Thucydides - Softcover

Connor, Walter Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691102392 ISBN 13: 9780691102399

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 1987

Inhaltsangabe

This full-scale sequential reading of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War will be invaluable to the specialist and also to those in search of an introduction and companion to the Histories. Moving beyond other studies by its focus on the reader's role in giving meaning to the text, it reveals Thucydides' use of objectivity not so much as a standard for the proper presentation of his subject matter as a method for communicating with his readers and involving them in the complexity and suffering of the Peloponnesian War. W. Robert Connor shows that as Thucydides' themes and ideas are reintroduced and developed, the initial reactions of the reader are challenged, subverted, and eventually made to contribute to a deeper understanding of the war.

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Walter Robert Connor

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This full-scale sequential reading of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War will be invaluable to the specialist and also to those in search of an introduction and companion to the "Histories." Moving beyond other studies by its focus on the reader's role in giving meaning to the text, it reveals Thucydides' use of objectivity not so much as standard for the proper presentation of his subject matter as a method for communicating with his readers and involving them in the complexity and suffering of the Peloponnesian War. W. Robert Connor shows that as Thucydides' themes and ideas are reintroduced and developed, the initial reactions of the reader are challenged, subverted, and eventually made to contribute to a deeper understanding of the war.

This book described earlier approaches to the "Histories," including attempts to account for the paradox of the intense emotional power of a work ostensibly so cool and detached. It demonstrates that many features previously thought to be signs of inconsistencies in Thucydides' thought or of different stages of composition are instead parts of the development of the reader's reaction to the war.

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Thucydides

By W. Robert Connor

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1984 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-10239-9

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
ix
Abbreviations..............................................................
xi
Introduction...............................................................
3
Book 1.....................................................................
20
Book 2.....................................................................
52
Book 3.....................................................................
79
Book 4.....................................................................
109
Book 5.....................................................................
141
Book 6.....................................................................
158
Book 7.....................................................................
185
Book 8.....................................................................
210
Conclusion.................................................................
231
Appendixes.................................................................
251
Index......................................................................
263

CHAPTER 1

THE ARCHAEOLOGY

Hume, echoed by Kant, said the first page of Thucydides was thecommencement of real history. But it is a puzzling and difficultbeginning—an idiosyncratic introduction to as complex an argument as isto be found anywhere in the eight books of the work or indeed in all thepages of ancient historical writing. After a brief statement of the anticipatedgreatness of the subject matter, the grand and potentially moving themeof the nature of the Peloponnesian War is abandoned for a digressionarguing that early Greek history was all on a small scale. This section,commonly called the "Archaeology," demands a reader of exceptionalpatience and determination. The ancient critics sometimes deplored itsdifficult style and peculiar arrangement, explaining how Thucydides shouldhave written the introduction to his work. Modern scholars have beentroubled by the difficult language and complexity of arrangement; thegreatest of them, Wilamowitz, admitted that "in spite of its deliberatestructure" the first book remained to him "a chaos."

The opening repudiates many principles of ancient rhetorical composition.It does nothing to ease the reader into the subject matter or theapproach. It abjures blandishments, ingratiations, or promises, except thebald statement that Thucydides, even at the beginning of the war, expectedthat it would be "great and most worth relating of all previous events."But the nature of this greatness is not specified for many chapters. Initially,there is only the assertion that this was the greatest kinesis, movement ordislocation, for the Greeks or even for most of mankind. The assertionseems excessive: What of the dislocations that followed the Trojan Waror the immense movements and destruction of the second Persian invasion?Almost immediately we lose sight of the Peloponnesian War and its effects,"the moral as well as the material loss—the fabric of society nearly broken,both intellect and virtue weakened or abused." Instead the focus turns toa negative point—that the events of early Greek history were never oflarge scale. Nor are the arguments in support of this position alwayscompelling. The lovers of Herodotus are understandably outraged: "Thucydidesmagnifies his own subject at the expense of the wars of Helleneand Barbarian, ludicrously missing the oecumenical significance and wantonlycompressing the duration and magnitude of the Herodotean theme."

Instead of a rhetorical magnification of the theme of the work we encounterat the outset a polemical essay on the nature of early Greek history,instead of the beginning of the narrative about Thucydides' own time, arevisionist argument about the remote past. The opening sentences set thework apart from the amiable discursiveness of Herodotus and, no doubt,from the inflated rhetorical history of the funeral orations and the displaypieces at the Olympic and other festivals. This work, we soon recognize,belongs instead with other examples of a new approach to the past detectableamong the fragmentary remains of the prose literature of the latefifth century B.C. The label "Archaeology" widely used in modern discussionsof the opening section of the work reflects, albeit obscurely, thisconnection. Although open to the false inference that Thucydides wastrying to unearth whatever information he could about the ill-documentedearly history of Greece, the term connected this portion of Thucydides'work with other late fifth-century reconstructions of the remote past. Theopening chapters are not an attempt at a comprehensive description of earlyGreece. Thucydides has much more to tell about early Greece than hereports here, as a glance at the beginning of the sixth book shows. Heknows—or claims to know—a great deal about the history of Greek colonization,and elsewhere displays detailed knowledge of episodes in theearly history of both Athens and Sparta. But in the Archaeology he hasconstructed an argument, an essay of revisionist history that presents afresh view of how Greece had once appeared.

Hesiod's idea of a Golden Age is representative of the radically differentview of the past held by earlier Greek thinkers. In his view there had oncebeen a happy stage of easy rapport between men and gods and even afterthat time, ages of heroic accomplishment, blessed in comparison to "contemporary"travail and misery. The myths and legends about early Atticasuggested a view similar to that in Hesiod. They reported times full ofviolence and dissension but set apart by a hero, Theseus, who unified andintegrated the state, secured freedom from the domination of King Minosof Crete and established Athens' ancestral ways. Such myths reflect atraditional way of viewing the past and a sense that improvements in man'ssituation can come only by divine intervention or by recapturing the lostglory of earlier days.

This view persisted through the fifth century and even later, at least insome quarters. It appealed to various audiences and took various forms,including highly moralizing versions. For the epideictic orator, the patrioticpoet, the painter at work on public monuments, history was often the stagefor the recurring struggle between bravery and cowardice, greed and restraint,right and wrong. History was the projection of moral qualities andconflicts.

But during the fifth century many thinkers began to repudiate such viewsof the past. When they imagined the early stages of human life, they foundthem anything but "golden." Life had been harsh, squalid, brutish, andshort. Only gradually, by the accumulation of knowledge and by discoveriesand inventions had mankind escaped vulnerability to the wild beastsand the elements. This radically new view of the past can be detected inmyth and poetry but often appeared in the prose essays and speeches thatcan be grouped together as archaiologiai. Thucydides' "Archaeology"concerns a later stage of human development man many of these accounts,for it deals not with man's first emergence from savagery, but with...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1987
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691102392
• ISBN 13: 9780691102399
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar