II. Interpretative challenges

Before turning to Thucydides’ language, an example of a more recent interpretative challenge may prove useful. On 31 October 1917, A.E. Housman’s poem ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ first appeared in The Times, together with an article about the anniversary of the First Battle of Ypres (which resulted in tens of thousands of Allied casualties). In an essay entitled ‘A Cautionary Tale’, David Kovacs recounts his initial misinterpretation of the poem, prompted by its provocative use of ‘mercenaries’.Footnote ⁵ Only once he became aware of its original context was he able to recognize the source of the poem’s irony: German propaganda portrayed British soldiers as a ‘mercenary’ army fighting young German volunteers, whereas the poem meant to show that the derogatory label was misplaced in the light of the British (professional) soldiers’ ultimate sacrifice.Footnote ⁶ The ironic use of the ‘mercenaries’ slur, familiar to the original audience, allowed the author to create and explore a contrast between its hostile and appropriated meanings. Stripped of this crucial context, the poem runs the risk of misinterpretation. Kovacs thus warns readers against overlooking hidden allusions in ancient and modern texts due to the mismatched sensibilities of different eras.Footnote ⁷

Classicists will recognize in this poem the kind of tropes known from the epitaphios logos tradition (the poem by Housman, himself a classicist, was reprinted in December 1917 with a brief ancient Greek adaptation in CR and in 1947 with an extended one in Phoenix). This relatively recent example reveals how easy it is to fall into the trap of reading literary works in line with one’s prior expectations or even taking ornate language at face value (not least when lofty praise and blame are expected). It also provides an analogy for how the understanding of ancient texts is shaped by inherited habits of textual and cultural interpretation.Footnote ⁸

This may serve as background for reading certain expressions in the Thucydidean funeral oration against the grain. Its opening paragraphs delineate the uniqueness of the Athenian mode of life and its constitution, ‘called dēmokratia’, including its altruism and inherent lawfulness (2.37); throughout this eulogy, Pericles constantly tries to forestall anticipated reproach.Footnote ⁹ He soon arrives at a comparison between the military prowess of Athens and Sparta (2.39.1). Simon Hornblower notes in his commentary that the hyperbolic rhetoric of 2.39, praising Athenian ‘easy-going’ military arrangements in contrast to Spartan rigour, is ‘puzzling’.Footnote ¹⁰ Admittedly, inciting one’s fellow citizens to continue fighting by saying that they are not as thoroughly trained as their adversaries may seem counter-intuitive today. Even so, three considerations mitigate the apparent paradox: first, Greek historians show military leaders going to great lengths to encourage their soldiers;Footnote ¹¹ second, Athens’ lack of Spartan-style training was all too clear;Footnote ¹² third, the funeral oration is shaped as a response to Archidamus’ speech in Sparta (1.80–85).Footnote ¹³ Yet, on closer examination, the formulation at 2.39 raises further difficulties.

The Thucydidean Pericles makes the contrast between the Athenians and the Spartans explicit when he tells his audience (2.39.1):

Most translations of this sentence attempt to iron out its problematic expressions and render ἡμεῖς δὲ ἀνειμένως διαιτώμενοι as some variant of ‘we live exactly as we please’,Footnote ¹⁴ ‘we with our unrestricted mode of life’,Footnote ¹⁵ ‘we have a relaxed lifestyle’,Footnote ¹⁶ ‘we know nothing of such harsh restraints’;Footnote ¹⁷ similarly ‘nous, avec notre vie sans contrainte’;Footnote ¹⁸ ‘anche se viviamo liberi da costrizioni’;Footnote ¹⁹ ‘a pesar de nuestro estilo de vida más relajado’;Footnote ²⁰ ‘wir dagegen pflegen einen entspannten Lebensstil’;Footnote ²¹ ‘my zaś, żyjąc w sposób bardziej swobodny’.Footnote ²²

