydides,” Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2016), pp. 194–215, for a very good overview of this issue in scholarship on Thucydides.

29 See, e.g., 1.22.4, 3.82.2, cf. 1.76.3 (Athenian ambassador’s speech at Sparta), cf. 3.45.7 (Diodotus’ speech), 4.61.5 (Hermocrates’ speech at the conference at Gela), and 5.105.2 (the speech of the Athenians at Melos).

30 See Pownall, Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose, pp. 6–9.

31 Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume I, 3.83.1n., observes that just because his speakers make the various moves of the Sophists we are not justified in concluding that he has a Sophistic view of relativistic moral values.

32 Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 133–34.

33 Rosen, Plato’s Statesman: The Web of Politics, p. 151.

34 Mary-Louise Gill, “Method and Metaphysics in Plato’s Sophist and Statesman,” 2005, 2015 revision, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-sophstate/ (accessed December 1, 2019).

35 Plato, Sophist, translated with introduction by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), “Introduction,” pp. 11–12.

36 Plato, Sophist, translated with introduction by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem, “Introduction,” p. 12.

37 Seth Benardete, Plato’s Sophist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), “Commentary,” pp. 150–51.

38 A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 399–400. Taylor makes the important points that in the Nicomachean Ethics this is called Aristotle’s Principle of the Mean; and Aristotle never lays claim to proposing this Platonic principle.

39 Swain, “Man and Medicine in Thucydides,” 114. See n. 48 for the references to the occurrences of phusis.

40 Price in Thucydides and Internal War fully develops the theory that the Peloponnesian War can and should be considered as a kind of stasis. See in particular pages 30ff. He argues very persuasively that the psychological characteristics of the war and the conduct of the combatants in Thucydides reflect the kinds of character and conduct associated with stasis.

41 See Simon Hornblower’s discussion in Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 45–47. See also Hornblower’s remarks in A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume I, on 1.22.1, pp. 59–60. I do not think that what Thucydides says here reflects some kind of incompatibility between two methods or points of view. Thucydides is being very precise about what he actually did to remember or ascertain what was said in the speeches and then reconstruct them. Hornblower is of course right that τὰ δέοντα refers to what was required by the situation. It seems possible to me that ἂν belongs with the phrase in which it is placed, ὡς δ᾽ ἂν ἐδόκουν. This is a common iterative usage. See William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (London: Macmillan, 1965 reissue of original 1889 edition), para. 199, page 66; and para. 162, page 56. It is true that ἂν can often be displaced grammatically to a dependent infinitive (LSJ s. v. D. I. 3). Charles Morris, Commentary on Thucydides Book 1 (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1891), takes it so here and pins ἂν to εἰπεῖν expressing a conditional sense but this seems less like a grammatical point that it is a support for the idea that what Thucydides is saying here is that he is to some extent inventing what the speakers doubtless (μάλιστ᾽) would say. It is plainer and more clear to see Thucydides saying, “However each speaker seemed to me concerning the circumstances at the time to say doubtless what was required, so it was written [by me, Thucydides] keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what each speaker actually said.” The use of ἂν with the main verb, generally in the imperfect, to express an iterative condition has a parallel also in Thucydides at 7.71, as noted by LSJ. This reading makes Thucydides’ statement more internally consistent. I believe that Thucydides in a manner more often seen in poets uses complicated language to make his readers pause and think. Professor Hornblower’s Thucydides and Pindar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) seems like the general case of this point. Hornblower in Thucydides, pp. 34–72, reviews the entire subject and comments that there is a “fluctuation between massive subjectivity and massive comprehensiveness, or perhaps between extreme subjectivity and extreme objectivity” in both the narrative, the erga, and the speeches or logoi. See also the discussion of Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 141–44.

42 For a recent overview relevant to this theme generally and then to the debates in Sicily (6.33.–40), see Gottfried Mader, “Fear, Faction, Fractious Rhetoric: Audience and Argument Thucydides’ Syracusan Antilogy (6.33–40),” Phoenix LXVII (2013): 236–59, and in particular pp. 258–59.

