In the Shadow of Pericles: Athens’ Samian Victory and the Organisation of the Pentekontaetia in Thucydides (original) (raw)
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Thucydides on Early Greek History
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017
This chapter studies Thucydides’ account of early Greek history in the “Archaeology” (1.1.2–1.21.2). It shows that Thucydides’ criteria of development and his reconstruction of history are heavily influenced by power relations in Greece during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War. Comparison with other sources for both the legendary and the historical past reveals the extent to which Thucydides, by means of omission, selective emphasis, and skewed interpretation, manipulates traditions that were well known to Athenian audiences, in order to create his distinctive vision of history as reaching a peak of military and economic development and “modernity” in the Greece of his own day. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways in which Thucydides’ influential model of Greek history fails to do justice to the historical realities of archaic Greece.
Atene&Roma, 2023
In Thuc. II 36, 1-3 Pericles structures the entire Athenian history into three phases, clearly distinguished through their respective merits: the age of the progonoi, that of the pateres, that of the present-day men. This is a great difference with the other logoi epitaphioi, where the Athenian past is an undifferentiated continuum; on the contrary, the tripartite climax in Thuc. II 36, 1-3 aims to give greater prominence to the last two phases, when Athens acquired and then developed the arkhe. Despite the overall clarity of the text, scholars have been puzzled by the exact identity of οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν mentioned in 36, 2 (and therefore by the definition of the chronological boundaries between the three groups). In this paper, strong arguments are given in favor of the thesis that the age of the pateres includes the Persian Wars: above all, the comparison with Thuc. I 144, 4 and the need for internal coherence between Thuc. 2, 36, 1 and Thuc. II 36, 4 (with its reference to the struggle against the “barbarian enemy”). Therefore, if the sixty years between 490 and the end of 431 are divided in half, the boundary between pateres and ‘present-day men’ can be placed around 461 BC: an actual turning point in the fifth-century Athenian history. Anyhow, this question is not only merely exegetical: the attribution of the Persian Wars to the pateres is consistent with the viewpoint (widespread in fifth-century sources) according to which the Persian Wars were the first step in the acquisition of the arkhe; the absence of a minimal reference to the Persian wars (a central theme in contemporary Athenian propaganda) seems to match the Periclean Athenian foreign policy, which put an end to the wars against the Persians, focusing on the hegemony over the allies and on the confrontation with Sparta and her allies.
Between thucydides and PolyBius the Golden aGe of Greek historioGraPhy
2014
Greek Monographs on the Persian World The Fourth Century BCE and its innovations dominique lenfant W hile it is the best-known Greek monograph on the Persian world, Ctesias' Persica is often cited today as an illustration of the supposed decadence of the historical genre in the fourth century BCE. One symptom of this 'decay' is Ctesias' choice of subject matter: rather than a politico-military history focused on the contemporary Greek world, Ctesias' history concerns conflicts that took place within the Persian Empire-court intrigues, for example, and local revolts. The apparent decline has also been observed in Ctesias' historical method and is linked to his alleged motivation for writing history: the vain desire to supplant Herodotus, rather than the search for truth that is thought to lie behind the projects of Herodotus and Thucydides. 1 Ctesias has, moreover, been accused of ethnic prejudices, particularly in his malicious portrayal of the Persian court. 2 Similar charges have also been brought against Dinon, a later writer of a Persica, who tends to be seen in relation to Ctesias as Ctesias is to Herodotus, namely as a plagiarist who tweaks the text in order to conceal his plagiarism. 3 Such views are for the most part overly simplistic, since they take into account neither the fragmentary nature of the evidence nor the biases of our sources. They compare Ctesias, moreover, only to the few historians whose works have survived intact, such as Herodotus, without paying any attention to other accounts of the same genre, about which we do indeed know something. As a result, they are unable to account for the distinctive features of the Persica as a whole. It is my purpose, therefore, to suggest another way of looking at these Greek monographs on the Persian world, a genre that may have assumed 1