Unsurprisingly, translators and scholars have generally found it natural to read this striking expression as straightforward praise of the Athenian lifestyle, since it appears within a eulogy (epainos) of Athens. More noteworthy, however, is that despite notable variation in translators’ understanding of this phrase and the difficulties with rendering it in its original spirit, commentators usually offer little sustained discussion.Footnote ²³ It has been frequently quoted in scholarship as ‘proof’ that the Athenians enjoyed and openly praised the ideal of ‘living as one pleases’ (which, according to pro-democratic sources, was not an Athenian democratic ideal at all).Footnote ²⁴

At first, the straightforward reading may seem appropriate in a passage full of clichés, bold antitheses and stereotypes about the Spartans and the Athenians (cf. Thuc. 1.70, 84–85; [Xen.] Ath. pol. 1.11; Dem. 20.105–08). However, there may be further context underlying the Thucydidean Pericles’ choice of words. I have found only one commentator, Ioannis Kakridis, who identifies the expression’s possible pejorative resonance and connects it with the language of Athens’ detractors (discussed in Section III).

It may be even more surprising to the modern reader to find that the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his 1629 translation of Thucydides, rendered the sentence in question as ‘and yet wee that live remissely, undertake as great dangers as they’.Footnote ²⁵ While Hobbes’ translation was at the time innovative in being based on the Greek text, not just the Latin, it may be worth comparing it with earlier Latin renditions. Lorenzo Valla’s 1452 translation reads: ‘Nos autem qui iam remissius uiuimus nihilo tamen segnius hostilia discrimina adimus.’Footnote ²⁶ Subsequent editors, however, moved this wording in a lexically less pointed direction, while making its concessive structure explicit; in Aemilius Portus’ 1594 edition (the one used by Hobbes),Footnote ²⁷ the sentence reads (p. 123): ‘Nos uero, quamuis remisso uitae genere utamur, nihilo tamen segnius eadem, nec minus ardua pericula subimus.’Footnote ²⁸ Portus’ choice of words in Latin, echoing Valla’s,Footnote ²⁹ may thus have influenced Hobbes’ English translation here,Footnote ³⁰ as it clearly did in various other passages.Footnote ³¹

Valla himself often added small clarifications to his interpretations of Thucydides’ ‘very compressed language’,Footnote ³² but without a strong anti-Athenian or anti-democratic bias, so covert criticism is less likely.Footnote ³³ Hobbes, by contrast, stresses in his autobiography how much he learnt from Thucydides about the weaknesses of democracy (‘Is Democratia ostendit Mihi quam sit inepta, | Et quantum Coetu plus sapit unus Homo’).Footnote ³⁴ Portus’ Latin, admittedly more ambiguous than Hobbes’ English, may thus have suggested his wording, while the English phrase’s clearer pejorative resonance looks like Hobbes’ conscious choice.Footnote ³⁵ Another translation equally close to the undertones of the Greek was Antoni Bronikowski’s extremely literal Polish rendition from 1861 (‘rozwięźléj żywiąc’, lit. ‘living more dissolutely’).Footnote ³⁶ Even more interestingly, in their choice of idiom, these 17th- and 19th-century translators may have registered something of the expression’s pejorative potential while preserving its ambiguity.

III. Living aneimenōs

The phrase in question, ἡμεῖς δὲ ἀνειμένως διαιτώμενοι, is rendered differently in the various translations quoted above but is unproblematic in terms of textual transmission.Footnote ³⁷ Its components are largely straightforward: ἡμεῖς δέ (the Athenians) is contrasted with οἱ μέν (the Spartans, named in 39.2), while διαιτάομαι can be taken to mean ‘to lead one’s life’, ‘to live’.Footnote ³⁸ The Lacedaemonians are brought up with arduous training (ἐπιπόνῳ ἀσκήσει), while the Athenians enjoy a less burdensome lifestyle.Footnote ³⁹