43 Cf. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 80–81.

44 Cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia, Volume I, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 408.

45 H. Flashar, Der Epitaphios des Perikles: seine Funktion in Geschichtswerk des Thucydides (Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungberichte, Philos.-Histor. Klasse 1969, Abh. 1, Heidelberg), p. 46.

46 Federalist #63, usually now ascribed to Madison, sometimes also to Madison and Hamilton together. From The Debate on the Constitution, Part 2 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), p. 318. See also https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-63.

47 David Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), reprint with corrections, p. 29.

48 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p. 30.

49 This is a matter of dispute, but the dispute does not affect the main point, which is that well before the time of Pericles the members of the boule were chosen by lot. For the suggestion that the original choice was by election, see P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 251. For the view that the choice was originally by lot see Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p. 26.

50 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 30–32.

51 See, e.g., Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 77–78.

52 Robert W. Wallace, “Councils in Greek Oligarchies and Democracies,” A Companion to Ancient Greek Government, ed. Hans Beck (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), pp. 199–201.

53 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 25–27.

54 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 31–32.

55 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato Translated with Notes and an Interpretive Essay (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 440 n. 3.

56 White, When Words Lose their Meaning, pp. 62–68.

57 Cf. Finley, Thucydides, pp. 160–161.

58 This point is made by Walter Müri, “Politische Metonomasie,” Museum Helveticum 2 (1969), p. 66. It is also interesting to note that ἠξίουν (“they deemed it worthwhile [or right]”) from ἀξιόω (“think or deem worthy”) is the first verb in this section, which describes how the disruption of the burial nomos eventually led to the loss of force in other nomoi (2.53). This entire description of the plague and the implicit comparison with stasis relies in many ways on Thucydides’ apparent knowledge of the medical writers of his time and earlier. The thorough reviews of Hornblower, on ii.47.3–54, pp. 316–326, and Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 16–20, summarize the substantial discussion of the subject. For a review of the relationship of stasis and the plague, see Clifford Orwin’s “Stasis and the Plague: Thucydides and the Dissolution of Society,” The Journal of Politics 50, no. 4 (November 1988): 831–47.

59 Finley, Thucydides, pp. 160–61.

60 For the political significance of the statement τὰ περὶ τὴν πόλιν πρῶτον ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἐταράχθησαν ([they] “first introduced civil discord at home”), see LSJ s. v. ταράσσω I.5.

61 Cf. Finley, Thucydides, p. 186: “he [Thucydides] did not think of revolution as bursting unexpectedly upon Athens towards the end of the war, but as the slow culmination of earlier party strife.” This is quite an important point or position on the subject. It is often overlooked or neglected. Mark Barnard, “Stasis in Thucydides: Narrative and Analysis of Factionalism in the Polis” (Diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980), uses a very restrictive definition of stasis (see, e.g., pp. 34ff. and especially pp. 38ff.). Thus, for example, he does not see stasis in Athens until the first use of στασιάζειν (stasiazein or to be in a state of revolution) in 411 BC (8.78). It is a useful to make sure that in interpreting Thucydides we do not expand the definition of stasis beyond Thucydides’ own definition of the phenomenon. On the other hand, as we will see, the effects of incipient stasis in Athens (and elsewhere) can be seen before full-blown stasis itself breaks out.

62 Finley, Thucydides, pp. 180–81.

63 See Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 326–27.

64 See Price, Thucydides and Internal War, p. 329; and Martha Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 2014), pp. 270, 272, who goes farther even than Price in seeing important signs of stasis in Athens even before the death of Pericles.

65 Cf. Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2008), 6.15 general note. For the relationship between Aristophanes’ Clouds and the criticism of Alcibiades, see Mary P. Nichols, “Philosophy and Empire: On Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium,” Polity 39, no. 4 (2007): 502–21.

