SOURCE: "Chance and Pity" and "Beyond Necessity," in Man in His Pride, University of Chicago Press, 1950, pp. 70-79, 80-92.

[In the excerpt that follows, Grene endeavors to answer the question, "in the true domain of politics … where does Thucydides find his highest value?" In order to find an answer, he explores Thucydides 's notion of primary historical forces—particularly necessity and chance—and examines those instances where Thucydides deems it appropriate to insert moral commentary on individual behavior.]

Chance and Pity

Everybody who reads Thucydides has been struck by the sparseness of any personal moral comment on the men and the happenings which he describes. But few seem to have noticed how curiously the moral comment, such as it is, has been directed. There are, in particular, three passages of this kind, each embodying some personal judgment of the historian and at first sight quite separated in the nature and variety of comment, yet which on closer scrutiny show a similar kind of detached humanity.

a) The first is the story of the destruction of the Boeotian town of Mycalessus. Mycalessus was far inland, its walls ineffective and in parts dilapidated; it was quite remote from the war or any concern in it. Unfortunately it happened that the Athenians had hired a body of Thracian mercenaries who were supposed to go with Demosthenes to Sicily. They came too late to join the expedition and proved too expensive to keep on foot without a specifically allocated military task. So the Athenians ordered them sent home and put them, for their return journey, under the command of an Athenian officer. Since the state was paying them a drachma a day per man, as long as they were under Athenian orders, and the journey home by land would take a considerable time, Deitrephes, their general, was instructed to employ them to do all possible harm to the enemy on the way back. It was under these circumstances that they marched through part of Boeotia and made their foray on this sleepy little country town of Mycalessus. Then Thucydides says: "They stormed Mycalessus and sacked its houses and its temples, killing every human being. They spared neither young nor old but killed everyone they met, women and children alike and even the pack animals and every living thing they saw. For these Thracians, like most other barbarians, are most bloodthirsty when they are confident. There was there, then, a terrible confusion and every form of death: in particular, they attacked a school— the largest in the town—where the children had just come in and butchered every one of them. This whole city suffered a catastrophe second to no other in its unexpectedness and horror." At the end of the passage he writes: "This is what happened to Mycalessus, a thing which is as much worth our tears as anything that occurred in this war, considering the small size of the town."

At the end of the Sicilian campaign Nicias surrendered to the Sicilian troops, though, as Thucydides tells us, because he trusted their Spartan general, Gylippus, rather than the Sicilians themselves. He and the other Athenian general, Demosthenes, were held for a while by the Sicilians at the request of Gylippus, but eventually they were both executed. According to Thucydides, the Syracusans among the Sicilians were afraid to spare Nicias lest under torture he should reveal the names of the considerable party within Syracuse itself which had tried to open negotiations with the Athenians. The total failure of the expedition and the loss of close to forty thousand men, killed, wounded, and prisoners, is very largely attributable to the stupidity, timidity, and incompetence of Nicias. Demosthenes had repeatedly tried to save the army, and his plans for this end were sound and their success probable. Nicias consistently balked them. These facts are vouched for by Thucydides himself in the seventh book. His comment on the end of Nicias is as follows: "On this charge, then, or one like it, Nicias died, being the least worthy of all the Greeks of my time to come to such a depth of misfortune, since he had lived all his life in accordance with what is popularly called virtue." Of Demosthenes he says nothing.

c) In 412-411 the democracy of Athens was overthrown by a conspiracy of oligarchs who had long been discontented with the prospects both of war and of peace if Athens remained democratic. The hope of enlisting Alcibiades and with him perhaps the help of Persia, which he was reputed to be able to deliver, weighed with some of this party. But the roots of the oligarchic attitude to the war, the democracy, and Sparta go back much further, as we saw in an earlier chapter. There were two wings of the oligarchic clique—a violent faction whose aim was a strong administration of a very few and a moderate constitutional party who wanted a restriction of the franchise and a remodeling of the constitution to bring it nearer to what Aristotle later calls a politeia, a mixture of democratic and oligarchic elements. The chief planner among the extreme oligarchs was a man named Antiphon; that of the moderates, Theramenes.

