Rhetoric and its problems

Rhetoric is speech that aims to persuade, convince, or exhort an audience to action. Once a pillar of the trivium of classical education, rhetoric was targeted in the early Enlightenment by Thomas Hobbes and other philosophers who sought to elevate public reason and truth in politics over the apparently less objective art of persuasive speech. Remarking on the efflorescence of political theory literature about rhetoric in the first decade of the millennium, Bryan Garsten coined the term “rhetoric revival” in 2011. True to its historical roots, the contemporary return to rhetoric is contemporaneous with the critique of the modern project: with the postmodern turn away from conceiving politics as a sphere of emergent objective truth, the public sphere is revealed as a realm of plurality and thus, ultimately, of narrative and opinion (Bartlett Reference Bartlett2019: x).

Rhetoric has always been a central subject of political theory; this renaissance is marked predominantly by a rejection of the Habermasian ideal of public reason and the sentiment that the study of rhetoric can shed light on contemporary deliberative democracy (Garsten Reference Garsten2011: 160–161). In his new translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Robert Bartlett writes, “For republican government to function, citizens must be able to stand before their fellows, express themselves clearly, and persuade a sufficient number of them that this policy, that treaty, these laws, should be approved or condemned” (Bartlett Reference Bartlett2019: vii). Bartlett is not alone in turning to Aristotle to consider the role of rhetoric in democratic politics: Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers (Reference Allen2009) argues that Aristotelian rhetoric can enable citizens to form relationships of trust with one another, while Bryan Garsten (Reference Garsten2006), Arash Abizadeh (Reference Abizadeh2002), and Bernard Yack (Reference Yack2006) all focus on the deliberative promises of Aristotelian rhetoric.

In Aristotle’s classic formulation, rhetoric is valuable for three reasons. The first is that “what is true and what is just are by nature superior to their opposites”; the second that there are audiences which could not easily be persuaded even based on the most “precise science” (epistēmē); and the third that “one must be able to persuade others of opposites” through dialectic in order to counter unjust arguments (Aristotle Reference Aristotle2019: 1355a). But how is one to determine when rhetoric is justly used? Should we judge its merit according to whether it is honest and straightforward or whether its ends are in accord with the greater goals of political life? Typifying noble deeds, Aristotle states that we call unqualifiedly good things “that someone does on behalf of the fatherland,” without regard to personal benefit (1366b). These remarks together would suggest that justly used rhetoric can prioritize the worthiness of some given set of ends—the security of a political community or the prosperity of its members, for example—over a strictly factual form of communication.

Its departure from strict factuality produces difficulties for rhetoric, though. In addition to being catered to the particularities of the audience at hand, rhetoric is complicated by its very purpose: to persuade, convince, or exhort. As Bryan Garsten notes, “The word ‘persuade’ arises etymologically from the same root as the words ‘suave’ and ‘sweet,’ which reminds us that democratic persuasion requires insinuating oneself into the good graces of one’s audience” (Garsten Reference Garsten2006: 2). Accordingly, rhetoric can trend toward flattery or outright lying, degenerating into a form of politics summarized by the Machiavellian adage that leaders must simply appear “all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion” (Machiavelli Reference Machiavelli1998: 71). In contemporary democracies, rhetorical consequentialism can be found in its most extreme form in the phenomenon of “post-truth” politics, which has been described thus: “When language has no reference to facts, truths, or realities, it becomes a purely strategic medium … if a statement works, results in the desired effect, it is good; if it fails, it is bad” (McComiskey Reference McComiskey2017: 6).

Closely related to post-truth politics, popular distrust in American leaders and institutions has been declining for decades. A 1975 report by Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki to the Trilateral Commission used the phrase “crisis of democracy” to describe the “increasing delegitimation of authority” across countries participating in the Commission, a phenomenon the authors closely associated with a decline of trust in leaders (Crozier et al. Reference Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki1975: 162). In the same year, Jürgen Habermas’s Legitimation Crisis was published in English, arguing that state administration under late-stage capitalism had produced a decline in public confidence in administrative functions, institutions, and leadership. Scholars left and right agree that the crisis of democracy is in large part a crisis of public trust, which polls show has steadily declined since the 1960s (Pew Research Center 2024).

Without stable, long-term bonds of trust in a polity, political allegiances will be built on self-interest alone, and thus are more likely to collapse when interests diverge. Trustworthy leaders not only promote a shared vision of politics but also maintain an epistemic context that renders horizontal political bonds between citizens possible. As Bruce McComiskey (Reference McComiskey2017: 7–8) puts it, “The very notions of sound arguments and reasoned opinions require facts, realities, and truths as epistemological counterparts, as references and standards against which adjectives like ‘sound’ and ‘reasoned’ may be compared.” Put differently, there is obviously a relationship between “truthfulness” and “truth”: without truth as an external referent, the content of truthfulness would be rendered meaningless (Williams Reference Williams2002: 2).

While the legitimation crisis and post-truth politics at first blush appear novel, a product of the digital age and the proliferation of competing sources of information, of hyper-polarization, or of modernity itself, distrust is a long-standing phenomenon in democracy. As Wolfgang Merkel (Reference Merkel2014: 11) has argued, one strand of the discourse on democratic crisis is as old as political philosophy itself, which “has posited from the outset that democracy is inconceivable without crisis.” Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, arguably the urtext of political philosophy, has often been read thus, with scholars from Thomas Hobbes onward frequently interpreting Thucydides as an elite critic of democracy (Balot Reference Balot and Low2023: 198).

One place such scholars turn is Thucydides’ famous account of faction (stasis) in Corcyra during the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War. In Corcyra, the competing demands of the democrats to remain allied with Athens and the oligarchs to form an alliance with Corinth and the broader Peloponnesian League resulted in a civil war. Thucydides reports that during this conflict “Men assumed the right to reverse the usual application of words to actions … the troublemaker was always to be trusted, the one who opposed him was to be suspected” (Thucydides Reference Thucydides2013: 3.82.4–5). Crucially, deception became the modus operandi for self-interested political leaders:

The dishonesty of the Corcyraean leaders is evident in their reversal of the relationship between words and deeds, which erodes the capacity of the citizens to interpret, much less contest, their specious slogans and deceptive claims, promoting an atmosphere of widespread distrust.

