Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

George Cawkwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134708437
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Understanding the history of Athens in the all important years of the second half of the fifth century B.C. is largely dependent on the work of the historian Thucydides. Previous scholarship has tended to view Thucydides' account as infallible. This book challenges that received wisdom, advancing original and controversial views of Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War; his misrepresentation of Alcibiades and Demosthenes; his relationship with Pericles; and his views on the Athenian Empire. Cawkwell's comprehensive analysis of Thucydides and his historical writings is persuasive, erudite and an immensely valuable addition to the scholarship and criticism of a rich and popular period of Greek history.

1
THUCYDIDES

For good or ill, we students of Greek History are utterly beholden to the Histories of Thucydides, and inevitably one begins with a profession of belief about that great man. Gone are the days when he was accorded the sacrosanctity once accorded to Holy Writ, as it may be fairly supposed he was accorded by his great commentator, A. W. Gomme. A more tempered regard is now inevitable. Indeed, his reputation is under assault and some prefatory statement is necessary from anyone about to engage in discussion of the history of the Peloponnesian War.

What little is known about the life of Thucydides is to be gleaned almost entirely from his book.¹ Unfortunately, we cannot be very precise about the date of his birth. It is commonly supposed that he was born not long before 454, for he returned to Athens in 404 (5.26.5) and probably passed some time making revisions, and in the Life of Marcellinus (§34) it is stated that he was over 50 at his death. The source of this statement is, however, very uncertain. It is more suggestive that Thucydides has Nicias speak of Alcibiades as young for the generalship in 415 (6.12.2) and under 420, the year of Alcibiades’ first recorded generalship (Plut. Alc. 15.1), Thucydides himself declared (5.43.2) that any other city would have regarded him as ‘young’ (neos). The age at which a man could be elected general is not known, but since thirty was the required age for entry to the council, the ‘young’ man is likely to have been at least 30. Alcibiades had assets both material and moral that Thucydides lacked and it would be no surprise if the latter’s less brilliant career began at a considerably later age.² So he may have been at least 40 when he entered in 424 on his only recorded generalship and have been born as early as the mid-460s. Consistent with this would be Thucydides’ claim to have begun at the outset of the war the work of recording what happened (1.1.1 and 5.26.5); young men of 23 are more minded to fight than to record wars; by the age of 34 a more reflective habit of mind would have come upon him. Let Thucydides then be born by the mid-460s.

But, it may be asked, 465 or 454, does it matter? It does indeed. If he was 15 or so when the remains of his great kinsman Cimon were laid to rest in the so-called ‘Cimonia’ (Plut. Cim. 19.5), the occasion must have left its mark. And if he had heard, or heard of, the high praise of Cimon uttered in Cratinus’ Archilochi (ibid. 10.4) shortly after his death, family pride would have been much touched, and Thucydides’ conversion to admiration of Cimon’s great rival, Pericles, would have been a most striking independence of mind. Not able to attend the Ecclesia until he was 18, he may have missed the excitements of Callias’ return from negotiating the Peace that bears his name,³ but growing up in such circles the boy must have heard the great issue of peace or war with Persia seriously discussed, and as he rose to manhood, the Parthenon began to rise on the Acropolis, and his education would have been completed amidst the intellectual and artistic ferment of the 440s. It is, then, no wonder that he should acquire an intense admiration of Athens, her empire and her whole way of life, so lauded in the Funeral Oration he put into the mouth of Pericles, the author of all this power and beauty. Thucydides himself beheld day by day this power of the city and loved it indeed (2.43.1).

His admiration for Pericles is at any rate plain enough (2.65). Yet it was Pericles who above all sought to maintain and foster the Empire and who also prized and developed the democracy, and Thucydides’ attitude to the Empire and to democracy must be closely examined. If he shared Pericles’ views on those matters, it was a radical change of stance. That is not, however, surprising in a man who, in his attitude to religion, displayed unusual independence of mind.

