On Justice Power and Human Nature

In his introduction, Thucydides sets himself both alongside and against his predecessors who documented famous wars in Greek history as it was understood in the historical present. Though he doesn’t name them explicitly, when he refers to “poets” and “prose-writers,” he’s most likely referring to Homer, whose epic poems the Iliad and Odyssey were incorporated into Athenian public life, and Herodotus, whose Histories was composed of narratives explaining the Persian wars. Like the epics and the Histories, Thucydides’s History is a chronicle of a war in which Greek speakers participated, but a crucial difference is that Thucydides claims only to tell of events that happened within his lifetime and that he could therefore verify. His statement that “poets” and “prose-writers” intend “more to delight the ear than to be true” (51) can seem, through a modern lens, derisive or dismissive. However, competition was a fundamental part of life in Athens, incorporated in contests held during festivals in honor of the gods as well as in their law courts and assemblies, with the goal of benefiting the community and, paradoxically, bringing them into harmony. Thus, even while Thucydides sets himself apart, he’s affirming his participation in an important Athenian tradition and value.

In the first two chapters and throughout the book, Woodruff incorporates speeches that effectively function as debates, providing the point of view of both sides, Spartan and Athenian. In Thucydides’s unabridged History, the speeches can be subsumed by the many squabbles and battles amongst allies who became the proxies through which Athens and Sparta flexed their power and authority. By keeping the context-setting material to the minimum required, Woodruff casts the speeches into relief, highlighting how and why leaders justified and validated the choices they made—and how their subject states promoted their causes to compel their superiors to make choices in the allies’ best interests. For example, the Corinthians successfully tapped into Sparta’s anxiety about Athens’s growing power to provoke Sparta into declaring war. When Archidamus offered a way to address Corinth’s grievances without resorting to violence, Sthenelaidas shrugged it off, even mocking Archidamus for speaking like an Athenian. In Athens, Pericles presented a hybrid of Archidamus and Sthenelaidas: Although he offered a potential alternative to war, his lack of faith in this option and his confidence in Athens’s readiness suggested an eagerness for war and the opportunity it allowed for Athens to test itself against its more established local rival.

The historical audiences of Homer and Herodotus would have known, at the beginning of the works, how both wars would end. Dramatic tension is created not from a big reveal at the close but because the audiences know more than the characters do. Thucydides makes use of this reversal of expectations and tragic irony as well. In his speech, Pericles tells the Athenians that he has many reasons to expect them to win the war, “unless you intend to enlarge your empire while still engaged in the war or choose to take on new risks. I am more afraid of our own mistakes, you see, than I am of our opponents’ schemes” (71). As an Athenian general, Thucydides likely would have heard the speech firsthand. Woodruff proposes that it’s also possible Thucydides puts these words into Pericles mouth so that his audiences, who were aware that Athens lost the war by making the exact mistakes he enumerates, would experience tragic irony.