Chapter Five
The Sophists of War
The most original contribution of the Greeks to military thought was their self-conscious development of the concept of raison d’état: They perceived warfare as a rational and utilitarian instrument of politics and thought of interstate relations (at times) as a structure of power politics independent of moral questions. This approach to interstate affairs was pioneered by the Sophists of the fifth century B.C. and became common in political oratory, especially at Athens. The history of Thucydides is the great monument to this tradition. Thucydides actually wrote earlier than most of the extant orators, but we will consider the orators first, as they gave Thucydides his inspiration.
In the late fifth century, the art of war, like every other aspect of Greek political culture, came under the influence of the itinerant lecturers known as Sophists, with their generalizing, systematizing, classifying habits of thought. Sophists claimed that all political affairs, including war, could be controlled by dialectical reasoning, reduced to a skilled art or craft, and taught—for a suitable fee. Before the Sophists appeared there had been no such thing as formal military training in the Greek cities, except for Sparta and perhaps elite units like the Sacred Band of Thebes. In the Funeral Oration of Pericles, it is mentioned as a point of Athenian pride that Athens did not prepare its sons for war, in contrast to the strenuous training of the Spartans (Thucydides 2.39). But under the stresses of the long exhausting war of 431-404 B.C., the traditional cult of hoplite amateurism gave way to a new demand both for military professionalism and for experts to teach these skills, and they soon presented themselves.
During the war, several types of military training became fashionable.1 The most elementary was called hoplomachia, the art of fencing with hoplite weapons, which was taught by many itinerant drillmasters. Plato’s Laches, a dialogue set around 420, contains a discussion of this discipline, representing a sort of argument that must have been heard often in the Athens of Plato’s youth. The fencing master eventually became one of the fixtures of the Greek gymnasium. His art was valued mostly as a gentlemanly accomplishment and exercise but was also a stepping-stone to certain more important military studies: taktika, the art of arranging troops, and strategika, the art of generalship.
In the early years of the war, there appeared at Athens two Sophists from Chios, Dionysodorus and his brother Euthydemus, who claimed they could teach anyone how to succeed in the office of general (strategos), which was filled by annual election. They offered training in all three techniques—hoplomachia, taktika, and strategika. They had the misfortune to be noticed both by Plato and by Xenophon, both of whom ridiculed them. In Plato’s Euthydemus (271-273), Socrates exposes the pair as pompous frauds. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.1), one of Socrates’s young friends, ambitious to be elected general, takes the course given by Dionysodorus, but is disappointed to find that Dionysodorus teaches nothing but taktika, the technique of drawing up soldiers in the phalanx, and does not instruct on how to use them in battle. There is more about this in Xenophon’s Education of Gyrus (1.6.12-14), where the young Cyrus is forced to waste his time with another incompetent teacher who promises to teach the art of generalship but in fact knows nothing but taktika.
If Xenophon is to be believed, Dionysodorus of Chios was a mere drill-master whose instruction could have little use outside the parade ground. But the Dionysodorus described by Plato claimed at least to be much more than a drillmaster. Perhaps Xenophon uses Dionysodorus as a straw man to represent a type of military Sophist he distrusted; or perhaps Dionysodorus, like some later military consultants, made large promises to justify his large fees.
By the end of the fifth century, these experts were well known throughout the Greek world, and some were entering the service of the Persian empire. In 401 B.C., Xenophon encountered a Greek mercenary in Anatolia named Phalinus, an expert in hoplomachia and taktika, who was advising a Persian satrap (.Anabasis 2.1.7). Whether he was the one who gave Xenophon his contemptuous opinion of the type we do not know. Nor do we know what the higher military art of the Sophists was like. No treatises survive from before the middle of the fourth century. Still, it seems that the major breakthrough in systematic military thought came in the late fifth century. At that time, warfare came to be perceived as a rational art (techne) comparable to the arts of medicine, architecture, and rhetoric, to be analyzed logically and in purely human terms, leaving the gods out of it. The rhetorical education the Sophists imparted taught men how to argue through a situation, considering all the alternatives and making judgments based on principles of human behavior. They taught, that is, what we usually mean by “strategy.” The semifictional speeches in Thucydides suggest that they taught strategy on a high level. If the Sophists claimed to teach everything a general should know, this must have included the ability to make convincing speeches on foreign policy to the assembly. In Xenophon’s view (attributed to Socrates), the art of generalship should include knowledge of finances, treaties, and alliances, as well as all other subjects that figure in political oratory (Memorabilia 3.1-6).
No examples of political oratory are extant before the end of the fifth century, but some early forensic (judicial) and epideictic (display) orations have survived that give us some notion of what political speeches before the assembly must have been like. The famous Sophist Gorgias has left us two pieces, called the Helen and the Palamedes, both of which are fictitious legal defenses of figures from the Trojan War. The Palamedes (13ff.) attempts to exonerate Palamedes, whom Odysseus accused of treachery to the Greeks, by listing all the possible motives for treachery—power, wealth, honor, safety, and so on—and showing that Palamedes could not have been tempted by any of them. This reminds us of the techniques used by some of Thucydides’s orators: the analysis of a situation by listing all possible hypotheses, the attempt to give the impression that every possibility has been included, and the judgment of likelihood based on allegations about normal and expected human behavior. Thucydides’s Athenian orators defend Athenian imperialism in the same way, by listing all possible motives for empire (all three of which—wealth, honor and safety—appear in Gorgias’s list), based on generalizations about human nature (Thucydides 1.76).2
The Just and the Advantageous
One of the leading insights of the sophistic revolution was to make a clear distinction between the just (dikaion) and the advantageous (.sympheron), which permitted rational debate about war and diplomacy. This seems to have been more common in fifth-century political rhetoric, as will be apparent when we turn to Thucydides; but even in the fourth century, the generally high-minded ethical tone of the orators was not thought inconsistent with a blunt recognition that there exists a code of reality or nature that is indifferent to human notions of justice.
