While Nietzsche sees Thucydides as a representative of the older Sophist culture,6 Thucydides’ commitment to accuracy leaves him in the position of needing a measure or measures against which to test information and logoi that may represent facts or interpretations based on facts. This puts him in the tradition of Ionian science, including Anaxagoras and the medical writers, much more than in the tradition of Protagoras and his yarn about how Zeus made us so that we can be moral, as Plato presents him in the Protagoras (322c–d). The very idea that Zeus could encourage ethical conduct seems ruefully comic considering his violence and his conduct toward women in general and his wife in particular, though it is reasonable to conjecture that the gods whose tale Protagoras told wanted to have worshippers. Zeus would perhaps also appeal to the male audience that Protagoras acquires. On the other hand, Protagoras, like Socrates in the Meno and elsewhere, sees humans as having a divine allotment in them (Protagoras 322a, ἐπειδὴ δὲ ὁ ἄνθρωπος θείας μετέσχε μοίρας, πρῶτον μὲν διὰ τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ συγγένειαν ζῴων μόνον θεοὺς ἐνόμισεν, “since men got a divine allotment, [and] first through his kinship with the divine alone of living things worshipped the gods”). At the end of the Meno Socrates makes a similar point to Meno, who lives in a dim world of ignorance and popular opinions.7 First we need to be reminded that “he is talking to Meno.”8 Socrates concludes: “Virtue [or ‘excellence’] appears to be born in us by divine allotment, in those to whom it is born” (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ ἡμῖν φαίνεται παραγιγνομένη ἡ ἀρετὴ οἷς ἂν παραγίγνηται, Meno 99e–100a). The link here between the Meno and the Protagoras is the divine allotment to men, which starts us off aiming higher than ourselves. Protagoras, as the kind of teacher Meno wishes to have, though he does seem to have a particular preference for Gorgias (see Meno, 70b, 71c–71e),9 presents the idea of this allotment. Meno hears it from Socrates, who wishes to be nothing like Protagoras, who, it seems, shares a kind of opinion with Socrates. The fact that they in a way share an opinion, that we have a divine allotment, is a very good example of why it is hard to capture the Sophist and to know how he or she differs from the philosopher (cf. Plato, Sophist, 216c).
The Meno introduces the hypothetical method as a way of answering questions about what virtue is (ἀρετή, “excellence” or “virtue,” transliterated arete) and whether it can be taught (86e–87b),10 but Socrates performs his introduction or initiation by means of a difficult and somewhat obscure mathematical problem.11 The point seems to be that just as Meno should have been abashed when he saw his slave learning geometry (85e–86d) but was not, he now must more fully face the question of whether he can be initiated or whether he will be turned away from philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular because he cannot rule himself (86d). He does not have the disposition to learn, so he himself turns himself away. This results in the final lesson of his execution at a young age after betraying his army’s interests in Xenophon’s Anabasis (II.6.21–29). At the very end of the Meno, Socrates again alludes to Meno’s difficulties in separating knowledge of arete from his desire for power carefully presented by Plato as his goal to find out first whether or not he can buy a teacher of arete. Learning the truth of the matter (τὸ σαφὲς) requires this separation (100b). Meno’s failure to learn is a failure of virtue, and what we would term moral virtue in particular. Indeed, his failures or weaknesses, that is, his physical beauty and the effect that it produces on men, his clear desire to dominate his wife at home and to rule men in his public life (Meno, 71e), and his troupe of slaves, all reflect deep conceptual weaknesses in Athenian life that are expressed in predictable and disastrous ways in the Peloponnesian War.
Thucydides also asks us to accept his claim that “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge (τὸ σαφὲς) of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it” (1.22.4), can rely on his work. He reemphasizes this point in his second introduction (5.26.5).12 In order to understand his work we must also ascend a kind of philosophical, and in his case also historical, ladder of understanding. It would seem that some of the notorious complexity and intellectual density of Thucydides’ conclusions, and also of the speeches, serve as an intellectual initiation while they also force the reader into a dialogue with Thucydides and some of his chosen speeches.
Understanding and possibly solving some or all of these political and social problems—all of which seem to derive from a desire for power over others and the complications that arise from the Peloponnesian War—requires that we start from clarity about what moral terms mean. Yet this is very hard during civil war (stasis) where suspicion and violence rule. In this light, we can see Thucydides’ reflections on changes in political discourse in Corcyra as an example of an incipient social science applying also to Athenian political rhetoric. In order to understand what went wrong at Athens we must consider that there are moral terms that reflect real moral and immoral conduct, and we must at least accept the principle that we can agree on what moral terms mean, or else there can be no real discourse. This then leads naturally to consideration of how the relationship between the description of stasis at Corcyra and the Athenian political speeches can help in the analysis of Thucydides’ political philosophy. In such discussions we must assume that Thucydides has given much care and attention to the dramatic and rhetorical coherence of his work, and that his arrangement and emphases carry a great deal of meaning.13 The goal here is thus primarily to understand what Thucydides has to say about the political sphere. In attempting to understand Thucydides, reference to Plato can be very helpful or perhaps crucial, since to start with at least many of Plato’s concerns explicitly relate to those of Thucydides, for example Athens’ greatness, her failure, the complex core of that failure in the spirit of Alcibiades, and the disappointing end of Nicias (7.86.5).
Friedrich Nietzsche made significant use of Thucydides in formulating his own ideas. Nietzsche also devotes an important part of his thought toward praising what he sees as Thucydides’ pre-Platonic, Sophistic virtues and condemning what he seems to believe was Plato’s soft rejection of ancient Greek masculine and even violent values in favor of what turned out to be in Nietzsche’s view a forward shadow of Christianity in Plato.14