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Georg Rechenauer and Vassiliki Pothou
Prologos
Thucydides is the author of the most famous description of the self-destruction
of an ancient city (Corcyra) because of a civil war. On a broader scale he argues
that war is a “violent teacher” (b d³ pºkelor … b¸aior did²sjakor, III 82, 2)
because it destroys the culture and the ethos of people. In this way war prevents
men from behaving with free will, and subjects their conduct to external conditions of crisis. This negation of human self-determination as set out by Thucydides in the field of the historical process, correlates with a drastic asperity in
the area of literary representation by which the historiographer brings his reader
into direct confrontation with the events described by him and into emotional
distress comparable to the people involved directly in the events. In this way, a
historian such as Thucydides becomes a violent teacher to his readers.
By taking this phrasing as a signature for the character of Thucydides’ History
as a whole it can be inferred that on the one hand Thucydides himself becomes a
violent teacher because of the subject of his narration. The important political
topic of the civil war – stasis (st²sir) – and its terrible moral consequences are
essential vectors of violence. On the other hand the geopolitics of Thucydides’
works can be seen as a battlefield where every possible brutality is allowed to
take place. The power of violence, that is the authority of the strongest and their
ability and intention to violently impose their will on the weak, constitutes the
principal idea in the negotiations between Athenians and Melians (V 87 – 111).
The remark on the profit (t¹ nulv´qom), which always is preferable to moral
standards (t¹ pq´pom), belongs to the same atmosphere of political cynism.
Thucydides is violent not only externally, but also internally, not only with his
material and his audience, but also with his work and even with himself. As a
historian he is dynamic and ‘aggressive’ and he gives the impression that he is
constantly sailing against the wind. First of all he criticizes the historiographical
models of his forerunners, Herodotus and Hellanicus. Besides, his critical mind
confronts and criticizes the credulity of people. Finally the key conception of his
history is an heretofore unusual concept, namely, this is the dimension of utility
of historiography in case of circularity of historical events.
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Georg Rechenauer and Vassiliki Pothou
A historian writing about and against the violence and fighting uncompromisingly against almost everything could not have a conventional style.
His style is not less harsh than his subject and his methods. The proud and
unbending archaic feature of his language is ideal for the polemical substance of
his work. The characteristic abbreviated style1 (obscura brevitas2) together with
the element of variatio (letabok¶) – according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus –
leads to aqstgq± "qlom¸a and – according to Cicero3 – to Thucydidean gravitas.
His uniqueness, innovation and self-isolation are signs of an introspective violence. It is for this reason that he became a lonely and unconventional teacher.
The work of Thucydides has not only substantially marked our idea of history
up to the present day ; but also on account of its complexity it invited especially
the philological and historical interpretations. In addition to emphasizing the
presentation of political and military aspects, his work, by introducing completely realistic and scientific perspectives in the analysis of historical events and
their compelling motive powers, sets standards, which have hardly been surpassed up to the present day. Considering the remarkable austerity with which
Thucydides presents the historical reality as a natural zone beyond all theological, ethical or ideological veneers, makes this model of history both the
intellectual conditions and the hermeneutical implications equally fascinating.
The present book tries to find answers to the question, how in the work of
Thucydides the relationship between historical reality and literary style is
formed. From different perspectives new understandings pose questions, how
the audience – the contemporary of the 5th century BC as well as the modern – is
guided from the author to a “violent reader”.
However, it should be recognized that the participants of the Regensburg
conference in July 2008 – sponsored generously by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Regensburger Universitätsstiftung – tried to abstain from any violence. On this occasion we would
also like to express our gratitude to our colleague Anton Powell who, at our
request, helped us by reading and commenting on most of the contributions.
As people say, Thucydides is “good to think with”: he is not just exposing the
sad nature of human folly, but thinks that his account of what men did and why
will be relevant to men who have to act in similar circumstances. This aspect is
discussed in Peter Rhodes’ chapter. He explores the nature of the Thucydidean
good leader who can judge what is likely to happen and plan appropriately for it.
Also his history shows that men did in some times learn from past mistakes.
Rhodes focuses on the volatility of the people and the impulse of popular
1 Dionysius of Halicarnassus De Thucydide 24.
2 Seneca Epistulae 114, 17.
3 Cicero De oratore II 13, 56.
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opinion, on the fragility of good order of the Greeks, on the nature and morality
of Athenian power. According to him, Thucydides’ world is not in principle a
world in which strength is the only important thing, but a world in which there
were principles of justice and possibilities of arbitration between states. In some
cases states invoke the nomoi or the nomima of the Greeks or of all men, but they
were actually not used to resolve problems but rather to score points. He suggests that Thucydides was unable to resolve the dilemma between his patriotism
and his pride of Athens’ fifth-century achievements and the immorality and
breaches of law on a larger scale.
