AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.91
While Thucydides’ account of stasis certainly details many of its horrors, one of the more terrifying outcomes is that it leads to a desire for the elimination of the other side. Thus, in Corcyra the revolution ended when there was nothing left of the aristocratic party (4.48.5). For many it is impossible to stay neutral, which is another kind of finality (3.82.8).92
Two of the clearest signs of stasis are the overturning of established nomoi (“customs” and “laws”) and the loss of faith in reason and discourse. These two phenomena converge in the effect of stasis on the language of political debate. Thucydides discusses this effect in his chapters on stasis in Book 3. Thucydides’ idea here anticipates Socrates’ clear point in the Phaedo that hatred of reason (misologia), which parallels hatred of humans, is one of the worst fates that can befall us (89d–90c). Socrates and Plato locate reason in speech or logos specifically because it is in spoken discourse that Socrates locates reason and the attempt to understand the Good and live in it.
NOTES
1 Aristotle, Politics, 1253al–18. Cf. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 9–10.
2 Currently, the Menexenus is believed by scholars to have been written by Plato. See George Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 158. The argument relies on the fact that Aristotle refers to the speech twice in the Rhetoric, 1367b and 1415b. In the second instance, he says, “For as Socrates says in his funeral oration, it is not difficult to praise Athenians among Athenians, but it [is difficult] among Lacedaemonians [i.e., Spartans].” The mention of Socrates’ “Funeral Oration” (ἐν τῷ ἐπιταφίῳ), seems conclusive barring some new evidence. For a recent and important review of the Menexenus, see Frances Anne Pownall, Lessons from the Past: The Moral Use of History in Fourth-Century Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 38–64.
3 For the convenience of the reader this and almost all subsequent references to Thucydides (and in most cases to other Greek authors) will be in the body of the text. The translation of this sentence is the subject of a large scholarly controversy. We will return to it, but for now, the meaning of the sentence καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει should be taken as I have done on the text and not as “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” This is the more popular translation of Richard Crawley, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D82%3Asection%3D4, accessed July 24, 2019. Thomas Hobbes’ translation is better for ἀξίωσιν: “The received value of names imposed for signification of things was changed into arbitrary.” (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0247%3Abook%3D3%3Achapter%3D82, accessed July 24, 2019). Hobbes is clearly more correct than Crawley or the standard Greek-English Lexicon of Liddell, Scott, and Jones ((LSJ), 9th ed. With a Supplement. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), which follows Crawley’s way of looking at the issue of how to translate ἀξίωσις, which is a very rare word in Greek before Thucydides.
4 While inclusive language might be more appropriate for modern egalitarian ideas, some of which derive directly from Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles, the fact that Athenian political life was almost exclusively male has some important bearing on its successes and failures. This was a type of weak psychological strength for the men, but generally a political deficiency of the highest order.
5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, translated with introduction and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” 2 (New York: Penguin 1968), pp. 106–107.
6 Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” Twilight of the Idols, 2, p. 107.
7 Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), p. 211.
8 Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, p. 255.
9 For a review of some of the complicated relationships between the Meno and the Gorgias, see E. R. Dodds, Plato Gorgias (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 23, and pp. 359–60, commentary on Gorgias 516e9.
10 This is of course a vexatious passage mainly (but not only) because of the complicated mathematics involved. The clearest exposition of the mathematics can be found in Sir Thomas Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1981), pp. 298ff. (This is a republication with corrected errata of the 1921 edition published by the Clarendon Press.) One very clear point is that Socrates’ explanation is somewhat obscure and seems to leave one or two points out. See also the thorough and very helpful discussion of this passage and most of the preceding scholarship in G. E. R. Lloyd, “The ‘Meno’ and the Mysteries of Mathematics,” Phronesis 37, no. 2 (1992): 166–83.
11 For the interpretation of the exchange as an initiation, see Lloyd, “The ‘Meno’ and the Mysteries of Mathematics,” pp. 178–83. The best translation is literal, and Heath’s cannot be bettered: “When they are asked, for example, as regards a given area, whether it is possible for this area to be inscribed in the form of a triangle or a given circle. The answer might be, ‘I do not yet know whether this area is such as can be inscribed, but I think I can suggest a hypothesis which will be useful for the purpose; I mean the following. If the given area is such as, when one has applied it (as a rectangle) to the given straight line in the circle [. . . it cannot, I (Heath) think, meaning anything other than the diameter of a circle] it is deficient by a figure (rectangle) similar to the very figure which is applied, then one alternative seems to me to result, while again another results if it is impossible for what I said to be done with it. Accordingly, by using a hypothesis, I am ready to tell you what results with regard to the inscribing of the figure in the circle, namely, whether the problem is impossible’” (from Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. 1, pp. 299 ff). For a very clear account of the logic of the passage and its application to epistemology, see Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 paperback reprint of 1996 edition), pp. 309–13.
12 See June W. Allison, Word and Concept in Thucydides (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press for the American Philological Association, 1997), pp. 192–93, who argues that τὸ σαφὲς characterizes logoi “only when Thucydides determines that the attribution is true.”
13 Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 34–72, reviews the entire subject and comments that there is a “fluctuation between massive subjectivity and massive comprehensiveness, or perhaps between extreme subjectivity and extreme objectivity” in both the narrative, the recounting of deeds, the erga, and the speeches or logoi. See also Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 141–144.
14 See: “But the struggle against Plato, or, so to speak more clearly and for the ‘people,’ the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia—for Christianity is the Platonism for