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
