καὶ περὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἁπάντων ὄντων, “and about all the rest,” but literally this means “and concerning all the other things that are,” which I think is an important expansion since Plato is clearly interested here in expanding hypothesis beyond material explanations, understandings, and causes to explanations that are beyond the material.
43 See, e.g., Allan Silverman, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Plato’s Middle Period Metaphysics and Epistemology,” 15. The Method of Hypothesis, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/#15 (accessed June 13, 2018), First published June 9, 2003; substantive revision July 14, 2014, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). See also on this point Lynn E. Rose, “The Deuteros Plous in Plato’s ‘Phaedo,’” The Monist 50, no. 3 (July 1966): 464; and J. T. Bedo-Addu, “The Role of the Hypothetical Model in the Phaedo,” Phronesis 24, no. 2 (1979): 111–32.
44 Seth Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 1–11.
45 Bedo-Addu and Rose, op. cit., agree in their respective studies that the “second sailing” is the inquiry into the formal causes of things, i.e., the Forms themselves. This leaves Socrates’ first effort as 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).
46 One of the core arguments of Martha Taylor in Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. While I believe most of Prof. Taylor’s examples of implied criticism of Pericles’ idea of the city as separated from the land of Attica are valid criticisms, it is not clear to me that enough attention is drawn to the irony of the examples she adduces.
47 Pericles exhorts the people to “behold the power of the city day by day in action, and become her lovers (erastai)” (2.43.1). τὴν τῆς πόλεως δύναμιν καθ᾽ ἡμέραν ἔργῳ θεωμένους καὶ ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους αὐτῆς. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume I, s.v. 2.43.1, argues, following Prof. K. J. Dover, that αὐτῆς, “of her” or “of it” (feminine, like “power” in Greek)” is the objective genitive of “lovers” and refers to the city, as in the translation. But this is quite likely another case of polyinterpretability such that the audience may hear a suggestion that they should become lovers of the power of the city. Pericles could have asked the Athenians to gaze on the beauty of the city, or on the courage of the people or any other important aspect of the city, but he chose to tell his people to gaze on the power of the city.
48 Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 297, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft767nb497/ (accessed January 20, 2019).
49 See Price, Thucydides and Internal War generally and esp. pp. 69–70. Price’s argument there that though the words are Socrates’ Plato does not endorse them is true of a great deal of what Socrates says in all the dialogues. Price appears to be agreeing with Socrates on this point about stasis engulfing the entire Greek world. One could do worse in terms of authorities on such matters than to quote Socrates and Plato.
50 See, for example, Marc Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides’ History, esp. pp. 237–38, 253–54. Cogan defines τὸ ἀνθρώπινον (1.22.4) as the public process of delivering speeches, and argues that the speeches must be compared in order to understand Thucydides. See also Peter Pouncey, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism, p. 79, where Pouncey explains Cleon’s echoes of Pericles as intended by Thucydides to force comparison with Pericles.
Colin Macleod, “Rhetoric and History (Thucydides 6.16–18),” in Collected Essays, p. 69, states that there are “revealing relations between speeches which do not belong together in time: a particularly valuable point of reference are those of Pericles, for Thucydides Athens’ best leader.”
Leo Strauss, The City and Man, makes some very useful remarks on the speeches in Thucydides: “The speeches answer questions—and not merely questions of the moment, but the most fundamental and permanent questions concerning human action—which Thucydides does not answer, and they do so in a most persuasive manner. Thus the reader is almost irresistibly tempted to . . . believe that Thucydides . . . must have used the speaker as his mouthpiece. Thucydides helps us indeed in judging of the wisdom of the speeches, not only by his account of the deeds but also by giving us his judgment of the wisdom of . . . the speakers. . . . In fact, precisely the speeches more than anything else convey to us his judgment of the speakers and only of the speakers” (p. 166).
One implication of this is that no speaker can or should be seen as using all the arguments available to him. The arguments chosen and the way they are worded carry great weight in interpreting the character and role of the speaker.
Finley’s Thucydides, p. 232, should also be noted: He contrasts Alcibiades’ last speech with Pericles’ third. Westlake, Individuals in Thucydides, pp. 311, 317, etc., makes a comparison of the speeches one of the central conclusions of his book.
More recently, see Christopher B. Pelling, “Thucydides’ Speeches,” Thucydides, ed. Jeffrey Rusten, pp. 276–90, Oxford Readings in Classical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
51 George Kennedy (The Art of Persuasion in Greece, p. 48) takes what seems to be the correct view that ta deonta (τὰ δέοντα) refers primarily to “what the speaker ought to have said,” using “ought” in the “rhetorical sense.” This is Gomme’s position too (Historical Commentary on 1.22.1). Hornblower (A Commentary on Thucydides: Volume I: 1.22.1 n.) suggests that ignoring this sense of the words “ignores the rhetorical uses of the phrase, which go back to Gorgias.”
Against the view that the phrase refers to what it was actually necessary to say at the given moment there is a significant argument: If speakers only say what is actually necessary, then certain disagreements, such as that between Cleon and Diodotus, might not arise. Either one of them, or perhaps even some other unexpressed opinion, could correspond to what had to be done, but surely not both or all. The resolution to this disagreement would seem to be that ta deonta refers to what ought to be said in support of what one has made up one’s mind is the right position to take. See also Pouncey, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism, who in a long footnote summarizes some of the chief contributions to the debate concerning 1.22.1 (pp. 165–67, n.10).
52 Strauss, The City and Man, p. 164, contends that while Thucydides may have refined certain speakers’ arguments, he did not “endow any speaker with qualities of understanding and choosing which he lacked.” This seems substantially correct. It recognizes the importance of rhetorical technique in the fashioning of any speech but allows Thucydides the leeway he needs to present actual speeches that reflect a given speaker’s understanding and rhetorical ability. Since the speeches thus reflect the speaker as well as rhetorical requirements, speeches can be profitably compared.
53 Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucydides’ History, 223–26, has made some sound remarks about this subject in relation to the speech of the Spartans proposing peace in Book 4 (4.17–4.22). He concludes that the speech was a serious rhetorical failure, and that this failure has important implications for how we should read the Histories. A study of the apparent purpose of each speech in Thucydides relying on standard principles of rhetoric, such as those enunciated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric and those implied and exemplified in earlier Greek speeches and discussions of rhetoric, would be an interesting and useful contribution to an understanding of Thucydides.
