situation in which Thucydides places him. Even rhetorical considerations must be used with care in interpreting the speeches, however. For instance, Thucydides puts both Diodotus and Cleon in front of the same Athenian audience in the same situation, but they make very different speeches. Their different characters and the goals of their speeches distinguish them. Thucydides presents their speeches because he wants us to see the differences in the characters of the speakers and in the general wisdom and humanity of the courses of action they recommend.52 These speeches, and indeed all the speeches, reflect more largely the speaker’s general intent (τῆς ξυμπάσης γνώμης) than they do the rhetorical demands the speaker faces.53 Thucydides uses the general intent of Pericles’ speeches to articulate a political ideal. It is to these speeches that we will turn next.
NOTES
1 Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 140ff.
2 White, When Words Lose their Meaning, pp. 87–89.
3 Morrison, Reading Thucydides, p. 25.
4 See Hornblower, Thucydides and Pindar, pp. 80–81 and 367, as well as his comments in A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume 3 at 6.24.4, 7.86.5, and 8.97.2. See also 2.43.1 where Pericles asks his people to become lovers of the city or, on another interpretation, lovers of the power of the city.
5 Thucydides uses the word νεωτερίζειν (3.82.1), literally, to do something new, to revolutionize a people or a situation. The word is often associated with violence. See LSJ s.v., νεωτερίζω.
6 For a relatively recent and very thorough review of the apparent influence of Greek medical thought on Thucydides, see Simon Swain, “Man and Medicine in Thucydides,” 303–27. On page 317, Swain notes that Thucydides describes the general form that stasis takes. He uses the plural of the word εἶδος (transliterated eidos), which is the same word Plato frequently uses for his forms. Swain says that Thucydides “gazes on the teratology” of the social symptoms of stasis and compares them with the “constancy of human nature.”
7 E. Greenwood, Thucydides and the Shaping of History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), p. 41. See also Hans-Peter Stahl, Thucydides: Man’s Place in History (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2009), p. 219.
8 I have taken and somewhat adapted what follows in chapter 1 largely from my article “The ἀξίωσις of Words at Thucydides 3.82.4,” John T. Hogan, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 21 (1980): 139–49, though I have deleted some of the more specialized or technical points. I have copied (without quotation marks) or only slightly modified significant portions of the text here from pp. 139, 143–45, and 147–48 of the original article, which the thoughtful copyright policies of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies and Duke University made possible. Duke kindly makes all issues of Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies, among other journals, available online: https://grbs.library.duke.edu/.
9 Cf., e.g., Gomme et al., Historical Commentary, 3.82.4 n.; Finley, Thucydides, p. 229; and Albin Lesky, History of Greek Literature, trans. James Willis and Cornelis de Heer (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1963), p. 463. See also LSJ s. v. ἀξίωσις IV where τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων is translated “the established meaning of words.” For a general discussion of the nature of linguistic reference and its relation to value, see Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, pp. 67f. and 114–15. In addition to Hogan, “The ἀξίωσις of Words at Thucydides 3.82.4,” pp. 139–49, see John Wilson’s “The Customary Meanings of Words Were Changed. Or Were they? A Note on Thucydides 3.82.4,” Classical Quarterly 32 (1982): 18–20, and, e.g., Dino Piovan’s “The Unexpected Consequences of War. Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language,” or “Las inesperadas consecuencias de la guerra. Acerca de la relación entre guerra, guerra civil y degradación del lenguaje en Tucídides,” Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política y Humanidades 19, no. 37 (2017): 181–97.
“This view is followed now by most scholars, among whom also Nussbaum, 2004, p. 751, n. 24 (this reference is from the 2004 Spanish translation of Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). However Orwin 1994: 177 n. 11 is against their interpretation” (Piovan, p. 187 n.19). See also Lisa Irene Hau’s Moral History from Herodotus to Diodorus Siculus (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 212, where she adopts the translation of “values” as the standard one provided by J. Mynott in his new translation of Thucydides (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Cf. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume 1: 3.82.4 n., who now also relies on the translation “valuation.”
More generally, see June Allison’s careful review of the subject of Thucydides’ comments on language here: Word and Concept in Thucydides, pp. 163–80 and esp. p. 169 n. 15.
10 See Piovan, “The Unexpected Consequences of War. Thucydides on the Relationship between War, Civil War and the Degradation of Language,” pp. 181–97.
11 Thomas Hobbes’ The History of the Grecian War in Eight Books, Written by Thucydides (1629) translates as “value.” Cf. again also John Wilson, “Thucydides 3.82.4,” (Classical Review 32, 1982), pp. 18–20, who translates the entire phrase as the “usual verbal evaluations.”
12 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 39ff.
13 Bagby, “Fathers of International Relations? Thucydides as a Model for the Twenty-First Century,” pp. 39–41.
14 “At their will and pleasure,” LSJ s.v. δικαίωσις III; Cf. Müri, “Politische Metonomasie,” 67f. “nach ihrer Willkür.” J. Classen and J. Steup, Thukydides (Berlin, 1885–1914) ad loc.: “die subjektive Auslegung, wie sei nach dem Umstanden recht d.i. gelegen war.”
15 Δικαίωσις occurs in four other places in Thucydides. At 1.141.1, it means “claim of right.” See LSJ s. v. δικαίωσις II, cf. Classen-Steup (“eine mit dem Anspruch auf ein Recht . . . gestellte Forderung”). The same meaning is present at 5.17.2. At 4.86.6, ἰσχύος δικαιώσει must mean “by the right of the stronger,” that is justification consisting in strength. For 8.66.2, LSJ (s.v. I. l) translate “condemnation, punishment.” The word could easily be understood here as “judgement of right” (which would lead to punishment). In any case, “condemnation” implies a “judgement of right.”
16 Its grammar resembles the second dative in the following expression from Thucydides: οἱ μὲν ἀπορίᾳ ἀκολούθων, οἱ δὲ ἀπιστίᾳ: “some [carried their own food] because they lacked servants, others through distrust of them” (7.75.5).
17 See R. Kühner and B. Gerth, Aüsfurliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache (Hanover and Leipzig, 1898), II.l, pp. 438–40 (section 11). The example and its translation are from H. W. Smyth, Greek Grammar, revised by Gordon Messing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), para. 1517. The first dative (ἀπορίᾳ) expresses external cause.
18 But cf. Müri, “Politische Metonomasie,” pp. 67–68, who argues successfully against Gomme.
19 I believe that this type of ambiguous or polyvalent construction occurs in a number of places in Thucydides. Hornblower, following I. L. Pfeijffer, Three Aeginetan Odes of Pindar: A Commentary on Nemean V, Nemean III, and Pythian VIII (Leiden, 1999), uses the term polyinterpretability to describe this rhetorical device, in which the author seems to intend that the readers or hearers of the work may interpret some words in more than one way at the same time. See Thucydides
