Plato and Thucydides are often thought to inhabit opposing intellectual worlds. Nietzsche's judgment in his essay “What I Owe to the Ancients” is emblematic. Plato is the idealizing philosopher; Thucydides, the courageous realist. This distinction continues with variations in (for example) the classical studies of Jacqueline de Romilly and Gregory Crane and the philosophical works of Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams. However, some interpreters question this sharp separation. John T. Hogan does so in this thoughtful and educational, if sometimes puzzling, book.

Title notwithstanding, Hogan's intent is to offer a reading of Thucydides, with Plato as, initially, a helpful partner (xx, xxxvii, 179, 252). The book focuses mostly on the Athenian speeches represented over the course of Thucydides's book (xviii). Hogan traces how a civic logos serving Athens's common good degenerates into obsessive self-interest, eventually causing internal civil conflict (stasis) and defeat in the Peloponnesian War (ix, xviii, 166, 169, 236, 261–62). The tragedy is that a regime that could have “spread democracy to the Greek states of the Mediterranean” (287, cf. 75–76, 274) turned itself into an imperial tyranny that self-destructed (31, 89, 92).

While the story of Athenian decline is familiar, Hogan makes his case in a distinctive way, carefully detecting linguistic deteriorations across Thucydides's narrative. After analyzing how political stasis distorts language, he offers close readings of Pericles's speeches (logoi), the highest point of Athenian political discourse (41). Subsequent chapters track noble affirmations of an Athenian empire that respects justice (74–75) devolving into the manipulative demagoguery of Cleon, the naked threats of the Melian dialogue, the imperious, disastrous aggression against Sicily, and the subversion of Athens's democracy by the oligarchy known as the Four Hundred. Plato is a companion throughout, dramatizing the dangerous narcissism of Alcibiades in the dialogues Symposium and Gorgias and theorizing the accomplishments of the good politikos in the Statesman, supplying both an appreciation of and a critical standard applied to the activities of Pericles (ix, xviii, 33, 240, 255, 290).

Hogan is strongest when he stays closest to the text (requiring substantial prior acquaintance on the reader's part). The theoretical introduction concentrates on Thucydides's use of the word axiōsis in the account (3.82) of how Corcyra's devastating stasis perverted customary language. In this reading, axiōsis (from axios, worth, agō, weigh) points not simply to meaning or denotation but to active valuation (xxiii, 3–4, 6–9, 88), language as sociolinguistic agency. A central resource is Hannah Arendt, especially her characterization of power as a political praxis that “springs up between men as they act together” within a context of radical intersubjectivity (viii–ix, 70). Hogan then accompanies Thucydides as he narrates the disintegration of Athenian civic agency.

These interpretations are packed with illuminating insights. Pericles's language in the Funeral Oration weaves Athens's project of colonization together with its forcible memorialization of itself everywhere (23). Though Pericles dismisses Athens's need for a Homer to sing its praises, he does so himself, in a way that Thucydides criticizes in advance as exaggeration (41). Cleon's cynical rhetoric imitates Pericles's inspirational speeches (96). Stasis, plague, and a lust for conquest are comparable forms of violence that the city “falls into,” all diagnosed by variants of the same Greek word (122). The Athenians’ invention of horse racing for celebrating Delos's early festivals turns pathological with Alcibiades's extravagant hypercompetitiveness, a movement without rest (125–26). Nicias's employing the optative mood in his speeches on Sicily reveals the weakness of his efforts to discourage the invasion (167). The Four Hundred pervert the meaning of “the suitable” (hoi epitēdeioi) as they plot their conspiracy (264). There are many more of these. Taken together, they reveal a meticulously composed and intricately connected text and a subtle and carefully observant reader.

The book is less successful dealing with general questions. Some lines of argument need elaboration; some judgments seem inconsistent. Though there are occasional gestures (x, 77, 105, 113), there is no thematic treatment of tragedy until the last substantive chapter's last paragraph (278–79). Drawing on Aristotle's Poetics, Hogan sees tragic action as marked by reversals rooted in error, followed by a recognition that replaces ignorance with knowing (Poetics 1452a). Such recognition eludes most of Thucydides's characters. After the Sicilian disaster, the war's principals behave as if they were starting over (8.5.1). It may be worth asking how Thucydides's writing might differ from tragic poetry.

Though Pericles's speeches represent the high point of Athenian logos, his leadership was imperfect (22); indeed, the war may have resulted from some great error of his (278). At times, his failings seem technical (205n70), for example not taking needs for formalized structures and leadership succession seriously (xxxiv, 35, 43, 93, 178, 278). Perhaps Pericles might have been a better political leader if he thought more like James Madison (xxxii–xxxiii; 123–24). Yet in his last speech, Pericles envisages a non-Madisonian Athens whose name will live in eternal memory because of its multiple wars (2.64.3–4). This is not a technical misstep but an ethical error about the content of the best life (273). The late Peter Euben once reminded me that while we know Thucydides's response to failure in Sicily, we do not know how he would have interpreted success.

Hogan surprisingly changes perspective when Plato's role shifts from interpretive resource to philosophical guide. Though they both criticize Pericles, Thucydides and Plato offer different alternatives. Thucydides values knowledge of human things over Periclean action; Plato embraces a higher knowledge (272–73); their differences now seem continuous, not polar. Here, Hogan is indebted (fully acknowledged) to the work of Leo Strauss. Yet does this shift mean that Thucydides can be best understood through the lens of Platonic political philosophy? Questions arise. If Plato partners with Thucydides in revealing the Athenian ideal's tragedy, what becomes of the Republic's “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (607b–c)? Is there really the equivalent of an incipient democracy project (274) in either writer? The judgment (99) that “for Thucydides as for Plato there is a knowledge of things apart from words” needs more explanation/defense.

Arendt's (important) presence provokes questions as well. Sometimes Hogan represents stasis as an organic affliction (ix, xxxvii, 123), suggesting that Athens's political deterioration was somehow inevitable (xliii–xliv, 47, 134). But Arendt valorizes politics’ capacity for beginning something altogether new, a seeming denial of inevitability (The Human Condition [University of Chicago Press, 1958], 246–47). It is also difficult to see her collaborating seamlessly with Plato, suspecting, as she does, his alleged substitution of making for acting (HC, 225); she singles out the Statesman for particular criticism (HC, 222–23, 227).

Such questions make comparative readings of Thucydides and Plato even more interesting and even less conclusive. For Hogan, Thucydides contributes to Athenian civic conversations and, implicitly, to ours as well (xxv, 290). A colleague once asked how such an intricate book, written to be read and reread, could converse. Great question. The best answer I could muster was that it can be a resource for continuing conversations among its readers, always, of course, needing words. If that answer resonates at all, Hogan's interpretive effort is a provocative contribution to that continuous revisiting.