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Justice and Empire: Athenian Silence and the Representation of Athens Abroad 5 i. introduction To this point I have for the most part focused my reading of Athenian democratic politics in the History on the interactions of Athenians in the assembly. The last two chapters in particular have centered on what I in Chapter 2 called the “deliberative mode” of Athenian action. Consideration of that mode of action centers our attention on the struggle of elites to win political inXuence and the manner in which the Athenian demos, by the silent power of its presence, problematizes all elite attempts to control the meaning of politics, action, and identity in the city. A full understanding of Athenian democratic politics, though, also requires attention to those moments in which silence prevails in the Athenian assembly. I turn in Chapter 6 to address more directly what I have called the “sudden mode” of Athenian action. In the present chapter I turn my attention to moments of Athenian action that appear at Wrst glance to exist somewhere between sudden action and fully deliberative action, focusing in particular on the conference at Sparta in book 1 and the Melian Dialogue in book 5. In such moments, though Thucydides reports no speeches given at Athens itself, Athenians do speak elsewhere. At a theoretical level, beyond grappling with this juxtaposition of the silence of hoi Athenaioi at home with the appearance of Athenian “envoys” abroad, understanding these moments requires thinking about the complex manifestations of Athenian plurality and Athenian unity as the Athenians come to act in the Greek world. More immediately, these moments bring to the fore the question of justice in the context of Athenian empire. ii. athenian justice at home and abroad The language of justice appears in the pages of Thucydides chieXy in the realm of “international relations.” This is not, of course, to make the more eccentric claim that justice reigns in the Greece that Thucydides portrays. Rather, I mean to point to the seemingly simple fact that speakers in the History refer to justice almost exclusively in the context of arguments about how one city does or should act toward other cities. This observation holds both when cities interact with one another through speech—as at Sparta in book 1, at Plataea in book 3, and at Melos in book 5—and when the citizens of a single polis gather to determine what to do. More particularly, for the Athenians, be they at home or abroad, questions of justice merge with the central issues of war and empire. Have the Athenians practiced justice in dealing with their “allies?” (How) ought justice to be considered in dealing with vanquished foes? More broadly, what role should considerations of right play in a war among cities of equal and unequal degrees of might? To this focus on justice as an aspect of “foreign policy,” we can compare the apparent absence of analogous questions about Athenian “internal politics.”1 As we have seen in Chapter 4, the discussion of democracy by Athenian speakers revolves around problems of collective political judgment . In reXecting on their way of political life, the Athenians repeatedly struggle with the broad question of how their politics does and should work and, more particularly, with questions about the proper relationship between advisers and demos as the city comes to make decisions. We can no doubt imagine justice in internal politics becoming a concern for the Athenians as well. The Athenians, that is, might well exercise their collective judgment in consideration of the “right” or “just” distribution of political power and political roles. They might, for example, ask whether it is just that some citizens seem to have more inXuence over the city’s decisions than others. But for the most part they do not.2 Justice, again, 126 silence and democracy 1. Thucydides himself does not suggest any sort of clear distinction between “foreign policy ” and “internal politics.” Though I use the contemporary distinction for the sake of clarity here, much of the present chapter (and Chapter 6 as well) will be concerned with questions that Thucydides’ account poses regarding the intertwining of the interactions of the Athenians in Athens and actions taken by Athenians and others in the course of Greek affairs. 2. Outside Athens, the Syracusan Athenagoras hints at an argument for democracy based on justice; in democracy, he says, the people “individually and collectively, have a fair share,” while oligarchy “offers the many a portion of the dangers and...

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