This study aims to show that Thucydides has written the Athenian speeches in the Histories so that they reveal a progressive decline in political discourse in Athens and among the Athenian speakers during the Peloponnesian War. This decline conforms to his description of the effects of stasis or political revolution on the valuation (ἀξίωσις transliterated axiosis) of words in 3.82. Thucydides’ interest in the change in the axiosis of words should be understood as part of a revolution in values, and not as a change in the meanings of words.
The Peloponnesian War, Corcyraean and Athenian political revolutions, and the decline in values that Thucydides revealed became part of the philosophical, political, literary, and social ferment of late fifth-century Athens and influenced the ideas of an entire generation of thinkers, including especially Socrates and Plato. As part of this movement, the collapse of the Athenian Empire had tragic consequences for many in the Greek world, though as some modern scholarship has pointed out, democracy itself recovered afterward and became stronger in Athens especially.1 Aristotle or his students comment on this in The Athenian Constitution: “For the people themselves have made themselves masters of everything” (41.2). Outside of Athens there was acute political class struggle in the fourth century BC that was resolved with internal peace and democracy in the third century BC, but essentially without self-rule.2 After Athens was defeated at the Battle of Crannon in 322, Athenian democracy and her self-rule or freedom were essentially terminated.3 Even though democracy was strong in Athens for a while, the long-term trend in the Greek world after Athens’ loss in the Peloponnesian War was away from democratic self-rule and toward various forms of rule by tyrants and cabals. This ended in Roman domination of Greece of course.4
Yet the failure of the empire had profound intellectual and life consequences for Socrates, Plato, and Thucydides, among others, which tended to overshadow the Athenians’ basic recognition that they needed to improve their form of government. These consequences projected new forms of thought and expression beyond the modes that had been available to Aeschylus and Sophocles. Both Plato and Thucydides thought deeply and extensively about the lesson of imperial democratic Athens so that as we consider how political revolution in Athens led to a revolution in values that can be seen decline in Athenian political discourse, we may look to Plato in particular to help in understanding the complex reaction of Thucydides. We may wonder at the mystery that Plato does not mention Thucydides, though their analyses of the problems in Athenian life clearly reflect the same experience and share many insights, and both were Athenian citizens.5
Thucydides presents speeches and other reports of communication, including his own views that he rarely but very pointedly introduces as part of a large, open discussion of Athenian values, challenges to those values, political views, and views on how to conduct foreign war policy in particular within and for an empire. This discussion typifies the free and open debate characteristic of Athenian life. It is also in particular a characteristic of Socrates’ conversations in the dialogues of Plato. The basic concepts are παρρησία (transliterated parrhesia), freedom of speech with implied equality,6 ἰσηγορία (transliterated isegoria), equality of speech and political equality generally,7 ἰσονομία (transliterated isonomia), equality before the law,8 and κοινωνία (transliterated koinonia), a sense of shared, community identity.9 These are important aspects of what it means to live in a democracy. The conversation among the Athenians has some epistemological implications also regarding the nature of common truths, according to Hannah Arendt:
The assumption [of Socrates] was that the world opens up differently to every man, according to his position in it; and that the “sameness” of the world, its commonness (koinon, as the Greeks would say, common to all) or “objectivity” (as we would say from the subjective standpoint of modern philosophy) resides in the fact that the same world opens up to everyone and that despite all differences between men and their positions in the world—and consequently their doxai [opinions]—“both you and I are human.”10
This understanding of the relationship of the world we all appear to inhabit to the world of truth and being in philosophical terms seems also to apply to Thucydides. What Arendt appears to be suggesting here is that the world opens itself up to everyone differently. What this implies for discourse is a radical intersubjectivity that supposes that we are all part of the same world, but we have differing perspectives on the same words and deeds. In Socratic terms, we believe that there is a world of being and that abstract concepts like excellence (ἀρετή, transliterated arete), the Form of the Good (ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα, transliterated he tou agathou idea, Plato, Republic Book VI, 502e), and other Forms of thought are part of it, but we exist in such a way that we interact with a world of what seems to each of us to be the case. In this view of what being in the world is, we live in a world of opinion (δόξα, doxa in transliterated Greek), but we believe our opinions approximate the truth, the world of Being. Socrates, Thucydides, all of Thucydides’ speakers, and Plato also are in conversation with one another and with us about how the world reveals itself to our understanding. Stasis, because it so deeply undermines our shared reality and even our ability to share that reality with one another, challenges the entire basis for understanding the political world especially. Understanding how this process of challenge and destruction takes place helps us preserve the common world we believe in so that we may live together in it.
Through close readings of the Athenian political speeches, it is shown that Thucydides portrays the development of stasis at Athens as an organic, long-term process full of complications, such as those Plato highlights in the Republic in particular, in Book VIII (559d–62e). Frustration with the myriad failures of political discourse in Greece generally and in Athens in particular may have concentrated Plato’s rejection of long discursive presentation of the sort favored by political figures. He adopted a second-best and retiring imitation of Socrates’ private but partly public style of philosophical engagement, which Socrates describes in the Phaedrus. Many other dialogues, notably the Statesman, the Symposium, and the Meno, can help shape our understanding of Thucydides’ Histories, which “doth secretly instruct the reader,” as Hobbes puts it, and can be as elusive as some of Plato’s dialogues. Like Plato, Thucydides rarely describes or states his meaning. Instead, he illustrates it “more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.”11
We will consider the following speeches of Thucydides in detail: the speech of the Athenian ambassadors in Book 1, all three of Pericles’ direct discourse speeches, the Mytilenean debate, the Melian Dialogue, Nicias’ and Alcibiades’ speeches in Books 6 and 7, and Euphemus’ speech at Camarina. The speeches of Pericles and the Athenian ambassadors function as a standard or reference for mapping the degeneration of political discourse, though an examination of the implications of the portrayal of Pericles’ policies reveals a deep problem with an unleashed desire for more (πλεονεξία or pleonexia in transliterated Greek) in Pericles’ actions and speeches. Socrates and Plato identify this problem too in Pericles as a political leader and as a moral force in several dialogues notably the Symposium. Furthermore, Plato’s Statesman provides a theoretical framework for understanding Pericles’ strengths and weaknesses. For Thucydides, Cleon serves as a model of the demagogue, while Alcibiades and Nicias represent an Athens in which the energy and moderation of Pericles have been separated into two men. The absence of speeches in Book 8 is interpreted to reflect Thucydides’ desire to show the declining importance of logos (Greek λόγος, “account,” “reckoning,” “reason,” “proportion,” “debate,” “reasoning,” and “speech,” among other senses of the word) on political action, though it is of course possible that in a final version of the text Thucydides would have indicated the decline through speeches in direct or indirect discourse. In a separate chapter, the affair of Harmodius and Aristogeiton and the relationship Thucydides establishes between it and Alcibiades show