The ambivalence of Isocrates on this question in his Panathenaic Oration is remarkable. He tells his audience that relations with other states can be carried out either in accordance with law, which means that states do not go to war without just cause, or according to reality (,aletheia), which means that only power matters (46). He condemns the Spartans for their “realistic” foreign policy and praises Athens for following justice, which was one of his favorite themes. But later in this discourse, he admits the Athenian empire was unjust and excuses it on the grounds that Athens had no choice, saying it is better to do wrong to other states than to suffer wrong oneself (117). Therefore, there are some circumstances in which realism must be preferred to justice, at least where freedom is at stake. Isocrates seems troubled by this admission and later returns to the problem: Why does justice not always pay in dealing with other states? The answer he gives is this: It is because the gods are careless and their vast negligence often permits the just to lose and the unjust to win. He then comments that to be sure, men should esteem a just defeat over an unjust victory, and sometimes they can, for men praise the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae as grander than any victory; but alas, this is not the common attitude (185-187).
Demosthenes is sometimes blunter. In his First Philippic, he warns the Athenians that according to nature (physis) all the possessions of the weak belong to the strong and that Philip of Macedon is merely acting on this principle (5). His point here is that Athenian democracy is just in its foreign policy and amoral naturalism is something expected of monarchy, but there is also the implication that if the Athenians have to deal with a leader like Philip of Macedon, then justice is better forgotten. This is said more explicitly in his For the Liberty of the Rhodians, delivered in 351 B.C.:
In my opinion it is right to restore the Rhodian democracy; yet even if it were not right, I should feel justified in urging you to restore it, when I observe what these people [the Rhodian oligarchs] are doing. Why so? Because, men of Athens, if every state were bent on doing right, it would be disgraceful if we alone refused; but when the others, without exception, are preparing the means to do wrong, for us alone to make profession of right, without engaging in any enterprise, seems to me not love of right but want of courage. For I notice that all men have their rights conceded to them in proportion to the power at their disposal … Of private rights [dikaioi idioi] within a state, the laws of that state grant an equal and impartial share to all, weak and strong alike; but the international rights of Greek states [literally, “the rights of the Greeks,” Hellenikoi dikaioi] are defined by the strong for the weak. (28-29 [trans. J. H. Vince])
Demosthenes seems to say here that justice does not exist in relations between states—and this before the whole Assembly. But he is referring to an emergency situation. Earlier in the speech, he reminded the citizens that conflicts between democracies and oligarchies are characterized by a special ruthlessness, because freedom itself is at stake (17-18). He means that justice is to be followed whenever possible; but if a democracy must fight for its survival and independence against oligarchies or monarchies, then some relaxation of this standard is permissible.
In spite of these ambiguous statements, it is the usual strategy of the orators to claim that the just and the advantageous coincide. The orator is explicitly advised to take this line in the rhetorical handbook called the Rhetoric to Alexander; written about 300 B.C. and erroneously included in the works of Aristotle. The speaker is counseled that if he wishes to exhort his audience to war, he should present as many arguments as possible: He should show that the city or its allies are being wronged by the other side or have been wronged by them at some time in the past (notice the absence of any statute of limitations on the Greek notion of injustice in war), so that they will have the favor of gods and men: But in addition, the orator should prove that the war will be advantageous, first, because it will bring one of the usual objectives, like wealth or glory or power, and second, because the city is stronger than its adversary in resources, allies, location, or planning. An orator who wants to argue for peace must, of course, show the exact opposite: He must convince his countrymen that the war would either be hopeless or unjust, preferably both, with much emphasis on the unpredictability of the fortunes of war (1425).
It was rarely difficult for orators to find connections between the just and the advantageous. One such argument was that unjust powers collect enemies, which is disadvantageous, and a hegemonic power that fails to treat its allies justly is doomed to fall shortly, which is also disadvantageous. When the orators do separate the just from the advantageous, it is often a rhetorical trick. Demosthenes assured the Athenians that he would advise them to go to war for the freedom of the Greeks even if that was not in their own interest (On the Chersonese 48-51; Fourth Philippic 24-27); but of course he really meant to persuade them that it was both just and advantageous.
The audiences of fourth-century oratory were clearly familiar with the distinction between the just and the advantageous, but the speakers rarely, if ever, attained the level of sophistication of the debates in Thucydides. And in philosophical literature of the fourth century, there is little discussion of the subject at all. The approach of Plato and Aristotle, as we have seen, was to limit wars among Greeks to just warfare and to admit the legitimacy of warfare for naked power only against barbarians. But there are also interesting passages in the usually sententious and moralistic Education of Cyrus of Xenophon. King Cambyses tells the young Cyrus that a ruler must be two different men, one a righteous man and the other a thief and robber (1.6.27-43). The point Xenophon makes is that in war one must sometimes fight in open battle and sometimes use tricks and devices, especially those that allow one to take the enemy by surprise; a general must be adept at both ethics. Elsewhere, Xenophon had Socrates himself declare that a general must be both a good protector and a good thief (.Memorabilia 3.1.6). In the Cyrus, Xenophon repeatedly compares warfare to hunting and makes Cambyses declare that enemies in war are like wild beasts, against which every kind of deceit is legitimate. Contemporary philosophers were capable of comparing warfare against barbarians to the hunting of wild animals, but always with the implication that wars among Greeks were on a different level. Xenophon implies that all warfare is as amoral as a beast hunt. To be sure, he immediately backtracks: At the end of the speech in which Cambyses gives this Machiavellian advice, the king adds that nevertheless all wars must be fought for just causes and after consulting oracles and omens to make sure of the favor of the gods. Raison d’état, apparently, applies to the jus in hello but not to the jus ad bellum. Xenophon did not follow his insight through. But he left an explicit justification for deceit and immorality in warfare, at least at certain levels, embedded in a work that greatly influenced later military thought, particularly that of Machiavelli.
Oratory and History
The sophistic type of political oratory was invented about the same time as historical writing, in the late fifth century B.C., and soon established a close connection with it. In the fourth century, it was widely assumed that one of the primary purposes of historical writing was to provide information for orators on matters of war and peace. The influential rhetorical school of Isocrates regarded historiography as one of the essential elements in the education of a gentleman. Isocrates called it “writings about the deeds of war” or “the old deeds and wars of the Greeks” and spoke of it as one of the established genres of prose composition (Antidosis 45; Panathenaic 1). About 370, he wrote to prince Nicocles, “Reflect on the fortunes and accidents which befall both common men and kings, for if you are mindful of the past you will plan better for the future” (To Nicocles 35, trans. George Norlin).