Hobbes’s interpretation of the instances of civil crisis in Thucydides’ text, advanced in the introduction to his 1629 translation of the text, emphasizes how such crises inhere in democracy itself and its medium of public speech:

Quentin Skinner, in his close analysis of Hobbes’s changing relationship with rhetoric throughout his career, places Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides in his early humanist phase, noting his rigorous adherence to the formal rules of rhetorical composition in the introduction to the work as well as his praise of Thucydides’ rhetorical achievement (Skinner Reference Skinner1996: 245). And yet, Skinner suggests that in Hobbes’s remarks on the stasis at Corcyra he expresses for the first time a profound political concern with paradiastole, a rhetorical technique of redescribing vices as virtues or vice versa with the aim of altering an audience’s perception of their moral significance (282). Later, in Leviathan, Hobbes worries that the rhetorical practice of redescription could result in circumstances of moral ambiguity and thus, potentially, the anarchy of the state of war (341).

Hobbes’s account of the reversion to total anarchy during times of rebellion and civil war in the Leviathan would at first seem to owe something to Thucydides’ account of the stasis at Corcyra—with both focusing on the propensity toward moral relativism, the breaking of agreements, and the dissolution of social bonds in times of crisis. In this vein, Richard Schlatter posits that the passage on stasis is “pure Hobbes and might have come from the pages of Leviathan” (Hoekstra Reference Hoekstra, Martinich and Hoekstra2016: 551n12). Likewise, Luka Ribarević (Reference Ribarević2023: 584) has contended that Hobbes, in translating Thucydides, was looking to the crises of the past to respond to the burgeoning conflict in the England of his day.

But as Kinch Hoekstra (Reference Hoekstra, Martinich and Hoekstra2016: 552) points out, Hobbes penned his translation of Thucydides in a very different context than that of Leviathan: while the England of the 1620s was subject to “fierce partisan debate,” civil war was not imminent and, moreover, democracy was not an important political program. What is clear from Hobbes’s explicit interpretation of Thucydides in this early translation is that he believed that the latter shared his skepticism of democratic rhetoric, and also that the translation might serve as a didactic bulwark against it: Hobbes later stated that he chose to translate Thucydides’ text “in order to make him speak to the English about the need to avoid the rhetoricians whom they were at that time planning to consult” (Skinner Reference Skinner1996: 230). Hobbes’s concern with rhetoric in general and moral redescription in particular during the two apparently more “humanist” phases of his career—the writing and publication of his translation of Thucydides and Leviathan, respectively—demonstrates that even at his most sympathetic to the idea that rhetoric was necessary to persuade audiences of the lessons of history or of his own civil science, he was concerned about its excesses, especially within democratic politics.

Hobbes bolsters his claim that Thucydides “least of all liked the democracy” by considering the latter’s praise of Athenian government under the tyrant Peisistratus and under Pericles, calling the latter “in effect monarchical.” With this gloss, Hobbes is referring to Thucydides’ famous statement that Athens under Pericles was not purely democratic: “What was in name a democracy was in practice government by the foremost man” (2.65.9). Hobbes was not the first thinker to interpret Thucydides’ depiction of Pericles in monarchical terms, but there is, likewise, a long tradition of interpreting Pericles as a democratic representative in the republican mode (Hoekstra Reference Hoekstra2012: 28–35). Since my account of rhetoric explicitly seeks to explain good leadership in representative politics, it is important to parse this distinction: was Pericles an isolated ruler, closely resembling Hobbes’s ideal sovereign? If instead he was a democratic representative, accountable to the people, Thucydides’ praise for his record of leadership may help us understand the distinction between good and bad democratic rhetoric.

A eulogy for good rhetoric

It has been widely noted that Periclean Athens represents an ideal for Thucydides (Dobski Reference Dobski2017; Fisher Reference Fisher2022; Thompson Reference Thompson2009). As Matthieu De Bakker (Reference De Bakker, Forsdyke, Foster and Balot2017: 251) argues, Thucydides’ eulogy for Pericles after his death in the second year of the war, as well as his later memorial for the general Nicias, “resemble funerary epigrams for those who have died prematurely,” urging reflection on their legacies and on the broader suffering of the war. In Thucydides’ eulogy, he argues that Pericles was a great leader of the Athenian demos because “he led them more than he was led by them” (2.65.8). Turning closely to Thucydides’ eulogy for Pericles reveals that in his endorsement of Pericles, Thucydides was neither advocating monarchy nor arguing that rhetoric itself was to blame for the civil strife in Corcyra and, later, in Athens. Instead, Thucydides was praising Pericles as the democratic leader who used rhetoric to best effect.

Describing the deterioration of Pericles’ war strategy after his death and the propensity of the Athenian leaders and demos alike to act for private gain instead of communal benefit, Thucydides writes that “Pericles, through his personal ability, his judgement and his evident integrity could freely restrain the masses … [he] could face their anger and contradict them” (2.65.8). In this, Thucydides argues that Pericles used rhetoric as a means of moderating the unique pathos of his audience in a given context. This dynamic is evident in all three of the explicit speeches Pericles gives in the text of Thucydides’ history, each of which is notably distinct in tone. Importantly, as we will see when we return to Hobbes, Pericles can be understood as practicing a form of moral redescription in these speeches: changing the manner in which he characterizes the justice of Athenian empire according to the needs of the moment.

Pericles’ first speech in the text occurs in the lead-up to the war, as the Athenians call an assembly to discuss demands that the Spartans, heading the Peloponnesian League, posit as conducive to peace. Thucydides documents that Pericles was at this time the leading man in Athens, considered “supremely capable both at speaking and in action” (1.139.4). In his speech, Pericles advocates that the Athenians not cede to the demands made by the Peloponnesian League, arguing that war is likely and the Athenians should be firm in their resolve. Pericles emphasizes the strengths of Athens and how they will be conducive to its victory in war: that they have capital, which the Spartans lack, as well as a more centralized decision-making apparatus and, crucially, mastery of the sea. On this last point, Pericles urges that the Athenians must “think like islanders,” letting their land and houses go, all the while protecting the sea and the city (1.143.5). He also cautions that the Athenians must agree not to expand their empire while the war goes on, strongly emphasizing that their ability to follow through with this policy might be decisive in victory or defeat. He closes by suggesting counterdemands, arguing war is inevitable, and emphasizing that “from the greatest dangers emerge the greatest honors, for cities and individuals alike” (1.144.3). The Athenians vote as he recommends, the Spartans forgo further diplomacy, and the war begins.

Already in this speech we are given crucial insight into Pericles’ role as a leader of the demos and his plans for Athens in the war. His advocacy for protecting the sea and the city over the people’s land and homes, while attuned to the city’s unique strength at sea, will prove a difficult policy for the Athenians to follow, as will his advice against expanding the empire. Nonetheless, Pericles’ first speech to the Athenians, much like his later funeral oration, is largely positive about the city of Athens and its standing in the Greek world, serving the rhetorical purpose of exhortation. In this speech and the two that follow, Pericles draws a direct parallel between individual and common glory, a connection which, as we will discuss shortly, the general Alcibiades later deploys precisely to goad the Athenians into expanding their empire to Sicily. While there is a note of caution that Pericles fears the mistakes of Athens more than he fears the mistakes of the enemy (1.144), his words indicate that the Athenians should feel confident that they are not only materially preeminent but also in the right vis à vis Sparta.

The funeral oration, delivered by Pericles at the close of the first year of the war, is notable in that it is the first time the Athenian populace is forced to reckon with the cost of war in Thucydides’ text. Opening and closing his eulogy with the idea of tribute in deeds as superordinate to tribute in words, Pericles praises the spirit of freedom, equality, tolerance, and openness that makes democratic Athens “an education for Greece” (1.39.1–2). Speaking of Athens’s reputation in war and in rulership, he says that “the proof of our power is supported by the strongest evidence and by every possible witness. We shall be the wonder of this and future generations” (1.41.4).

We get a better sense of the meaning of Thucydides’ praise for Pericles in the second year of the war, amid great popular unrest in Athens. The triumphant tenor of the funeral oration is absent in Pericles’ third speech, made in the midst of a harrowing plague. As Ioannis Evrignis (Reference Evrigenis2014: 190) puts it in his work on Hobbes’s reception of Thucydides: where the Athens of the funeral oration is “a picture of Hobbes’s commonwealth,” informed by reason and replete with commodious living, the Athens of the plague is “a place of unimaginable suffering, a hellish state of nature.” Thucydides describes in protracted detail the impact of the plague on body, mind, and polis, discussing how it results in conditions of lawlessness as people abandon customs, their “immediate pleasure” becoming the standard of “what was good and useful” (2.51). Pericles’ policy of staying in the city is more unpopular than ever, given the propensity of the plague to spread more quickly under such conditions.

Pericles’ plague speech demonstrates that his commitment to leading the demos does not devolve into flattery—in this speech, Athens, the “education for Greece” of the funeral oration, has become “like a tyranny.” He denounces the Athenians for their misplaced resentment, emphasizing the importance of common security and success to individual flourishing (2.60.1) and critiquing the demos for lacking the strength of mind and resolve to follow through on the policy they had committed to at the beginning of the war. Ultimately, Pericles argues that the benefits conferred by empire require shouldering its burdens, including the hatred of the Athenian empire from those outside it and the danger that inheres in this hatred. It is at this point that Pericles says “by now your empire is like a tyranny, which it seems wrong to take but perilous to let go” (2.63.2). As Thucydides writes in his eulogy, Pericles asserts his interpretation of Athens and proposed policy for it, against the will of the people if necessary. And good rhetoric is necessary to achieve this task.

Thucydides’ praise for Pericles stands in sharp juxtaposition to his criticism of the leaders who followed him, who “being more on a level with each other and in competition each to be first, began to surrender even the conduct of affairs to the whims of the people” resulting in many mistakes, in particular the ill-advised expedition to Sicily in the 17th year of the Peloponnesian War (2.65.10). The focus on Sicily reveals that with this statement Thucydides not only indicts the self-interested leaders who come to the fore in Athens after Pericles’ death, like Alcibiades, but so too the public-spirited individuals who fail to stop them, including the general Nicias, who lacks the rhetorical power to persuade the masses to forego this expedition. Thucydides documents that by this point in the war, the Athenian people are clamoring to subjugate Sicily, where they have been invited by the Egestans to intervene in the region’s civil turmoil (6.1.1). Based on accounts from Egestan envoys and Athenian representatives dispatched to the island, which Thucydides calls “enticing and untrue,” the Athenian assembly votes to send 60 ships to Sicily, appointing Nicias, Alcibiades, and Lamachus as generals.

Four days later, in an assembly to discuss the necessary provisions for the journey, Nicias sets out to demonstrate to the Athenians that their “haste is untimely” and their “ambitions are not easy to achieve,” emphasizing that sailing to Sicily will weaken the Athenians’ struggle against the Peloponnesians at home (6.9). Nicias cautions the demos against being swayed by “a certain person here who is so gratified at being chosen to command that he urges you to let the fleet sail, thinking only of his own interests” (6.12.2). That person is Alcibiades, who, in Thucydides’ own words, “was passionately eager to be made general and hoped that he could thereby conquer both Sicily and Carthage and so by his success promote both his personal wealth and his reputation” (6.15.2). While Alcibiades is “highly regarded because of his distinguished ancestry” (5.43), the people nonetheless do not trust him. This is not simply because of his youth and inexperience, signaled by Nicias, but because of his extravagant and lawless lifestyle and the naked ambition behind his actions (6.15)—in short, because of his deeds.