It has been much debated whether Thucydides was an atheist. If he had been so, he would have been unusual but far from unique. It is difficult to name atheists of the fifth century, though atheism was clearly conceivable as the celebrated fragment of Critias’ Sisyphus shows⁴ (VS 88 B25), and we are ill-informed about the trials of which we hear of those accused of it.⁵ So it is hard to say how widespread such opinions were. Indeed, where atheism was an offence, prudence dictated reserve. Athens was a remarkably tolerant society. Plato could criticise democracy and propose without fear an idealised Spartan constitution for his ideal city. But religion was different. Unorthodox opinions about the gods could bring down the wrath of the gods not just on the free-thinking individual, but on the whole city.⁶ The Mysteries could be profaned by men of advanced opinions, but the price had to be paid, even by the man whose education was thought to have corrupted the young. By the fourth century, however, to judge by Plato’s Laws, unbelief was widespread and frank (cf. 885c, 886d, 888b, 908b and c). So it would not be surprising if Thucydides was an atheist, albeit discreetly so.

Unfortunately, the evidence he provides is ambivalent.⁷ To all Greeks of earlier ages and to most in the second half of the fifth century, the divine will was manifested to men partly in exceptional natural occurrences like earthquakes, plagues and eclipses, the meaning of which was plain to all, partly in signs and portents which required the specialist interpretation of seers (manteis), and partly by oracular utterances.⁸ Herodotus was, on the whole, so minded.⁹ For him, man may misinterpret but oracles do not err.¹⁰ The gods constantly intervene to secure the result they want. His whole cast of mind is theological. Thucydides is vastly different.¹¹ Only one of the oracles given during the war happened to come true (5.26.3). Only those lacking experience of climatic conditions were terrified by thunder and lightning (6.70.1). The gods are, indeed, conspicuous by their absence and wherever he makes his speakers appeal to them, it is sure presage of disaster.¹² Nowhere does Thucydides reveal himself more tellingly than in the chapter (2.54) he wrote immediately after his account of the Plague. To the Greeks generally, plagues came from the gods.¹³ For Thucydides, this mighty plague came from Ethiopia and spread widely over Egypt, Libya and the Persian Empire before it came to the Piraeus (2.48), doubtless imported by merchants; he had observed that it was spread by contagion (2.47.4, 50, 51.5). That was his view of its origin unlike those who ‘knew the oracle given to the Spartans when they asked the god whether they should make war and the god gave the response that if they fought with all their might victory would be theirs and he said he would lend a hand.’ For them, the Plague was divine aid for Sparta. Thucydides gives his answer. First, he manifests his sceptical attitude to portentous utterances: men, he says, take the version that seems to fit in with their present conditions. Then, most revealingly, he declares that men interpreted the Spartan oracle to match what was happening; the Plague began when the Peloponnesians had invaded and it did not go into the Peloponnese to any extent worth mentioning. So the Plague was seen as divine punishment; but not by Thucydides. Of course, it would have been unwise, probably dangerous, for him to say openly that the gods had nothing to do with it.¹⁴ He makes his viewpoint clear by implication. The Plague ‘settled on Athens most, and after that on the most populous places (ta polyanthrōpotata)’ The contagion was worst where people were most crowded together. That was all there was to it. The whole chapter is a notable exercise of scepticism.

Thucydides seems in general rationalist and scientific, both in what he says and in what he does not. The eruption of Etna is remarked (3.116) without suggestion that a god is engaged. The relation of tidal waves and submarine earthquakes is noted (3.89). His comment may be sly: he recounts the coincidence of the second outbreak of the Plague and widespread earthquakes in Athens, Euboea, Boeotia, and especially in Orchomenus (3.87), and so rebuffs the idea that the Plague expresses the displeasure of heaven with Athens by remarking that what is popularly supposed to be divinely engineered, the earthquake, was so widespread, with its epicentre in Boeotia, that it had no relevance to the Plague – which, in any case, as already remarked, came from Ethiopia.¹⁵