Aristotle was more explicit about the uses of history. In his Rhetoric, he says war and peace constitute one of the major subjects of political oratory and insists that orators must be knowledgeable about such matters. The successful political orator must know
the power of the city, both how great it is already and how great it is capable of becoming, and what form the existing power takes and what else might be added, and, further, what wars it has waged and how (it is necessary to know these things not only about one’s native city but about neighboring cities) and with whom there is probability of war, in order that there may be a policy of peace toward the stronger and that the decision of war with the weaker may be one’s own. [It is necessary to know] their forces also, whether they are like or unlike [those of one’s own city]; for it is possible in this respect as well to be superior or inferior. Additionally, it is necessary to have observed not only the wars of one’s own city but those of others, in terms of their results; for like results naturally follow from like causes. (.Rhetoric 1.4, 1359-1360 [trans. George Kennedy; his interpolations])
Aristotle speaks as though the orator must have a comprehensive knowledge of all wars of the past, their conduct, and their results. Where does the orator go for such knowledge? “It is clear that in constitutional revision the reports of travelers are useful (for there one can learn the laws of foreign nations) and [that] for debates about going to war the research of those writing about history [is useful]. But all these subjects belong to politics, not rhetoric” (.Rhetoric 1.4, 1360 [trans. Kennedy]). The phrase translated by Kennedy as “debates about going to war” appears in the manuscripts of the Rhetoric as politikas symhoulas, or “political debates”; but the most recent edition of the Rhetoric, by Rudolf Kassel, emended this to polemikas symhoulas, or “debates about going to war,” on the basis of the medieval Latin translation of the Rhetoric by Herman the German.3 For information about warfare and foreign affairs, we must turn to “the inquiries of those who write about deeds” (a more literal rendering of the phrase translated by George Kennedy as “the research of those writing about history”).
By the mid-fourth century, there existed a large and well-known body of Greek literature that had as yet no convenient name—it was not yet called historia—but was generally described as the “writings of the deeds of war” or “inquiries about the deeds of war”: It included Herodotus, Thucydides, the several continuations of Thucydides, which went under the title Hellenica (Affairs of Greece) (only Xenophon’s survives), and the accounts of the western Greeks by the lost Syracusan writers Antiochus and Philistus, which went under the title Sicelica (Affairs of Sicily). It was taken for granted that this literature was the source of knowledge for anything about war, diplomacy, or interstate relations. It is interesting that Aristotle explained the purpose of these writings in terms similar to those of Thucydides: “Like results naturally follow from like causes” (compare Thucydides 1.22, 3.82). It is also worth noting the frequency with which Thucydides’s orators drew on historical examples. For instance, the Mitylenians justified their revolt against Athens by citing examples of Athenian misconduct (Thucydides 3.11); and Cleon said, “The fate of those of their neighbors who had already rebelled and been subdued, was no lesson to them [the Mitylenians],” implying that it should have been (Thucydides 3.39, trans. Crawley). The symbiotic relationship between oratory and history soon produced a new type of realistic historiography intended to serve as a storehouse of examples for political orators.
The Realist Theory of History: Thucydides4
Thucydides of Athens took from Herodotus the ambition to tell the story of a great war, the confident assumption that great deeds deserve commemoration, the literary devices of epic and drama, and the urge to seek the aitiai that lie behind the rise and fall of states. At the same time, he self-consciously portrayed himself as an innovator. His basic innovation was the invention of a new style of prose narrative for describing warfare, the most adequate term for which is realism. The new style was defended pugnaciously in Thucydides’s preamble: He distanced himself from Herodotus by emphasizing his concern for akribeia (precision or carefulness), claiming to write only about what he had seen himself or had learned from eyewitness accounts (1.22); he said that he had recorded events as they occurred winter and summer (2.1), which seems to imply the inclusion of all events in strict chronological order, in contrast to Herodotus’s epic selectiveness and discursiveness. Thucydides wished to give the impression that he was not concerned with entertainment but rather with an austere presentation of things as they were, implicitly stressing blame and criticism more than praise, disaster more than expansion, the fall of states more than their rise.
The eschewal of rhetorical embellishment is, of course, a rhetorical device itself. Thucydides was as concerned as Herodotus to tell a good story, though a different kind of story, and beyond his preamble, he showed no more concern than Herodotus with problems of conflicting evidence. There has been much controversy over whether Thucydides and other classical historians should be read as historians in the modern sense or as literary artists.5 But the real difference between classical and contempory historians is that the classical historian thought, with no sense of contradiction, that history was both a highly wrought literary presentation using traditional poetic techniques and an empirical and dialectical instrument for getting at the truth about important human affairs—even if their perception of “truth” was not quite ours. Rhetoric cannot be separated from content. The literary effort to give the appearance of painstaking accuracy and comprehensiveness must produce a more accurate and comprehensive account. The Thucydidean style implies at least an awareness of the problem of evidence, the gap between the semifictionalized presentation of narrative and its underlying factual base—a problem that would be unavoidable for Thucydides because he dealt with current events, not Herodotean events already half-receded into legend. But in the final analysis, the priorities of Thucydides and his audience are not ours. As Kenneth Dover remarked, they lived in a culture where techniques of literary art were very highly developed, and those of scientific investigation, hardly at all. We tend to assume Thucydides adopted the rhetoric of realism out of concern for the problem of evidence, when it is more likely the reverse—he had to show some concern for evidence because he had adopted the rhetoric of realism.
Accepting the rhetoric of realism as a rhetoric, let us begin to identify its main features. The prose of Herodotus was flowing and expansive, a series of tales or arguments linked by the principle of action and reaction. The narrative of Thucydides is antithetical rather than linear. He constantly balances one thing against another, sometimes symmetrically, as in the famous sentence in the Funeral Oration of Pericles—“We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy” (2.40, trans. Crawley). But more typically, Thucydides uses broken symmetries and unexpected variations, especially contrasting words that express speech or intent (logos, gnome, and so on) with words expressing facts, deeds, or power (ergon, dynamis, and so forth). Adam Parry counted 420 examples of such word-deed antithesis. This antithetical style, developed by the Sophist Gorgias, was popular then in Athenian oratory. Thucydides adapted it to the purposes of historical narrative because it conveyed a certain realistic view of the world, a blunt tough-minded appraisal of a reality filled with surprise and struggle, where rational planning had a tendency not to work out as expected. This style was imitated later by the Latin historians Sallust and Tacitus and thereafter had a long history in European literature; and it was often associated with political realism and the doctrine later called raison d’état.
