Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty: Thucydides and the Language of Power

This is partly due to the subject-​matter; Herodotus was writing about the relatively cheerful subject (for a Greek) of a conflict which the united Greek cities won against a foreign invader, while Thucydides’ topic was a savage struggle among the no longer united Greek cities, a struggle which devastated Greece and which no side really won. (Technically Sparta won by conquering Athens, dissolving the Athenian empire, destroying Athens’ defensive walls, and installing an oligarchy friendly to themselves. But a year after the Spartan troops left, the Athenians overthrew the oligarchy; a little over a decade later, they rebuilt the walls; and a couple of decades after that, they’d in large part rebuilt their empire. How many dead bodies is such a fleeting victory really worth?)

But the contrast is also in large part a matter of temperament; Thucydides is a steely-​eyed political realist with a cynical view of human nature, ever ready to puncture romantic illusions about the Trojan War (I.1) or the origins of Athenian democracy (VI.19). Not for him Herodotus’s digressions on fascinating cultures, his collections of tall tales, or his professions of reliance on divine providence. If Herodotus’ history is Star Wars, with its excursions to exotic cantinas, and its plucky band of freedom fighters fending off the evil empire, then Thucydides’ history is Game of Thrones, a brutal and ruthless clash of ambitions in which the weak are trodden underfoot. It’s no accident that Thucydides was the favorite historian of Thomas Hobbes, who describes him as the author “in whom … the faculty of writing history is at the highest,” since “there is not extant any other (merely human) that doth more naturally and fully perform” the “principal and proper work of history,” namely, to “instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future.”¹

Thucydides (c. 460-​c. 400 BCE), an Athenian citizen, served as a general in the war, until he was accused of being responsible for a major military loss (he denied it), and was consequently sent into exile, much of which he spent in the company of Athens’ enemies, thus giving him insight into the perspectives of both sides of the war. During this period he apparently observed events at hand, interviewed people about events afar off, and kept careful notes; after the war he retired to his estate in Thrace and began assembling all this material into a magisterial history which, in the event, he never finished. (The first two books of Xenophon’s Hellenika, or History of My Times, seem to be intended as a posthumous completion of Thucydides’ History; in any case they a) begin where Thucydides stops, b) carry the narrative through to the end of the war, and c) are much more Thucydidean in tone and style than the rest of the Hellenika.)²

In his impatience with fanciful tales and sentimental illusions, and in his insistence on identifying underlying causes rather than stopping with superficial ones, Thucydides often seems strikingly modern. Indeed, at one point (I.1) he, like some displaced time traveler, describes, quite accurately, how the ruins of Athens and Sparta will look to later generations and how the two will differ in their appearance.

Yet while Thucydides is a magnificent writer and a brilliant historian, by the standards of modern historical research he shares some of the shortcomings of his predecessor. Indeed, he is even vaguer about his sources than Herodotus was. Also, the impression he gives of thoroughgoingness can be misleading; he covers so much that it is easy to overlook the possibility that he is omitting a great deal. For example, many Greeks in his day believed that the protectionist Megarian Decree was the principal cause of the war – indeed Aristophanes devoted a whole play, the Acharnians, to this economic analysis of the conflict³ – but Thucydides barely mentions the Decree, and were it not for rival sources like Aristophanes one would never guess that it might be important.

One of the most problematic features of Thucydides’ narrative is the lengthy speeches he assigns to various historical figures. His readers, from attending the tragic and comic theatre, would have been used to seeing moral and political issues dramatized through pairs of opposing speeches, and Thucydides duly supplies his audience with the same feature in his history. But how historical are the speeches?

Noting that some speeches he heard himself while others were reported to him (though he doesn’t tell us which are which), Thucydides explains that in either case it was “difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory”; hence his decision to “make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions,” while at the same time “adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”⁴ In other words, when Thucydides reports a speech by Pericles, what we’re getting is some mixture of Pericles and Thucydides, but the relative proportions are anyone’s guess.

Accordingly, just as it’s not easy to tell how far the speeches represent positions genuinely taken by the people he attributes them to, it’s not easy to tell how far the speeches represent Thucydides’ own views either. Most of the speeches share his own unsentimental realism, which might lead us to see the speakers as mouthpieces for the historian – except that the speakers are often arguing against one another. Thucydides puts enthusiastic defenses of democracy in the mouths of such figures as Pericles (II.7) and Athenagoras (VI.19) – we’ve looked at his main Pericles speech earlier in this series⁵ – but his own political preference appears to have been for the “mixed constitution” combining aspects of democracy and oligarchy;⁶ at any rate, he writes of the short-​lived Constitution of the 5000, which was an attempt at just such a mixed constitution:

Herodotus had attributed Athens’ rise to prominence to its democratic institutions;⁸ but Thucydides prefers a geographical explanation:

(Thucydides here anticipates Plato’s account in the Republic of how wealth breeds militarism.)¹⁰

Thucydides sometimes allows his speakers’ hard-​headed realism to be placed in the service of what might seem like bleeding-​heart goals. For example, he has the Athenian politician Diodotus argue against harsh punishments, but on purely pragmatic rather than compassionate grounds – namely, that punishments actually do a fairly poor job of deterrence, while clemency can motivate people to reform:

One of the most famous passages in Thucydides is his description of the effects of civil war in Corcyra and elsewhere, particularly as regards his account of linguistic change in service of political ends.

Nowadays the idea of politically motivated linguistic change is one that we associate with dystopian science-​fiction writers like Zamyatin,¹³ Rand,¹⁴ and Orwell;¹⁵ but the issue was likewise of concern to Hobbes, who, e.g., having distinguished three basic forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) according to whether the rule is by one, few, or many, goes on to say:

This alertness to the political use of language is one of the many lessons that Hobbes learned from Thucydides.