The opening: "Thucydides the Athenian wrote the history of the war fought between Athens and Sparta." Like Herodotus, Thucydides sharply differentiates himself from the epic tradition, by locating the center of authority for what follows as himself rather than the Muses. He then proceeds to argue that the Peloponnesian War was the greatest and most important war which had ever been waged. That claim, you will soon realize, was false; in fact the Persian Wars were much more significant for world history than the Peloponnesian. In one sense though the claim is true: the Peloponnesian War is the greatest only because it had the greatest writer for its chronicler.
Next Thucydides gives a rapid survey of Greek history from the beginnings to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. The central theme of this section is twofold: (a) progress from the primitive past to the modern present, and (b) the central importance of naval power throughout history. The Persian Wars are treated in a few lines (1.18) and barely mentioned again thereafter, a tacit but important acknowledgement that that subject had already been done. Even though (as we will shortly see) Thucydides believed that Herodotus had treated the topic in an inadequate fashion, he showed no inclination to go over the same ground.
He then sets out the reasons for the brevity of the treatment of early history in a series of critically important programmatic statements. (Handout 1):
In investigating past history, and in forming the conclusions which I have formed, it must be admitted that one can not rely on every detail which has come down to us by way of tradition. People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way - even when these stories concern their own native countries.It is not revolutionary, of course, for Thucydides to say that there were such things as false stories about the past. Herodotus knows this too. Notice that Thucydides begins with a false start, as if he intends to really get into the early material. Herodotus also begins with a false start, a look back at a time far earlier than the period which is the true subject of his work. Thucydides can not resist the opportunity to demonstrate how his more sophisticated methodology can improve on Herodotus' treatment of the remote past, as for example when he refers to archaeological evidence (grave goods) to prove that the Carians had colonized Delphi (1. 8). But the most important thing about this section is how it sets up a contrast between investigation of the remote past and of the recent past. The explicit disclaimer of authority concerning the former implies and reinforces a claim of much greater authority for the latter. That claim, that it is possible to produce a wholly accurate account of contemporary or recent events, begins to be explicit: "as for this present war ... if one looks at the facts themselves, one will see that this was the greatest war of all." The "greatest war" idea is a red herring; the real point is that it is possible to look at the facts themselves.
The next passage (Handout 2) buttresses this idea of the superiority of contemporary history:
And with regard to my factual reporting of the events of the war I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way, and not even to be guided by my own general impressions; either I was myself present at the events which I have described or else I heard of them from eye-witnesses whose reports I have checked out as thoroughly as possible.At one level the statement is completely unimpeachable: modern legal systems embrace the idea that the testimony of an eyewitness is the most valuable of all. The principle is flawed, of course: if someone came forward and said he had seen OJ stabbing Nicole and the waiter, that would carry more weight than drops of blood, even though the witness might be lying and the DNA tests cannot lie. But lying is not at issue here, or not yet. With this statement Thucydides takes a giant step towards establishing the credibility of his account by recognizing what is axiomatic to the historian: the source is all-important. But what of "I have made it a principle not to write down the first story that came my way"? This is much more troubling. Thucydides is saying that he weighed the credibility of his source and, if he determined that the source was not credible, he simply discarded it. In fact the text of Thucydides bears this out. You can count on one hand the number of places where Thucydides presents alternative accounts of the same event. Historians wish that Thucydides had let us see more of the inside of his workshop. The depressing but in my opinion inevitable conclusion is that this is supposed to make the reader relax his guard; we can suspend our own critical judgement because Thucydides has already winnowed away the chaff. In this my view appears to be diametrically opposed to that of Connor (IV 4) and other reader-response critics. But the opposition is more apparent than real. Thucydides promises to save the reader from bad evidence, not from bad interpretation. Connor says "in the Histories we only rarely find a single or explicit evaluation of events, while speeches normally specify and hope to achieve one and only one response." But Thucydides does provide judgements more often than Connor would have us believe, especially if we realize that the selective presentation of evidence is itself a judgement or an interpretation. Thucydides does invite an intelligent reader, and he does expect the reader to think and challenge and pose questions, maybe even to play a part in constituting the meaning of the text. As I hope to convince you, this sort of programmatic statement is really part of the demonstration by Thucydides of the techniques of persuasion. So it is troublesome for an historian who hopes to rely, not only on Thucydides' report of events, but also on his interpretation and conclusions. Yet it is also a clue to understanding his purpose, his approach to writing history.