The extremists made the initial moves in the revolution and administered the city for a while by secret-police methods when, as Thucydides puts it, "no one of the rest of the citizens spoke against these measures, being afraid and seeing the size of the conspiracy; and if anyone did he was immediately killed in some convenient manner, and there was no search for the doers of the deed or justice to be had against them if suspected, but the multitude kept quiet and were so terror-stricken that each man who had no violence done him, even though he kept his mouth shut, thought it a gain." The terror did not last long, and the moderates among the oligarchs took control and drafted a new constitution which was to limit the franchise to five thousand. The extreme oligarchs had already formally suggested this, but, according to Thucydides, this was a mere pretense to make the transition from the democracy easier; they had no intention of making the five thousand a working political unity. Theramenes, however, the leader of the moderates, wanted the five thousand in good faith, and of the constitution set up in the name of the five thousand Thucydides says: "For now for the first time in my lifetime the Athenians seem to have enjoyed an excellent government; for there was a blend in it of the few and the many, and this was the first thing which lifted the city out of its ill condition."

Now if we look at these passages, first in their contexts and then in conjunction with one another, something of their strangeness becomes apparent. In the first place, none of the three constitutes what one might call remarkably merited comment—on a comparative basis. Is it not strange that the man who records the total destruction of Melos conducted in the most cold-blooded fashion, and the almost complete destruction of the city of Mitylene, and the execution of the Plataeans who surrendered after the siege should have had not one word of pity for the victims or blame for the executioners and reserve this pity and blame for the murder of a few hundred villagers and a school-house of children in Boeotia? Is it not strange that the man who notes the end of Antiphon (described as "second to none among his day in virtue") and the end of Demosthenes, who had won the Pylos campaign so brilliantly, who had even almost rescued the Sicilian expedition from the failure to which Nicias' leadership doomed it, without even a single phrase or comment, should have delivered so complete and comprehensive a verdict of praise on Nicias, who had lost the decisive battles of the war? And is it not strange that the man who had seen Periclean Athens and acknowledged its enormous power, resilience, and vitality should have reserved his praise of the "best government" for the rather dim academic experiment of Theramenes, which lasted a couple of months and was really hardly ever alive, as a functioning unit, at all?

One way to remove the sense of strangeness in these comments is to explain them individually and piecemeal. Each of them is, of course, susceptible of an individual explanation. We can say that, after all, Thucydides is human, like any other man; that the devastated village and the murdered school children appealed to his sense of pity as greater and more terrible events had somehow failed to do. Or we might force ourselves to see the emphasis on the size of Mycalessus as the important matter. Other cities greater than this had fallen but none more completely, considering its smallness. And we can explain away the comment on Nicias by assuming a personal friendship between Thucydides and Nicias and a personal hostility between Thucydides and Demosthenes. And we can explain away the statement on the constitution of Theramenes by saying that, after all, Thucydides is a moderate oligarch, by preference, that he has never approved of the democratic empire, and that his word of praise for the polity of Theramenes is his personal voice as a fifth-century politician. The common thread which runs through all such individual explanations is a separation of Thucydides the historian and Thucydides the man. We picture to ourselves a Thucydides austerely bent on his task of recording the Peloponnesian War yet at times revealing a sort of private humanity which he shares with all of us.

When a historian is primarily a philosopher of history and secondly a historian, as in the case of Hegel or Spengler, such a bifurcation of the professional and the personal is conceivable. Because the pattern is conceived first, born of the impact of some set of facts on the individual artist before the set of facts has taken artistic form. When this takes place, the particular foibles of the philosopher-historian can, at moments, crack the mold he has created. But when, as is true of Thucydides, the concrete particular, in its completeness, is both the form and the totality of the philosophy, the personal cannot intrude. What he has seen, detail by detail, is the story, and the story has major implications; but the implications spring from the story, not the story from a theory. The personal, in such a case, enters only when the historian selects his subject in the first place; it does not appear as an addendum or an interruption in the treatment of the subject.

More than this. If we look again at the three passages quoted, we can see a common link in the moral comment. All three passages deal with men or events which are peculiarly within the realm of chance rather than in that of necessity.

In the case of Mycalessus, Thucydides stresses this. The soldiers who did the deed were mercenaries who came late for the operation to which they were assigned; it was a mere casual chance that they were sent back by way of Boeotia and that the instructions they received—to do all the harm to the enemy that they could en route—led them in the most accidental way upon this wretched Boeotian village. Mycalessus itself, witness its fallen and crumbling walls and its sense of utter security, was a place in no sense suited to play a role in this war. Melos might and naturally did become a bone of contention between Athens and Sparta; an island inhabited by Dorians siding with neither Athens nor Sparta is bound in terms of the logic of the war to suffer. But Mycalessus need not have, as far as this same logic went, and it is for that reason that Thucydides pities it.

