noted by Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I: 2.52.1 n. See also Morrison, Reading Thucydides, pp. 147–48.
75 Cf. Morrison, Reading Thucydides, pp. 148–49: “Thucydides offers a glowing tribute to Pericles, yet if his leadership of Athens was analogous to Athens’ role as an imperial city, was Pericles then in some sense an enslaver? Does he retain a touch of the tyrant? If Thucydides admires Pericles, does this suggest that Thucydides admires aggressive power figures? These possibilities are at least suggested by the application of the term arche to the Athenian statesman.” This seems like a very fruitful way to consider such echoes and relationships. Was Pericles actually a tyrant? No, he was not, but some of his acts necessitated by the war that he accepted led him to take steps that in retrospect may suggest improper rule.
Note the imperfect tense of ἐγίγνετό (“was becoming”). Had Thucydides wished to contend that Pericles’ rule had solidified into the rule of one man, he might have used the perfect tense or perhaps the aorist.
76 As Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I, 1.79.2 n., remarks, following E. Badian, From Plateia to Potidaea: Studies in the History and Historiography of the Pentecontaetia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 230 n.40, “Archidamus is the only individual in Thucydides to be called σώφρων,” i.e., “moderate.”
77 Robert C. Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Postmortem Study (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2011), p. 80.
78 Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Postmortem Study, pp. 78–83.
79 Finley, Thucydides, p. 171.
80 See Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, “Fathers of International Relations? Thucydides as a Model for the Twenty-First Century,” in Thucydides’ Theory of International Relations, p. 29.
81 Orwin, “Democracy and Distrust,” p. 112.
82 Finley, Thucydides, p. 195: “The phrase expresses the instability born of the sufferings and demoralization [of Athens], and its emergence is the sign that these experiences had radically affect Athenian democracy.”
83 Virginia J. Hunter, Thucydides, The Artful Reporter (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), p. 80.
84 See Nicolas Denyer, Alcibiades (commentary) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 88–89.
85 See, e.g., Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” pp. 489–513 and in particular, note 1 on page 508. Prof. Monoson notes that there is a reference to Socrates in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1367b8). Yet this is not completely conclusive as the reference is to what Socrates said in the Menexenus not that Plato wrote it. But Prof. Monoson is correct that today the general view seems to be that the dialogue is by Plato.
86 See Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenus,” pp. 500–2, who explains the attack on Pericles very clearly in terms of Socrates’ focus on regular family relations as the core of love in the city and on the Athenians’ claim of autochthony and the land they have in common with one another as a city as the counterpoise to the inequalities and injustices of family relations and positions in society.
Two other issues that are to some extent outside the boundaries of the topic here are Plato’s rejection of female inequality, which was a significant issue in Athens, his positioning of the family as a fundamental building block of sound polis in The Laws, and his rejection of the inherently sexual nature of the relationship between older, powerful men in Athens and the young, attractive and often rich and powerful objects of their attention, the boys born into the upper classes of Athenian society. The Meno reveals these issues as basic concerns related to education in Athens.
87 Finley, Thucydides, p. 225. While Thucydides’ definition of stasis in 3.82–3.83 is clear and full, he does not offer an articulated theory as to the stages in its development. On the other hand, he provides some clear examples, e.g., Corcyra and Athens. It is quite likely, to judge from his analysis of stasis and from the histories of later revolutions, e.g., the Roman Revolution and the French Revolution, that a psychological and sociological analysis would reveal some patterns in the emergence of stasis. The pattern we are exploring here is how one observer, Thucydides, saw changes in the emotion, violence, and values expressed in political speeches.
88 W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 89 n. 24, 157, 159–61. See also Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, pp.60ff, where Taylor examines in detail the way in which the people of the outlying cities (as Thucydides calls them [2.16.2]) seem to respond to the idea that they must give up their land and move into Athens in order to fulfill certain important military objectives early in the war and also to live out the vision of Athens that Pericles lays out in the Funeral Oration. See also Monoson, “Remembering Pericles: The Political and Theoretical Import of Plato’s Menexenos,” pp. 500–2, who explains that the speech composed by Aspasia (whom Socrates also here names as the author of the Funeral Oration for Pericles) praises the autochthony of the Athenians whose mother is earth (237b–238b). In addition, the Menexenus also focuses on the family as the foundation of the bravery for the state (246a–249c).
89 Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 139–41, 240–41. See also Jacqueline de Romilly, “Les problemes de politique interieure dans l’oeuvre de Thucydide,” in Historiographia Antigua (Commentationes Lovanienses in Honorem W. Peremans) (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1977), pp. 77–93, esp. p. 93. Nevertheless, Thucydides is subject to limitations by the history of the period about which he is writing. It is in this sense that we should understand Aristotle’s remark that history is more particular than poetry (Poetics 1451b).
90 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 69–74 et passim.
91 James Madison, “Federalist #10,” https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10, The Federalist Papers, originally published in The New York Packet, November 23, 1787.
92 Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 72–73.
Stasis in Corcyra Modeling Revolution for Thucydides and Plato
Thucydides inserts into his account of the stasis at Corcyra a series of reflections on the effect of war and revolution on people’s characters and actions. Corcyra fell into stasis when the Corinthians set free the prisoners they had taken at Epidamnus (3.70.1). Then the Corcyraeans provided the first full examples of the effects of revolutionary passion (3.85.1), giving Thucydides the occasion to provide a very characteristic, abstract interpretation of the events.
Thucydides sees the revolutions throughout the Greek world during the war as a kind of movement:, since as he says, “later at least the entire, so to speak, Hellenic world was set in motion” (ἐπεὶ ὕστερόν γε καὶ πᾶν ὡς εἰπεῖν τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν ἐκινήθη, my translation, combined with Crawley, 3.82.1). Thucydides links stasis with the war as a whole, which he also sees as a movement, in fact, the greatest “movement” up to his time (κίνησις transliterated kinesis 1.1.2). In opposition to this movement excited by war and stasis stands the rest and orderly activity of research and writing, which exile gave to Thucydides (5.26.5).1 This opposition of orderly activity to disorderly movement is one of the central contrasts of Thucydides’ work, along with the relationship between logos and ergon. Because