Not only the sentences but the narrative structure is antithetical. The basic unit of composition is the logos-ergon combination, a juxtaposition of the word and the deed, of the speech and the action. In Herodotus, the speeches and the dialogues are narrative devices that move the story along; in Thucydides, they are analytical devices. Herodotean narrative is a series of actions; Thucydidean narrative becomes a series of debates followed by actions. At crucial points in Thucydides’s story, someone usually makes a speech before an assembly or council, predicting success or failure as the result of a certain action; or Thucydides may present the reader with arguments for both sides of the question, giving a complete picture of the situation. This is the logos. And then the ergon: The action the assembly decides upon is described, and we see the outcome, confirming or refuting what the speakers have said. The speeches are the hinges of history.
Not all Thucydidean narrative fits the dramatic logos-ergon pattern. Thucydides also uses a day-to-day type of narrative, composed of long stretches of close-packed detail, often highly compressed and difficult to follow. There is a certain degree of incompatibility between the logos-ergon narrative, which is an adaptation of Herodotus’s methods, and the day-today narrative, which is peculiar to Thucydides and arises from his need for accuracy and comprehensiveness. At times the story seems to almost separate into two histories: One of these is highly selective and schematic, consisting of the dramatic elaboration of a handful of important episodes, highlighted by much fictional speech making; the other type of narrative is highly comprehensive and often devoid of interpretation, apparently aimed at including as many events as possible for their own sake. What readers remember best about Thucydides is the first type, the dramatic set pieces: the Funeral Oration of Pericles, the great debate in the Athenian assembly over the fate of Mitylene, the chilling dialogue on Melos where the envoys of Athens explain the meaning of empire to a small state that happened to be in their way. These set pieces sometimes seem so unrelated to the detailed dayto-day narrative that some commentators have seen a conflict between Thucydides as selective artist and Thucydides as comprehensive fact gatherer. But more often, there is a creative tension between the two, producing a narrative unlike any other historical work ever written, a unique combination of intellectual detachment and emotional power. The big dramatic moments would lose effectiveness if we had not lived through the war with the participants; the events on Melos and Corcyra would lose their fascination and fearfulness if we had not followed the grim routine of the war summer by winter in slogging detail, so that when we finally come to Corcyra we can understand what such things can do to a social fabric and how easily they can happen again.
The purpose of narrative realism is to impart a new perspective on the past. The main impression we receive from reading Herodotus is the essential sameness of things within the cosmic order; but Thucydides emphasizes the uniqueness of events and the efforts of men to impose a human order on them. Herodotus sees mostly the similarity of the revolutions of the wheel of history; Thucydides is more interested in the variations. He makes the point—a simple one, but the essential key to an empirical approach to history—that the future is never an exact reflection of the past: “If [this work] be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge 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, I shall be content” (1.22 [trans. Crawley]). There are repeated patterns in the past, for otherwise Thucydides would not be able to make sense of the past at all, but they are the patterns of air and water. Under the glass of eternity, all things may look alike, but under the glass of politics, all things are unique. The whole point of his preamble is to show the unique scale and significance of the Peloponnesian War.
There is no sense of cosmic order in Thucydides. The ultimate aitia of Herodotus, the will of the gods or fates, is quietly moved upstairs and out of sight. Instead of Herodotus’s two levels of causation, the divine and the human, Thucydides has only “human things” (to anthropinon). It is this anthropinon, the constancy of human nature, that makes events repeat themselves in fluid patterns that can be compared, contrasted, and organized into a connected narrative; this is the purpose of the new style of political realism. The central metaphor of Herodotus is a chain of retribution that tends always to run against mysterious limits, and his central theme is the helplessness of man before fate. In contrast, the central metaphor Thucydides uses is the antithesis of words and action, and his theme is the effort of men to control fortune through the exercise of intelligence and planning, art and skill. As Herodotus’s retributive cycle corresponds to the social and political realities of the archaic world he portrayed, so Thucydides’s narrative strategies reflect realistically the way political decisions were made during the Peloponnesian War—by open debate carried out in the spirit of dialectical rationalism taught by the Sophists.
The realistic style implies a candid acceptance of raison d’état. Causation is only a “human thing” and, furthermore, not all human things are the result of deliberate intention, nor are all open to moral evaluation. Thucydides made an effort unique in ancient historiography to describe the causes of war and empire in terms of long-developing institutional factors that the actors are not wholly conscious of and that are not wholly chosen by them. He tried to find the locus of power in states and resources rather than in individual wills. Moreover, he attempted to understand interstate relations in terms of the strategic logic of power relationships operating in an anarchic and amoral world.
Thucydides’s opening section, called the “Archaeology,” introduces a group of themes that play important roles throughout his narrative: the hegemonic tendency of the strong to dominate the weak, the deciding factors of resources (chremata) and preparedness (paraskeue) in determining that balance of power, and the value of sea power as a source of these qualities. Herodotus had been well aware of the importance of sea power. He probably gave Thucydides the idea developed in the “Archaeology” that there had been a succession of thalassocracies in the Aegean going back to the legendary Minos and culminating in the Athenian empire (Herodotus 3.122). Herodotus knew that the naval power of Athens had been the deciding factor in the Persian Wars (Herodotus 7.139), an observation that actually implies everything Thucydides has to say about causation, but to Herodotus these are casual asides that are not allowed to interrupt the grand flow of his story. Thucydides saw in them the key to history. Only sea power, he thought, tends to expand beyond clear limits, and only sea power permits preparedness and empire on the Athenian scale. Naval policy—so obviously a techne, so clearly dependent upon elaborate technology, money, planning, and preparedness—had imparted a peculiar precocity to Athenian political discourse, the most lasting monument to which was Thucydidean realism.
If these are the causes of wars, they are outside human blame. No one was responsible for the Peloponnesian War, “without parallel for the misfortunes that it brought upon Hellas.” The war was made inevitable by the “growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon” (1.23, trans. Crawley). The point of this sentence is not to place the responsibility for the war upon either Athenian policy or Spartan policy—though modern commentators have argued for one or the other—but upon both. The real cause was a problem situation, compounded of rising power and reacting power, that combined to anangkasi the war—they “made war inevitable,” in Crawley’s translation. The impersonal institutional factors that bring about these long-term shifts in the balance of power are the anangkai, the necessities of war.