Yet the adverb that Thucydides uses here, ἀνειμένως, is particularly perplexing. It derives from the verb ἀνίημι (LSJ s.v., II. generally ‘let go’, II.1.b ‘loosen, unfasten’, but also II.7.b pass. ‘to be treated remissly’) and normally suggests carelessness or neglect (cf. Thuc. 1.129.3 ἀνεῖναι πράσσειν, 4.27.1 ἀνέντων τὴν φυλακήν, 8.63.4 μὴ ἀνεθήσεται τὰ πράγματα, Eur. Or. 941, Xen. Mem. 2.4.7; echoed in ῥᾳθυμίᾳ μᾶλλον ἢ πόνων μελέτῃ in Thuc. 2.39.4),Footnote ⁴⁰ often implying a lack of limits or the state of being ‘uncurbed’ (Soph. Ant. 579, El. 516; Eur. Andr. 727).Footnote ⁴¹ Kakridis observed that the expression, like the ῥᾳθυμία that follows, seems to be used in a somewhat pejorative sense, as though Thucydides had taken it over from the language of the opponents of Athenian democracy so that, in characterizing Attic paideia, it might shed its negative force.Footnote ⁴² Yet this reading has never been seriously pursued.

The contrast between the two systems of upbringing could also be seen as part of an Athenian debate between an older ‘elite’ and a newer ‘liberal’ model. The same polarity and the same terms recur in Aristotle’s requirement that children’s pastimes be neither laborious nor lax (δεῖ δὲ καὶ τὰς παιδιὰς εἶναι μήτε ἀνελευθέρους μήτε ἐπιπόνους μήτε ἀνειμένας, Pol. 7.17, 1336a28–30).Footnote ⁴³ Thucydides’ Pericles refers to Athens as a model of education twice in his speech (2.39.1, quoted above, and most famously in 2.41.1),Footnote ⁴⁴ as does Archidamus earlier for Sparta (1.84). Such statements seem to belong within debates over nature and culture that gained prominence with the rise of the first ‘sophists’, often keen on presenting opposing arguments on every subject.Footnote ⁴⁵

The conflict between two generations and models of paideia was also the topic of Aristophanic comedies composed in the years following Pericles’ death, above all the Clouds.Footnote ⁴⁶ Aristophanic characters make numerous references to paideuein, didaskein and manthanein (and their derivatives),Footnote ⁴⁷ but also generally scrutinize two models of upbringing and ways of life (tropoi, 88–89, cf. Thuc. 2.36.4, 2.39.4, 2.41.3) and the arguments (logoi) behind them.Footnote ⁴⁸ A similar debate appears later in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, where Pericles and the young ‘sophistic’ Alcibiades engage in a conversation (1.2.40–46).Footnote ⁴⁹ Echoes of these discussions can be found in most late fifth-century literature, not least in Euripides, who often makes his characters wonder whether virtue comes from one’s origins or from upbringing.Footnote ⁵⁰

This is not to say that the Athenians lived ‘remissly’ by their own lights or by modern standards, but Thucydides’ awkward phrasing seems to respond to a debate current among his audience or readership. In other places in Thucydides, we find ἀνειμένος in an openly or implicitly negative context. A near-identical phrase appears in the Archaeology (1.1–23), full of cultural allusions,Footnote ⁵¹ when the historian recounts the Greek past and makes a comment on how the Athenians were the first to lay aside their arms and to shift ‘towards the more delicate’ (ἐς τὸ τρυφερώτερον). The passage sets three διαιτ- terms side by side, applied in turn to the Athenians (ἀνειμένῃ τῇ διαίτῃ), to their older men of means (τὸ ἁβροδίαιτον, 1.6.3) and to the richer Spartans in their relation to the many (ἰσοδίαιτοι, 1.6.4).Footnote ⁵² Perhaps this sequence was meant as a teasing remark on the Athenian sense of identity or a portrait of the Athenians through the eyes of other Greeks and all those critical of their lifestyle, with its relatively wide access to what elsewhere would be considered ‘luxury’ (cf. 2.13, 2.38.2, 2.40.1; [Xen.] Ath. pol. 1.11, 2.7–12).Footnote ⁵³ The participle is used pejoratively with more emphasis in Brasidas’ speech, when the Spartan general argues that the Athenians are unprepared and not yet focused on the upcoming battle, and thus remain indolent and can be caught off guard (ἐν τῷ ἀνειμένῳ αὐτῶν τῆς γνώμης, 5.9.6).

