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I. Introduction

A. I don't understand Thucydides. I find him difficult, disturbing, insightful, brilliant, frustrating, and almost impossible to get a handle on. Thucydides is an education.

B. I want to focus on one aspect of Thucydides to see if it throws light on T's methods or purpose: his use of language, especially his speeches.

1. Previous lecturers on T. (Silverman, Gillcrist, and Sacks) have all raised the issue of T's relation to language as parts of their argument, and have focused on the speeches in Thucydides.

2. Thucydides clearly saw the speeches as important: he mentions his procedure in writing the speeches in Book I. 22 ( 1. Keeping as close as possible to general sense of words actually used; and 2. make speakers say what was called for by each situation), and he gives them great prominence in the text.

3. What I will propose this morning is that Thucydides used speeches to show how during Peloponnesian War, language lost its grip on reality. There was not just an ever increasing gap between what was said and what was meant, but between language and reality. Crisis in Greece, and especially in Athens, of logos. Logos important concept in Greek culture: language, speech, word, rationality, proportion, calculation. Human beings, who prided themselves in being different from animals because of their use of logos, lose this tool. In a recent book, When Words Lose Their Meaning, James Boyd White, brilliantly analyzes T. history as showing the breakdown of what Boyd calls the culture of argument. At the beginning of the Histories T. pictures for us this culture of argument as operational in the Greek world, allowing individuals and states to discuss issues in terms of justice, self interest, and gratitude. Boyd argues that T. illustrates for us how this culture of argument breaks down at Athens, and shows us the consequences of this. As will be clear, I agree with Boyd's major point, but I want to take it a step further. My thesis is that not only did T. see this happening in the period he is describing, but that is own work is in some ways both a beneficiary and a victim of this process of the disintegration of logos.

3. Structure of Talk:

Part I: What has happened to language at Athens in second half of 5th century? Focus on the sophists, who were the central figures in this crisis of language.

Part II: Look at speeches in Thucydides with this background in mind.

What we will see is that T. is a product of his age: reflects debates about language and the nature of reality developed by the Sophists, that were raging at Athens, and applies them to history. They gave him powerful tools to analyze what happened during the Peloponnesian War and convey it to his readers, but at the same time made his text problematical.

II. Rhetoric and the Sophists in 5th cent Athens: I want to build on some of the remarks Professor Silverman made about rhetoric and the Sophists in 5th century Athens.

A. Rhetoric always a part of Greek culture

1. Speeches in Homer, Tragedy, Herodotus. Greeks always had great interest in rhetoric.

2. 2 major changes in 5th century:

a. Democracy in Athens

b. Development of the science of rhetoric

A. Democracy in Athens

1. Democratic reforms led to broadening of citizenship: citizenship meant direct participation in government: parrhesia: free speech

a. assembly (aristocrats and others)

b. law courts: no public prosecutors or lawyers : you attacked others and defended yourself directly.

c. funeral orations, etc.

2. change in requirements of citizenship quick, problematic:

traditional Athenian education could not cope. Traditional education involved three main areas:

(1) basic literacy (reading and writing); memorizing poetry

(2) music: flute or lyre

(3) physical education (running, long jump, javelin, discus, wrestling)

3. No formal education past that. Prior to mid-5th century, this sufficient. Rest of a person's education carried on by mother or father: women learned skills they needed from older women, men (aristocrats) learned skills from hanging around older men).

4. Full democracy and the need for rhetoric it created changed this.

2. This is where other major change is important:

B. The development of rhetoric as a techne, or art or science.

a. This did not start at Athens, but in Syracuse, in Sicily: Syracusan tyrants overthrown in 460's, lawcourts set up: Tisias and Corax taught a technique of judicial rhetoric to Syracusans. They were first we know who systemized rhetoric, gave it a set of rules.

b. Athens, which just at this period was undergoing democratic changes where rhetoric became increasingly important, was a ready market for the art of rhetoric. Group of men called Sophists brought the art of rhetoric to Athens.