The theme of the superiority of contemporary to ancient history is not sufficient, however, for a proof of superiority to Herodotus. For the later events which Herodotus relates, he too had access to eyewitnesses. So to Handout 3: "The rest of the Hellenes, too, make many incorrect assumptions not only about the dimly remembered past, but also about contemporary history." Herodotus' errors show that the treatment of contemporary history has to be combined with diligence (for they are not errors caused by any deliberate distortion for personal or political ends, but merely careless mistakes).
Those kinds of pitfalls (the ones caused by distortion rather than carelessness) are more interesting. Thucydides goes on: (Handout 4) "Not that even so the truth was easy to discover: different eye-witnesses give different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality for one side or the other or else from imperfect memories." What is most amazing about this statement is not that Thucydides recognizes that some sources distort the truth because of some prejudice (which I mean in the literal sense of premature judgement). Rather, it is that this statement does not admit of the possibility of any source which does not suffer from one or the other of these failings. Most modern readers take the sentence to mean that Thucydides has rejected biased accounts in favor of unbiased ones, and that by implication he is claiming that he himself is free from bias. That reading is false. Thucydides says nothing about his own bias or freedom from it, and indeed there are a few places in the history where he does not bother to conceal it. But to me this sentence says that every source is biased. Against this reading you might urge the point that the first part of the sentence suggests that the truth has in fact been discovered despite the obstacles of bias and imperfect memory. But that is not stated; if it is implied, the implication is qualified, such that a true account free from the distortion of bias is held up as an ideal, but no direct claim is made to have achieved that ideal. Again you could look to the legal system for an analogy. In a criminal case before a jury, the judge tells the jurors to ignore their personal impressions of the defendant and decide solely on the basis of the evidence. Yet the defense attorney still dresses his client up in a nice suit and brings on the fellow's white-haired second-grade teacher to say what a polite boy he's always been. If an ideal is not attainable, does that mean we should not pursue it? So some modern writers have triumphantly proclaimed that they have caught Thucydides out on this issue of objectivity (e.g. Hunter, Handout IV 2). In fact Thucydides, who does not claim to be objective or unbiased, was at least one step ahead of them.
Passage 5 gives an example of how successful Thucydides was at avoiding the trap of accepting the excessively biased accounts of others. It is his encomium for Themistocles, the Richard Nixon of Athenian politics. Themistocles was what might charitably be called controversial. We saw in Herodotus how he got the credit for formulating the strategy which defeated the Persians at Salamis, while at the same time being castigated for deterring the Greeks from following up their victory by preventing Xerxes from crossing his army back to over the Hellespont. Herodotus says Themistokles did this for the basest of reasons: to build up a reserve of good will with the great King in case he should need it in the future. And Herodotus has Themistokles sending a secret message to Xerxes pointing out that he has done him this favour. The last we see of Themistokles in Herodotus, he is busily extorting money from the islanders, supposedly to fund further attacks on the Persians, but in fact to line his own pockets. We can deduce at a minimum that Herodotus followed a tradition strongly hostile to Themistokles. Now, the idea that Themistokles made advance plans to ingratiate himself with the Persian king, while utterly false, gained credence among the Greeks with hindsight. Themistokles was ostracized at Athens some nine years after the battle of Salamis, around 471 (this is something which Herodotus knows but chooses not to mention). For the last episode of his life, Thucydides fills in the gaps. Themistokles was accused of intrigues with the Persian king, to whose court he fled for refuge when it became impossible for him to live safely in the Greek world. He was condemned to death at Athens en absentia, but died of an illness safely ensconced in his Persian province. From these later events it is easy to see how the false story of treachery in the aftermath of Salamis arose; since Themistokles eventually did get political asylum with the Great King, it was easy to claim that he had been secretly on the side of the Persians all along, or at least hedging his bets. But the important thing is Thucydides' summation of the career of this man, who ended his life as a vilified traitor. (Handout, 5) It is very difficult to perceive any ulterior motive for Thucydides' encomium of Themistokles. Politically they were far apart, Thucydides the moderate oligarch (compare 8.97), Themistokles the extreme democrat, the man who empowered the common people by making Athens depend upon its navy. Apart from Thucydides, the historical tradition on Themistocles is uniformly hostile, and so the admiration for Themistocles, founded as it is upon a critical evaluation of his accomplishments, speaks for Thucydides' success in avoiding partiality.