66 See the persuasive argument of Michael Vickers, Aristophanes and Alcibiades: Echoes of Contemporary History in Athenian Comedy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 35–36 and 161–62, that Aristophanes based Pheidippides to a large extent on Alcibiades and Strepsiades on Pericles.

67 For example, see Finley, Thucydides, pp. 19–20, generally following Thucydides’ support, and Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, generally and persuasively suggesting an important subtext of criticism of Pericles in Thucydides. See also Craig Waggaman, “The Problem of Pericles,” Thucydides’ Theory of International Relations, ed. Lowell Gustafson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), pp. 197–220, reviewing Pericles’ work as a political strategist; Andreas Avgousti, “A Text for the City: Plato’s Menexenus and the Legacy of Pericles,” Polity 50, no. 1 (January 2018): 72–100; and S. Sara Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” Political Theory 26, no. 4 (August, 1998): 489–513.

68 “Besides, to recede is no longer possible, if indeed any of you in the alarm of the moment has become enamored of the honesty of such an unambitious part. For what you hold is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe” (Crawley’s translation of ἧς οὐδ᾽ ἐκστῆναι ἔτι ὑμῖν ἔστιν, εἴ τις καὶ τόδε ἐν τῷ παρόντι δεδιὼς ἀπραγμοσύνῃ ἀνδραγαθίζεται: ὡς τυραννίδα γὰρ ἤδη ἔχετε αὐτήν, ἣν λαβεῖν μὲν ἄδικον δοκεῖ εἶναι, ἀφεῖναι δὲ ἐπικίνδυνον. Thucydides, 2.63.2). There are several points that can be made about this, of course, not the least of which is the apparent derivation by Cleon of a similar point in Book 3, chapter 40.4, where he uses the very same word as Pericles did, ἀνδραγαθίζεσθαι. One large issue here appears to be how power politics applied to foreign affairs fosters the growth of a similar kind of political calculus within the state. See, e.g., Clifford Orwin, “Democracy and Distrust,” in Thucydides’ Theory of International Relations, edited by Lowell Gustafson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), pp. 98–114 and especially pp. 100–2.

69 Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, pp. 60–65.

70 See Eric Robinson, “Democracy in Syracuse, 466–412 B.C.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 100 (2000): 189–205, for a complete review of the tradition that Syracuse was a democracy as that compares with what seem to the actual historical facts, which are more complicated than the tradition.

71 For the discussion of the contradiction between the goal of Pericles to make the idealized and theoretical Athens the focus of all civic life and the apparent actual sense of the people of Attica that their land was as much a part of their definition of themselves as Pericles’ vision, see Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, pp. 62–65 in particular.

72 Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, pp. 64–66.

73 Edith Foster, Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 176 (Kindle location 1994). The entire section with the title “Thucydides on Attica and Athens” (pp. 174–83, Kindle location 1974–2075) contrasts the discussion of Theseus and his early political unification with Pericles’ later and more complete unification that included moving the people themselves.

74 Cf. ἡ ξυγκομιδὴ ἐκ τῶν ἀγρῶν ἐς τὸ ἄστυ (2.52.1) and ἐσεκομίζοντο ἐκ τῶν ἀγρῶν (2.14.1) as noted by Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I: 2.52.1 n. See also Morrison, Reading Thucydides, pp. 147–48.

75 Cf. Morrison, Reading Thucydides, pp. 148–49: “Thucydides offers a glowing tribute to Pericles, yet if his leadership of Athens was analogous to Athens’ role as an imperial city, was Pericles then in some sense an enslaver? Does he retain a touch of the tyrant? If Thucydides admires Pericles, does this suggest that Thucydides admires aggressive power figures? These possibilities are at least suggested by the application of the term arche to the Athenian statesman.” This seems like a very fruitful way to consider such echoes and relationships. Was Pericles actually a tyrant? No, he was not, but some of his acts necessitated by the war that he accepted led him to take steps that in retrospect may suggest improper rule.

Note the imperfect tense of ἐγίγνετό (“was becoming”). Had Thucydides wished to contend that Pericles’ rule had solidified into the rule of one man, he might have used the perfect tense or perhaps the aorist.