3. Who were the Sophists?

a. modern use of the term today: derogatory

b. ancient use not originally so. sophistes was a general word which originally meant `wise man', used of Homer, Hesiod, Solon, etc.

c. in mid 5th century it became a technical term of sorts: a professional teacher.

d. In one way, it is misleading to talk about Sophists as a group: they were individuals who taught different things and were interested in a wide variety of topics. But topic that united them was language, and especially the art of rhetoric.

e. Number of identifying features which made a person a Sophist (Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement):

1. received fees for their teaching, often very expensive; because of their cost, most often surrounded by young aristocrats.

2. patronized by the rich (Pericles as patron of sophists)

3. most Sophists were non-Athenian, and itinerant:

4. claimed to teach political arete: political excellence, those skills that one needed to excel as a good citizen and politician:

5. primary among these skills was the art of speaking.

But if the Sophists only taught how to be an excellent citizen and public speaking, what was the problem? More than an ancient version of toastmasters clubs.

Some aspects of rhetoric that they taught were uncontroversial: (Kennedy, Art of Persuasion in Greece 30ff)

They divided oratory into three types:

1. deliberative - speeches in the assembly

2. judicial (forensic) - speeches in court

3. epideictic (speech in praise or blame - Pericles' Funeral Oration)

1. new interest in dividing speeches into parts: prooemium or introduction, narration of facts, proof, epilogue. Rules derived for each section: for example, in the proemium, it was often suggested that one get up and gain the sympathy of one's audience: Hum lecturer, Socrates in the Apology.

2. interest in prose styles: e.g. Gorgias

3. philology: linguistic study (examined various meanings of words, shades of meaning: e.g. Prodicus)

None of these cause any immediate problems, but a fourth thing did, what Kennedy calls a:

4. new rationalism of proofs and arguments:

- delight in gymnastics of argument. This best seen in two types of argumentation:

(1) eristic, which can loosely be defined as trying to win an argument by an means possible, such as logical fallacies, verbal ambiguities, and the like, and was often employed in "question and answer" format,

and

(2) antilogic, the juxtaposing of two speeches containing contradictory views of a single topic, e.g. it is just to beat your parents, it is unjust to beat your parents.

These and other techniques described as "making the weaker argument the stronger."

- reevaluation of appeals made to justice, honor, or expediency: led to a reevaluation of what these terms meant. What was importan was not what justice, honor, or expediency really were, but what speakers could make them seem to be in order to persuade their audience or win their case.

- appeal made to "probability": what seems likely or reasonable. Tisias: weak man attacking strong man.

5. This new rationalism spearheaded by the sophists provided intellectual tools for a questioning of everything: rules of rhetoric, rules and conventions of society, the nature of justice, the gods. This helped make Athens in the 5th century an incredibly vibrant place:

This was much more controversial, and to see exactly why, we will turn to the handout sheet, passages 1-7:

Protagoras of Abdera (Thrace) c. 490-420 BC

1. Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not. (DK 80 B 1)

2. Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life. (DK 80 B 4)

Gorgias of Leontini (Sicily) c. 490-390 BC

3. Three successive headings from Gorgias' book On the Nonexistent or On Nature: "First and foremost, that nothing exists; second, that even if it exists it is inapprehensible to man; third, that even if it is apprehensible, still it is without a doubt incapable of being expressed or explained to the next man." (DK 82 B 3)

4. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity....The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. (Encomium of Helen, DK 82 B 11, sections 8 and 14)

Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, second half of the 5th century BC

5. [Thrasymachus] says that the just is nothing other than the interest of the stronger. (DK 85 B 6a)

Antiphon (Athens) second half of the 5th century BC

6. Justice consists in not transgressing the laws and usages of one's state. Therefore the most profitable means of manipulating justice is to respect the laws when witnesses are present but otherwise to follow the precepts of nature. Laws are artificial compacts, they lack the inevitability of natural growth. Hence to break laws without detection does one no harm, whereas any attempt to violate the inborn dictates of nature is harmful irrespective of discovery by others, for the hurt is not merely, as with the lawbreaker, a matter of appearance or reputation but of reality. (DK 87 B 90)