The last of the programmatic statements addresses the purpose of the work, and it is critically important. Recall that Herodotus had defined his purpose in terms of memorialization, "that the deeds of mankind might not fade into oblivion." Thucydides says (Handout, 6),
It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.There is a widespread and essentially erroneous tendency to read this as a warning to future imperialists, a warning which ends up sounding rather like the standard Greek aphorism about keeping to the middle road, not overreaching, because that inevitably brings destruction. This idea is so basic to Greek thought that it was inscribed on the wall at the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, MHDEN AGAN. In fact the implication of the word "useful" is quite different from that. But I can not tell you what I think Thucydides means by this "usefulness" yet. First I must say something about rhetoric and the sophists.
It is not possible to understand Thucydides' text without recognizing first of all the paramount importance to it of rhetoric. What did rhetoric mean to a Greek in the second half of the fifth century BC? First of all, rhetorical training was the equivalent of higher education. It was provided by professors who called themselves sophists, and their time was expensive. Accordingly, only the privileged received such training, and it was usually aimed at sending the student on to a career as a politician or a lawyer (which in Athens meant a writer of legal speeches for the client to deliver himself in court). In these careers rhetoric would be his stock in trade.
In contemporary English sophistry means something like "deceptive speech" or "verbal manipulation." But in antiquity a sophist was just an itinerant professor, and the word itself was not necessarily pejorative. To be sure, some 5th century Greeks thought of the sophists as petty quibblers, twisters of words, phonies. But today no one would characterize her own discourse as sophistry, whereas in 5th century Greece there were men who were proud to call themselves sophists. The importance of rhetorical skill in Greek thought goes back to the beginning, e.g. Helen praises the ability of Odysseus as a public speaker as she and Priam look out over the Greek army from the wall in Book 3 of the Iliad. But it was in the democratic polis that rhetoric emerged as the ultimate tool for acquiring and wielding power. The demand for rhetorical education increased, and with it the supply.
One of the most famous rhetoricians in Thucydides' time was Gorgias, a Greek from Sicily. We know from Thucydides that Gorgias was in Athens in 427 as an ambassador from his own city, and we presume that there were later visits as well. Gorgias is known chiefly from two sources: first, the portrayal of him by Plato in the philosophical dialogue which bears his name, and second from a small corpus of preserved writings. Plato's Gorgias is more or less a fictional character, but he does provide a provocative definition of rhetoric and its role in society (Handout, 7): "Rhetoric is the ability to persuade anyone with speech, the jurors in the law court, the council members at the council meeting, the voters in the assembly, and anyone else in any political setting. By virtue of this power you can have anyone as your slave, from a doctor to a gymnastics coach."
So rhetoric to the sophists meant power and political advancement, as articulated by the Gorgias which Plato creates. This mentality can best be understood by anyone who has been on a debate team. It makes absolutely no difference what the resolution is, or whether you think it is right or wrong; the only thing that matters is to persuade the audience. Indeed, that is part of the point of the Platonic dialogue, that rhetoric is morally bankrupt.
The real Gorgias makes a similar point in a much different context. His speech in defense of Helen of Troy was published as a sort of advertisement for his rhetorical teaching. The idea is that everyone blames Helen for starting the Trojan War; if Gorgias can get Helen off, he can convince any jury of anything. In her defense, then, he says (Handout, 8):
But if it was a speech which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech ( logos ) is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body creates and effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.