In fourth-century literature, the picture is no different.Footnote ⁵⁴ Two passages in Aristotle deserve particular attention, since they deploy similar phraseology in a closely comparable context. When discussing different categories of culpable error and the ways individuals voluntarily become corrupt through negligence, the philosopher notes (Arist. Eth. Nic. 3.5, 1114a4–7):

Similarly, in his description of Spartan institutions, he observes (Pol. 2.9, 1270b31–35):

It is striking that Aristotle, in his criticism of the lifestyle of the ephors in Sparta, uses the same vocabulary as Thucydides’ Pericles when speaking of the Athenians (though Aristotle, too, emphasizes the ‘austere’ lifestyle of most Spartans). To Aristotle, living ἀνειμένως is one of the many failings that follow from lacking self-restraint (cf. Eth. Nic. 2.5, 1105b27). The use of λίαν in Pol. 1270b (‘too slack’) seems to reinforce the negative judgement and suggests that aneimenos is considered gradable here (cf. Solon fr. 6 West; Pl. Resp. 8.549d; fr. 142.2–3 adesp. PCG), while elsewhere this condition is treated as entirely pejorative, without any discernible spectrum of degree. These passages also illustrate how ‘loose’ tends to carry a negative charge for Greek authors and how this sense persisted throughout the Classical period. It also persists in the language of moral reproof in later antiquity.Footnote ⁵⁵

The passage from the Politics also brings to mind Euripides’ Peleus, scandalized by the ways of the Spartan maidens who exercise ‘with their thighs naked and robes loosened’ (Andr. 598), while the Ethics passage invites comparison with Xenophon’s description of Asiatic slaves having no constraints when wine is abundant and their masters are absent (ἀνειμένως ἔπινον καὶ ἐθορύβουν, Cyr. 4.5.8). Negative undertones are already clear in Sophocles, whose characters condemn ‘unrestrained’ women (χρὴ γυναῖκας εἶναι τάσδε μηδ’ ἀνειμένας, Ant. 578–79; cf. El. 516), and in Euripides, particularly his Andromache, on the elderly and their uncontrolled temper (727), and the Children of Heracles, on a man of unrestrained spirit being useless to the polis (3–4; cf. Pl. Resp. 8.561a, 9.573a and Arist. Eth. Nic. 7.7, 1150b on the ‘laxness’ of yielding to pleasure).

When Aristotle later speaks of different types of constitution, he states that the democratic ones are ‘slack and soft’ (ἀνειμένας καὶ μαλακάς,Footnote ⁵⁶ Pol. 4.3, 1290a28–29; cf. 5.1, 1301b13–17, Rh. 1.4, 1360a24–27, [Ath. Pol.] 26.1; Pl. Resp. 3.410d–e). It is this kind of criticism, as voiced by the oligarchic and philolaconic opponents and, eventually, by the revolutionaries of 404,Footnote ⁵⁷ that resounds in the Thucydidean Pericles’ wording when he claims that the Athenians love fine things with εὐτέλεια (‘frugality’),Footnote ⁵⁸ and pursue knowledge without μαλακία, ‘softness’ or ‘effeteness’ (2.40.1). Thus, with reference to the common stereotypes, it seems clear that Thucydides’ Pericles is drawing a stark antithesis between the strictly enforced Spartan training on the one hand (cf. 2.39.4 τῶν αἰεὶ μοχθούντων), and on the other, the reputed Athenian ‘slackness’ and lack of harsh discipline, coupled with a claim to natural bravery (τῷ ἀφ’ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν ἐς τὰ ἔργα εὐψύχῳ, 2.39.1; μὴ μετὰ νόμων τὸ πλέον ἢ τρόπων ἀνδρείας, 2.39.4; cf. ἀνεπαχθῶς δὲ τὰ ἴδια προσομιλοῦντες, 2.37.3).