There is one passage, however, that has seemed to many to mean that Thucydides did hold to the traditional view. In 1.23 in pursuit of his thesis that the Peloponnesian War was the greatest war, he remarks that not only did it go on for a very long time, but also in the course of it an unparalleled number of what he terms pathēmata occurred. These included events involving human suffering, such as droughts, famines and the Plague. So, by pathēmata he can mean ‘sufferings’ and ‘afflictions’, but he also includes ‘eclipses of the sun’ which, as far as we know, the Greeks did not suppose entailed suffering. Their inclusion suggests that these pathēmata are not chance concomitants of the war, but are due to powers more than human. If this interpretation of the word ‘eclipses’ is correct, Thucydides was not wholly rationalist, or not rationalist all of the time.¹⁶ The chapter is an uncomfortable fact. It does not destroy the general impression that Thucydides was one of the free-thinkers of the age, but it shows he was not always so.

At least one may beware the easy labelling of his views. Thucydides was a most elusive person who says almost nothing directly of his opinions which, in consequence, have to be teased out of his text. A common starting-point is his remark about the rule of the Five Thousand in 411 (8.97.2) from which it has been presumed that Thucydides was a moderate oligarch. In so far as such a judgement is dependent on taking the phrase eu politeusantes to mean ‘having a good constitution’, it can be brusquely repudiated.¹⁷ In talking of the Athenians’ disregard of Pericles’ policy (2.65.7) when the constitution remained unchanged, he uses the converse phrase (kakōs es te sphās autous kai tous xymmachous epoliteusan) which must mean ‘They conducted policy badly.’ So in itself the phrase used of 411 does not argue that Thucydides approved of the constitution of the Five Thousand. What he says is to be judged in the light of a passage of Xenophon’s Memorabiliu (4.4.16), where the essence of good government is declared to be concord (homonoia). But Thucydides does go on to explain why the Athenians had good government at that time. ‘The mixture with regard to the few and the many was modeitate.’ So he does seem to be commending the moderateness of the oligarchy of 411. However, it is also clear that this had not always been his view.

The surest thing one can say of his political sympathies is that he greatly admired Pericles (2.65). Pericles was the man principally responsible for the development of the Athenian Empire as well as being a notable fosterer of the democracy. Was Thucydides then an imperialist and a believer in democracy? The reason for Pericles’ powerful position was in part his judgement (gnōmē), but Thucydides does not speak of his particular judgements, and one might wonder whether it was Pericles’ skill in judging what best served his purposes that Thucydides admired, not those purposes themselves. However, if one looks at the obituary he wrote for Themistocles (1.138.3), the position is plainer. He too played a notable part in the development of the Empire and of the democracy.¹⁸ Thucydides did not allude specifically to that. Rather, he commended Themistocles’ judgement, his very great ability quickly to decide what had to be done (ta deonta). That is the tell-tale phrase; there is nothing about his purposes and his choice of ends, but simply his ability to decide on the necessary steps. That is, for Thucydides, there is only one course open and the best statesman is the man who best discerns it. Consistently with this, in the speeches in the Histories, it is never the balancing of justice and advantage, always purely the calculation of advantage. That is how he thinks statesmen really think. A man who thinks like this is inevitably imperialist, for no sane man would not prefer his city to have power over another rather than to be in some other city’s power. In some sense, therefore, Thucydides was imperialist. Why, after all, did he choose to include that laudation of imperial Athens, the Funeral Oration? It is Pericles’ profession of faith, but it was included, one presumes, because the man to whom Thucydides accorded admiration and allegiance spoke for him too.

The Funeral Oration expounds at length the sentiment expressed in Pericles’ last speech.

