Thucydides, early in his account of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, expresses his intention to write a book that will reveal the truth about “that which is human” and then remarks that his book will therefore be “a possession for all time.”1 Thucydides’ explicitly philosophic intention in writing this book in order to convey lasting truths about the character and condition of human beings suggests that his book is better understood as a work of philosophy than as a work of history. Yet, while the end of his book is philosophic–to teach the permanent and universal truth about human nature–the means is historical–to give an account of a particular conflict between the alliance of the Peloponnesians, led by the city of Sparta, and the city of Athens.

Even though Thucydides is the first character to appear in the book, he is extremely reticent in his account of himself in his book as a whole. Although he tells us how he felt at the beginning of the war, when he “hoped” that it would be a great war since Athens and Sparta were, he then believed, both at the peak of their greatness, Thucydides never tells us how he felt at any point later in the war, most notably, when he learned that he was afflicted with the deadly plague; when he failed to defend Amphipolis from Brasidas and was subsequently condemned to exile for twenty years by his fellow Athenians; or when, during his years of exile, his fellow Athenians set out to conquer Sicily.1 However, his book offers glimpses of his character through implicit contrasts with five other characters, all Athenian, whom he resembles: his fellow exile, Alcibiades; the three characters – or groups of characters – who share, in varying ways, his understanding of the fundamental character and condition of human beings – the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta and at Melos, and Diodotus; and the only character in the book who claims to be a lover of wisdom – that is, a philosopher – Pericles (2.40.1). By comparing and contrasting Thucydides with these figures, we may come to see his distinctive nature more clearly.2

Pericles seeks to provide the Athenians with an education that will liberate their natural reason from the constraints of piety and tradition and guide their naturally self-interested passions toward devotion to their community. In this way he hopes to secure for Athens a regime that is based on the natural energy of human beings – the “power of nature” (1.138.3) – rather than on subservience to human and divine law. Thucydides’ account indicates, however, that Pericles’ effort runs afoul of the divisive and violent character of human passion and the abiding power of piety within the human soul and, possibly, beyond it. In this way, Thucydides’ account calls into question whether any political society can be based on the liberation of human nature and hence whether human nature must not be subordinated to a higher power of some kind if political society is to endure and flourish.

Thucydides indicates in a number of ways that the section of his book from its beginning up until the account of the factional strife in Corcyra presents the case for the greatness of Athens over Sparta – of Athens’ regime and its education, and of the understanding of human nature and the human condition on which Athens is based (1.1–3.69). First, as we have seen, in the Archaeology, he presents himself as a partisan of Periclean Athens.1 Second, Thucydides presents a comparison of the two “who had come to be the most illustrious Greeks of their time,” “Pausanias the Spartan and Themistocles the Athenian,” a comparison that highlights the violent, tyrannical, and foolish character of Pausanias but that culminates with Thucydides’ first eulogy of an individual in the book, his eulogy of Themistocles for his outstanding practical wisdom.2 Third, this section of the book presents what is by far Thucydides’ longest eulogy of any individual in the book, of the Athenian statesman Pericles, more than triple the length of Thucydides’ next longest eulogy, that of the Spartan Brasidas.3 Thucydides’ eulogy concludes a discrete, relatively compressed subsection of the book, that is introduced by Thucydides’ praise of Pericles as “a man at that time first of the Athenians, most powerful at both speaking and acting,” a subsection that is 8.1 percent of the book as a whole, and that is entirely dominated by Pericles.4 This subsection contains four unanswered speeches by Pericles – three in direct discourse, and one in indirect discourse – including three of the eight longest speeches in the book and by far the longest speech of all, the Funeral Oration.5 That oration presents Pericles’ eloquent account of the greatness of Athens and specifically its superiority to Sparta in the enjoyment of life and in intelligence.6 Fourth, this section of the book presents the Athenians’ two naval victories over the vastly more numerous Peloponnesian forces, led by Sparta, victories presented by Thucydides as due to the Athenians’ superiority in skill, judgment, and daring.7 Finally, this section presents the Athenians’ thoughtfully compassionate treatment of the rebellious Mytileneans – the greatest act of compassion in this harsh war – in stark contrast with the seemingly thoughtless and cruel treatment by the Spartans of the Plataeans.8 Thucydides in this section of the book portrays Athens as a city with the most sagacious statesmen, the most ingenious and energetic citizenry, and the most thoughtfully humane character.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre has a great deal to say about listening, especially in contrast to looking. This Chapter demonstrates that in Pericles visual modes of perception are imbricated in regimes of power and exploitation, while audition is presented as a way out. When characters in the play lend their ears to sounds and voices that are all-too-often silenced, ignored, or drowned out – especially those belonging to women and the natural world – they are miraculously redeemed and regenerated. Marina’s voice, in particular, drives the drama toward its happy conclusion. To account for the power of her voice, I turn to Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and David Kleinberg-Levin, each of whom takes aim at the oppressiveness of logocentrism, celebrating instead the enlivening energies of the pre-semantic and extra-verbal. As do these authors, Pericles associates the plenipotent voice of the play with the feminine, the more-than-human, and the beyond-meaning, indicating that these can usher us into productive and ethical relationships with others and our world.