The proof that Thucydides was influenced by Gorgias involves points of contact between the prose styles of the two authors, so it is not suitable for presentation here, but you can take it on faith (it is not my own invention, but widely recognized by students of the subject). This brings us to the speeches which adorn Thucydides' History. By his own admission the speeches do not meet the standards for accuracy which he establishes for the narration of facts and events (Handout, 10). This is controversial, but everyone admits they are not verbatim transcripts of what was actually said. Some say they are pure inventions, while others emphasize Thucydides' promise to keep close to the overall sense of what was said, and the truth (which is not recoverable) is somewhere in between these two poles. Why are they there? Not to make the reading a more pleasant experience, a goal Thucydides explicitly disavows. Nor is it adequate to say that he was bound by generic convention to include speeches, that a Greek of his time could not conceive of a narrative account without speeches. The true reason is that the speeches are models of rhetorical persuasion. Thucydides' intended audience is the young man from a wealthy family who hopes to make his way to power in the polis as a general, statesman, or lawyer. He will need knowledge of military affairs, of strategy and tactics, and also he will need the ability to sway the crowd with rhetoric. Lessons of both types are to be had from Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War; this, then, is what he means by the statement we left hanging above (Handout 6): "It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful ..." The purpose is nothing so high-minded as to save mankind from itself. It is to teach aristocratic youths how to manipulate the dull-witted masses for their own ends.
Consider now the continuation of that sentence (Handout, 6):
... useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.What view of human nature is this? Think back to Herodotus' description of the experiment carried out by Polykrates of Samos, the one which ends with the quotation of Pindar "Custom (nomos) is king of all." In the latter fifth century there was a debate about the relative importance of nomos and physis in explaining why people behave the way they do. For the purposes of this debate, nomos meant something like "civilization" in the sense of that which sets humans apart from the animal kingdom, whereas physis meant something like "nature" in the sense of what humans have in common with the animal kingdom.
For the answer to the question, what is Thucydides' view of human nature, let us look to the description of the plague which afflicted Athens and some other Greek cities in the second, third, and fourth years of the war. The account of the plague begins with a long description of the symptoms and effects of the disease. It is truly horrifying. We do not know what the disease was, but medical knowledge was fairly primitive, the disease was highly contagious, and people were dying all over the place. Thucydides describes what effect this catastrophic situation had upon the Athenians (Handout, 11).
For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law. All the funeral ceremonies ( nomoi ) which used to be observed were now disorganized, and they buried the dead as best they could. Many people, lacking the necessary means of burial because so many deaths had already occurred in their households, adopted the most shameless methods. They would arrive first at a funeral pyre that had been made by others, put their own dead upon it and set it alight; or, finding another pyre burning, they would throw the corpse that they were carrying on top of the other one and go away.It may not be coincidental that the particular nomos which Thucydides chooses to depict as crumbling during the plague is the same as the one which Polykrates uses to test the power of nomos with the Callatians.
The same idea comes out more baldly in the description of the breakdown of the fabric of society during a period of political unrest, civil war almost, at Corcyra (Handout, 12). In a crisis, the veneer of civilization falls away, law and custom and gods and rituals are ignored, and people stand revealed for what they really are: animals. Put it how you like, the law of the jungle, kill or be killed, might makes right -- it is an amoral if not an immoral view of human nature, all the more disturbing because of the seductive element of truth in it. It should not be hard to see the link between the sophistic view of human nature and the sophistic view of rhetoric.
It is the sophistic amorality which pervades the text of Thucydides which allows us to reject the very influential views of F. M. Cornford and his school. They say, in essence, that Thucydides honestly set out to write as a secular rationalist, recognizing causation only at the human level, but that the traditional or tragic pattern of hubris, overreaching, reversal, and downfall was so ingrained upon his psyche that despite his best efforts the History is in the end a gigantic tragedy. Athens is the tragic hero who experiences great success, reaches for too much, and comes crashing down. The traditional gods are replaced by Tyche "chance", which according to Cornford exercises a quasi-mystical power in the History. I cannot do justice to Cornford's thesis here. It is original and brilliant, also (I would argue) totally wrong. The tragic paradigm presupposes some developed notion of right or wrong beyond expediency and advantage. That moral element is missing in Thucydides' History.
So Thucydides is a sophist, perhaps the greatest of all the sophists. But he is also an historian, certainly the greatest of all the ancient historians. To assess and critique that grandiose claim, let us consider how Thucydides treats Cleon, a populist leader who succeeded Pericles for a few years as the most influential man in Athens. According to the biographical tradition, it was Cleon who prosecuted Thucydides for negligence over the loss of Amphipolis and got him convicted and sent into exile. That may be true, or it may be an inference from Thucydides' own text, where the hostility to Cleon is not concealed.