Alcibiades gives a rousing speech, playing on the imperial ambitions of the demos and encouraging them to venture to Sicily primarily by emphasizing the connection between personal glory and the glory of the city. After listening to Alcibiades and other speakers, Thucydides reports, “the Athenians were even more motivated than before to support the mission” (6.19.1), a decision crucial in the ultimate victory of Sparta in the war. Thucydides does not attempt to explain why the Athenians follow Alcibiades in this course of action, but there is a strong implication, based on the fervor of the Athenians to venture to Sicily in the first place, that they are persuaded by Alcibiades because he tells them what they want to hear: that the expedition is not only necessary to the security of their empire in the war but could in addition result in untold glory, for individual and city alike. With the foil of Pericles encouraged by Thucydides’ eulogy, it becomes clear that Alcibiades’ strategy is to flatter the people and satisfy their ambitions in order to achieve preeminence.

Nicias’ failures are likewise illuminated by the eulogy. Whereas he cannot be grouped among the self-interested Periclean successors, he is nonetheless incapable of restraining the demos because he is not a match for Alcibiades rhetorically, failing in large part to understand and respond to the fickle pathos of the Athenian people. When Nicias meets his death at the hands of the Syracusans after the routing of the Athenians in Sicily, Thucydides describes him as “a man who of all the Greeks in my time least deserved to meet with such misfortune, since the whole conduct of his life had been regulated by virtuous practices” (7.86.5). Whereas Thucydides praises Pericles for his public abilities, and particularly his remarkable skill at moderating the demos, he essentially praises Nicias as a private person.

In contrast to these two leaders, the strength of Pericles’ rhetoric is evident in his ability to persuade the people, even when it requires contradicting them. Not only does Pericles’ speech to the assembly persuade the Athenians to go to war with Sparta, but after his speech during the plague, the Athenians elect to follow his counsel, ceasing overtures to the Spartans and committing themselves “wholeheartedly to the war,” although the people’s frustration with Pericles leads them to punish him with a fine (2.65.2). Later, though, they reinstate him as a general because, per Thucydides, “they regarded him as indispensable to the needs of the city as a whole” (2.65.4).

Turning back to Hobbes’s monarchical interpretation of Thucydides, the fact that the people can fine Pericles, actively choose whether to follow his advice, and determine his fitness for the generalship indicates that he is accountable to the people, unlike Hobbes’s ideal sovereign. As Josiah Ober (Reference Ober, Tsakmakis and Rengakos2006: 152) puts it: Thucydides’ statement that in practice Athens was ruled by Pericles means that the Athenian demos approved “of proposals that were patently trustworthy because they emanated from a man in whom the Athenians rightly placed their full confidence.” Against the highly privatized political community proffered by Hobbes in his mature political philosophy, where individuals are shut out of politics and the sovereign ostensibly does not need rhetoric because of his absolute power, Pericles and other Athenian leaders still needed to gain the trust of the Athenian demos in order to persuade them of their policy. In this respect it is somewhat remarkable, as Hoekstra (Reference Hoekstra, Martinich and Hoekstra2016: 549) points out, that in his introductory essay to the text Hobbes rejects both democracy and oligarchy, since for Thucydides the Peloponnesian War was predominantly a struggle between these competing regime-types.

Hobbes’s monarchical interpretation of Thucydides is closely tied to his distaste for democratic rhetoric. Yet, in his effort to moderate the demos during the plague, Pericles uses a method analogous to the rhetorical mode of moral redescription with which Hobbes is so concerned, articulating a dysphemistic characterization of Athens to calm the passions of the demos and persuade them to continue on the course of the policy he has advised. In his statement that Pericles was able to restrain the masses, Thucydides suggests that Pericles utilized redescription in line with precisely the goal that the classic theorists of rhetoric suggest for paradiastole: mitigation (Skinner Reference Skinner1996: 161). “Whenever he sensed that arrogance was making them more confident than the situation merited he would say something to strike fear in their hearts,” Thucydides writes, “and when on the other hand he saw them fearful without good reason he restored their confidence again” (2.65.9).

Hobbes, in his close translation of Thucydides’ history, could not have missed this stark distinction in Pericles’ rhetorical characterizations of the city of Athens. This leaves us, once again, at an impasse as regards judging whether rhetoric is justly or unjustly used. Clearly, for Hobbes, rhetoric is justified sometimes, for example, in his own use of persuasion in his later political writings, and ostensibly by Pericles, the leading man cum monarch of Athens. And yet, Hobbes argues in his introduction to the translation that rhetoric can be particularly dangerous for the stability and security of a commonwealth. What accounts for the difference between Pericles’ rhetoric and that of the demagogues Hobbes critiques?

Far from being an example of sophistry or dishonesty, Pericles’ changing evaluations of the city of Athens demonstrate his consistency as a leader. In both the funeral oration and the plague speech, Pericles appeals to the same core vision of what Athens can be: a model for all Greece. Whereas in the former speech Pericles praises the Athenians for what they have achieved, in the latter he indicts them for forgetting their history and identity, submitting themselves to an entropy both biological and political, and thus ceding all grounds of justification for their empire. While Pericles’ consistency of vision is demonstrated across these speeches, the public-spirited record of his deeds helps us better understand what sets him apart from run-of-the-mill demagogues and sophists: his own willingness to make the sacrifices he demands of the broader Athenian populace. But before we turn to this model of evaluating rhetoric, we must consider the dominant classical alternative: an evaluation of character based on speech and objective status alone.

