Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War by Martha Taylor (review)

In this interesting and original book, Taylor argues that Thucydides offers an extensive critique of Pericles’ “radical redefinition” of the city of Athens, by which she means his vision of the city as divorced from its physical entity and re-conceptualized as the empire, dependent on its fleet. As she demonstrates, the ability to redefine the city was crucial to Pericles’ war strategy and was continued by his successors, but ultimately and inexorably resulted in the disastrous campaign in Sicily and left the Athenians vulnerable to stasis. In other words, the Athenians’ willingness to abandon their real city, the very strategy that had saved them during the Persian Wars, ultimately contributed to their downfall in the Peloponnesian War.

Taylor develops this central idea in five chapters. In the first, she elucidates more precisely Pericles’ radical redefinition of the city. As she argues, Thucydides prepares the reader for Pericles’ re-conceptualization of the city, which he does not articulate until the end of book one, through the presentation of the intangible factors that make a city great in the Archaeology, a city’s self-destruction through stasis in the Epidamnus episode, the emphasis upon the Athenians’ distinctive character and restless nature in the speeches given at the Spartan congress in 432, and the demonstration of this very nature in the Pentekontaetia. Taylor demonstrates that Pericles’ vision of the city is particularly radical because he recognizes no difference between the traditional homeland in Attica and any other Athenian possessions, and effectually goes far beyond the abandonment of the city in 480, which was a temporary emergency measure with the ultimate goal of restoring the physical city itself. Thucydides, however, undercuts Pericles’ vision of Athens as an immaterial entity severed from its physical territory by emphasizing the Athenians’ reluctance to leave their homes and, through subtle subversion in Pericles’ funeral oration and the plague narrative, hinting at its self-delusional unreality and possible invitation to destruction.

In the subsequent four chapters, Taylor shows how Pericles’ redefinition of the city does in fact result in disaster for the Athenians, as their single-minded devotion to the pursuit of a naval empire abroad (according to Pericles, the city’s “real” territory) leads to both civil strife and the inability to focus upon their own home territory. She argues that Pericles’ successors continued to follow his policy even after his death, motivating the Athenian attack on Melos (Chapter 2) and the disastrous Sicilian expedition (Chapter 3). In the end, however, as Taylor correctly observes, it was not the Sicilian expedition that brought the city to its knees, but stasis, which she defines as “violent disagreement about conflicting ideas of the city” (189). In Chapter 4, Taylor discusses how the shift to oligarchy in 411 can be viewed as another redefinition of the city, as the rejection of the democracy, the (by now) traditional form of government in Athens. Here, she demonstrates how Thucydides offers a more nuanced view of the oligarchical “coup” of 411 than has previously been recognized, by hinting at how little resistance there actually was to the change of government and underlining the weakness of the Athenian attachment to democracy. In the final chapter, Taylor turns to the Athenians on Samos, who spearhead the return to democracy. While many commentators have found the Athenian democrats on Samos sympathetic (perhaps influenced by the modern idealization of democracy?), she convincingly argues that they too redefine the traditional city, this time by political affiliation, and their zealous political partisanship is potentially just as dangerous as Pericles’ belief that the true city was Athens’ overseas empire. As she concludes, Thucydides’ “narrative underscores the benefits of political compromise and implies that compromise and reconciliation are only possible for Athens around the image of the traditional city in Attica” (224).

As will be evident from this short synopsis, Taylor follows recent approaches to Thucydides that emphasize the internal allusions, significant repetitions, narrative...