Was the new style intended to impart any lessons, other than those intended by Herodotus? The lessons of Herodotus are those of the poets. Herodotus’s repeated warnings not to overstep boundaries teach no practical political lessons because we never know where those boundaries are. The revolutions of the wheel are erratic. Croesus, had he taken to the sea, would have overstepped limits (Herodotus 1.27); but somehow it was all right for the Athenians to take to the sea, and Herodotus does not tell us what the difference between the two situations may have been. At the height of his power, Xerxes makes a genuine effort to resist the temptation to cross the Hellespont into Europe, but he is tricked and manipulated by divine forces (Herodotus 7.12ff.).
Thucydides pretended to a bleak and exact realism that was supposed to make his story more “useful” (ophelimos) than that of Herodotus, and many have supposed he wanted to teach practical lessons in statecraft and warfare to a select audience of generals and politicians like himself. But it is as difficult to extract lessons of immediate practicality from Thucydides as from Herodotus, because Thucydides emphasizes the unpredictability of events even more than Herodotus. Therefore, some have concluded that Thucydides’s history is essentially another commemorative epic whose usefulness, like that of Herodotus, lies in its contribution to human knowledge and moral sensibility.
His work is certainly that, but the concern with realistic detail and the focus on the decision making process suggest that Thucydides did mean the new style to be useful in a political and strategic sense. It is not accidental that the same issues rise again and again in Thucydides’ narrative, creating running arguments that bind the story together. One central theme is raison d’état, the conflict between the just and the advantageous in human affairs. The earliest clear formulation of this idea in all literature is to be found in the defenses put forward by Athenian orators to justify the Athenian empire. The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 431 B.C. declare
that it was not a very wonderful action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up under pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honour, and interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger. (1.76 [trans. Crawley])
Some Sophist must have popularized this tripartite scheme of the causes of war, as versions of it turn up in several authors; I have already quoted similar passages from Xenophon and Aristotle. It was used by Thucydides’s translator Hobbes, who reformulated the scheme thusly: “In the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; second, diffidence; thirdly, glory. The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.”6 The Athenians do not deny the existence of the sphere of justice; they do not claim that might makes right, a position attributed to certain Sophists of that time in the dialogues of Plato. Rather, they claim that the mechanics of power in interstate relations limit the scope of justice, for men and states are uniformly egotistical and naturally at odds with one another. Even in interstate relations, justice ought to be observed as far as possible, and they claim Athens had in fact done this: “Praise is due to all who, if not so superior to human nature as to refuse dominion, yet respect justice more than their position compels them to do.” This thesis is repeated by Athenian orators whenever they have to defend their empire to outsiders. The scope of justice, very limited even in the speech at Sparta, is further diminished in the later defenses—the other two major speeches are those on Melos (5.85ff.) and on Sicily (6.82ff.). This style of raison d’état is particularly associated with Athenian oratory, though we also hear it in the speech of Hermocrates at Syracuse (4.61). It is surely no accident that Syracuse is also a naval democracy.
The principles of raison d’état seem to be taken for granted by Thucydides himself in his account of the events leading up to the war. They are taken for granted by Pericles, the Athenian general whom Thucydides admired more than any other living politician. The author attributes to Pericles several major speeches (especially those at 1.140 and 2.60) on strategy—the first strategy, in the sense of a rational long-term plan for foreign policy, described in all literature. Pericles brushes aside traditional notions of just warfare: “For what you hold [the empire] is, to speak somewhat plainly, a tyranny; to take it perhaps was wrong, but to let it go is unsafe. And men of these retiring views, making converts of others, would quickly ruin a state … such qualities are useless to an imperial city, though they may help a dependency to an unmolested servitude” (2.64, trans. Crawley). The strategy he proposes amounts to a drastic break with traditional agonal notions of warfare. He persuades the Athenians to refuse battle on land and to allow their ancestral fields to be laid waste—the ultimate dishonor according to traditional views—and to exploit the enemy’s lack of sea power, fighting a long war of attrition without decisive battles. These arguments demonstrate the brilliant political culture developed by the Sophists. They may be almost wholly Thucydides’s inventions except for the main points, but they show the level of argument that must have been common in the Athenian assembly.
Is raison d’état therefore the “useful” lesson Thucydides wants his history to teach? Does he mean to show how intelligence (gnome) can control fortune (tyche)? Does he want his readers to emulate Themistocles, founder of Athenian sea power (who could “excellently divine the good and evil which lay hid in the unseen future,” 1.139), and Pericles, its first great strategist? The text may easily be read that way. Yet the lessons are never clear. Gnome turns out to be a fragile weapon. Just after this encomium to Themistocles, we are told of his death in exile, perhaps by suicide. The Funeral Oration of Pericles is followed immediately by the great plague. Intelligence is constantly frustrated by fortune, the more so the deeper we get into the war. The long series of logoi alternating with erga give the effect of cumulative experience, but often they demonstrate a failure to learn from experience. By the time we reach the Corcyraean revolution the repetitiousness of human situations seems no longer an opportunity, but a trap. The will to power seems inescapable, yet power will always raise up other powers to check its growth: The inevitable expansion of a city like Athens will run up against the inevitable resistance of a city like Sparta; our most careful exercises in preparedness will encounter somebody better prepared. These warnings are reiterated in the speeches and confirmed by the narrative, wherein we see one well-laid plan after another foiled by the chaos of war. The only general lesson would appear to be the one stated at the start of the war by the Athenians at Sparta: “Consider the vast influence of accident in war, before you are engaged in it. As it continues, it generally becomes an affair of chances, chances from which neither of us is exempt, and whose event we must risk in the dark” (1.78, trans. Crawley).
It is difficult to say what general conclusions the author drew, because the few comments he makes in his own person are obiter dicta and are not to be taken as his definitive interpretation of his history. His history was supposed to be its own definitive interpretation. Still, one of these obiter dicta is unusually revealing. In his account of the civil strife (stasis) on Corcyra, Thucydides intrudes himself into his narrative to point out a general lesson in a tone of unaccustomed passion:
The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in the symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes … Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared. (3.82-83 [trans. Crawley])
This is one of those patterns that recur in the course of “human things,” the contemplation of which makes their retelling “useful.” The author of this passage could not have entirely shared the amoral sophistic doctrines of raison d’état recited by many of his statesmen. The motives that lead to war may get out of hand, turn on the city, and tear it apart. War, as Thucydides says here, is a rough master, a harsh teacher (biaios didaskolos)—a statement that A. W. Gomme, in his commentary on Thucydides, called the nearest thing to a moral the historian had to offer. Certainly this warning is one of the lessons Thucydides wanted his audience to take away: The demands of justice are not forever ignored with impunity, even under the necessities of war.