It would be valuable to know whether these puzzling expressions were ever uttered by the historical Pericles, resonating with a conscious irony in delivery, or whether it was the phrasing chosen by Thucydides,Footnote ⁵⁹ at times arguably critical of Pericles’ boastful claims about the war.Footnote ⁶⁰ Their use seems to respond to an ongoing discussion, drawing attention to phraseology recognizable to the audience and familiar to critics of the Athenian lifestyle.Footnote ⁶¹ At one level, this is the familiar wartime polarity of Athenian and Spartan lifestyles, articulated above all in Athenian sources. At another, the same contrast could be taken up within Athens itself. Indeed, in the later stages of the war and in its aftermath, Athens experienced two oligarchic revolutions and renewed debates about the best constitution, including the discourse of patrios politeia and its moral training, still echoed in literary texts of the following decades (beginning with Lysias, Xenophon and Isocrates), with Sparta as a clear point of reference, particularly under the Thirty. Such a pronounced contrast between two models of societal organization could be read as a case of ‘schismogenesis’, that is, an escalating emphasis on difference through mutually exclusive self-definitions and lifestyles that wartime discourse could present as ‘one’s own’ and utterly opposed to that of the enemy.Footnote ⁶²

Internal evidence from Thucydides (1.6.3, 1.129.3, 4.27.1, 5.9.6, 8.63.4) and contemporary evidence from other fifth-century sources,Footnote ⁶³ with the support of fourth-century prose,Footnote ⁶⁴ are sufficient to corroborate the pejorative force of the expressions used by the Thucydidean Pericles but by themselves do not explain their inclusion in the funeral oration and its expected praise of Athens.

IV. Solution

Several questions still remain, and at least two solutions to the puzzle of the awkward wording in Thuc. 2.39 (and 2.40) could be proposed. The safer, ‘stylistic’ one rests on the assumption that Thucydides presents a bold antithesis between two extremes, something in which both he and other fifth-century authors often indulged and which could lead to intentional oxymorons.Footnote ⁶⁵ He may be ironically understating the character of the Athenian constitution through meiosis or litotes (if read together with οὐδὲν ἧσσον in 2.39.1; cf. 2.8.1, 6.18.7), some of his favourite tropes, especially common in his speeches’ binary oppositions, not least in the many double negations of the funeral oration itself (2.36.2, 2.36.4, 2.40.2, 2.41.4, 2.43.1).Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet rhetorical devices in Thucydides tend not to stand alone and instead serve a purpose, whether rhetorical or narratological.

A more ‘contextual’ solution, in line with Kakridis’ philological intuition, would thus assume that Thucydides’ Pericles echoes the language and catchwords of Athens’ detractors (both domestic and foreign).Footnote ⁶⁷ The idiom would thus be given a more positive yet ironic spin, as often happens with commonly used slogans and slurs creatively appropriated by those against whom they are originally directed (with the reappropriated use often limited to the in-group, at least initially, as has been the case with ‘queer’),Footnote ⁶⁸ or used ironically in a literary work, as in the Housman parallel. Pericles’ wording may lack an equivalent of inverted commas, such as δῆθεν or even simply δή, which would have explicitly signalled pretence (and would have spoilt the irony), but in Thucydides these generally are not used as irony cues in direct speech.Footnote ⁶⁹

