The Tragedy of the Athenian Ideal in Thucydides and Plato. John T. Hogan

is other or different. Far from being a Sophist, Thucydides seems to anticipate the issue of the Other in political life at the very beginning of his Histories when he observes the same point that many young readers of Homer have wondered about, “Why doesn’t Homer call the Greeks Hellenes? And why are only some of them Hellenes?” Thucydides’ answer is that at the time of Homer the Greeks were neither conscious of themselves as a separate group nor conscious of foreigners as barbarians (1.1.3).³⁷ What is not us or ours is what is “other” in regard to us. That “other” can be categorized and quantified, which enables us to understand it. One of the most important applications of Plato’s assignment (in the Statesman) of Non-Being to the concept of Other occurs in the political world with the statesman serving as the type or model of the political being:

      Ξένος (The) Stranger:

      πότερον οὖν, καθάπερ ἐν τῷ σοφιστῇ προσηναγκάσαμεν εἶναι τὸ μὴ ὄν, ἐπειδὴ κατὰ τοῦτο διέφυγεν ἡμᾶς ὁ λόγος, οὕτω καὶ νῦν τὸ πλέον αὖ καὶ ἔλαττον μετρητὰ προσαναγκαστέον γίγνεσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἄλληλα μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ [284ξ] πρὸς τὴν τοῦ μετρίου γένεσιν; οὐ γὰρ δὴ δυνατόν γε οὔτε πολιτικὸν οὔτ᾽ ἄλλον τινὰ τῶν περὶ τὰς πράξεις ἐπιστήμονα ἀναμφισβητήτως γεγονέναι τούτου μὴ συνομολογηθέντος.

      Νεώτερος Σωκράτης (The) Younger Socrates:

      οὐκοῦν καὶ νῦν ὅτι μάλιστα χρὴ ταὐτὸν ποιεῖν.

      Ξένος (The) Stranger:

      πλέον, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἔτι τοῦτο τὸ ἔργον ἢ ‘κεῖνο—καίτοι κἀκείνου γε μεμνήμεθα τὸ μῆκος ὅσον ἦν—ἀλλ᾽ ὑποτίθεσθαι μὲν τὸ τοιόνδε περὶ αὐτῶν καὶ μάλα δίκαιον. (284b–284c)

      (The) Stranger:

      Then, just as with the Sophist we compelled that which is not to be, when the argument escaped us on this point, so now also the greater again and the lesser must be compelled to become measurable not just relative to one another but also to the genesis of measure. For, it is not possible, at least, for either the statesman or any other person to have become without dispute knowing of things concerning actions unless this has been agreed to.

      Younger Socrates:

      Then now too as much as possible we must do the same thing.

      (The) Stranger:

      This work, Socrates, is still more than that—and yet we remember the length of that, how great it was, but to set down just such a point concerning them is also very just. (284b–284c)

      The Younger Socrates then asks what sort of thing the Stranger means. And the Stranger replies that he will need to explain more fully later but for now the answer is adequately and beautifully shown, that all the arts are in a similar state and our argument says that the “greater and the lesser are at the same time measured not only in relation to one another but also in relation to the coming into being of the mean” (μεῖζόν τε ἅμα καὶ ἔλαττον μετρεῖσθαι μὴ πρὸς ἄλληλα μόνον ἀλλὰ καὶ πρὸς τὴν τοῦ μετρίου γένεσιν, 284d).

      This crucial passage in the Statesman explains that what is better and what is worse can arise politically and that we can learn how to measure them. The epistemology derives from the Sophist, to which the Stranger makes a specific reference (“the Sophist” in 284b, cf. Sophist 235). The Stranger’s next step in the argument is to undertake a division between the sciences that rely on mathematics and measure with “number, length, depth, breadth, and thickness” (284e), and those sciences that measure in regard to “the moderate,” “the fitting, and the needful” and all the other standards that are situated in the mean apart from the extremes (284e).³⁸

      What is the subject in Plato to which we apply these considerations of the standard of what is moderate, fitting, and needful? It is the character and action we see in human life and our broadly conceived political relations with one another. The analogous word for Thucydides that helps us supply the mean or the moderate is what he calls human nature, or the human, or nature (φύσις, transliterated phusis). He refers to “the human” (τὸ ἀνθρώπινον) in his discussion of his method (1.22.4) and to human nature when he explains the characteristics of stasis (ἕως ἂν ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις ἀνθρώπων ᾖ, “as long as human nature remains the same,” 3.82.2). A number of times important speakers in the speeches he reports refer to “the human” and “human nature,” for example, the Athenian ambassadors at Sparta (1.76.3), Diodotus in his response to Cleon (3.45.7), Hermocrates at the conference at Gela (4.61.5), and the Athenians at Melos (5.105.2). Of course, in the last three instances, the speakers are emphasizing one part of human nature in one degree, but overall Thucydides presents a picture of human nature as something that can be known and characterized in our relations with one another even when we disagree. In fact, as Simon Swain has pointed out, the word phusis in Thucydides refers in “all but one” [case] to “man in human society” not to “biological man” or “to nature itself.”³⁹

      Thucydides a not a Sophist nor is he like Protagoras. Thucydides aims at truths that may be unattractive to his readers because unlike Protagoras and other teachers searching for money and power, Thucydides aims at “the truth” (τὸ σαφὲς, 1.22.4) not popularity, political power, or money, like Protagoras in the Protagoras. He also gives no impression of doing his writing for money. His view of his work resembles Plato’s in spirit and in its goals, though the methods focus on historical events because he wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. The Statesman and its view of political life and leadership will be helpful when we consider Pericles’ role, which seems at first to be the apparently archetypal statesman in Thucydides’ Histories, though he later emerges as a more complex figure whose memory is tinged with tragedy.

      One further way to consider the issue of what the truth (τὸ σαφὲς) is for Thucydides and how it relates to what the truth is for Plato is to consider what each of them appears to present as the claim writing can have on reaching the truth. That issue is complicated in both cases as both Thucydides—rather obviously—and Plato—not quite so plainly—aim to relate what they experienced and learned through their experience of the people around them. They have differing modes and approaches, Thucydides seeking to discover facts, deeds, and words in the lives of many figures, and relate them to one another, and Plato seeking to learn from Socrates and to convey in a dramatically convincing way, who Socrates was and what he thought and believed. Yet for both writing is both an opportunity to express complex truths and a tool that can be used to reveal various different points of view about the same words and deeds. Plato presents this theory of writing most clearly in the Phaedrus (275d–277a), while in Thucydides the force and meaning of what he writes—especially when he writes in his own voice directly to the reader—can be just as elusive as it is in Plato. Formally, they have some differences in that Plato does not speak directly to his readers (outside of the “Letters”), while Thucydides does occasionally address his readers directly, but with intense ambiguities that still remain challenging even after they are parsed.

      Part of the reason for Thucydides’ elusiveness seems to be that he was a participant in the war (5.26), which led to his position as an Athenian exile that gave him a broader view (5.26.5). He does seek to know the “exact truth” (Crawley, ἀκριβές τι),