The war eroded respect for logos, however, and pushed the Athenians toward unsafe and radical actions, most notably the Sicilian Expedition. Thucydides shows this process beginning among the Athenians with his account of the plague following directly upon the Funeral Oration. After describing the various aspects of the attacks of the plague (2.47.3–2.50), Thucydides turns to its effect on the morale of the people (2.51), and then to the way it upset the rites of burial (2.52, and especially 2.52.4). The rite of burial had provided the occasion for the Funeral Oration (2.35.1), in which Pericles praises the ideal of Athenian adherence to written and unwritten nomos (2.37, and especially 2.37.3), while the rite itself symbolizes this adherence. The plague, by disrupting this most important nomos, led to a general anomia: πρῶτόν τε ἦρξε καὶ ἐς τἆλλα τῇ πόλει ἐπὶ πλέον ἀνομίας τὸ νόσημα (“Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague,” 2.53.1). The plague marked the beginning of the lawlessness that survived it.
There are many parallels between the effects of the plague and of stasis.57 Both were violent. Both decreased respect for religion (2.52.3, 2.53.4; cf. 3.82.8), and both were lawless (2.53.1, 2.53.4; cf. 3.82.6). In both situations, people thus became more daring (2.53.1, 3.82.4). In general, each of these phenomena destroyed established nomoi, that is, customs, rules, and laws. The swiftness of the plague caused a swift revolution in values so that people, thinking of their bodies and wealth as ephemeral, considered what was pleasurable, and what would lead to pleasure, as both honorable and useful.58
The plague, together with the first invasion of the Peloponnesians, changed the spirit of the Athenians (2.59.1–2), and for the first time in the war broke the unity of the polis of Athens. Pericles’ third speech was only partly successful in restoring the mood of the people, as they gave up the idea of settling their disputes with the Spartans, but also fined Pericles for his conduct of the war (2.65.2). In the chapter after Pericles’ last speech Thucydides details the political failure at Athens that followed his death. He had told them to be patient, to pay attention to the fleet, not to try to extend the empire, and not to risk the fortunes of the city during the war (2.65,7; cf. 1.144.1). The Athenians did the opposite of this. They allowed private ambition and private interests to lead them into activities unrelated to the war. When these projects were successful, they profited individuals, when unsuccessful, they injured the state (2.65.7). Thus, the desire for power arising from greed and ambition led to stasis. Thucydides’ analysis of the causes of decline in Athens corresponds to his general portrait of stasis in 3.82.
While Pericles was alive, he led the people rather than being led by them (2.65.8). But his successors, being roughly equal to each other, and desiring to be first in the city handed over the affairs of state to the whims of the multitude. Since the popular leaders after Pericles were interested primarily in their own advancement rather than in the prosperity of Athens, they brought the city into many blunders, in particular the Sicilian Expedition.59 Because they were ambitious, they recalled Alcibiades. For the first time, the city fell into civil discord (2.65.11).60 By 411 the city was already in stasis, which finally cost it the war.
Stasis is an organic development in a city and does not arrive full grown in one day.61 Because of his method Thucydides does not call attention to each stage of the emergence of stasis at Athens, although he does indicate, as they occur, certain incontrovertible signs of the political degeneration there. Once he has described the stasis at Corcyra and drawn out its general features, he assumes the effect of his description on the remainder of his narrative. He “state[s] the general character of an event in its first appearance and thereafter assume[s] it as the underlying condition of his narrative.”62 For him, the chief characteristics of stasis are its lack of moderation (3.82.3), its violence (3.82.2, 82.8), its emotional concentration on swift, thoughtless action (3.82.4–3.82.8), the overthrow and abuse of nomoi in order to further those actions (3.82.6), and the ultimate disregard for the political discourse that Pericles saw as the essential preliminary for all successful action (2.40.2).
Even before Pericles’ death, there are other serious signs of disturbance in Athenian politics beyond the fine that he suffered.63 After Potidaea capitulated, the Athenians, apparently because of their growing bitterness at their situation, blamed the generals for accepting the terms (2.70.4). They did this even though the generals had what appeared to be good reasons (2.70.2), thus providing an example of the Athenians’ punishment of their leaders, which reaches a crisis in Thucydides with the recall and condemnation of Alcibiades in absentia.64 The dangers of democracy are manifold, but in Thucydides’ narrative two of the most serious problems with this form of government are, first, that the people are fickle (2.65.4) and inclined to choose as leaders those who pander to their desires and reward them with money and, second, that democracy leads to tyranny by demagogues. In this respect, Thucydides’ ideas come close to Plato’s in the Republic (562c–d, 564e–566c). This raises the question of how comparing what Plato writes with Thucydides’ work can be useful in understanding Thucydides. One clear way of understanding Plato’s work as being related to Thucydides will be in the idea that both came into a world in which religious plays, that is, Greek Tragedy, provided Athenians and others with an important way of understanding the world in which they had lived, their current world, and perhaps what the future might hold. Plato’s dialogues are unusual in format in Western philosophy. He was clearly influenced by Greek Tragedy in many of the earlier dialogues such as Meno and Euthyphro and also the relatively later dialogues like Phaedo, Symposium, and Protagoras.
Plato openly addresses the failure of the Athenians to educate their children well. Thucydides implies a variety of concerns in this area in his discussion of Athenians’ incorrect beliefs regarding the affair of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. His portrait of Alcibiades, while recognizing Alcibiades’ capabilities, suggests deep problems in his character.65 Aristophanes’ Clouds presents a comic version of the general case of Alcibiades and his failed education.66 This famous case of a failure of education links the two thinkers and Aristophanes. Both Thucydides and Plato, presumably like many in Athens, identified Alcibiades as the young man who could show that democracy could produce good leaders. Their views of eros as Alcibiades’ deepest problem are quite similar. Alcibiades desperately wants to be erotically attractive and to be loved, at least as Plato presents him in the Symposium, and as Thucydides presents his efforts, but he has no vision at all of what he would want to do with an Athens that loved him. He is the signal failure of the wealthy Athenian patriarchy.
Another way in which Plato’s work can be helpful is that Plato defines a way of living in the world as centered on knowledge or at least the belief that we may attain it (Meno 86a–c). This serves as a culturally relevant counter to the relativistic thought of Thucydides’ contemporaries in attempting to educate the Sophists. Plato thus serves as a philosophical point of comparison who can help readers understand both what Thucydides was attempting to respond to and how he attempted to create his response.
The position of Pericles in Thucydides’ estimation is somewhat more puzzling than it seems at the first reading, as several scholars have noted.67 While much of what Thucydides says supports the portrayal of Pericles as a very superior leader, there are some strong disquieting aspects and views of his leadership in the narrative and in some of the speeches, for example, the emergence of the plague right after Pericles’ famous Funeral Oration, a plague that subverts many of the most sacred human customs related to burial. Even in his last speech in Book 2, he explains the contradiction between the active life of power politics that animates an imperial state and the incompatibility of this life with the quiet life of a person at home.68 Professor Martha Taylor writes an extensive and persuasive analysis of the conflict between the idea that many Athenians had of Athens as a particular geographically located place and Pericles’ ideal of a city that exists primarily in the minds and hearts of her people as an extended domain that could be an empire of all the world and a tomb for her famous men (Thucydides 2.43.3).69 This conflict