Such a reading seems apt in a speech that repeatedly presents Spartan civic values as alien and antithetical to Athenian ones. It would allow us to see 2.39–40 as praise of Athens that quietly turns alleged vices into asserted virtues (a device later known as conciliatio or συνοικείωσις, cf. Thuc. 6.16–17). It could thus also function as a double entendre, meaningful yet striking at the surface level while leaving room for a contextualized ironic reading. As Richard Rutherford notes: ‘ironic or exaggerated praise can be a form of blame, and vice versa.’Footnote ⁷⁰

On this second, more tempting interpretation, the use of such a phrase (perhaps best rendered as concessive, ‘and even though we live remissly…’)Footnote ⁷¹ in the Thucydidean Pericles’ speech invites an ironic interpretation, possibly on more than one level, given the historian’s interest in evaluative vocabulary and the familiar polemical uses of such language against Athens. In this context, his description of the Athenian past (with both aneimenos and trupheros appearing in 1.6.3)Footnote ⁷² seems even more striking, since it shows Thucydides himself deploying the same vocabulary in his narrative voice, and so poses similar interpretative challenges. More significantly, considering the regularly pejorative use of aneimenos in Classical sources, this reading would also explain the use of other terms of criticism that Pericles neutralizes in different ways: rhaithumia (often negatively contrasted with ponoi),Footnote ⁷³ malakia (sometimes explicitly paired with rhaithumia)Footnote ⁷⁴ and euteleia Footnote ⁷⁵ in the following sentences (2.39.4–40.1). Here such lexis appears either as an echo of hostile characterization answered by redefinition, or as an explicit rejection (the ‘effeteness’ slur in 2.40.1, malakia, perhaps the strongest accusation, is outright rejected by aneu, ‘without’).

Reappropriated by those it had branded, such vocabulary can function as a compact rebuttal and help explain why the phrasing remains so resistant to translation. The sense and spirit of the relevant expressions in 2.39–40 would thus be roughly: ‘we may live carelessly, but we are not any less brave and can always win’ (2.39.1, above); ‘we may be lax in our sluggish unpreparedness (ῥᾳθυμίᾳ … τοῖς τε μέλλουσιν ἀλγεινοῖς μὴ προκάμνειν) but we are eager to face dangers with courage as part of our character (τρόπων ἀνδρείας ἐθέλομεν κινδυνεύειν)’ (2.39.4); ‘we may be unshowy in our display, yet still enjoy the city’s splendour (φιλοκαλοῦμέν τε γὰρ μετ’ εὐτελείας), and while we love seeking knowledge, this does not make us at all soft (φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας)’ (2.40.1).

On this reading, the historian’s wording seems deliberately ironic, while at the same time addressing contemporary criticism of the Athenian lifestyle and consciously engaging in two prevalent antitheses: one between Athens and Sparta in general, the other between two different images of the strengths and weaknesses of Athens’ education, military training and political order. One might speculate whether this antithetical language had become popular in Athens by the time of the speech’s composition or was particular to Periclean political language.

Even if the original context must remain partly conjectural, taking such rhetorical complexity into account should prove more fruitful than attempts to compel Thucydides’ Pericles to speak the language of modern politics through a more straightforward rendering designed to match contemporary expectations (not least because the difficult reading articulates a similar idea much more cleverly, as could be expected from Thucydides).Footnote ⁷⁶ Given the number of compressed and often problematic Thucydidean expressions, this approach may offer new ways of analysing not just the Periclean funeral oration but also other speeches in Thucydides, which interpretative endeavours too often smooth out at the expense of the discordant and ambiguous qualities of the Greek.

Scholars have already identified, and continue to identify, numerous ironic statements in classical literature. Recognition of the fact that slur reappropriation could appear in Thucydides’ speeches specifically and that such terms could be ironically interwoven with other contemporary utterances may be useful for the analysis of the ‘discourse beyond the speech’, not least in classical historiography and rhetoric. Reading these speeches with discursive appropriation techniques in mind may help us properly contextualize such utterances and uncover meanings closer to their original contexts without sacrificing the undertones otherwise lost to us today.