The End of the Histories and the End of the Atheno-Peloponnesian Wars, in T. Harrison and E. Irwin, Interpreting Herodotus, OUP 2018. (Unrevised proofs) (original) (raw)
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This seminar puts Thucydides’s accounts of Athenian military defeat in their social and literary contexts. It begins by demonstrating that other genres at Athens, such as tragedy, comedy, public oratory and inscriptions, were reluctant to mention Athens’s defeats, and never described the events of its military disasters. Historiography’s detailed accounts of military losses thus preserved the memory of these adverse events; in addition, they offered an argumentative analysis. After discussing why postwar Athenians might have been interested in reading descriptive explanations of their own military disasters, the seminar reviews two famous Thucydidean narratives of Athenian defeat: the stories of the battles at Delium and on Epipolae at Syracuse. It compares these narratives to such post-defeat responses as are available from our Athenian evidence, showing that these responses were characterized by a tendency to deny defeat, to blame generals or soldiers for cowardice, or to blame bad luck or the gods. The seminar concludes that Thucydides’s accounts would have been read in the context of these more common explanations, which his accounts opposed, and suggests that we consider his narratives of Athenian defeats as arguments that pertained to the postwar political context, in which it was advantageous for parties who wished to undertake new wars to forget or deny defeat. At the same time his detailed accounts commemorated the efforts of the defeated Athenian combatants.
Between ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’ and The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (and beyond)
Polis 41: 176-202, 2024
This article discusses the fortune of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s famous article ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’, and reassesses its basic thesis that the Athenian Empire was popular among the lower classes of the allied cities in the light of recent developments in the field. After surveying the article’s immediate and more recent reception, and discussing its relation with The Origins of the Peloponnesian War and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, it isolates four key new trends in Greek history that, while going against some of Ste. Croix’s basic convictions, end up reinforcing his overall case. These are: a renewed attention to the mass and elite dichotomy, with recent work interpreting Greek oligarchy as a fundamentally reactive and anti-demotic regime; the recognition of the continued relevance of Persian med- dling in the later fifth-century; a sea-change in Attic epigraphy which has led to the post-dating of several ‘imperial’ decrees; the new recognition of the dynamism of the Greek economy, and of the economic function of the Athenian Empire itself. Finally, the article addresses the paradigm of class struggle and stresses how democracy and economic dynamism, to which the Athenian Empire contributed, fostered the growth of slave markets and worsened the exploitation of ‘marginal’ regions as slave suppliers.
Divine Vengeance in Herodotus’ Histories
Masters Thesis--UNC , 2017
This essay argues that the motifs of divine vengeance present in the Histories reflect a conscious, considered theory of divine action. This theory is defined by Herodotus’ empirical methodology and his lack of poetic revelation or other claimed insight into the nature and motivations of divinity. For Herodotus, divinity possesses a basically regulatory role in the cosmos, ensuring that history follows certain consistent patterns. One such pattern is vengeance, by which a large-scale balance of reciprocity is maintained in human events through human and divine acts of repayment. This theory underlies Herodotus’ historical project, reinforcing his general skepticism about human knowledge and power and making possible his universalizing approach to historical narrative.
The Laws of War in the Pre-Dawn Light: Institutions and Obligations in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War
2005
This Essay, in honor of Oscar Schachter, discusses Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, not only glimpsing into the events surrounding the conflict but also considering how the sparring Greek city-states understood and manifested laws of war. This article describes numerous customs, practices, and procedures including respect for truces, ambassadors, heralds, trophies, and various forms of neutrality the ancients adhered to during times of conflict. The Greek city-states and their warriors recognized and enforced obligations concerning a city-state’s right to war (jus ad bellum) and conduct in war (jus in bello). While the ancients’ laws of war were always recorded in treaty, many of the laws were mutually recognized and formed out of custom, with respect to one’s adversary. Thucydides did not record his account for the purpose of describing ancient law, but his account provides evidence that a form of international law existed in the ancient world. It may be worth examinin...