The Mind of Thucydides

Jacqueline de Romilly, Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501714825
• eBook ISBN: 9781501719738
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

The publication of Jacqueline de Romilly's Histoire et raison chez Thucydide in 1956 virtually transformed scholarship on Thucydides. Rather than mining The Peloponnesian War to speculate on its layers of composition or second-guess its accuracy, it treated it as a work of art deserving rhetorical and aesthetic analysis. Ahead of its time in its sophisticated focus upon the verbal texture of narrative, it proved that a literary approach offered the most productive and nuanced way to study Thucydides. Still in print in the original French, the book has influenced numerous Classicists and historians, and is now available in English for the first time in a careful translation by Elizabeth Trapnell Rawlings. The Cornell edition includes an introduction by Hunter R. Rawlings III and Jeffrey Rusten tracing the context of this book's original publication and its continuing influence on the study of Thucydides.

Romilly shows that Thucydides constructs his account of the Peloponnesian War as a profoundly intellectual experience for readers who want to discern the patterns underlying historical events. Employing a commanding logic that exercises total control over the data of history, Thucydides uses rigorous principles of selection, suggestive juxtapositions, and artfully opposed speeches to reveal systematic relationships between plans and outcomes, impose meaning on the smallest events, and insist on the constant battle between intellect and chance. Thucydides' mind found in unity and coherence its ideal of historical truth.

1

NARRATIVE METHODS

Most striking to readers of Thucydides’ work are the speeches and their content. Speeches represent the element of the history that most clearly differentiates it from the norms of modern practice and that, in its reasoning as well as in its implicit freedom, makes it most suited to personal analysis. Yet, despite the conspicuous presence of these speeches and their density, the entire interpretative function is not exclusive to them, nor is the rest of the account, by contrast, a simple reproduction of facts. The fact that there are few sweeping statements does not suggest that historical reconstruction is less real or less personal. There is no such thing as simple reproduction of the facts, and least of all in Thucydides’ work, and so it seems most appropriate to begin the study of narrative methods by considering an account in which there are no speeches.

For this purpose, one could select any chapter in the work. The best example, however, would involve an episode to which Thucydides gives a great deal of attention, such as the set of chapters that describe, without speeches but still with great force, the Athenian attempt to invest Syracuse with a circle of walls and the failure that ensued following the arrival in Syracuse of the Lacedaemonian Gylippus (6.96–7.9).

If there were other accounts written by contemporary historians, it would be instructive to compare them with Thucydides’ reporting, but, since these events have been recorded only by historians for whom Thucydides is the principal source, the usefulness of such comparisons is quite limited. What is clear, however, is that this episode, so fraught with consequence, merited the author’s full attention. The narrative that he makes of them may therefore show such distinctive characteristics as to provide all by itself a particularly clear and complete idea of his methodology. In this case, it can show how Thucydides selects and expresses certain facts that he wishes to retain, as well as how he organizes his narrative of them, in one particular order in preference to any other.

Unity

Choice of Elements and Guiding Threads

From the same series of facts, known from a single source, two different historians will obviously select different elements.

According to Plutarch, Euripides says that the Athenians won eight victories between the time of their arrival in Sicily and their first defeats, a number that Plutarch considers too low (Life of Nicias 17). On the basis of Thucydides’ account, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct what these eight victories could have been. We might recognize some of them (five, probably) within the group of chapters considered here. But the very difficulty of identifying them shows that Thucydides, less concerned with extolling the merits of the troops than with clarifying the chain of actions, did not think he had to single them out as events. They are, for him, contained and nested in the unifying element of the text, namely in the attempt to surround Syracuse with fortifications and its failure.

Will Athens succeed? Will its fortifications manage in time to isolate Syracuse? This is the sole question that is asked and that dominates the whole account. An Athenian victory depends entirely on the possibility of undertaking and achieving the construction of a wall; a Syracusan victory becomes simply a matter of delaying or preventing it. And this opposition gives to the text a corresponding continuity and unity and allows readers to follow step by step, in detail, the narrative progression, the unfolding of a single enterprise, a single project.

The passage opens with the Athenian landing in the region of Syracuse. The Syracusans had wanted to defend the plateau at Epipolae in order to make it difficult for the Athenians to surround them, even if they won the battle. In fact, however, the Athenians took Epipolae as soon as they landed, and constructed their first fort: the effort to surround the city, the primary concern of these two opposing sides, has begun.

