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