In 427 the Athenians deliberated about how to punish a city on Lesbos, called Mytilene, which had rebelled against the Athenians and tried to get out of the Athenian empire. The assembly decided to deal with the city harshly, to make an example of Mytilene by killing all the male citizens and selling the women and children into slavery. Then they had a change of heart and decided to reopen the question. Thucydides gives two speeches on either side of this question, and the first of them is by Cleon. Cleon lost the debate and the decision to slaughter the Mytilenians was overturned; looking at how Thucydides makes Cleon speak should be informative, both about that phantom objectivity which Thucydides never claims to have and about rhetorical models. As you look at the quoted passage, remember that what Cleon wants is for the assembly not to change its previous decision. (Handout, 14).
Cleon tries to pull off a rhetorical trick in the speech by blurring the distinction between a decree and a law. A decree (psephisma) was a resolution of the popular assembly, passed to deal with events at hand. It had the force of law for the moment, but only until whatever it directed should be done had been done. A law at Athens (nomos) was of a higher order than a decree. The procedure for passing a law was much more complex than the procedure for promulgating a decree, and until some time in the fourth century there was no established procedure for the repeal of a law. And even in the fourth century it was very difficult to repeal a law. Thus the conception of a nomos as something immutable is rooted in Athenian legal practice as well as in the sense of the word as "custom" in addition to "law". Cleon's trick is to speak of the assembly's previous decision to put the men of Mytilene to death as if it were an old and venerable law instead of a decree passed only the day before to deal with a particular situation. No law will actually be altered if the assembly changes its mind about Mytilene, as in fact it did. Cleon assimilates the rebellion of Mytilene to a homicide, then argues as if the validity of the homicide law (which the Athenians believed to be the oldest and most venerable of all their laws) were at stake. Thucydides means us to perceive the transparency of this rhetorical ploy.
Cleon's greatest accomplishment was the capture in 425 of a little island off the coast of Messenia (next to Laconia, where the Spartans live). This feat resulted in 292 Spartans being taken prisoner. The Spartans were frantic to get these prisoners back, and they offered peace on favorable terms if Athens would return them. This episode is not part of the assigned reading so I do not want to dwell on it, but a glance through the passages (Handout 15) will be enough to get the point. Thucydides does not falsify the story to make Cleon look bad or omit it entirely so as to deprive him of the credit, but he subtly colors the account so as to make it appear that the whole thing was just a colossal stroke of luck for Cleon.
To conclude, some comparison between the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides is inevitable. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was usual to privilege Thucydides at the expense of Herodotus. It was emphasized that in Herodotus' history divine forces are part of the scheme of causation, in Thucydides' history they are not. Herodotus is imprecise about chronology and wanders freely from the main subject (if that main subject is understood to be the Persian Wars or even the East-West conflict), with countless digressions both temporal and topical; Thucydides is relatively careful about chronology, keeps to an annalistic format, and stays focussed on the narrative of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides sees it as his responsibility to exercise critical judgement about everything in his history and never to pass on false stories unless they are clearly identified as such, and only then if they somehow influenced people's opinions or the course of events, whereas Herodotus sometimes exercises critical judgement, but as often fails to do so and just passes on whatever his source tells him. In short, in keeping with our modern obsession with progress, our tendency to see everything new as somehow better than what came before, Thucydides seemed to be a giant step forward.
In the last 30 years Herodotus has been gaining ground. In many ways his is a much richer text. Thucydides' single-minded focus on war, troop movements, battles, strategies, and the politics of conflict may well make you feel that there is nothing here for you. It may also make him seem to be something of an automaton, though it would be foolish to conclude that he was a cold and heartless man; the History simply sticks to the programme Thucydides lays out for it in the programmatic section, and if Thucydides seems distant and uninvolved, the reason is that he believed that was the authorial stance which was most conducive to his purpose. His purpose was to present the most persuasive possible account of the Peloponnesian War and the most persuasive possible analysis of the decisions made in its course, in order that we the readers might in our turn use his example to formulate our own most persuasive possible discourses, to be used for the advancement of ourselves or our countries.
©1995 David L. Silverman. All rights reserved.