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
