One must turn him over line by line and read his hidden thoughts as clearly as his words: there are few thinkers so rich in hidden thoughts. Sophist culture, by which I mean realist culture, attains in him its perfect expression—this invaluable movement in the midst of the morality—and ideal swindle of the Socratic schools which was then breaking out everywhere. Greek philosophy as the decadence of the Greek instinct; Thucydides as the grand summation, the last manifestation of that stern, hard matter-of-factness instinctive to the older Hellenes. Courage in the face of reality ultimately distinguishes such natures as Thucydides and Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has himself under control—consequently he retains control over things.40
Thucydides’ obvious interest in opposed arguments can mislead, however, in the sense that it does not provide a full account of his use of arguments or logoi. The meaning and importance of the speeches arises from comparison of them to one another and to the narrative, which is quite similar to the way in which Greek tragic plays work at least on a formal level. It is also similar to the way in which the action of Plato’s dialogues complements the arguments, though there action in itself is usually not the main focus. No speech by itself presents us with Thucydides’ viewpoint.41 Similarly, the notion that he is a kind of scientific historian is not a full account of what he does by any means. That is not to say that he is not interested in science and scientific ways. He clearly is, as his discussion of the plague and stasis demonstrates. But his method of thought resembles Socrates’ as explained in the Phaedo. Thucydides uses the hypothetical method to understand both general causes and causes in particular cases, as when after the Peloponnesian invasion of Attica turns back, the sea comes up at Orobiae in Boeotia in a tsunami (3.89.2). Thucydides famously speculates that this must have been the result of an earthquake: “Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen”(3.89.5). While his object is to understand an event in the world he figures out through thought that at earthquake must have caused the sea to rise up. This is abstract reasoning about a hypothesis applied to physical events, yet the scientific insight serves an interpretive or even symbolic purpose as the Peloponnesian War is a war of the Athenian powers at sea with the Spartan forces of the land.
Socrates and Plato use the hypothetical method to understand the formal causes of things (Phaedo, 100d), the idea of cause itself in other manifestations (e.g., teleological causes), and also “concerning all the other things that are.”42 While there is some debate about the meaning of the “second sailing in search of the cause” (τὸν δεύτερον πλοῦν ἐπὶ τὴν τῆς αἰτίας ζήτησιν, 97c–d) that Socrates undertakes and explains in the Phaedo as part of his response to the failure in his eyes of Anaxagoras to live up to his promise of explaining the world in terms of Mind (97b–98b), the hypothetical method is clearly just what Socrates sets it out to be, a method of taking a hypothesis and seeing where it leads.43 The “second sailing” is the inquiry into the formal causes of things, that is, the Forms themselves, but this leads us back to ourselves and to an inquiry into one crucial value, justice, which is the primary object of the Republic. 44 Socrates’ first effort or sailing was thus an attempt to explain all the things that are in terms of the Good. For these types of explanations, Socrates is still looking for a teacher at the end of his life (99c), which I take to be first a kind of Socratic irony as Socrates attempts to understand his death as good, and second an example of Platonic irony, a kind of dramatic irony, as Socrates’ search for a teacher contrasts with the many failures of misguided Athenian fathers to find teachers for their sons.45
Thucydides’ Histories abound in such ironies that raise important questions about the Periclean enterprise, for instance, in the way the narrative of the Plague follows the Funeral Oration and prefigures the undermining of important civic customs by contrasting the formality and grace of the Funeral Oration with the chaos of death everywhere destroying the rite of burial (2.52.4).46 Athens’ greatness and appeal derives from the moral energy of the people, but in unleashing that energy Pericles induces and exhorts the people to gaze upon the power of the city and become her lovers.47 The question then is whether this idea leads to what the Greeks called pleonexia, which is a generalizing abstract noun combining what we might call greed, arrogance, and an exaggerated sense of entitlement and political and military aggrandizement, in short, a desire to have more. In his chapter on stasis, Thucydides concludes that the cause of the ruin of revolution comes from pleonexia and ambition or love of honor (φιλοτιμίαν, transliterated philotimia, 3.82.8).48
Even an active state like Athens must have, in Pericles’ view, a component of order or it will wear itself out. Stasis is constant political motion within the state, and as such it eventually leads to ruin. If the valuations of words themselves change, we lose our grasp on the moral status of things and events, since we can no longer even describe or discuss them.
Thucydides places his work in opposition to these tendencies in order to fix forever the events he describes. For him, the sense, valuation, and meaning of words must be relatively constant, or else we could not read what he wrote. His picture of the degeneration of political language has two broad lines. First, there is the decline within Athens itself, but there is also a decline in the political discourse of the Greek world as a whole (3.82.1). One purpose of this study is to show how Thucydides’ description of the degeneration of political language in 3.82–3.83 applies specifically to Athens, but the question naturally arises whether the general model of stasis extends to the Greek world as a whole, as Socrates suggests in Book 5 of the Republic (470b–d).49 To the extent that the Greek world was united against the Eastern powers, and it certainly was, the model has a proper political framework since the ties that bound the Greeks were not merely ties of political and military expedience but ties based on kinship and a shared cultural heritage specifically including the Greek language.
The crucial separation between Pausanias and the Spartans and the rebounding disgrace of Themistocles among the Athenians shows the leaders of the alliance against the Persians to be broadly ambitious (1.130.1–2 for Pausanias and 1.137–138 for Themistocles) and grasping for more, which also matches political motives in stasis. The two leaders exemplify some of the ways in which stasis arises and seem to prefigure a general separation among the allies. From there it seems clear the erosion of fellow feeling among the allies of Athens and their eventual discontents and rebellions lead to internal warfare in the Delian League that clearly resembles stasis more than it does war between independent and militarily powerful states.
In order to understand how Athens in particular changed during the war, we must first look at the speeches of Pericles, which represent for Thucydides the highest achievement of Greek political speech if we set aside Thucydides’ own logos, which then parallels the logoi (plural of logos) of Socrates and Plato.
Before we do this, however, it will be best to address briefly certain questions about how to interpret the speeches in Thucydides. In general, he invites comparisons of speeches by making them abstract and general, and by using a number of verbal echoes. Many scholars have taken the position that the speeches can and should be compared.50 Yet in making such comparisons, one must also consider the different rhetorical demands made on each speaker or group of speakers, because according to Thucydides’ own account, his composition of the speeches is not a simple matter.
Thucydides says that in writing the speeches he made the speakers say what seemed to him to be necessary (τὰ δέοντα, ta deonta) in each case, while keeping as close as possible to the overall intent, purport, or thought (τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης) of what was really said (τῶν ἀληθῶς λεχθέντων, 1.22.1). Thucydides distinguishes here three aspects of each speech: (1) what was actually said, (2) the overall intent or general purport of the speech, and (3) what seemed to him to be necessary to say. Thucydides’ program for his speeches has been the subject of thorough scholarly examination. While the first two aspects of the speeches seem clear, the third still occasions some dispute. Here, however, I will take ta deonta as referring to what was