This chapter examines epiphany and its place in personal religion by focusing on narratives that feature Athena as the epiphanic deity across different periods, locales, and media. In all cases, Athena is construed as engaging closely with personal requests and concerns of particularly diverse nature from military excellence and political dominance to enhancement of socio-religious capital, and, perhaps more surprisingly, health. Athena’s epiphanies have thus been identified as particularly pertinent for our purposes, as they highlight the grey area that oscillates between personal and poliadic spheres of religious action, thus allowing us to witness the close and complex correlations between the two. Even if the two spheres draw from a common stock of religious schemata and behaviours, contrasting them reveals a wealth of useful information about how personal religious appropriation and innovation are situated in relation to more established forms or expressions of poliadic religious action. Above all, this contrast shows how even groundbreaking religious innovations needed to be anchored properly in easily recognisable, time-tested, and well-established religious schemata.

Participation is meaningless without communication. Just as the Athenian leader Pericles communicated with his citizens in his famous Funeral Oration, so must we communicate with one another to take and coordinate human action through human cooperation. Communication is not possible without a space in which to communicate. The basis of participatory democracy must be communication and action taken together in a public space. We must therefore have more public spaces for democratic participation by everyone, including those among us who have been excluded, who have been marginalized and invisible. Within these public spaces for participation, communication must occur through deliberation with people coming together and talking things through on fair and equal terms to arrive at a mutual decision based on mutual rational criticism. This deliberation must include everyone, and it must be face to face. Local experiments throughout the world have shown that this can be done. By using an ancient sortition machine they called the kleroterion, the ancient Athenians showed how the collective wisdom of the people can be summoned and employed in making public decisions. They also learned through hard experience – exemplified in the trial and execution of Socrates – that collective wisdom and collective action through democratic decision-making are best when the decision-makers are educated to be the best citizens and make the best decisions.

This chapter provides a brief history of thinking about glory from Homer to Arendt. It begins with the “Achillean” conception of the term, which is focused on celebrating how rather than why one fights. We then contrast this idea with its “Periclean” counterpart, wherein glory is fundamentally moral and political. Next, we discuss Cicero’s classical account of glory. The Roman orator argues that civic pursuits are more worthy of glory than military ones, both because the former often make the latter possible and because they frequently are more closely aligned with the state’s true interests. Machiavelli is far more circumspect about the connection between personal virtue and glory. For him, an interest in glory is constitutive of competent leadership and the objects of glory are necessarily exalted: success in war, high diplomacy, or institution building on a grand scale. Hobbes’ emphasis is more psychological – our need for glory, he claims, makes us dangerous enough to each other to require the social mediation offered by the government. Finally, we consider the connection Arendt draws between a “Greek” understanding of politics, where the private realm is subordinated to public “action,” and the emphasis on immortality and permanence fundamental to the idea of glory.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