76 As Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I, 1.79.2 n., remarks, following E. Badian, From Plateia to Potidaea: Studies in the History and Historiography of the Pentecontaetia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 230 n.40, “Archidamus is the only individual in Thucydides to be called σώφρων,” i.e., “moderate.”

77 Robert C. Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Postmortem Study (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 80.

78 Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Postmortem Study, pp. 78–83.

79 Finley, Thucydides, p. 171.

80 See Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, “Fathers of International Relations? Thucydides as a Model for the Twenty-First Century,” in Thucydides’ Theory of International Relations, p. 29.

81 Orwin, “Democracy and Distrust,” p. 112.

82 Finley, Thucydides, p. 195: “The phrase expresses the instability born of the sufferings and demoralization [of Athens], and its emergence is the sign that these experiences had radically affect Athenian democracy.”

83 Virginia J. Hunter, Thucydides, The Artful Reporter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), p. 80.

84 See Nicolas Denyer, Alcibiades (commentary) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–89.

85 See, e.g., Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” pp. 489–513 and in particular, note 1 on page 508. Prof. Monoson notes that there is a reference to Socrates in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1367b8). Yet this is not completely conclusive as the reference is to what Socrates said in the Menexenus not that Plato wrote it. But Prof. Monoson is correct that today the general view seems to be that the dialogue is by Plato.

86 See Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” pp. 500–2, who explains the attack on Pericles very clearly in terms of Socrates’ focus on regular family relations as the core of love in the city and on the Athenians’ claim of autochthony and the land they have in common with one another as a city as the counterpoise to the inequalities and injustices of family relations and positions in society.

Two other issues that are to some extent outside the boundaries of the topic here are Plato’s rejection of female inequality, which was a significant issue in Athens, his positioning of the family as a fundamental building block of sound polis in The Laws, and his rejection of the inherently sexual nature of the relationship between older, powerful men in Athens and the young, attractive and often rich and powerful objects of their attention, the boys born into the upper classes of Athenian society. The Meno reveals these issues as basic concerns related to education in Athens.

87 Finley, Thucydides, p. 225. While Thucydides’ definition of stasis in 3.82–3.83 is clear and full, he does not offer an articulated theory as to the stages in its development. On the other hand, he provides some clear examples, e.g., Corcyra and Athens. It is quite likely, to judge from his analysis of stasis and from the histories of later revolutions, e.g., the Roman Revolution and the French Revolution, that a psychological and sociological analysis would reveal some patterns in the emergence of stasis. The pattern we are exploring here is how one observer, Thucydides, saw changes in the emotion, violence, and values expressed in political speeches.

88 W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 89 n. 24, 157, 159–61. See also Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, pp.60ff, where Taylor examines in detail the way in which the people of the outlying cities (as Thucydides calls them [2.16.2]) seem to respond to the idea that they must give up their land and move into Athens in order to fulfill certain important military objectives early in the war and also to live out the vision of Athens that Pericles lays out in the Funeral Oration. See also Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenos,” pp. 500–2, who explains that the speech composed by Aspasia (whom Socrates also here names as the author of the Funeral Oration for Pericles) praises the autochthony of the Athenians whose mother is earth (237b–238b). In addition, the Menexenus also focuses on the family as the foundation of the bravery for the state (246a–249c).

89 Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 139–41, 240–41. See also Jacqueline de Romilly, “Les problemes de politique interieure dans l’oeuvre de Thucydide,” in Historiographia Antigua (Commentationes Lovanienses in Honorem W. Peremans) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977), pp. 77–93, esp. p. 93. Nevertheless, Thucydides is subject to limitations by the history of the period about which he is writing. It is in this sense that we should understand Aristotle’s remark that history is more particular than poetry (Poetics 1451b).

90 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 69–74 et passim.

91 James Madison, “Federalist #10,” https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10, The Federalist Papers, originally published in The New York Packet, November 23, 1787.

92 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 72–73.