Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 74-11(E), Section: A
Adviser: Egbert J. Bakker
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2013
This dissertation seeks to demonstrate that certain portions of Thucydides' history which are thematically, stylistically or methodologically anomalous owe their idiosyncrasies to their status as loci of self-definition. In these passages Thucydides constructs his history by variously employing, reworking, recontextualizing, and even parodying the methods, themes and styles of his predecessors and contemporaries
The first three chapters (Part 1) treat the evidence-based survey of Greek history which introduces Thucydides' work (commonly known as the Archaeology). The central argument is that the evidential method of the Archaeology is not programmatic, although some scholars have thought it to be so, and though some later historians have seen in the Archaeology an anticipation of their own empiricism. I show that the Archaeology's evidential method was not unique to Thucydides, but rather belonged to a larger oral, agonistic discourse of intellectual inquiry which was shared by orators, medical writers and philosophers in late 5th century Greece. Thucydides employs this evidential discourse in the Archaeology in order to reject it for his narrative of the Peloponnesian War. His purpose in so doing is to define his history against the oral, ephemeral productions of his predecessors and contemporaries. The Archaeology is the logos to the ergon of Thucydides' history, or, in other words, a site of self-definition e contrariis.
The next two chapters (Part 2) treat two related passages, Thucydides' final judgment on Pericles and the excursus on Pausanias and Themistocles. I argue that Thucydides' praise of Pericles is more ambivalent than has generally been recognized, and that the explanation for this ambivalence lies in the atypically Herodotean excursus which immediately precedes Pericles' arrival on the narrative stage
In the first of these two chapters I ask the question: why does Pericles die one and one half years before his time in Thucydides' narrative? I suggest that the purpose of this anachrony is the ironic juxtaposition which results from confronting Pericles' death with the events which follow it: the Spartan expedition to Zakynthos and the Peloponnesian attempt to secure Persian aid. I argue that these events are symbolic of the factors which won the war for Sparta (her fleet and Persian coin)---factors which Pericles failed to foresee. Since the obituary emphasizes Pericles' foresight, the juxtaposition is manifestly ironic
In the second chapter I suggest that the irony identified in the previous chapter can best be explained by examining the Pausanias and Themistocles excursus. I first note that its narrative of the rise and fall of Cylon, Pausanias and Themistocles bears remarkable similarities to Herodotus' history. On closer examination, however, I find that Thucydides undermines the Herodotean flavor of the passage by smuggling in themes more Thucydidean than Herodotean: foresight, intelligence and chance. I therefore argue that the purpose of the excursus is to elaborate a new theory of growth and decline which emphasizes the incalculable element in human affairs, using Herodotus as a springboard. With this in mind, I suggest that the relationship between the Periclean obituary and the passages which follow it echoes the relationship between Thucydides' praise of Themistocles' genius and his narration of the ignominious conclusion to Themistocles' career. Thucydides is elaborating a pessimistic view of human predictive ability by juxtaposing his own praise of two men of outstanding foresight with outcomes which they failed to predict. Insofar as this idea is elaborated by means of an implicit contrast to Herodotus, the Pausanias and Themistocles excursus also constitutes a site of oblique self-definition
In the final section of the dissertation (Part 3) I examine a more typically Thucydidean set of passages: the battle between the Corinthians and Corcyraeans off the coast of Actium in Book I, and its sequel at Sybota. I compare the narratological and discursive workings of each passage to determine how Thucydides departed from the rote accounting of the first battle to create in the second a paradigmatic example of how strategy, perception and chance interact to produce unforeseen results in war. Thus I begin to ascertain the ways Thucydides fashioned for himself an idiosyncratic narrative and discursive technique for battle narrative, which was suitable to his equally idiosyncratic thematic concerns