Rhetoric and character: limitations of the Aristotelian model

Skinner suggests that Hobbes’s praise of Pericles is consistent with the central tenet of English Renaissance humanism “that wise and virtuous noblemen represent the best and most natural ‘governors’ of any well-ordered state” (Skinner Reference Skinner1996: 242).Footnote ¹ Hobbes would later translate Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which expresses an analogous understanding of the qualities that equip a leader for rule and rhetoric. But this manner of judging rhetoric is problematized by the question of what attributes define, in the first place, a virtuous character. Can character be judged according to a speaker’s status, or should we evaluate it according to the apparent intentions behind a speaker’s words? And how can we judge a speaker’s intentions, when all we have before us is the appearance of their words and deeds?

Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric focuses on the form of rhetoric qua art over and above its effects: “[rhetoric’s] task is not to persuade but rather to see the persuasive points that are available in each case … for it does not belong to medicine to produce health but rather to advance health to the extent that a given case admits of it” (Aristotle Reference Aristotle2019: 1355b). Although of the three modes of persuasion available to speakers—appeals to the speaker’s own character (ethos), the emotional disposition of the audience (pathos), and the argument itself (logos)—Aristotle definitively states that “character wields pretty much the greatest authority” (1356a), his discussion of character in Book II of the Rhetoric has more to do with a given speaker’s position—their age, birth, power, and fortune—than with “character” conceived as noble or base comportment. Aristotle asserts, for example, that “the characters of the young are marked by desire” that they are naïve rather than cynical, and that they choose to do what is noble over what is advantageous” (1389a). A speaker’s “character” in the Aristotelian formulation is basically fixed: a product of their status and situation in life rather than the record of their past deeds.

Perhaps because of this lack of emphasis in Aristotle on character qua comportment, scholars of Aristotelian rhetoric tend to elevate logos as the most important element of persuasion. Allen (Reference Allen2009: 143, 146) posits that a speaker can alleviate the interpersonal distrust that plagues politics by proving “that his approach to self-interest is trustworthy” and by demonstrating “the ethical commitments that guide his treatment of other people” through logical reasoning itself. Garsten (Reference Garsten2011: 173) likewise emphasizes that in Aristotle, arguments are a way of “influencing the audience’s emotions and their view of the speaker’s trustworthiness.”

But the experience of politics demonstrates that this is not a task that can be effected through speech alone. Referencing an example from John Dryzek (Reference Dryzek2010) in which an audience chooses not to believe scientists when they are shown to have a vested interest in promoting a certain drug, Garsten (Reference Garsten2011: 171–172) writes that this and other examples “suggest that the primary question being judged by an audience is not about the cogency of the speaker’s argument or evidence … the primary judgment is actually the one about the speaker’s credibility and character.” Garsten further suggests that in the case of contemporary campaign rhetoric, the ethos a speaker displays through speech will not suffice to demonstrate their good character, indicating the limits of the Aristotelian rhetorical model (175).

The relationship of trust between speakers and their publics is iterative: singular speech acts cannot be considered in a vacuum. For an audience to answer Allen’s (Reference Allen2009: 144) question whether a speaker is “likely to act in accord with the general principles he espouses” requires a record of past speeches and deeds by which an audience can hold their speaker accountable. Ultimately, inattention to this interplay produces a theoretical failure when it comes to distinguishing good from bad rhetoric, judged not according to strategic success, as in the post-truth paradigm, but the nobility of its aims. One typology of the literature on rhetoric states that “good” rhetoric has to do with generating judgment or critical reflection, fostering deliberation, resolving motivation issues, and producing friendship across difference (Simon Lambek Reference Lambek, Ballacci and Goodman2024: 344–345). Evaluations of “bad” rhetoric for the most part cohere to the same formalistic model. While Jennifer Mercieca (Reference Mercieca2019) focuses on intentions in her argument that “dangerous demagoguery” specifically uses “weaponized communication,” for example, this is still an appeal to a formal structure of duplicity rather than to the character of the speaker herself. In an appeal to effects, some scholars have argued that rhetoric is harmful when it foments in-group/out-group divisions (Dryzek Reference Dryzek2010). While the effects of speech are no doubt important, the historical and contemporary political record demonstrates the dangers of purely strategic communication.

Influenced by the Aristotelian model, accounts of both good and bad rhetoric predominantly focus on the formal structure of speech rather than attempting to measure the speaker’s trustworthiness. There are some exceptions, including Kapust and Schwarze’s (Reference Kapust and Schwarze2016) case that Cicero accounts for the role of speaker propriety and sincerity in the judgment of rhetoric in a manner that Aristotle fails to. But sincerity is a difficult attribute to judge. How can we ever know the play of thoughts behind a speaker’s words, or whether she believes the things she says to be true? Responding to this difficulty, Elizabeth Markovits has argued that sincerity is impossible to judge and is accordingly an untenable—and potentially dangerous—democratic ideal.

Markovits (Reference Markovits2008: 74) argues that the contemporary emphasis on the need for sincerity in democratic politics both excludes the kind of people who cannot or are not inclined to speak plainly—academics among them—and, more importantly, produces what Jon Hesk calls a “rhetoric of anti-rhetoric”: persuasive speech that misleadingly denies its own, persuasive character. Markovits advocates trustworthiness as an alternative to sincerity and its anti-rhetorical stylings. Trustworthiness can be ascertained through an evaluation of the “public person,” Markovits contends, by comparing a leader’s words to her deeds. This simple but powerful formulation evades the difficulty of ascertaining sincerity but also challenges the Aristotelian notion that justice speaks for itself, in the form of its argumentation.

Thucydides, by carefully documenting the words and deeds of the leading figures of the Peloponnesian War, provides us with a textbook for what this kind of judgment might look like in practice. Thucydides’ understanding of the relationship between speech and deeds connects to his professed intention of factual inquiry into the nature of human affairs. Distinguishing himself from the poets “who exaggerate things for artistic purposes,” as well as the chroniclers, whose writings “are composed more to make good listening than to represent the truth,” Thucydides asserts that his account is based on “evidence” and “actual facts” (1.21). In Bernard Williams’s account, Thucydides’ innovation was to effectively invent “historical time” by holding the distant past, including myths, up to the same level of scrutiny as the recent, local past. Similarly, Mark Fisher (Reference Fisher2022: 47) has recently argued that Thucydides accepts the “poetic authority” of tradition, all the while seeking to explain this tradition with the burgeoning causal tools of fifth-century BC science. In short, Thucydides’ use of scientific, causal explanation presents history as a record of concrete, observable deeds that enables us to evaluate the words of chroniclers, poets, and other individuals who trade in fiction.