The most thorough discussion of the conflict between the just and the advantageous is the debate over Mitylene, an Athenian ally that had revolted in wartime and was to be punished by the execution of all Mitylenean adult citizens (3.37-48)7 Cleon defends the proposed massacre in the name of justice; Diodotus argues for mercy in the name of expediency. The opposing principles seem at first clearly cut, but they start to blur as soon as the reader tries to analyze the complex arguments. Cleon’s arguments are really based upon expediency as much as justice. He argues that ruthless punishment is just but also advantageous, as it will deter other dependencies from rebellion; in fact, he admits that even if it were unjust, they would still have to carry out the punishment.
To sum up shortly, I say that if you follow my advice you will do what is just toward the Mitylenians, and at the same time expedient; while by a different decision you will not so much oblige them as pass sentence on yourselves. For if they were right in rebelling, you must be wrong in ruling. However, if, right or wrong, you determine to rule, you must carry out your principle and punish the Mitylenians as your interest requires; or else you must give up your empire and cultivate honesty without danger. (3.40)
Diodotus’s counterargument purports to be based upon expediency alone: “The question before us as sensible men is not their guilt, but our interests. Though I prove them ever so guilty, I shall not, therefore, advise their death, unless it be expedient… we are not in a court of justice, but in a political assembly; and the question is not justice, but how to make the Mitylenians useful to Athens” (3.44 [trans. Crawley]). Often this passage is quoted as a classic statement of Machiavellian realism, and often it is assumed that the otherwise unknown Diodotus is Thucydides’s mouthpiece. Both assumptions are questionable. Diodotus actually ends up arguing on grounds of justice as well as expediency, observing that it is neither just nor expedient to punish the Mitylenian common folk along with the oligarchs, for the oligarchs were responsible for the revolt, and the common people in Mitylene and in other cities are well disposed toward the Athenian democracy. It seems unlikely that Thucydides shared this view. He disagreed with Diodotus’s assessment of the imperial situation, believing that the Athenian empire was generally disliked by its subjects, no matter what their class.8 His comments on the Corcyraean turmoil, which come soon after the debate over Mitylene, show that the most hateful and destructive aspect of the war to him was the way both sides followed the strategy of Diodotus—using ideological pretexts to meddle in the internal constitutions of cities and stir up civil strife.
In this debate, Thucydides seems to be exploring the consequences of raison d’état. This is the first explicit discussion in literature of the relationship between the two vocabularies of war, the moral and the strategic; and the main point appears to be the difficulty of separating them, for neither Cleon nor Diodotus manages to disentangle expediency from justice, and neither policy could have saved the Athenian empire. In its tantalizing inconclusiveness, the debate resembles the teaching methods of Socrates, Thucydides’s contemporary.
Thus, the special “usefulness” of realistic history was to provide examples of political discourse like this. For all his irony and skepticism, Thucydides seems to believe in the value of rational political discussion. He very often uses might-have-been arguments: If the Greek expedition in the Trojan War had been properly financed, the Greeks might have taken Troy at once (1.11); if Nicias had attacked Syracuse at once, the Sicilian expedition might have succeeded (7.42); if the Persians had intervened after that, they might have ended the war, but they preferred to keep the balance of power (8.87); if the Spartans had followed up their victory at Eretria in 411 B.C., they could have ended the war then (8.96). Thucydides wants to educate his readers to think things through in this way, exploring all possible alternatives and contingencies, shifting all arguments, subjecting all erga to logos. He must have entertained to some degree the hope that intelligence could master and ride the course of fortune. His actors, in the dark, must risk the chances of war, but as they grope, they try to light the way with intelligence and experience as best they can. For all his pessimism, Thucydides hoped to provide his readers with vicarious experience in the making of such decisions, so that they might divine a bit more clearly the good and evil hidden in the future. In such a realistic appraisal of events, there is a kind of usefulness that derives neither from the practicality of the orator nor from the contemplation of the philosopher. This is the utility of history. The purpose of historical examples is not to furnish simple precepts but to extend and stimulate the political intelligence. By studying how people behaved in a large number of actual cases, we can deduce some criteria of possibility and probability and use these as guides to action. The study of history may help us to avoid some mistakes: to stop the growth of empire before the point of overextension; to be mindful of the need for restraint and calculation; to know that the just and the advantageous, whatever clever Sophists might say, are strangely linked; and if we cannot avoid our fate, to adjust to it. The most adequate summary of Thucydides’s intentions seems to me to be that of Colin Macleod, “a passionate, though often gloomy, enquiry into the possibility of rational behaviour in politics and war.”9
The Legacy of Thucydides
One of the problems about Greek military thought is to explain why the brilliant strategic philosophy of the fifth century faded so quickly. Doubtless this was partly because the art of war in the fourth century became terribly complicated. The main issue of the fifth century, the conflict between the traditional hoplite strategy of pitched battle and the Periclean naval strategy of avoiding battle, became irrelevant, for the Peloponnesian War showed that as a pure strategy neither would work. Old-fashioned hoplite warfare makes its last appearance in Plato’s Republic, where it exists in a heavenly city that will never be realized on earth. The purely naval strategy attempted by Pericles had been equally discredited and the limitations of sea power were becoming obvious. There was great fear of enemy invasion, for the threat to the land was no longer symbolic; the well-organized and well-supplied armies of the fourth century were capable of inflicting real devastation on agriculture. Therefore, it was deeply desirable to keep warfare away from one’s own territory, and the preventive strike became a favorite strategy. Timolaus of Corinth, urging an immediate attack on Sparta in 394 B.C., pointed out that the best way to deal with wasps is to burn them in their nest (Xenophon, Hellenica 4.2.12). The anti-Macedonian speeches of Demosthenes repeatedly urged the Athenians to attack the Macedonian wasps in their nest or at least to fight them as far from Attic soil as possible (Third Philippic 52). If the enemy could not be stopped by a preventive strike, then he must be stopped at the borders, and much planning and money were now spent on border fortifications, a pet subject for Xenophon (.Memorabilia 3.5.25-27, 3.6.10-11). If the border could not be held, the enemy must be met in pitched battle outside the walls in the old-fashioned way, though with more complicated tactics. The last resort was to endure a siege, because siege tactics were increasingly formidable and, after about 350, deadly.10 Demosthenes told the Athenians in 341 that in his lifetime no art or craft had undergone such revolutionary improvement as the military art (Third Philippic 47).
