(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