Realise that the city has a very great reputation with all mankind for not giving in to disasters and for having expended a great many lives and made great efforts in war, and that it possesses power previously unmatched, the memory of which, should we go down somewhat (for in the nature of things everything diminishes), will remain with posterity for ever, that as Hellenes we had empire over a very great number of Hellenes, that we held out in very great wars against our foes both separately and in concert, and that we dwelt in a city admirably provided with everything and very great.

(2.64.3)

Here is the boast of imperial power and of the imperial city. One suspects that in these two speeches Pericles speaks for his great admirer too.

We can, generally speaking, have no great confidence in drawing on the speeches to elucidate Thucydides’ opinions. It is clear that they are not like any of the samples of oratory that have survived. They tend to the general and the intellectual too much to be seriously regarded as the record of the uttered words. In some way, they have been sublimated, but one can never be sure whether they express what Thucydides thought or what he thought the speakers thought. If it is the latter, it is possible that he made them think in his own way, the speaker’s presumed thoughts being run, as it were, into the mould of Thucydides’ own ways of thought. In that case, discerning the genuinely Thucydidean from, for example, the Cleonic or the Nician should be suspected of being largely subjective. The speeches of Pericles, however, are different. He was the man ‘who led the city with moderation (metriōs) and kept it safe, and in his time it became very great’ (2.65.5), and it seems not unreasonable to treat his speeches on the greatness of Athens as speaking for Thucydides too.¹⁹

Imperialist, then, let him be; but was he also, like Pericles, a believer in democracy? He seems at moments somewhat dismissive of popular assemblies and their inconstancy. The words he uses (ochlos, homilos) seem more appropriate to a fickle mob than to the sovereign People.²⁰ When, however, one considers the manner in which the sovereign People behaved on the two successive days of the Mytilene debate (cf. 3.36.4), the charge of fickleness is not to be denied and certainly would not have been denied by Pericles himself (cf. 2.59). Such behaviour was, and indeed is, only to be expected. But for Pericles the important point about democracy was not that everyone participated so much as that anyone who had the ability to serve the city was not prevented by poverty (2.37) and that there was a career open to talent. Could Thucydides have thought differently? In his famous chapter on the decline of Athens after Pericles (2.65) the emphasis is on the quality of leadership, and since it is a fact of life that statesmen of high quality are rare, he must have favoured that system which gave the highest hopes of their appearing.²¹ The disadvantages of the system had to be borne, and in any case, if Athens was to have the great advantages of having empire, it had to be a naval empire, which meant a ‘naval multitude’ (nautilcos ochlos) which would require and maintain democracy (8.72.2; cf. Arist. Pol. 1304a22f). Shocking as it will be to some latter-day sages, it may well be that Thucydides gladly accepted both empire and democracy. The Spartan alternative could no more appeal to him, than it did to Pericles (2.39). Quite apart from their national character (1.70) and their rumoured dark deeds at home (4.80), Spartans could not behave themselves when they got abroad (4.81), and their claim to accord their allies independence was a sham (1.19). The Funeral Oration makes it all clear.

Thucydides began work for his book, if we may believe him (1.1), in 431, and it looks as if there was an original version of the events of the Archidamian War – or ‘the ten-year war’, ‘the first war’, as he variously termed it (5.25.1, 24.2, 26.3) – for he chose to reintroduce himself when he set out to describe the breakdown of the Peace (5.26.1). But his account of that first war bears evidence of rewriting after his return to Athens from exile in 404 (e.g. 2.65), while...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Thucydides
• 2. ‘The Truest Explanation’
• 3. Thucydides and the Strategy of the Peloponnesian War
• 4. Thucydides, Pericles and the ‘Radical Demagogues’
• 5. Thucydides, Alcibiades and the West
• 6. Thucydides and the Empire
• Appendix 1. A note on the so-called ‘Financial Decrees’ of Callias, IG l3 52 (= ML 58)
• Appendix 2. The Megara Decrees of Plutarch, Pericles 30
• Appendix 3. Military service in the Athenian Empire1
• Notes
• List of Works Referred to in Notes