Against the claim first advanced by Charles Norris Cochrane that Thucydides was the first “scientific” historian, insofar as his text strictly consists of “bare factual statements together with causal explanations,” it has been argued that Thucydides’ obvious thematic interests as expressed in the speeches of the text show that whatever objectivity his text demonstrates is itself a product of art (Williams Reference Williams2002: 153). Thucydides writes that, though he aimed to remember or learn what was spoken with the utmost precision, “What I have set down is how I think each of them would have expressed what was most appropriate in the particular circumstances, while staying as close as possible to the overall intention of what was actually said” (1.22). This apparently paradoxical statement—that Thucydides aimed for precision but utilized theoretical reconstruction—has vexed scholars for some time. In his translation of the text, Jeremy Mynott underscores Thucydides’ attribution of speeches to whole groups of people, like the Corcyraeans and Corinthians (1.36), assignment of elaborate speeches to commanders in the midst of battle (2.87), and reports of speeches that could only have been relayed to him by unsympathetic onlookers, such as the Spartans (3.52). If these speeches are simply constructed to convey a speaker’s intentions as Thucydides himself surmises them, is there not some circularity to judging leaders and their speeches according to the words Thucydides gives them?

But this critique conceals the fact that Thucydides did not view himself as, like Herodotus, a “rhetorical teller of tales” (Williams Reference Williams2002: 162) or a chronicler stuck in the “imaginary realm of fable” (Thucydides 1.21). If we take Thucydides’ methodological statement at face value, the speeches, though not verbatim, do aim to reconstruct or represent what was actually said. As two scholars have argued, Thucydides could have maintained stylistic freedom while nonetheless relaying the essential points of each historical speech, albeit with varying degrees of accuracy (Farber and Fauber Reference Farber and Fauber2001: 38). And yet, the sentiment that Thucydides must have had varying degrees of knowledge of each of the speeches has produced a tendency in scholarship to attempt to reconstruct how Thucydides obtained his information in order to assess his depiction of the “intention” of the speeches (Farber and Fauber Reference Farber and Fauber2001; Hornblower Reference Hornblower1987), an endeavor almost as fraught as the initial relaying of the words themselves. Against this investigative disposition, I would propose that we consider Thucydides in his role not merely as factual historian but also as a careful theorist of politics, distilling the essence or core of speeches and, thereby, of speakers.

From this perspective, the speeches of the text are products of both fact and theory. When both Pericles and Alcibiades discuss the relationship between personal glory and the glory of the city, for example, we are meant to draw a comparison between their words and to evaluate their competing roles in the politics of Athens, and what sort of political archetype they represented for Thucydides and the other Greek observers of the war. Our concern, then, is not with the historical figures Pericles and Alcibiades, but with Thucydides’ versions of them, which serve as a kind of distillation of their essence as Thucydides understood it. Treating Thucydides’ text as both a historical and a theoretical work enables us to evaluate its leading figures within the confines of a narrative that is both factually accurate and rich with core philosophical insights about what its author calls “the human condition.” Reading the text in this manner reveals that it is the compatibility of a speaker’s words with their deeds that generates trust. In ancient and contemporary democratic polities alike, citizens do not trust their leaders simply as a product of their age, power, or status, as in the Aristotelian account of character and rhetoric, they trust them because their words match their deeds in service of the polity.

Words, deeds, and trust

In his speech during the plague, Pericles recognized that the Athenian ethos of innovation, action, and expansion might have disastrous consequences and urged restraint during the war accordingly. But the turn to a more quiescent and moderate lifestyle would be, as W. Robert Connor (Reference Connor1985: 72) notes in his analysis of Thucydides’ history, “contrary to all [of Athens’] national characteristics,” and as such the defeat of the imperial city-state seems almost fated in the text. Connor suggests that we should not understand the defeat of the Athenians as, simply, their failure to follow Pericles’ strategy after his death but rather “the result of a conflict between the Periclean demand for restraint and tranquility and the innately restless character of the Athenians” (73).

Connor presents the case as though the demise of Athens was fated, a product of its intrinsic thirst for imperial power. Yet this analysis does not cohere with Thucydides’ own explanation of Athens’ fall, which he attributes to poor leadership. Recall that Thucydides writes that the reason the Athenians did the opposite of what Pericles recommended after his death, seeking expansion, was that, while he was able to “restrain the masses,” his successors, vying for leadership, “began to surrender even the conduct of affairs to the whims of the people” (2.65.8).

Turning to Thucydides’ eulogy for Pericles and noting the joint emphases on the statesman’s rhetorical ability and personal integrity, scholars have drawn different conclusions about the basis of Pericles’ leadership in Athens. Harvey Yunis (Reference Yunis1991: 191) has argued that Thucydides distinguishes Pericles from the demagogue Cleon, who later incites the demos to subjugate Mytilene, insofar as he was not only capable of persuading the masses but so too of informing them: in both of Pericles’ deliberative speeches he provides crucial military and financial information to enable the demos to make informed decisions. Ober (Reference Ober, Tsakmakis and Rengakos2006: 152) likewise argues that the political system was “genuinely educational” under Pericles, who he interprets as a kind of technocrat, uniquely able to operate the complex machinery of Athenian democracy.

