"Thucydides Book 2: Overview of selections"

So, first of all, the screencast, long ago I gave you a screencast in general about Thucydides, and you can look at that for the ideas about the whole story, which is incomplete in Thucydides, but it's completed by Xenophon, and he refers in this section that we're reading, he actually jumps ahead to the end of the story, very unusually, to the end of the war, and gives you a big spoiler about why the Athenians lost the war already in the early books. And then I talked about other topics that people, or topics that people approach Thucydides through, themes that they use, and especially the, I think I meant to talk about the idea of, is it all composed at different times, or was it composed in one go? That's something I'm not going to be talking about now. So that's all preliminary, and I'd have you look at that, but when I turned to book two, in particular, the center of book two is something that, if it's all we had of Thucydides, he would probably still be just as famous, because it's four different passages, all of which are different, and there's three different kinds of writing in Thucydides. It's important to distinguish them. One of them is narrative, and that's usually military, but here we have a narrative example of the plague, and in that case, the writer is anonymous. Thucydides is an anonymous narrator. And then we have speeches, speeches by the characters in the narrative, and there's a lot of debate on that, but I'll tell you right now that my view is these do not speak for Thucydides himself. There are ideas that Thucydides wanted to get out, but they are not necessarily his, particularly since many of them are quite outrageous and exaggerated. And if anybody speaks for Thucydides, it's usually considered Pericles does. But even in the case of Pericles, in his last speech, he says some things that I'm pretty sure Thucydides would not endorse 100%. And so that's the funeral oration in Pericles' last speech, their speeches, and then authorial passages, of which there are few but important ones. And there in book chapter 65, we have a quasi-obituary of Pericles written long before he died. He isn't going to die for another year or two, but he's out of the narrative after this last speech. And with Thucydides' own estimate of what kind of a leader Pericles was, and why the Athenians lost the war, and why they probably should have won it. So these four passages are incredibly important. They're quite different from each other, and yet they're juxtaposed. And that's another unusual feature of them too. You go from highs to lows, back to highs again, and then you jump ahead to the end of the war. It's not that these four parts succeeded each other chronologically, he had to push them all together deliberately. So the funeral oration with the ideal of Athens is immediately followed by the plague, which actually probably started before the funeral oration, and of course continued long after the part where he talks about it for several years yet. So you get a very different view of Athens and Athenian life in the plague, but it doesn't wipe out the funeral oration. I think that's an important point. The funeral oration still stands. It's not that you say at the end of the funeral oration and the plague, oh well that was all a fantasy, that never happened, because all of that remains true throughout the war. The plague doesn't really affect that, it's different things that the plague affects. And then in the last speech you get the astonishing statement by Pericles to the Athenians, who now want peace, that your individual sufferings don't matter, and it's the survival of the city that matters, and that's what we're working for, which is very hard-hearted. Actually it's not completely out of line with the funeral oration, but it's certainly more blunt. And second, a very blunt statement is, you should have realized when you started an empire that you would become a tyrant, and it's too late to give up the war, because now it's like you can't leave the mafia, you can't quit the mafia, except by dying, and you can't quit being tyrannical imperialists, except by suffering greatly. That's an unbelievable thing for a leader to be telling the Athenians at this point. And then followed by Thucydides saying that Pericles was in fact a great leader, and told the Deimos exactly what they needed to hear, and he could control them. And presumably the two speeches we've seen are examples of that, but it's not the first thing we would have thought of, is that that's what the Deimos needs to be told. So these four sections offer a grist for the mill of many different theories about Thucydides, that he's pro-Athenian and pro-Pericles, that he's anti-war and anti-Pericles, that he's an optimist about Athens and its greatness, that he's a pessimist or he has a tragic view of history, that the Athenians were punished by the gods because they became too proud, or the other view is that, no, Pericles would have won the war. Pericles' death stopped the Athenians from taking over as they should have. Those views are all tenable, there's good evidence for them all here. So that's why these four sections are so key, and I think any translator usually starts with these, and they are pretty much self-contained. So the juxtapositions are quite...oh, and one other thing, in the funeral oration, Pericles says at the beginning, he uses a very important word at the beginning of his history about why he's writing the war, he says the Athenians and the Spartans were at the acme of their preparation and of their power. And acme, as you know, it means the height, right? The acme, not the roadrunner kind of acme, but a real acme, which is that your height, and acme has an implication, which means what's left after the acme? Decline, right? Yeah, and so that's one of the reasons that the beginning of Gibbon's history, you may know, I may have mentioned this before, it's a bit of a reminder, Gibbon starts his history by saying, when I'm starting my history is the best period to live in all human history, he says that. And the reader should know at that point, well, get ready for a decline, and that decline is going to follow at great length. It's almost as if he trapped himself in the notion of decline by making that statement at the beginning. Because the decline is not, not everybody can see the decline in Gibbon, certainly not a precipitous decline, it takes many centuries. But the funeral oration goes along with that. It is an acme. Thucydides would say for both parties, and for all of Greece, in terms of its power after its victory in the Persian War. But Pericles says, even within that acme of Greece, we are at our acme now. So that's, I'm not going to do too much interpretation, but I did want to stress that.