Tucidide. De bello Peloponnesiaco. - Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War

Martha C. Taylor

Loyola University Maryland

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This book began as a three-page paper for a junior-year course on Thucydides with Richard Hamilton at Bryn Mawr College. It was then reincarnated as a final paper for a seminar on Herodotus, Thucydides, and the Greek Enlightenment with Carolyn Dewald when she was at Stanford University. It is to these classes and these exemplary teachers that this book owes its genesis and most of what is good in it.

Many other individuals were crucial to my work. Early on, Mark Munn gave wise advice on the direction of the project, and Mike Jameson offered crucial encouragement and vision. I wish that he could have seen the final product. Anthony Woodman read an early draft of and offered many helpful suggestions for further thought and inquiry. Leslie Zarker Morgan, Katherine Stern Brennan, Sharon Nell, and Joe Walsh helped me with translations from Italian, French, and German. Audiences at the American Philological Association's annual meetings, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Pennsylvania honed my argument with their comments and questions. I am grateful to Mark Munn, Rick Hamilton, John Dillery, James Rives, and Jeremy McInerney for the invitations to speak. The Milton S. Eisenhower Library at The Johns Hopkins University was very generous in offering affiliate access to its collection, and Margaret Field in the Interlibrary Loan Office of the Loyola University/Notre Dame College Library proved indispensable. Finally, the anonymous readers of Cambridge University Press and my exemplary editors there saved me from numerous errors and greatly enhanced the whole work.

For the time free from teaching that was crucial to the completion of this project, I am grateful to the Center for the Humanities at Loyola University Maryland for the grant of a Junior Faculty Sabbatical in 19971998, and to the provost and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Maryland and to its Research and Sabbaticals Committee for the grants of a half-year sabbatical in 19992000 and a full-year sabbatical in 20062007. These last sources also offered numerous summer grants over the (long) life of this project. For both the time and the financial assistance I am deeply grateful to all these individuals and groups.

Katherine Stern Brennan, Nora Chapman, Angela Christman, Amy Cohen, Christine De Vinne, Virginia De Vinne, Kathy Forni, Janet Headley, Barbara Jutila, Phil McCaffrey, Marsh McCall, Tom McCreight, Gayla McGlamery, Bob Miola, James Rives, Jennifer Tobin, and especially Joe Walsh were constant sources of personal and professional encouragement.

Finally, I am grateful to the directors of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies for permission to reuse in ).

The dedication records my greatest debt to my husband, who read the entire manuscript many, many times and never flagged in his belief in it, and to my sons, who provided a respite from it.

Every student of Greek history knows that in the Persian wars of 480479 B.C., the Athenians abandoned their polis but fought on to victory at Salamis from their ships. In the Peloponnesian War fifty years later (431404 B.C.), Pericles urged the Athenians to use a similar strategy. In accord with Pericles vision of Athens as the sea and the city, the Athenians abandoned the land and houses of Attica and adopted a defensive war strategy designed to take advantage of Athenian naval superiority.

Thucydides chronicled this long war between Athens and Sparta. Despite all that has been written about Thucydides and Pericles, however, no work has yet focused on Thucydides critique of Pericles radical redefinition of Athens as a city divorced from its traditional homeland of Attica. That critique is the subject of this book.

Thucydides, I argue, repeatedly questions and discredits the Periclean vision.

He demonstrates that this vision of Athens as a city separated from Attica and coextensive with the sea leads the Athenians both to Melos and to Sicily. After Sicily, flexible notions of the city greatly exacerbate civil strife in Athens, and the end of Thucydides (preserved) text praises political compromise and reconciliation focused on the traditional city in Attica. Thucydides final comments prize that city over even empire itself and implicitly censure Pericles for ever directing the Athenians gaze toward another city.

We begin with an analysis of Thucydides presentation of Pericles radical redefinition of the city in books 1 and 2 of his History . Thucydides suggests that Athens strength lies in intangibles. Both the Corinthians and the Athenians at the Spartan congress before the war present the Athenians ability to conceptualize their city and divorce it from their territory as a source of strength. The Corinthians, in particular, stress the restlessness and boundary confusion of the Athenians and show that they make no distinction between their home territory and that of others. (This is part of what makes them such worrisome neighbors.) Furthermore, in his account of the fifty years between the Persian War and the beginning of his war, Thucydides shows that the Athenians grew powerful because of their willingness to be away from home.