Critias (Athens) c. 460-403 BC

7. And then I think men set up laws as punishers, in order that justice might be ruler [of all alike], and hold violence a slave. And anyone who might transgress was penalized. Then, since the laws prevented them from performing overt acts by force, they performed them secretly. Then it seems to me [for the first time] some man, acute and wise in mind, invented the fear of the gods for mortals, so that there might be some terror for the bad even if in secret they do or say or think anything....Saying these words he introduced the most pleasant of teachings, hiding truth with a false account....And I think that it was in this way that someone first persuaded mortals to think that there existed a race of deities. (Sisyphus, DK 88 B 25)

The reaction to these doctrines of the Sophists was dramatic:

A. some people loved them: the sons of the rich, like Alcibiades.

B. some people hated them: fathers of those sons (!), and conservative elements in Athenian society:

We will see Plato's reaction in the Apology and Republic. Socrates often lumped with sophists by contemporaries, (there were many similarities), Plato concerned to show the difference.

But given they were controversial, what effect did they have on contemporary writers?:

1) Sophocles and Herodotus influenced by them, but they were able to integrate the ideas without disrupting their fundamental beliefs. They learned from the sophists, but were able to integrate sophistic teaching into a more traditional framework.

2) Euripides and Thucydides much more effected. They used sophistic ideas, but to illustrate and analyze a world falling apart.

Euripides: questioning of the gods, increased use of rhetorically flavored speeches, questioning of traditional views and values. In his play we are reading for Friday, the Bacchae, we will see that Euripides explores and perhaps re-evaluates concepts like wisdom and human happiness in very paradoxical ways.

III: Thucydides' Appropriation of Sophistic Techniques

One could argue for sophistic influence in many aspects of Thucydides' History:

1) Thucydides' Greek prose style: self consciousness of style not just to be difficult, but to get reader to work for meaning.

2) lack of divine structure, critical attitude towards the Gods, emphasis on human beings as center of universe.

3) most obvious, though, is T's use of sophistic methods in his speeches.

Remarkable thing is not that there are speeches (Herodotus has them too), but how and why he uses them.

Most readers first approaching Thucydides are disturbed that there are so many of them, that they are so long, and especially that they at times seem so irrelevant to their immediate context.

But if we look closer, we begin to see a deeper pattern.

1. The contents of the speeches are infused with sophistic ideas and techniques, and self consciously so:

Two Examples:

Mitylenian Debate (3.36-50; pages 212-223)

- both speeches, those of Cleon and Diodotus, use sophistic tools:

1. They are set out like antilogies: We should severly punish the Mityleneans; We should not severly punish the Mityleneans.

2. The two speakers are both self conscious about the nature of speech and political discourse.

3. Both speakers use sophistic distinction between justice and advantage. Cleon claims it is both just and advantageious for Athens to put to death all the males and enslave all the women and children, Diodotus that justice has nothing to do with the matter: the Athenians should only look to what is in their advantage, and that is to spare the people of Mitylene.

- analysis difficult: what are we to make of Cleon's and Diodotus' arguments? How are we to evaluate them?

Prefer one over the other?

I as a reader want to privilege Diodotus' viewpoint, but cant fully. He does the right thing, but for the wrong reason: expediency. He sets a terrible precedent. James Boyd White argues that this is the crucial step in destroying the culture of argument: first time in work justice is ruled completely out of bounds.

Or do both speeches cancel each other out, like sophistic antilogies? If so, where does that leave us?

Similar problem with other passages:

Melian Dialogue (5.84-116; pages 400-408)

1) Again, there is self-consciousness about the nature of speech: Athenians ask to speak in front of people, Melians want them to speak in front of few; Athens asks if they can use dialogue, question and answer form. Antilogy of opposing continuous speech replaced by eristic: close question and answer. Athenians play role of sophist in eristic, driving home their arguments.