There was intense discussion of all this in the fourth century, but it rarely rose above the practical and technical. As we have seen, orators rarely handled strategic problems, the causes and consequences of warfare, or the ethical problems of justice versus advantage with the philosophical fearlessness and sophistication of the fifth century—though we should remember that Thucydides may have made fifth-century oratory sound more philosophical than it really was.
Another sign of the increasingly practical and technical quality of military thought is the appearance of a professional military literature. Around 350 B.C., a soldier called Aeneas the Tactician wrote a series of handbooks on the art of war, perhaps known collectively as the Strategica (Art of generalship), which assumed the status of a standard reference work in the Greek and, later, in the Latin world.11 In the following century, this work was epitomized by a general named Cineas, who was in the service of King Pyrrhus of Epirus; this epitome was still being used by Cicero in the first century B.C. Only the section dealing with sieges (The Defense of Cities) has come down to us; perhaps if we had more of it, we would be more impressed, but the extant books are narrowly technical. One aspect of this work that makes it worth mentioning here is Aeneas’s interest in collecting tricks and surprises for the deception of the enemy, illustrated by historical anecdotes. These devices, later called stratagemata, became a principal subject of later Greek and Latin military literature and one of the channels whereby the classical realist approach to warfare was transmitted to medieval and Renaissance Europe. That will be considered further in a later chapter.
But what of the historians? The fifth century had bequeathed two major narrative styles, the linear epic style of Herodotus and the antithetical realistic style of Thucydides, which were associated with two different views of the world—the encomiastic Herodotean world of moral achievement and cosmic law, versus Thucydidean pessimism and irony. At the beginning of the fourth century, the influence of Thucydides was strong; several authors wrote continuations of his unfinished history, of which only the Hellenica (.Affairs of Greece) of Xenophon survives. But later in the century, the Herodotean style and manner seems to have won out. Even in Xenophon, it is the main literary influence, and since Xenophon imitated Herodotus in a fashion much easier for later historians to read and to imitate, this style remained the main tradition of historical writing to the end of antiquity. Herodotus doubtless owed much of his popularity to the fact that he had set the upheavals of war and empire within a universal moral order. But by the fourth century, Herodotus’s faith in cosmic order was largely replaced by the cult of Tyche (Fortune, or Chance), worshiped as a goddess. Even Xenophon had lost interest in the causes of wars: The central theme of his Hellenica is the unpredictability of history, and the lessons he wants to convey are mostly practical lessons for commanders, which he collected in his Education of Gyrus at greater length and with more freedom from the encumbrances of historical fact. Polybius’s acerbic comments on his predecessors leave the impression that most Hellenistic historians were fascinated by dramatic and unexpected turns of fortune, which they often exploited for sensationalistic effect in a fashion Polybius thought more appropriate for a tragic poet than a historian (the sort of tragedy he has in mind in this passage [15.36] sounds more like Seneca than Sophocles). The example of Alexander the Great and the influence of the many lost Alexander historians could only have strengthened the tendency to focus on meteoric individuals and sensational effects. The emphasis on unpredictability led to a widespread belief that the function of history was to teach moral lessons, especially on how to bear the changes of Fortune.12
But there were some who continued the Thucydidean tradition. Perhaps our greatest loss is Hieronymus of Cardia, courtier of the Antigonid kings, whose history of the wars of Alexander’s successors covered the years 322-273 B.C. Some of it survives in the form of an epitome written by Diodorus of Sicily in the first century B.C.: These books (18 through 20) are unlike anything else in Diodorus in their clear descriptions of strategy, realistic battle narratives, and use of speeches and debates to clarify issues.
But our understanding of this tradition is dependent mostly upon Polybius of Megalopolis, its only representative and, indeed, the only Hellenistic historian whose work has survived unless we count the late epitomizer Diodorus.
Polybius self-consciously tried to revive Thucydidean history, which he thought had been neglected by recent historians. His methodological observations are of interest because he stated the purposes of this type of history more explicitly than Thucydides ever did (Thucydides left it to his narrative to say this). He calls this tradition pragmatike historia, for which “realistic history” seems the most adequate translation—the adjective pragmatike implies the serious, the businesslike, the systematic, the practically useful. Polybius means by it a narrative devoted exclusively to political and military affairs, stripped of all rhetorical embellishment and entertainments, meant for an audience of active statesmen and soldiers (Polybius 9.1-2).
I have recorded these events [of the First Punic War] in the hope that readers of this history may profit from them, for there are two ways by which all men may reform themselves, either by learning from their own errors or from those of others … From this I conclude that the best education for the situations of actual life consists of the experience we acquire from the study of serious history. For it is history alone which without causing us harm enables us to judge what is the best course in any situation or circumstance. (1.35 [trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert])
Realistic history provides an enhanced awareness of recurrent situations and possibilities, always informed by appreciation of the uncertainties of war. It focuses on the decisionmaking process: “The special function of history, particularly in relation to speeches, is first of all to discover the words actually used, whatever they were, and next to establish the reason why a particular action or argument failed or succeeded” (12.25b). Polybius is much more aware than Thucydides of the difficulties created by fictive speechwriting in a history that purports to be realistic. And causal analysis, Polybius claims, is essential: “Neither writers nor readers of history should confine their attention to the narrative of events, but must also take account of what preceded, accompanied, and followed them” (3.31 [trans. Scott-Kilvert]).
Polybius’s most original contribution is his view that causes are most adequately explored in a “universal” (koina) history. He thought that this kind of history became possible after the Second Punic War, because only then did the whole Mediterranean world become unified under Rome.