Hans-Peter Stahl thinks that Thucydides, while himself horrified by the
phenomenon of violence, is the one who “taught” that violence reveals itself as a
permanent potentiality of human nature: it is easily activated whenever the
smooth veneer that a comfortable life style provides is stripped off. He focuses
on the horrors of Corcyra and civil strife, and he checks how features mentioned
at III 82 may play out in the historian’s presentation of ever widening developments. Further he tries to detail more instances of veneer unmasked when
violence runs out of control on a wider than merely intramural scale. According
to Stahl hardly anywhere else in Thucydides’ work but in Euphemos’ speech does
the war reveal itself so strikingly as the fabricator of a veneer that hides the truth.
The aim of his analysis is to reveal the author’s art of unmasking and of letting
speakers, even unwittingly, themselves reveal the violent reality underlying the
official veneer. He concludes that if war in Thucydides is the remover of veneer,
so vice versa also the removal of veneer may be indicative of a state of war and the
cases considered in his paper reveal how below any shining veneer there always
seems to lurk somewhere the reality of violence.
The technique of retardation pertaining to the narrative label of ‘suspense’ or
the gradual disclosure of the course followed by the plot, but also the wideranging narrative patterning, are, if not strongly fictional, at least rhetorical and
literary features. That is the subject addressed by Antonios Rengakos, who discusses the Homeric-Herodotean narrative means adopted by Thucydides and
the discomfort produced by the irreconcilable discrepancy between the claim to
objectivity in the second part of the Redensatz and the reporting of speeches in
the work. In addition, he argues that in some aspects of the Thucydidean narrative one can detect a pronounced distancing from Herodotus and a return to
the more traditional Homeric practice. He concludes that it is Homeric epic that
in the end stands as the definitive narrative model of ‘scientific’ historical
writing as instigated by Thucydides, and not the ‘logographer’ Herodotus.
Suzanne Said focuses on Thucydides’ intertextual relation to Herodotus and
aims to elucidate Thucydides’ historiographical agenda in the Archaeology by
comparing Herodotus and Thucydides, concentrating primarily but not exclusively on their prefaces. She suggests several corrections of the Herodotean
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narrative proposed by the Archaeology, corrections which always involve some
major Thucydidean thesis. A brief review of the formal features shared by the
two prefaces makes the contrast in vocabulary all the more stark. By combining
four independent myths into two pairs of abductions of women involving the
crossing of the Hellespont, Herodotus introduces three major themes of the
Histories: kidnapping, women as objects of lust and transgression. Thucydides,
on the other hand, replaces in the Archaeology the kidnappings of women with
collective violence, robbery and plunder on sea as well as on land. According to
Said, the corrections of Herodotus found in the Archaeology further link the two
historians, while distinguishing their aims. She concludes that the comparison
of the two prefaces allows a better appreciation of the different ways in which the
past may reverberate with the present and vice versa and a better awareness of
the difference between an epic and a tragic historian.
The contribution of Jonathan Price concentrates on the study of Thucydidean
influence on Flavius Josephus and on the following two problems: first, the
intelligent reading and independent compositional choice of Josephus and
second, the analysis of Josephus’ historical method or literary style. The author
proposes to address the problem of Josephus’ reading of Thucydides by examining the use of a single key word in the Bellum Judaicum – stasis. How did
Josephus understand the phenomenon of stasis? This is the question Price
proposes to ask regarding Josephus. He specifies that the problem with Josephus’
understanding of stasis in a Thucydidean mode started in a way indicating that
the conceptual problem had semantic implications. According to Price, stasis is
presented familiarly as internal conflict within the Jewish population, and as
such one of the contributing factors to an unnecessary rebellion and later to a
straight-out rebellion. In the direct and unmistakable imitations of Thucydides
in Bellum Judaicum IV, Josephus departs from the Thucydidean model, but in a
way which seems to violate the very principles of Thucydidean historiography.
For in those passages, Josephus uses the description of stasis as a tool of partisan
polemic, rebuke and incrimination. He concludes that the mimēsis of Thucydides in BJ was intended merely to add an authoritative shield for Josephus’
passionate polemic and his historical vision could not have been more different
from that of Thucydides.