By contrast, Fisher (Reference Fisher2022: 41) underscores Thucydides’ emphasis on how the Periclean successors were “more equal to one another,” accordingly striving each to become preeminent and flattering the people in the bargain. Rather than technocratic expertise, Fisher argues Pericles’ authority was based on his “superlative prestige.” The Athenians did not ultimately lose the war as a result of abandoning the Periclean policy of restraint, Fisher argues; instead they withstood the war for eight years after the Sicilian Expedition, until they eventually succumbed to infighting (43). The crux of Thucydides’ eulogy for Pericles, on Fisher’s read of the text, is a matter of personality rather than policy.

This modern debate in essence treats the matter of Pericles’ role in democratic Athens, which we first encountered in Hobbes’s interpretation of Thucydides. Both Ober and Fisher suggest that Thucydides was not sanguine about the pure democracy that followed the decline of Athens’s foremost man: for Ober (Reference Ober, Tsakmakis and Rengakos2006: 152), the masses “systematically miseducated their would-be leaders” rather than being educated by them; for Fisher (Reference Fisher2022: 54), the regime transitioned from a relatively stable rule by one man to an unstable, collective rule by the demos: “the locus of autocratic power within the democracy had simply changed.” Ober’s portrait of democratic education would indicate that Pericles’ example might be relevant to contemporary representative democracies, whereas Fisher’s emphasis on “superlative prestige” suggests Pericles’ example may not be replicable. So what exactly was the basis of Pericles’ authority over the Athenian people?

From ancient authors, including Aristotle (Reference Aristotle1984: Ath. Pol. 27) and Plutarch (Reference Plutarch1998: Pericles, 9), we are told with a note of criticism that Pericles was particularly popular among the demos not simply due to his military and political prowess but also the populist policies that he supported as the leading statesman in Athens. And as regards his character in the Aristotelian sense, Pericles’ family background, wealth, age, and experience likely contributed to his esteem in the eyes of the people. But if our task is to understand the archetype of Pericles in Thucydides’ history, we can only reconstruct Pericles’ leadership through the limited prism of the historian’s description of the war, which began near the end of Pericles’ life and, accordingly, his ascendancy in Athens.

Thucydides himself does not emphasize Pericles’ wealth or family background in any of his discussions of Pericles’ status as the leading man in Athens, only mentioning his family when it is relevant to the details of the war. Instead, Thucydides notes his capability in speaking and acting (1.127.3, 1.139.4, 2.65.8), leadership (2.65.5), good judgment and understanding of the city’s strengths (2.34.6, 65.5, 65.8), and integrity (2.65.8). Combined, these characterizations suggest that when Thucydides states that Pericles owed his influence to his “personal distinction” in the eulogy, he is speaking about these qualities of leadership rather than Pericles’ static, objective status. This characterization indicates that it is necessary to evaluate the record of Pericles’ deeds.

Early on, Thucydides’ reader understands that Pericles has the trust of the Athenian people, a relationship indicated by the fact that they are willing, at multiple points in the war, to sacrifice their land and lives to follow his counsel (1.145, 2.14, 2.65.2). In Thucydides’ first explicit introduction of Pericles, he describes how before the war the Spartans call attention to a curse in his family, demanding that the Athenians exile him from the city in what Thucydides identifies as a specious pretext for war (1.126–127). As Thucydides interprets it, the Spartans want to prejudice the Athenian demos against Pericles, knowing that he is petitioning for war and fearing his influence. The theme of foreign interference, first introduced in the Spartan demand to drive out the curse of the goddess, is echoed in the first year of the war when Pericles fears that the Spartan king Archidamus, who initially encouraged the Spartans to demand that the Athenians drive out this curse, will spare his land either due to their familial connection or to poison the Athenian demos against him (2.13).

During the first two years of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles not only has to worry about these attempts by the Spartans to discredit him; he must protect himself, too, against the ire of the Athenian demos, who as we have already seen blame him multiple times for his unpopular strategy of staying within the city limits and not going out to fight while the Spartans invade Attica, burning the countryside before the Athenians’ eyes (2.21, 2.59). Yet even when the Athenians punish Pericles, as during the plague when they fine him, they still, remarkably, execute his policy. While the demos directs their anger against Pericles the person, they continue to follow, and therefore apparently trust, Pericles the statesman.

In an assessment of Pericles the public person, there is ample evidence in the text that Pericles’ words match his deeds in service to the city. We have already seen that Pericles was a gifted rhetorician, using logos to good effect as well as understanding the interplay between his own argument and the pathos of his audience within a particular context. As regards his deeds, Pericles not only proves to be an accomplished military strategist, understanding how to leverage Athenian sea power, but also demonstrates wise counsel and consistent commitment to the city of Athens. This consistency is clear when, for instance, Pericles offers his land for public use if it is spared by the Spartans (2.13.1). We can also observe Pericles’ integrity in his use of speech to restrain the masses. Standing firm in his policy against the protestations of the demos, Pericles’ speeches function as deeds: convincing the people to find their resolve in the war and commit to a policy of restraint. Without these public-spirited deeds, the consistency of vision that we witness in Pericles’ speeches would ring hollow; his advocacy of sacrifice in the demos would be hypocritical if he were not himself willing to commit to a policy of restraint.

Pericles’ resolve, consistency, and integrity become still more evident in a further comparison between his record and that of Alcibiades, who ultimately betrays Athens. While he is in Sicily, the Athenians send a ship for Alcibiades to summon him back to the city to stand trial for his implication in mock celebrations of the Mysteries and for attempting to subvert popular rule (6.53). Alcibiades instead travels to Sparta, where he styles himself a victim of democracy, states his desire to regain leadership in Athens, and urges the Spartans to send aid to the Syracusans in their struggle against Athens (6.89–91). The Spartans are affirmed by his speech, Thucydides reports, to send aid to Sicily and launch an expedition against Athens, which turns the tide of the war in favor of Sparta.

Both Alcibiades and Pericles are threatened, at multiple points in the text, by fear and base personal interest in the masses. Indeed, Thucydides posits that the people’s extreme distrust for Alcibiades leads them to trust other leaders, bringing about the downfall of the city (6.15.4). Rather than serving as a positive endorsement of Alcibiades’ leadership, this remark indicates that in their distrust for Alcibiades the demos pushed him to side with the Spartans, leading to the “great reversal” for the Athenians in Sicily. This point is crucial in fleshing out the relationship between each leader and the people: Alcibiades betrayed his city when the people turned on him, whereas Pericles remained committed to leading the demos even in the face of their anger.