Thucydides describes all the work that followed and refers to its progress in detail. It begins with the construction of the circular wall (6.98.2: ἐτείχισαν τὸν κύκλον, “They walled the circle”), they proceed first, building the northern wall (6.99.1: ἐτείχιζον … τὸ πρὸς βορέαν τοῦ κύκλου τεῖχος, “They walled the northern wall of the circle”), then beginning the southern wall (6.101.1: ἀπὸ τοῦ κύκλου ἐτείχιζον οἱ Ἀθηναῖοι τὸν κρημνὸν τὸν ὑπὲρ τοῦ ἕλους, “From the circle the Athenians started to wall the cliff above the swamp”), then completing it (6.103.1: ἀπὸ τῶν Ἐπιπολῶν καὶ τοῦ κρημνώδους ἀρξάμενοι ἀπετείχιζον μέχρι τῆςθαλάσσης …, “Beginning from Epipolae and the sheer area they started to wall up to the sea …”).

Corresponding to each of these moves is the Syracusan defensive effort to construct transverse walls. First comes the countermove of 6.100.1 (ὑποτείχισμα, “cross-wall”), undertaken beneath the Athenian encircling wall.¹ This is a response to the Athenian construction of the north wall; it leads to a military intervention by the Athenians and the subsequent demolition of the construction (6.100. 3: τήν … ὑποτείχισιν καθεῖλον, “They destroyed the cross-wall”). The second wall, a response to the first southern fortifications, is undertaken further south, across the swamp (6.101.3). This one consists of a ditch and a palisade. The Syracusans then despair of ever preventing investment (6.102.4).

At this point, the Athenians have almost succeeded; references to the various constructions are sufficient evidence. This is what gives the interruption that follows its dramatic force: the Lacedaemonian Gylippus, who was sailing to the aid of Syracuse, hears about the status of the fortification (7.1.1) and moves quickly; he soon reaches Epipolae. When does he arrive? In case we were not paying close attention to the progress of the work so clearly indicated by Thucydides, he specifies the exact state of the works: “His arrival happened to coincide with the critical moment (7.2.4: ἔτυχε δὲ κατὰ τοῦτο τοῦ καιροῦ ἐλθὼν …) when the Athenians had completed, with the exception of a small portion next to the sea that they were still working on, a double wall to the Great Harbor; as for the remainder of the wall, above the circle wall and extending to the sea by way of Trogilus, stones had been brought in for the greater part of the distance; some sections had been left half-built, others were entirely completed. The danger to Syracuse had indeed been great.” In this passage both the precise technical summary and then the comment, which does not lack emphasis, are remarkable; just as each separate detail is linked to the progress of the siege walls, the reversal itself is portrayed in terms of that progress. Only the intensity is greater to the extent that this progress will be more altered by it.

What can Gylippus actually do? Under his direction, the Syracusans, while attacking a weak point in the south wall, begin to build on a plateau, to the north, a new transverse wall (7.4.1): just in time, he manages to intercept the Athenian wall (7.6.4). The Syracusans accomplish their goal; even in the event of an Athenian victory, the investment of Syracuse is now impossible.

All of these chapters, by returning to a single problem and to the struggle between two opposing aims, are ultimately presented as a minidrama, entirely coherent, in which a perfect unity of action prevails. This outcome will appear all the more remarkable when one considers that even such authors as Plutarch and Diodorus, who followed Thucydides and found his material fully organized, are still not able to preserve this clarity because they had other interests. Plutarch in particular, wishing to show the worthiness of his hero Nicias, claims that one of his exploits was to have “surrounded Syracuse with fortifications”; it is only later that he says he “almost entirely” succeeded, and it is not until help has arrived that he indicates what the situation actually was. Neither brevity nor the effort to concern himself with Nicias alone can purport to explain this, since we find details in Plutarch that are not in Thucydides and that have nothing to do with Nicias.² Instead, the truth is that Thucydides, by relating everything to a single idea, wished to clarify a particular sequence of events, whereas Plutarch was driven by a different concern.

One might suppose that if Thucydides chooses to center everything around the story of the siege in this way, it is because the siege itself interests him. As a historian of war, of strategy itself, he would naturally bring to military details the interest of a technician, and the pages that concern us would transmit, in a more precise manner, his sense of siegecraft. Such an interpretation should be dismissed. Evidence against this view is readily furnished by the account itself. No technical detail is given, neither the nature nor the exact placement of the various constructions is provided, and the operations are so incompletely described that we even find, several chapters later (7.43.4), three camps that had never been mentioned.

Consequently, while all the events are related only as a function of the progress of the siege, this is not because the siege is of interest to Thucydides in itself; it is because the siege creates the unity and order of these events.

Some combatants are fighting, others are at sea; some are good tacticians, others fight bravely, or are zealous on behalf of their allies. But paramount to their individual intentions and isolated motives is a general motive in view of which, ultimately, every action is accomplished: one side wishes to invest, and the other to prevent the investment. And Thucydides focuses on that matter alone. He pays no attention to the detail of motives, of actions, of circumstances; what interests him is the ultimate goal that embraces everything. And, if everything in the account holds together, it is because everything is linked to this ultimate goal.

But this very characteristic involves another one. Thucydides chooses to link his entire account to the broadest intention (γνώμη) because it gives unity to this whole group of events. In this case, of course, that tendency could not be limited to this set of chapters alone; it permeates a larger group as well, and the intention (γνώμη), which creates the unity, is only the expression of another, even larger unity.

One example is provided by the Syracusan idea of setting a union of Sicilian forces against the Athenians. The Syracusan Hermocrates mentions the notion of hegemony at the beginning of book 4 (4.59–65). In book 6 Nicias worries about it (6.21.1), Alcibiades discusses the possibility (6.17.4), and both Hermocrates and Athenagoras predict it (6.33.4–5, 6.37.2). Additionally, Hermocrates at Camarina speaks of the urgency of hegemony (6.77.1), while the Athenian Euphemus attempts to alarm his audience by referring to the threat of it (6.85.3). It is obvious Thucydides is taking great care to frame the episode under study here by two references connecting it fully to the theme. Before the arrival of Gylippus, in fact, it is Nicias who receives the Sicilian forces: a contingent meets the Athenians in 6.98.1 at the moment when the Athenians have just set foot on Epipolae. Just prior to Gylippus’s arrival, in the midst of the Athenian success, Thucydides again signals the arrival of new reinforcements (6.103.2). But Gylippus himself arrives with Sicilian troops (7.1.3–5), and soon, having halted the investment, he leaves Syracuse to recruit new troops elsewhere in Sicily (7.7.2). Then the Syracusan idea begins to take shape. And Nicias’s letter emphasizes this circumstance, repeating as many as four times that Gylippus has raised troops, is raising them, and will raise more (7.11.2, 7.12.1, 7.15.1, 7.15.2). The episode’s conclusion is thus revealed through this idea. It is the same through all of book 7; each battle throughout the book is framed between the arrival of the Sicilian reinforcements and the departure of Gylippus, who leaves in search of new alliances. Each departure (7.7.2, 7.25.9, 7.46.1) and each return (7.21.1, 7.32–33, 7.50.1)—in other words, any movement in the coalition of forces—is stated with precision. So precisely, in fact, that we track the progress of this plan just as we tracked the progress of the investment in the episode involving Gylippus. And as in that episode, just before the reversal, which is here the arrival of Demosthenes, Thucydides makes his point on this subject (7.33.2: “Indeed almost the whole of Sicily, except the Agrigentines, who were neutral, ceased merely watching events as it had previously done, and now actively joined Syracuse against the Athenians”). Thucydides places Demosthenes’ arrival in the context of the coalition of forces just as he had placed Gylippus’s arrival in the context of the progress of walls. Only this time, Demosthenes’ arrival does not change the face of things, for new reinforcements will not stop arriving until the end (7.50.1). Thus the notion of Sicilian unity constitutes a new intention (γνώμη), a new guiding thread, one more far-reaching but with a similar effect. Like the effort to invest Syracuse, a Sicilian coalition is a unifying element, and for this very reason Thucydides will trace its progress.

One could, in books 6 and 7, find many other such examples. If the incident involving Gylippus is situated along the path leading to Sicilian unification, it is situated on another path as well, this one no less obvious, one that leads to Spartan intervention and consequently to the waging of a double war against Athens, in Sicily and in Greece. This is not the place to consider all the steps by which this result was gradually attained;³ however, it may be of interest to point out that, even in the episode involving Gylippus, Thucydides is careful, simply by remaining silent, to put aside all adventitious details that would cloud the picture and cause one to lose sight of the guiding thread. Specifically, Thucydides says simply “Gylippus the Lacedaemonian” (6.104.1), without further introduction of the person, without even giving his father’s name;⁴ this discretion⁵ makes clearer the relationship between these events and Alcibiades’ speech advising the Lacedaemonians to send to Sicily “a Spartiate as commanding officer” (6.91.4). Yet a historian driven by other concerns might have drawn some lesson from the identity of this Spartiate.⁶ Thucydides prefers a clear theme to richness of detail.

Alongside these two ideas, both relating to the intervention of the states in the conflict, there are others one might trace. Militarily, for example, Thucydides neglects anything episodic or anecdotal (for example, the single combat between Lamachus and Callicratus) but is attentive to the tactical intention. Thus it is that battles conducted in the same theater can be linked together; here too we see Gylippus personally drawing a lesson from his first defeat and adapting to the circumstances of the battle. Everything follows. The technique is perfected, correcte...

Table of contents

• Editors’ and Translator’s Preface
• Editors’ Introduction
• Author’s Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. Narrative Methods
• 2. Battle Accounts: Analysis and Narration
• 3. The Antithetical Speeches
• 4. Investigating the Past: The “Archaeology”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index of Thucydidean Passages Discussed
• General Index