Jeffrey Rusten’s chapter focuses on the narrative challenge of Thucydides, who
selects Corcyra as the jumping-off point of his history. The historian superimposes his story on Homer’s story of the Phaeacians’ fatal alliance with
Odysseus (Odyssey 6 – 8, 13) and Herodotus’ account of the Corcyra-CorinthSamos feud (III 48 – 53). Rusten concludes that for Thucydides the Phaeacian
tradition lives on. In addition Thucydides’ unique civic characterization consists
of a second narrative virtue of this beginning. The Athenian audience is
somewhat characterized: although they are na€ve listeners, as the appeals to their
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emotion by Corcyreans suggest, their final decision reveals a cold diplomatic
ruse. The Corcyra affair brings into play the whole range of causal factors for the
war hinted at in the Archaeology and developed in Book I. According to Rusten, it
is all there at the start, in a very new kind of narrative. Thucydides would still be
ranked one of the greatest ancient historians, even if Thucydides I 24 – 55 were all
that survived today.
Paula Debnar suggests that the Corcyra debate reveals quite a lot about the
Corcyreans’ character, and she focuses on the rhetoric of the antilogy, that
means on the picture that emerges from the Corcyreans’ explanation of their
traditional foreign policy, on their justification of hostility towards Corinth and
on their assertion of the shared interests that allegedly unite Athens and Corcyra.
According to Debnar, the Corinthians are emotional, and their complaints verge
on hyperbolē and their attack on the character of their colonists is on target. She
remarks that the Corcyrean envoys offer a general precept concerning the relationship between mother-cities and colonies and that the Corinthians also turn
on its head the Corcyreans’ recipe for smooth colony-metropolis relationships.
She also notes that the narrative offers evidence to support the claims of
Corinthians about the Corcyreans’ behavior concerning their arrogance, but the
Corcyrean envoys speak as if in forming an alliance. She concludes that one of
the reasons the Athenians restrict themselves to a defensive alliance is that they
want the Corinthian and Corcyrean fleets to engage and wear each other down.
June Allison suggests that the battle of Delium, a demonstration of innovative
military strategy and weaponry and of religious nomoi violated by both sides is a
narrative unit. The five short speeches of the Delium narrative are each different
from one another for different reasons: the condensed variatio is itself unique in
the History. She argues that land, its occupation and boundaries, is a theme
carefully developed in the episode and that the passages taken together cohere by
virtue of some legal language and phrases. The focus of her discussion is the
dramatic action from the beginning of the episode which involves a mixture of
narrative poses and variations on speech acts. The legal-sounding antilektos,
surprisingly, is found only here in Classical literature and the insertion of the
unique abstract noun paroikēsis consists a hallmark of Thucydidean self-conscious style. According to Allison, the Delium episode is thus threated quasimetaphorically with elements from a dispute over territory to suggest that what
might have been negotiated or arbitrated by neighboring states is rent apart by
war. She concludes that once more in the History war is shown to have corrupted
a feature that belongs normally to civilized behavior and in this case “the biaios
didaskalos has marginalized the politikos didaskalos.”
The contribution of Thomas Poschenrieder focuses on an aesthetic approach
of style; it enquires for inevitable elements in Thucydides’ representation of
historic events and constrains the investigation to one of Thucydides’ pecu-
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liarities of style, the frequent use of nominalization in the neuter. Poschenrieder
asks whether the traditional rhetorical patterns of explanation according the
examination of Thucydidean style by Dionysios of Halicarnassos do justice to
Thucydides’ representation. He notices that the neutral formulation possesses a
comprehensiveness that covers a lot of things and can also refer to the world of
objects combined with human beings. As well the neutral expression shows a
specific indecisiveness that allows to deal with objective and human things in the
same way. The neutral formulation enables the historian to direct the reader’s
attention to the situations as such and allows him to view human factors and
impersonal factors together. In his conclusion the author sums up that the
nominalizations enable Thucydides for example to make qualities as such objects of historical consideration, to term them historically effective factors and,
with relation to the nominalizations in the neuter, to formulate his historical
considerations at the best.
