This book makes the wonderfully suggestive attempt to interpret the ringing “silence” of the Athenian demos in Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War in a manner that renders it more than the quietude of an only nominally democratic mass. John Zumbrunnen asks readers of the History to reject interpretations of Thucydides as resoundingly anti-democratic and instead to read his famously self-identified “factual” account of the Peloponnesian War in terms of what it can teach us about mass democracy and the relationship of the “silent” demos to the ongoing construction of group identity and the actions of the polis in war. Zumbrunnen does this by examining Thucydides's different understandings of democratic silence in the Mitylene debate, Pericles's speeches, the Melian dialogues, and the case of the Athenian allies in Plataea. He identifies two kinds of silence in these cases. At times, according to Zumbrunnen, as in the case of the Mitylene debates, the silence of the democratic demos in Athens destabilized elite control of the city. More frequently, however, Thucydides presents Athenian action absent any kind of deliberation as a silent ceding of “all attempts to control meaning” or establish identity to elites (p. 190). In this second instance, Zumbrunnen suggests that Thucydides's account be read as a warning about the “tendency of democracy to become merely nominal” (p. 2).

In either case, Zumbrunnen's most original contributions to both Thucydidean scholarship and democratic theory more generally are his observations on the opacity of silence in the context of democracy. Contra the tendency among many scholars of the History to read the speeches of elites as representative of a collective Athenian “character” (tropos), Zumbrunnen's account seeks to situate discussions of who hoi Athenaioi are within the largely unknown (and unknowable) dynamics of their democratic politics. This approach works better in instances when he challenges the textual and historical readings of the character-driven analysis. For instance, in response to scholars who have read the Melian dialogues in terms of a decline in Athenian character since the Mitylene debates, Zumbrunnen points out the numerous textual uncertainties regarding the “representativeness” of the envoys sent to Melos. Such uncertainties call into question the collective nature of the silent demos whose politics they are meant to represent, thus rendering the “character” of the Athenians unstable and opaque. At other moments, Zumbrunnen's analysis is less convincing. His attempt to cast the Funeral Oration as a moment of “deliberative and democratic” politics feels particularly strained. Zumbrunnen's point that that the oration should be read as Pericles's attempt to define the identity of the Athenians rather than as “as simple expression of that identity” is well taken and puts Pericles into his rightful place as rhetorician rather than a speaker of truth (p. 91). But the unreadable nature of Thucydides's presentation of the demos's silent response to this speech remains simply that: unreadable. Coding this silence as “deliberative” in any form seems an odd contortion, one that ultimately finds “deliberative and democratic” practices in precisely the kinds of “nominal” politics that Zumbrunnen dislikes. In this reading, it is unclear how Thucydides's account of the demos in Athens is any different from the patently undemocratic narrative of the silent, but always slightly ominous and powerful, presence of “the people” in medieval “Mirror of Princes” texts.

What, then, is Thucydides's contribution to democratic theory and, particularly, to theories that wrestle with the nagging tension between the plurality of democracy and the unity of the polity during wartime? Zumbrunnen rightly asks us to consider this question from within a context that challenges the “inside/outside” debate in political theory and international relations scholarship. Realists, he argues, have long viewed Thucydides as a theorist solely concerned with the city as a “unit of action” where the internal dynamics of democratic practices aimed at self-identification remain inconsequential to the actions of a polity at war. Rather, Zumbrunnen argues that we need to read the silence of the Athenian demos through a “constructivist” lens that views the “unit of action” as a diverse package of norms, history, and identity debates (p. 17). But Zumbrunnen's analysis ignores precisely the richest and most revealing insight to be gained from such a dual focus. Thus, he argues, the Athenians demos in the History (through their differently textured silences regarding the city's action) can be understood as always engaged in a process of defining their collective character. Zumbrunnen then turns to Aristotle and Hannah Arendt to help think through the process of conceptualizing character through action. He notes the “awkwardness” of applying such notions developed for individuals “to a city” (p. 78), but then does it anyway, concluding that Athenian silence and political speech incorporate both the “revelatory” and “instrumental” aspects he finds in Aristotle and Arendt (p. 85).

What we lose in this strangely reductive reading of the Athenian polis as an individual is any understanding of how the forging of collective identity in the context of the city's actions as a unit of action reflects back on and conditions the forging of that identity itself. In other words, we lose the sense of a complicated dialectical relationship between internal debates (or silences) about identity and externally focused debates (or silences) about action that Zumbrunnen's very analysis invites us to explore. Thus, despite Pericles's entreaties to forget the past and to forge Athenian actions based on the realities of the present, the silent Athenian demos would absolutely have been aware of themselves as an imperial power and not merely another city caught up in the push and pulls of “Greek intercity relations” (p. 147). If Zumbrunnen truly wants Thucydides to speak to contemporary democratic theorists concerned with the “activation of the demos” in a way that challenges the standard “character” debates that emerge in times of war (p. 187), then exploring the relationship between democracy, collective identity, and the polis as an imperial “unity of action” would seem essential. Indeed, such a reading might go far toward countering apologist readings of the History as a guidebook for negotiating the tension between democracy and empire that have infected Thucydidean scholarship since the creation of “international relations” as a discipline.