[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,
