Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides' History

3. Deliberative Action and Athenian “Character”

Deliberative Action and Athenian “Character” 3 i. introduction But not on this occasion alone, but on many others as well, the Lacedaemonians proved the most convenient of all people for the Athenians to be at war with. For as the farthest from them in character (tropos)—the one people being quick, the other slow; the one enterprising , the other timid—they were obliging in general and particularly in the case of a naval power. The Syracusans demonstrated this; for because they were the most similar to the Athenians in character, they also fought the best against them. (8.96.5) Thucydides offers this comparison of the Spartans and the Athenians within a few chapters of the point at which the History abruptly ends. Amidst the internecine political struggles of the 400 and the 5000 in Athens, a Peloponnesian Xeet has engaged and destroyed twenty-two Athenian triremes off Eretria. With Athens itself suddenly left all but undefended by sea, the Spartans have a golden opportunity: they could blockade the Athenian port at the Piraeus and compel an unconditional surrender; or alternatively, they could feign an attack on the Piraeus, thus luring the remaining Athenian Xeet away from the shores of Ionia and the remnants of the Athenian empire in Asia Minor (8.96.4). In the event, the Spartans fail to act decisively at all, and Athens survives to begin a slow recovery (8.97). Thucydides’ suggestion that such reluctance is characteristic of the Spartans seemingly conWrms the analysis offered by the Corinthians at Sparta in book 1. The Corinthians warn the Spartans to take heed of “what sort of opponents [they] will have in the Athenians” and of “how greatly, let us say totally, they differ” from the Spartans themselves. Where the Spartans are “delayers,” the Athenians are “ready to act”; where the Spartans are “the most home-bound of all,” the Athenians are “always abroad”; where the Spartans are quick only “to preserve the status quo,” the Athenians are “deWnitely innovators and quick to form their plans and carry out whatever action they resolve” (1.70). Just as Thucydides says in book 8, the Athenians are bold, the Spartans timorous. The presence of such apparently similar accounts of the Athenians and Spartans near the beginning of the History and at its close clearly suggests the importance of some sort of collective “character” for both Thucydides and his speakers. Certainly, students of the History have found the idea of collective character to be of more than passing interest. Perhaps the most common approach stresses the consistent contrast between the Athenian and Spartan characters and its importance in explaining the course of the war. Lowell Edmunds, for example, describes this contrast as “programmatic ,” suggesting that it provides “the terms and concepts” by which both Thucydides and his Greeks “understand events.”1 Others focus more speciWcally on the Athenian character and the unfolding of its implications over the course of the war. Thus Steven Forde has argued that the “liberation ” at the heart of the Athenian character allows for the rise of the Athenian empire but proves “a corrosive incubus,” ultimately unleashing an “individualism” that “destroys the city in time.”2 72 silence and democracy 1. Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides, 89–90. For similar arguments, see J. H. Finley, Thucydides, 121; Pouncey, The Necessities of War, 78; and Kagan, The Archidamian War, 358. Along these lines, of particular interest is the situation of character as a key variable in a Thucydidean “causal theory of empire” as part of an attempt to make another of the “Great Books” relevant to “today’s behavioral science” by Bluhm, “Causal Theory in Thucydides ’ Peloponnesian War,” 32. Such an approach no doubt seemed particularly relevant in the Cold War atmosphere of the early 1960s, when the contrast between Athens and Sparta might be generalized, then mapped onto comparisons of American and Soviet “character.” For an insightful account of this apparent “immediate applicability” of Thucydides during the earlier years of the Cold War, see Connor, Thucydides, 3–8. Attempts such as Bluhm’s to read Thucydides as a scientist of some sort have generally fallen out of favor, as shown by Monoson and Loriaux, “The Illusion of Power and the Disruption of Moral Norms,” 285. Cochrane’s discussion of the inXuence of Hippocratic medicine on the History remains the most famous sustained account of Thucydides as scientist; Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History. 2. Forde, “Thucydides on the Causes of Athenian Imperialism,” 433 and...