Socrates’ claim that he is engaged in a cooperative inquiry (506e3-5) may surprise readers of the dialogue. In particular, some readers take Callicles to be a hostile interlocutor; his views about philosophy, ethics, and politics seem to be designed to give us a vivid picture of everything that Socrates rejects and of the whole outlook that vehemently rejects Socrates. Socrates, however, attributes the success of his argument to cooperation between himself and Callicles; he implies that Callicles fulfils the promise that Socrates saw in him when he described him as the ideal interlocutor. Evidence drawn from Thucydides shows that Callicles holds the views of an enlightened (in his view) Periclean supporter of democracy. Socrates exposes a conflict between the acceptance of hedonism and the recognition of non-instrumental goods that belong to this Periclean outlook. Hedonism is fairly attributed to Callicles, and Callicles acknowledges it. Since Callicles is willing to make the effort to ‘view himself correctly’, he recognizes the fairness of Socrates’ argument, and accepts its consequences. Despite appearances, he participates in the cooperative inquiry that leads to Socrates’ conclusion.

This chapter tests (and largely confirms) Nicole Loraux’s intriguing hypotheses concerning the authenticity of Pericles’ famous funeral oration and Thucydides’s ambivalent attitude towards this genre. It argues that Thucydides’ funeral speech of Pericles (2.35–46) owes much to the actual speech that the historical Pericles delivered in 431/0 BC to calm the widespread dissatisfaction with his policy of restraint vis-à-vis the Peloponnesian invaders. To achieve this end, Pericles focussed on one of the epitaphic commonplaces, namely the Athenians’ democracy and way of life as one of the reasons for their exceptional courage. Considering that Thucydides is highly critical of the epitaphic orators’ distorted version of the Athenian past (1.21.1), the inclusion of this funeral speech in his history may seem surprising, but it allowed Thucydides to explore the institutional/cultural reasons for the Athenians’ remarkable war-making ability, which his Corinthians had attributed earlier to the Athenians’ nature (1.70). Thucydides is not uncritical of Pericles’ idealization of Athens, though. By creating deliberate verbal echoes of Pericles’s eulogy in earlier and later passages of his work, Thucydides used the epitaphios logos of Pericles as a crucial point of comparison to illustrate the destructive impact of the war on the Athenians.

Pericles’ funeral oration has played a significant public role, especially in Anglophone countries, over the last century. Renaissance humanists had valued it simply as a masterful piece of oratory, to be studied for its literary qualities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was seen primarily as a source of historical information about Athenian culture, with no present significance. The great change came in the early nineteenth century, when radical and liberal thinkers in Britain, for whom democracy was no longer a threat but a promise, focussed increasingly on the contents of the speech. Cultural achievement was, they argued, intimately bound up with the participation of the people in public life. For them, the proof was in Pericles’ praise of Athens and its institutions. Ancient and modern democracy were now elided, and the words of this funeral speech were thus made available for politicians seeking to celebrate their own societies, from the United States of America to the European Union. These readers of the funeral oration as a celebration of democracy almost entirely ignored the original context of the speech. Developments in modern warfare as well as the rise of the mass citizen army changed this.

The author first addresses the contents and the nature of the proems of the Histories, secondly the arrangement of Ephorus’ work and, thirdly, the main contents of each of the thirty books that formed it.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

Ancient Greece, especially Athens, provides the best documented early example of mass democracy. With the democratic reforms of the fifth century, populism – the direct mobilization of the masses – becomes an effective path to power. This chapter looks at several examples from fifth- and fourth-century Athens, which demonstrate the use of demagoguery as an efficient, if much derided, alternative to patronage-based politics. Ancient Rome provides a somewhat different context. As a republic, Rome gave the masses a more limited and indirect role in politics. Typically, politics was a purely elite affair. Yet for those elites who found the normal insider path blocked to them, direct appeals to the masses could prove effective. However, given the limited formal role for the plebs in Roman politics, this direct mobilization could often lead to violence.

This chapter explores Thucydides’ depiction of leadership in the Greek city states. For Thucydides, the association between leader and led is an essential determinant of the direction taken by a state; his text often explores the ways in which the thought and rhetoric of an individual are converted into the actions of a citizen group. Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles’ leadership is central to this question; the characteristics and behaviours that he embodies are replicated, with variations, in other political leaders who appear in the work. After analysing Thucydides’ representation of Pericles, therefore, this chapter goes on to discuss how other leaders in the work – Hermocrates, Archidamus and Brasidas – relate to this Periclean template.