Introduction
Part 1. Subject and Method
In Thucydides’ Histories, the relationship between logos (plural logoi, Greek λόγος, cf. Thucydides 1.22.1) and ergon (plural erga, Greek ἔργον or “work, work of war, deed, action,” Thucydides 1.22.2) is of fundamental importance, since the book, which is also a logos, is concerned primarily with the life of the polis, and political life depends on logos to articulate political action. Thucydides presents in dramatic form two interdependent truths—that man is political and that he is endowed with speech.1 He shows how these truths supplement one another and presents the various forms of the relationship between logos and ergon, from excellent to degenerate types. Using the opposition between logos and ergon as a key for examining the philosophical bases of different types of political arrangements, he reveals a distinctive political philosophy that has many points of similarity and some differences with Plato’s Republic and certain other dialogues, notably the Statesman, the Menexenus for its presentation of the origin of Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration, the Symposium for its depiction of Alcibiades, the Charmides for its discussion of sophrosune, and the Laches because Nicias takes part in the discussion of courage in it.2 Plato’s Statesman provides a clear conceptual framework for understanding how we can think in general philosophical terms about what Thucydides presents in a mixture of facts, speeches, interpretation, narrative history, and speculative political philosophy.
In one of his most striking comments on the nature of the polis and war, Thucydides asserts: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει (3.82.4),3 which should be translated thus: “Men changed the customary valuation of words in respect to deeds in judging what right was.” This statement, occasioned by the civil strife in Corcyra in 427, is an important indication both of Thucydides’ view of the nature of political discourse and ultimately of his political philosophy. It applies not only to the degeneration of political discourse in Corcyra but also to the Hellenic world at large, and is exemplified in the Athenian speeches in the Histories. By comparing these speeches (including the speeches by Athenians, wherever they are, and the speeches of certain others in Athens) with one another, we can see how the use of common political phrases and ideas, especially when Thucydides has one speaker echo another, reveals a progressive degeneration in the value of logos in Athens. These points of comparison are like vertebrae that help to organize a picture of the whole political man as Thucydides sees him.4 This analysis intrinsically supports the view that no one speech in Thucydides can reliably represent for us what Thucydides thought. Thucydides’ narrative depends on his ability to address the actual facts he sees and uncovers. Here the insight of Friedrich Nietzsche that “courage in the face of reality” distinguishes Thucydides, who sees “reason in reality” and then hides his thought in the reality of the facts he tells us, reveals a difference from the Plato that Nietzsche emphasizes: Plato retreats, he thinks, into the ideal.5 Thucydides wills himself to see this “reason in reality.” Plato sees the elimination of the cares, concerns, and any influence of our bodies as an enabling step in the struggle to know. Since we cannot know anything purely when our souls are in our bodies, we find there are only two possibilities for knowledge, either we cannot attain it anywhere or we can only attain it when our souls separate from our physical selves (Phaedo, 66e–67a, cf. 107b–c). This then leaves us with the goal of purifying ourselves as much as possible in this life so that we can come closer to knowing.
While Nietzsche sees Thucydides as a representative of the older Sophist culture,6 Thucydides’ commitment to accuracy leaves him in the position of needing a measure or measures against which to test information and logoi that may represent facts or interpretations based on facts. This puts him in the tradition of Ionian science, including Anaxagoras and the medical writers, much more than in the tradition of Protagoras and his yarn about how Zeus made us so that we can be moral, as Plato presents him in the Protagoras (322c–d). The very idea that Zeus could encourage ethical conduct seems ruefully comic considering his violence and his conduct toward women in general and his wife in particular, though it is reasonable to conjecture that the gods whose tale Protagoras told wanted to have worshippers. Zeus would perhaps also appeal to the male audience that Protagoras acquires. On the other hand, Protagoras, like Socrates in the Meno and elsewhere, sees humans as having a divine allotment in them (Protagoras 322a, ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ ἄνθρωπος θείας μετέσχε μοίρας, πρῶτον μὲν διὰ τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ συγγένειαν ζῴων μόνον θεοὺς ἐνόμισεν, “since men got a divine allotment, [and] first through his kinship with the divine alone of living things worshipped the gods”). At the end of the Meno Socrates makes a similar point to Meno, who lives in a dim world of ignorance and popular opinions.7 First we need to be reminded that “he is talking to Meno.”8 Socrates concludes: “Virtue [or ‘excellence’] appears to be born in us by divine allotment, in those to whom it is born” (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἡμῖν φαίνεται παραγιγνομένη ἡ ἀρετὴ οἷς ἂν παραγίγνηται, Meno 99e–100a). The link here between the Meno and the Protagoras is the divine allotment to men, which starts us off aiming higher than ourselves. Protagoras, as the kind of teacher Meno wishes to have, though he does seem to have a particular preference for Gorgias (see Meno, 70b, 71c–71e),9 presents the idea of this allotment. Meno hears it from Socrates, who wishes to be nothing like Protagoras, who, it seems, shares a kind of opinion with Socrates. The fact that they in a way share an opinion, that we have a divine allotment, is a very good example of why it is hard to capture the Sophist and to know how he or she differs from the philosopher (cf. Plato, Sophist, 216c).
The Meno introduces the hypothetical method as a way of answering questions about what virtue is (ἀρετή, “excellence” or “virtue,” transliterated arete) and whether it can be taught (86e–87b),10 but Socrates performs his introduction or initiation by means of a difficult and somewhat obscure mathematical problem.11 The point seems to be that just as Meno should have been abashed when he saw his slave learning geometry (85e–86d) but was not, he now must more fully face the question of whether he can be initiated or whether he will be turned away from philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular because he cannot rule himself (86d). He does not have the disposition to learn, so he himself turns himself away. This results in the final lesson of his execution at a young age after betraying his army’s interests in Xenophon’s Anabasis (II.6.21–29). At the very end of the Meno, Socrates again alludes to Meno’s difficulties in separating knowledge of arete from his desire for power carefully presented by Plato as his goal to find out first whether or not he can buy a teacher of arete. Learning the truth of the matter (τὸ σαφὲς) requires this separation (100b). Meno’s failure to learn is a failure of virtue, and what we would term moral virtue in particular. Indeed, his failures or weaknesses, that is, his physical beauty and the effect that it produces on men, his clear desire to dominate his wife at home and to rule men in his public life (Meno, 71e), and his troupe of slaves, all reflect deep conceptual weaknesses in Athenian life that are expressed in predictable and disastrous ways in the Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides also asks us to accept his claim that “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge (τὸ σαφὲς) of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it” (1.22.4), can rely on his work. He reemphasizes this point in his second introduction (5.26.5).12 In order to understand his work we must also ascend a kind of philosophical, and in his case also historical, ladder of understanding. It would seem that some of the notorious complexity and intellectual density of Thucydides’ conclusions, and also of the speeches, serve as an intellectual initiation while they also force the reader into a dialogue with Thucydides and some of his chosen speeches.
Understanding