Years later in the war, after the oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred in Athens, Alcibiades is recalled to leadership by a contingent of Athenian soldiers at Samos who oppose the oligarchy. Hearing exaggerated tales of abuses in Athens, the soldiers at Samos want to sail against the Piraeus and Alcibiades cautions them against it, with Thucydides concluding that Alcibiades “for the first time and to a greater extent than anyone else, seems to have performed a real service to the state,” and that “no one else would have been capable of restraining the mob” (8.86.4). Once again, though, Alcibiades’ intentions are revealed by his deeds: he has been lying to the Athenian soldiers about the extent of his influence over the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, who they hope can help them in the war. Based on these behind-the-scenes machinations, including advising Tissaphernes to wear out both the Spartans and the Athenians and suggesting the installation of the oligarchy in the first place (8.46–47), it is safe to conclude that while Alcibiades does effectively restrain the soldiers here, it is still self-interested: his best chance of future leadership is in an Athens ruled by oligarchy and not divided by civil war.

The point of this comparison between Pericles and Alcibiades is not that Pericles’ leadership was completely self-sacrificing: he no doubt benefitted personally from his leadership of Athens, and it is precisely as a result of this leadership that his own name is written on what he calls the “finest tomb” in his funeral oration: the “eternal memory” of word and deed (2.43.2). Without Pericles, Thucydides implies, Athens came to its ruin. But without Athens, Pericles would not be remembered as a great statesman. Rather than indicating a strictly disinterested attitude toward leadership, Pericles’ consistent pride for and allegiance to the city demonstrates that he is convinced of the connection between personal and communal glory that he emphasizes in all three of his speeches. In other words, he signals “that his approach to self-interest is trustworthy” (cf. Allen Reference Allen2009) through the coherence of his words and deeds. Alcibiades, by contrast, demonstrates that his primary interest is private glory, contra his words, by abandoning Athens at the point in the war when good leadership is most crucial.

In support of Ober’s democratic interpretation, there is the fact that Pericles responds to the concerns of the people, that he attempts to educate them, and that he not only champions deliberation in his speeches but also invites their judgment. In an example of the latter, Connor (Reference Connor1985: 68) argues that Pericles’ eulogy transforms the conventional role of ceremonial oratory: instead of looking back on the past, he looks “forward to what Athens might become.” This transformation is crucial given that for Aristotle (Rhet., 1358b), the three types of rhetoric—deliberative, judicial, and epideictic—were defined according to the audience and the temporal stakes of the speech at hand: listeners could be either an onlooker or a judge of past or future events (a juror or an assemblyman, respectively). Traditionally, the audience of an epideictic speech were observers of displays of praise and blame, not judges either of past or future. By shifting his epitaph to the future tense, Pericles in effect invites the form of future-oriented judgment characteristic of deliberative assemblies even in his least deliberative speech in the war.

Evaluating Pericles’ policy in the war and his relationship to the people of Athens reveals that Thucydides’ Pericles was not effectively an autocrat, as Hobbes styles him. As the people’s actions against both Pericles and Alcibiades make clear, the demos, during the democratic period of Athens’ history, effectively controlled its leaders’ fates, appointing generals and choosing whose policy to follow. While Thucydides points to leadership as crucial in the breakdown of trust in the city after Pericles’ death, presenting his record as in some sense exceptional, his accountability to the people indicates that Pericles was indeed a democratic leader.

Yet Fisher is right that the technocratic interpretation of Pericles ultimately fails to capture the essence of Pericles’ excellence. Ober’s gloss on Periclean Athens emphasizes its highly developed political and cultural institutions, leading him to conclude that Thucydides overestimates Pericles’ importance (Ober Reference Ober2008: 62, 71). By contrast, Fisher’s account, which centers its analysis around the eulogy and the theme of the self-interestedness of the Periclean successors, privileges Thucydides’ own explanation of how the democracy functioned under Pericles and why it collapsed after his death.

In the final analysis, though, while Fisher’s attention to the problem of leadership does get us closer to understanding Thucydides’ own interpretation, his analysis does not pay enough attention to Thucydides’ emphasis on Pericles’ understanding of the character of Athens and its unique strengths, as a result dismissing the importance of Pericles’ policy. Thucydides writes that after Pericles died, “his foresight about the war became still more fully recognized” as the Athenians, “led by private ambition and personal greed to pursue policies that proved harmful both to themselves and their allies,” abandoned his policy of focusing on the navy and restraining from expanding the empire (2.65.5–7). Here Thucydides does not just emphasize Pericles’ leadership of the demos; he indicates that his policy was in the best interest of the city: “there were ample reasons why Pericles was in a position to make his prediction that the city could easily prevail in the war over the Peloponnesians alone” (2.65.13). Again, the focus here is not just on how Pericles’ words restrain the masses, but how his policy—a combination of real and proposed deeds—benefited the city of Athens.

From his close attention to the actions of the Peloponnesian War and his careful reconstruction of its speeches, it is evident that Thucydides praised Pericles not just because he was gifted in logos but because his consistency, patriotism, and sound policy made the demos trust him. Whether or not the Periclean model is fully reproducible, by treating Pericles and other figures in Thucydides’ war narrative as ideal-types, combinations of historical fact and theoretical insight, we can distinguish the abstract traits that are desirable and undesirable in democratic leaders. Nicias’ failures demonstrate that good rhetoric is necessary, while Alcibiades’ record indicates that, untethered from a commitment to the public good, rhetoric can be a destructive force. Pericles, through fine rhetoric, noble deeds, and the coherence of these two political media, shows that while trust-formation is difficult to achieve in democratic politics, it is not impossible.