Now my history possesses a certain distinctive quality which is related to the extraordinary spirit of the times in which we live, and it is this. Just as Fortune [Tyche] has steered almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and forced them to converge upon one and the same goal, so it is the task of the historian to present to his readers under one synoptical view the process by which she [Fortune] has accomplished this general design … while various historians deal with isolated wars and certain of the subjects connected with them, nobody, so far as I am aware, has made any effort to examine the general and comprehensive scheme of events. (1.4 [trans. Scott-Kilvert])
This concept of history as a unified organic structure, which becomes intelligible only when we see the entire pattern, was a profound insight. Unfortunately, Polybius could not clearly explain why this is so. His discussions of causation often suggest that he thought of the causes of wars in terms of conscious strategies. But in the passage that follows, he shows an awareness that there are impersonal, institutional, Thucydidean forces working in history:
Thus I regard the war with Antiochus as having originated from that with Philip, the war with Philip from that with Hannibal, and the Hannibalic War from that fought for the possession of Sicily [First Punic War], while the intermediate events, however many and diverse they may be, all converge upon the same issue. All these tendencies can be recognized and understood from a general (koina) history, but this is not the case with histories of separate wars. (3.32 [trans. Scott-Kilvert])
Polybius never quite decides whether Rome had a conscious plan for world dominion. Sometimes he describes the Hannibalic War as the first step in a Roman strategy of world conquest and sometimes as the event that first led the Romans to conceive the idea of world conquest (1.3, 1.63, 6.50). He is certain there is a grand design, though he is not sure whether it is the plan of Rome or Tyche; but he is sure that the traditional war monograph is inadequate to reveal it. He may not explain clearly just why it is useful to see the big picture, but he did not really have to. His history had demonstrated it.
The realism of Polybius was less bleak and uncompromising than that of Thucydides. He knew perfectly well that states tended to follow their own interests. He commended the Syracusans for switching their support from Rome to Carthage in the First Punic War, though Rome had been their loyal friend, on the grounds that it is always prudent for small states to maintain the balance of power (1.83—this is the earliest passage known to me in which the concept of the balance of power is stated as a general principle). He knew that the just and the advantageous rarely coincide, but he had high praise for statesmen who could combine them (21.32); he admitted no excuse for breaches of faith, and one of the reasons he admired the Romans was that they preserved better than the contemporary Greeks the ancient hoplite traditions of honest battle (13.3). Unlike Thucydides, he introduces many historical examples simply for moral imitation, in the Hellenistic fashion.13 Nor did he try to imitate the harsh antithetical style that won Thucydides his austere immortality. In the eyes of posterity, his sound morals did not compensate for his lack of stylistic brilliance. One hundred years after Polybius died, the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus listed him, along with many other prolix and dull Hellenistic historians, as one of the authors no one ever read through. Only a fragment of his huge narrative survived to the Renaissance, when Polybius finally won recognition, but even then, not so much for the Thucydidean qualities described here as for his constitutional theories, which are treated in the next chapter.
Notes
1. E. L. Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 23 (1982), 223-233; “The Hoplomachoi and Vegetius’ Spartan Drillmasters,” Chiron 13 (1983), 1-20.
2. I owe this comparison to Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford, 1992), 61-63. The speeches are translated in The Older Sophists, ed. Rosemary Sprague (Columbia, S.C., 1972).
3. Aristotelis Ars Rhetorica, ed. Rudolf Kassel (Berlin, 1976), 23; see also Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. George Kennedy (New York, 1991).
4. The literature on Thucydides is vast. For a short introduction to the subject, see Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore, 1987). Other recent works to which I am indebted include Virginia Hunter, Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973); Lowell Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); P. R. Pouncy, The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism (New York, 1980); H. H. Rawlings III, The Structure of Thucydides’ History (Princeton, 1981); W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, 1984); Colin Macleod, Collected Essays (Oxford, 1983); Adam Parry, The Language of Achilles and Other Papers (Oxford, 1989).
5. For guides to this controversy, see W. R. Connor, “A Post Modernist Thucydides?” Classical Journal 72 (1977), 289-298; K. J. Dover, “Thucydides ‘as History’ and ‘as Literature/” History and Theory 22 (1983), 54-63. A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (London, 1988), argues the “literature” interpretation.
6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 1.13. See Gabriella Slomp, “Hobbes, Thucydides, and the Three Greatest Things,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990), 565-586; L. M. Johnson, Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism (De Kalb, 111., 1993).
7. The Mitylenian debate is discussed in nearly every major study of Thucydides. I have been influenced by Colin Macleod’s essay in Collected Essays, “Reason and Necessity: Thucydides III 9-14, 37-48,” 88-102, and by Clifford Orwin, “The Just and the Advantageous in Thucydides: The Case of the Mitylenian Debate,” American Political Science Review 78 (1984), 485-494.
8. An attempt to defend the Athenian empire from Thucydides’s critique by G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, “The Character of the Athenian Empire,” Historia 3 (1954-1955), 1-41, has had considerable influence, but I do not find it persuasive. Ste. Croix argues that Thucydides’s speeches are largely fictions apart from the main point, so when Thucydides makes Pericles and other Athenian orators say the empire is hated by its subjects, we should take this as Thucydidean editorializing. I share this view of Thucydides’s speeches, but that does not mean he was free to make his characters say anything he wanted. Literary realism requires dramatic plausibility, and I find it impossible to believe the historian could make politicians like Pericles and Cleon declare in the open assembly that the Athenian empire was a tyranny detested by its subjects unless this was a well-known fact. Thucydides did not gain his reputation for veracity that way. If he also shows us cases where the loyalties of faction overrode loyalty to the city, there is no contradiction: He describes this phenomenon in detail in his account of the Corcyraean revolutions, and there he emphasizes that such factional and ideological conflict is a new thing, largely brought on by the war itself.
9. Macleod, Collected Essays, 70.
10. On fourth-century military thought, see J. K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley, 1970); Josiah Ober, Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian Land Frontier; 404-322 B.C. (Leiden, 1985); E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden, 1988).
11. Aeneas the Tactician: How to Survive Under Siege, ed. David Whitehead (Oxford, 1990); and Wheeler, Stratagem.
12. The following treatment of later Greek historiography is indebted particularly to Charles Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, 1983); K. S. Sacks, Polybius and the Writing of History (Berkeley, 1981), and Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton, 1990); and Jane Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia (Oxford, 1981).
13. The moralistic side of Polybius is brought out by A. M. Eckstein, Moral Vision in “The Histories” of Polybius (Berkeley, 1995).