41 See Simon Hornblower’s discussion in Thucydides (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 45–47. See also Hornblower’s remarks in A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume I, on 1.22.1, pp. 59–60. I do not think that what Thucydides says here reflects some kind of incompatibility between two methods or points of view. Thucydides is being very precise about what he actually did to remember or ascertain what was said in the speeches and then reconstruct them. Hornblower is of course right that τὰ δέοντα refers to what was required by the situation. It seems possible to me that ἂν belongs with the phrase in which it is placed, ὡς δ᾽ ἂν ἐδόκουν. This is a common iterative usage. See William Watson Goodwin, Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb (London: Macmillan, 1965 reissue of original 1889 edition), para. 199, page 66; and para. 162, page 56. It is true that ἂν can often be displaced grammatically to a dependent infinitive (LSJ s. v. D. I. 3). Charles Morris, Commentary on Thucydides Book 1 (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1891), takes it so here and pins ἂν to εἰπεῖν expressing a conditional sense but this seems less like a grammatical point that it is a support for the idea that what Thucydides is saying here is that he is to some extent inventing what the speakers doubtless (μάλιστ᾽) would say. It is plainer and more clear to see Thucydides saying, “However each speaker seemed to me concerning the circumstances at the time to say doubtless what was required, so it was written [by me, Thucydides] keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what each speaker actually said.” The use of ἂν with the main verb, generally in the imperfect, to express an iterative condition has a parallel also in Thucydides at 7.71, as noted by LSJ. This reading makes Thucydides’ statement more internally consistent. I believe that Thucydides in a manner more often seen in poets uses complicated language to make his readers pause and think. Professor Hornblower’s Thucydides and Pindar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) seems like the general case of this point. Hornblower in Thucydides, 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 erga, and the speeches or logoi. See also the discussion of Strauss, The City and Man, pp. 141–44.
42 For a recent overview relevant to this theme generally and then to the debates in Sicily (6.33.–40), see Gottfried Mader, “Fear, Faction, Fractious Rhetoric: Audience and Argument Thucydides’ Syracusan Antilogy (6.33–40),” Phoenix LXVII (2013): 236–59, and in particular pp. 258–59.
43 Cf. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 80–81.
44 Cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia, Volume I, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 408.
45 H. Flashar, Der Epitaphios des Perikles: seine Funktion in Geschichtswerk des Thucydides (Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sitzungberichte, Philos.-Histor. Klasse 1969, Abh. 1, Heidelberg), p. 46.
46 Federalist #63, usually now ascribed to Madison, sometimes also to Madison and Hamilton together. From The Debate on the Constitution, Part 2 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1993), p. 318. See also https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-63.
47 David Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), reprint with corrections, p. 29.
48 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p. 30.
49 This is a matter of dispute, but the dispute does not affect the main point, which is that well before the time of Pericles the members of the boule were chosen by lot. For the suggestion that the original choice was by election, see P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 251. For the view that the choice was originally by lot see Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p. 26.
50 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 30–32.
51 See, e.g., Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 77–78.
52 Robert W. Wallace, “Councils in Greek Oligarchies and Democracies,” A Companion to Ancient Greek Government, ed. Hans Beck (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), pp. 199–201.
53 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 25–27.
54 Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp. 31–32.
55 Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato Translated with Notes and an Interpretive Essay (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 440 n. 3.
56 White, When Words Lose their Meaning, pp. 62–68.
57 Cf. Finley, Thucydides, pp. 160–161.
58 This point is made by Walter Müri, “Politische Metonomasie,” Museum Helveticum 2 (1969), p. 66. It is also interesting to note that ἠξίουν (“they deemed it worthwhile [or right]”) from ἀξιόω (“think or deem worthy”) is the first verb in this section, which describes how the disruption of the burial nomos eventually led to the loss of force in other nomoi (2.53). This entire description of the plague and the implicit comparison with stasis relies in many ways on Thucydides’ apparent knowledge of the medical writers of his time and earlier. The thorough reviews of Hornblower, on ii.47.3–54, pp. 316–326, and Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 16–20, summarize the substantial discussion of the subject. For a review of the relationship of stasis and the plague, see Clifford Orwin’s “Stasis and the Plague: Thucydides and the Dissolution of Society,” The Journal of Politics 50, no. 4 (November 1988): 831–47.
59 Finley, Thucydides, pp. 160–61.
60 For the political significance of the statement τὰ περὶ τὴν πόλιν πρῶτον ἐν ἀλλήλοις ἐταράχθησαν ([they] “first introduced civil discord at home”), see LSJ s. v. ταράσσω I.5.
61 Cf. Finley, Thucydides, p. 186: “he [Thucydides] did not think of revolution as bursting unexpectedly upon Athens towards the end of the war, but as the slow culmination of earlier party strife.” This is quite an important point or position on the subject. It is often overlooked or neglected. Mark Barnard, “Stasis in Thucydides: Narrative and Analysis of Factionalism in the Polis” (Diss. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1980), uses a very restrictive definition of stasis (see, e.g., pp. 34ff. and especially pp. 38ff.). Thus, for example, he does not see stasis in Athens until the first use of στασιάζειν (stasiazein or to be in a state of revolution) in 411 BC (8.78). It is a useful to make sure that in interpreting Thucydides we do not expand the definition of stasis beyond Thucydides’ own definition of the phenomenon. On the other hand, as we will see, the effects of incipient stasis in Athens (and elsewhere) can be seen before full-blown stasis itself breaks out.
62 Finley, Thucydides, pp. 180–81.
63 See Price, Thucydides and Internal War, pp. 326–27.
64 See Price, Thucydides and Internal War, p. 329; and Martha Taylor, Thucydides, Pericles and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 2014), pp. 270, 272, who goes farther even than Price in seeing important signs of stasis in Athens even before the death of Pericles.
65 Cf. Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Volume III (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2008), 6.15 general note. For the relationship between Aristophanes’ Clouds and the criticism of Alcibiades, see Mary P. Nichols, “Philosophy and Empire: On Socrates and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium,” Polity 39, no. 4 (2007): 502–21.
66 See the persuasive argument of Michael Vickers, Aristophanes and Alcibiades: Echoes of Contemporary History in Athenian Comedy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,