Athenians argue expediency, a variation on the theme of might makes right. They refuse to let Melians use standard discourse of right vs. wrong, just vs. unjust, the gods, faith in allies (the Spartans might come and rescue them).

Are we supposed to take? If so, whose? The Athenians? but we see where their logic leads them: the slaughter of innocent men, enslavement of women and children.

The Melians? No, because although we see them as heroic and up against the wall, we see that their language is flawed. They are out of touch with reality. They are in the right by conventional morality, the gods should come to their side, their allies the Spartans should come - but they do not, and they are destroyed.

This pattern is found in many other passages: two speeches or speakers juxtaposed with each other, each arguing a different position, with no direction given for how we are to interpret them.

But once we see this, where do we go? What is T's purpose in setting up his work with all of these speeches? What is his purpose in the work?

It is clear that T. thought hard about the relation of language to reality.

Most famous passage in T. that illustrates this is his treatment of the Civil War at Corcyra

Quote: 3.82 (Handout #8).

8. So revolution broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities of revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. (Thuc. 3. 82).

I don't know what T's real purpose was.

Tough question.

2 attractive answers:

Robert Connor, Thucydides, Handout, #9:

9. The work cannot be summed up as advocacy of Periclean rationalism, the law of the stronger, a tragic pessimism, or any of the other formulations so popular in Thucydidean scholarship. It defies reduction and resists simplification, for a very good reason. Any encapsulation stops our rethinking and re-examination of our own premisses and values. (Connor, 249).

James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning, Handout, #10:

10. What our question raises, then, is whether it is the object of this text to hold its actors responsible for what they say and do--to praise and blame, to admire and condemn--or whether, by contrast, its object is merely to describe and explain in some scientific fashion the chain of events that make up its narrative. The question affects the meaning of the text in the deepest way, yet it plainly has no answer. Such irresolution on matters of the greatest importance is a structural characteristic of the text as a whole. Again and again it suggests a question, or forces it upon the reader, and then offers grounds for conflicting responses. (White, 86).

Both Connor and White, but especially White, stress how unstable and destabilizing Thucydides account is. As I mentioned earlier, White sees a progression - from Pericles Funeral Oration, the plague at Athens, the revolution in Corcyra, the Melian Dialogue to the speeches of Alcibiades and Nicias during the Sicilian expedition - of a disintegration of a culture of argument.

T. employed powerful analytical tools provided by the sophists, used them to get closer than anyone before to seeing reality of Greek politics, deeper motives of why people and states act the way that they do. He was able to peel back the rhetoric, see glimpses of deeper laws: states act out of fear, not justice, and the way in which they try to justify their actions often hides their true motives.

T. is both a beneficiary of the sophists, and their ultimate victim.

Two options, neither attractive:

a. Cant go back to old way, although at times T. seems to want to:

Handout, #11: T's comment on civil war in Corcyra.

11. As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. (Thuc. 3. 83)

b. Can't fully embrace new way, because it is not clear what the new way is - if not justice, then what? might makes right? Argue on the basis of pure advantage? but this only leads to chaos, overreaching, blindness: slaughter of Melians, disaster of Sicilian expedition.

c. T. seems to be pointing towards a way in some places in the text: to agree with the sophists that justice and the other virtues are artificial constructs, but argue that they are necessary constructs.

Handout, #12, #13:

12. Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection. (Thuc. 3. 84; cf. 3.59)

13. Melians: Then in our view (since you force us to leave justice out of account and to confine ourselves to self-interest) - in our view it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men - namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should be allowed to use and to profit by arguments that fall short of mathematical accuracy. And this is a principle which affects you as much as anybody, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance and would be an example to the world. (Thuc. 5. 90)

But I cant quite see it. Perhaps you can in conference.

There is no firm ground to stand on any more.

T. has used sophistic thought brilliantly, but without resolution. Why should an individual or state be just? What is the relation bewteen justice, self-interest, and power?

As we will see, this is a problem that will not go away. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all try to answer the problem.

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Last Modified: 21 Oct. '95