The aim of the paper of Roberto Nicolai is to study Thucydides’ speeches in
order to understand the historian’s choices as far as the selection of the speeches
is concerned, their location in the work and the different arrangements they
undergo (single speech, antilogy, dialogue, letter). Another focus is on the relations between speeches and narrative. After the second Spartan invasion the
historian focuses on a single speech by Pericles, because this choice agrees with
Pericles’ ethos and strategy of communication. The antilogy of speeches in the
Mytilene debate is a theatrical device as well as a sophistic way of presenting
problems on both sides. The dramatic debate of the Melian dialogue works as a
key for evaluating the Athenian defeat. The importance of the Sicilian expedition
is underlined by a set of three speeches by Nicias, Alcibiades and Nicias again.
The letter of Nicias to the Athenian assembly is again a way of analyzing strategies of communication. He summarizes that Thucydides’ goal is not to compose
complete reports, but to create paradigms of speeches held in paradigmatic
situations. The speeches have to be suited to the situation, which has an ethos of
its own. The historian pays attention to mass psychology and he analyzes the
medium. Finally the author remarks that the overlap between speeches and
programmatic passages shows that some speeches can be considered as examples of mise en ab‚me.
The intention of the contribution of Antonis Tsakmakis and Yannis Kostopoulos is to better understand Cleon’s rhetoric by investigating the imposition of
Cleon – the first prominent Athenian politician after the death of Pericles in
Thucydides’ History – on his audience, the Athenian public. According to the
authors, the parallels between Pericles and Cleon invite to a comparison which
underlines the differences. Adopting the methodology of linguistic pragmatics
they focus on the relationship between the speaker and his audience. They
examine the way Cleon shapes his speech in order to match it into his relative
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power and they scrutinize the attitude of Cleon towards his hearers. Is Cleon
concerned with establishing a common perspective with his audience or does he
prefer to detach himself from the crowd, avoiding solidarity with them? That is
the subject addressed by Tsakmakis and Kostopoulos, who try to provide an
answer to these questions by examining relative linguistic phenomena, as the
frequent use of the second plural person, the use of direct references to the hearer
and the significant use of offensive characterizations. Their conclusion is that
Cleon, a speaker of absolute authority who does not hesitate to exercise his
power on his hearers by being imposing, prefers to remain distant and unfamiliar to his audience.
The paper of Nino Luraghi aims to offer a contribution to an assessment of
Thucydides’ understanding and interpretation of the historical phenomenon of
Spartan hegemony and of its foundations. He develops the observation that the
aim of Thucydides was a more precise understanding of Spartan power and its
implications in terms of growth and expansion, and complaining that Spartan
state-implemented secrecy posed an obstacle to his endeavor, although he may
have ended up under the spell of the Spartan mirage, conveying a positive image
of the Spartans. He focuses on the role of Spartan power in Thucydides’ reconstruction of early Greek history and in the high point of the crisis of the
Peloponnesian League after the Peace of Nicias and before the Athenian expedition of Sicily. According to Luraghi, for Thucydides constitutional stability
turns out to be the secret of Spartan power, or, to make sure that their allies
would be ruled by oligarchies in the interest of the Spartans, as the historian puts
it in famous passages from the Archaeology. Further the author considers the
series of snapshots of Athens and Sparta included in chapters 18 and 19 and he
notices a Leitmotif of Book I: the idea that the war finally broke out because the
Spartans convinced themselves that this was the last occasion to confront Athens
on more or less equal footing. He proposes that in Thucydides’ view, it is just
possible to surmise, that Spartan power was not capable of growing indefinitely,
since its goal was stability, not expansion. In addition he clarifies that Thucydides’ insistence on the magnitude of the campaign of 418/17 seems to be intended
to convey, not the acute danger for Sparta, but the power of the Spartan war
machine. Luraghi concludes that Thucydides’ approach to the Peloponnesian
League in Book V confirms the observations on the place of Sparta in the Archaeology : the key point being that Athenian power grew by its very nature and
Spartan power did not, so that ultimately for Athens the only thing that was
necessary was to outlast Sparta.
The paper of Darien Shanske addresses the notion of lawfulness in Thucydides: “what can be said about when und why lawfulness obtains and when it does
not.” He argues that Thucydides’ narrative demonstrates some additional important and surprising aspects of the ethos that preserves the law. Thucydides
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makes the riddle of whence law and in particular lawfulness especially pressing.
Shanske focuses on the unusual amount of detail on the abuse of legal process in
the run-up to Corcyrean stasis. The phenomenon under discussion relates to
events when the ordinary legal order appears to have broken down and it is
sometimes related in our texts to epieikeia, sometimes to dikē, and sometimes to
a special non-created category of nomoi. He underlines first, the distinction
between the law itself and the tendency to conform to the law and secondly, the
distinction between prescription and description. He discusses some examples
of Thucydides partaking in the traditional portrayal of lawfulness and he
demonstrates the fragility of lawfulness and the surprising lawfulness of Athens.
His conclusion is that Thucydides portrays lawfulness as confoundingly confirming an old-fashioned but murky truth about the mysterious nature of our
conformity to law.
Emmanuel Golfin analyzes the interpretation of the violence by Thucydides
on several levels, the causes of violence and the possible suggestion of remedies
for excessive violence. The author intends a diagnosis of the process of violence
and he observes that the war seems to encourage the civil war in that violence
becomes commonplace and extends both in space and time. Further he tries to
gather and to conceptualize the elements of explanation found in certain narrative passages, speeches or comments. According to Golfin the historian no
longer considers reason as the main human faculty, when he insists on the
excessive violence caused by the war. The next topics of his paper are the possible
existence of a theological explanation and the fragility of the moral model offered by the city, substituting for transcendence. Evil is part of human nature
because the Thucydidean narrative shows that relationships between human
beings as well as between cities are based exclusively on force. The author
remarks that one of the causes of evil can be found in Thucydides’ conception of
historical time, suggesting an ever-changing movement between two extremes,
war and peace. Golfin then examines the connection between the extension of
violence and Thucydides’ conception of the Athenian empire and of domination.
His conclusion is that it seems to be an alternative to evil lying neither in some
unthought of reconciliation of the belligerents nor in moral principles ineffective
in Thucydides’ view, but in the ability that prepares action.
As Georg Rechenauer emphasizes, the case of the plague is involved in an
organic meaningful way in the concept of the overall composition and it constitutes the first important turning point in the interpretation of the Peloponnesian war. He focuses on important connections to the historiographic
representation and on the relationship between politics and illness, between
polis and the sick body. He notices that Thucydides, using the motif of the
destructive violence of the plague, wanted to connect the epidemic disease with
his main political theme – the war, and the use of a terminology reflecting
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corporeality in the revolt of Mytilene at the beginning of the III. Book shows the
close affinity between plague and war. He discusses the political consequences of
the plague on the present power of Athens and the inner destruction of the
Periclean concept of power. He analyzes the importance of the plague account in
the structural context of Book II, its contrast to the logos epitaphios and the
analogy between the plague and the process of war and stasis. Finally he examines the manner, by which Thucydides constrains his reader to look on the
sick body and to deal with the violent scenario of the plague constructed by
Thucydides. His conclusion is that the internal stability and the polis as a
community are threatened by destruction from the plague. This is the most
radical lesson Thucydides gives to his audience by the case of the plague.
According to Vassiliki Pothou irrationality is a stumbling block, with which
Thucydides frequently collided. Although the Peloponnesian War in Thucydides
seems to be classic and rational, she tries to outline the irrational dimensions of
war (length and scale), the irrational dimensions of power (length and breadth of
the Athenian mastery), and the irrational politics. Further she focuses on the
connection between irrationality and metabole, on the relationship between
irrationality and death and on the manipulated irrationality. Her next topics
concern the core of irrationality, that means the case of Sicily and of PylosSphakteria, the Melian Dialogue, the case of latent irrationality and of irrational
contradiction. Her investigation continues with the self-destructive irrationality,
the case of the Athenian Demos and the equivocation of irrationality, the case of
Cleon. She concludes that the duel between logos and paralogos reflects on a
smaller scale the incompatibility between Thucydides and his contemporaries.
As is explicitly shown by the contributors, the topic of violence in Thucydides
is a multi-dimensional issue with many interpretations. As Hans Peter Stahl ably
formulates, “by applying Thucydides’ characterization of war as a ‘biaios didaskalos’ to Thucydides himself, the title of the Regensburg conference transplants and foregrounds an essential trait.” The topic of civil war of Corcyrachapters and the concept of stasis are inevitably on the centre of the contributions. However, the comparison with Herodotus on the one hand and with
Josephus on the other hand, help us to throw light on the different applications
and processes of violence in Thucydides. As well linguistic statistical analysis
and particular details of technicality prove that the phenomenon of violence
functions simultaneously on many levels. Anyway, the fact that the conference
about “Thucydides – a violent teacher? ” did not end with blood on the floor of
Walhalla, but beer, confirms the statement of Peter Rhodes about our historian:
as people say, he is “good to think -and to trink- with.”