The same sort of pattern is discernible in the story of Nicias and his relation to the Sicilian expedition. He did not want such an expedition at all and least of all wanted to command it, as we learn from Book vi. Being, in spite of his own intentions, elected general, he is, then, in a purely fortuitous way, deprived of the two assistants who could have made it a success: of Lamachus by death and of Alcibiades by desertion. He makes another desperate effort to get rid of the command following on his first failure, when he demands reinforcements so large that he assumes the Athenians will refuse and a successor to himself because of his incapacitation through illness. He succeeds in neither request. Fatally, the Athenians sent another army so large that he had no excuse left for failure; and they affirm their confidence in him by insisting on his retention of office. Finally, when beaten in the battle in the harbor, he might still have withdrawn his forces relatively intact, but the eclipse of the moon intervening found his superstitious weak spot, and the result of his enforced delay is the complete destruction of the army and himself.

The peculiar poignancy of Nicias' position is further emphasized when we bear in mind that he was, in his own esteem and in that of the Athenians, a very lucky general. He comes before us time and again with his uneasy reliance upon good fortune. Thucydides tells us that he was especially anxious to negotiate the peace of 421 which bears his name, because so far his good luck in generalship had been unbroken and he wished to have the record of a general never defeated. He had "lived all his life in accordance with what is popularly considered virtue" and with the timid caution of one who has been lucky and knows that luck can change. And the result of his "popular virtue" and his caution about luck is to be involved himself and involve his country in the most prodigious catastrophe she had ever experienced.

There is, I believe, in these two passages the sense of Thucydides' awe in the face of chance. Thucydides was not a superstitious man; he plainly did not believe that chance was our name for God's contrivances or that the area which Diodotus labeled "chance" is really the pattern of destiny. But, I think, the peculiar ironies of chance inspired him with a kind of horror, and in these two instances, that of a well-meaning, decent, and incompetent man, meaninglessly enmeshed in a task demanding enormous skill, and the simple little country town with its men and women, children and animals, senselessly slaughtered by a hired mercenary army for no conceivable military purpose, the disproportion between the people and their fate awakened a human pity which is nonetheless explicable according to his own theory of history and its development.

The last instance—that of the comment on the Constitution of the Five Thousand—is much harder to place. The Constitution of the Five Thousand is certainly not peculiarly the product of chance, nor does chance in connection with it exhibit the irony which is remarkable in the case of Nicias and the village of Mycalessus. On the other hand, there is perhaps another way of seeing the Constitution of the Five Thousand as a thing not directly growing out of the necessity of history—thus explaining Thucydides' comment on it. In the chapter on stasis Thucydides says: "In peace and good times both states and individuals show better judgment because they do not fall into necessities which are too strong for will or intention." The "better" here probably indicates the same kind of moral comment as the "best" applied to the government of the Five Thousand: that is to say, in both cases "better" and "best" refer to some sort of moral excellence which is no longer possible when the stress of circumstances "likens the temper of most men to their circumstances."

This is further supported if we seek for a definition of "better" in the chapters on stasis and for "best" in that section dealing with the Constitution of the Five Thousand. The gist of the chapter on stasis is that the proper qualities of man in a state of normalcy—courage, caution, decency, and intelligence—become superseded by peculiar distortions in fact, such as insensate daring, ruthlessness, and universal suspicion, and that the use of the moral terms also changes. The distorted extremes received the moral titles due to their normal counterparts. In the chapter on the Constitution of the Five Thousand, Thucydides cannot mean that the "best government" is best in the sense that it will help Athens win the war, for the first actions of this government are directed toward a peace with Sparta. The reason he gives himself for the attribution of "best" is true and significant. "For it was a blend of the few and the many, and this was the first thing that lifted the city out of its ill condition." The conflict of the few and the many is the basis of stasis, and stasis Thucydides stamps as the peculiar internal condition resulting from external war.

In other words, allowing for the basic drives of human nature which lead to the potentiality of war between states and the potentialities of war within the society between the few who have and the many who have not, the actualization of human aggressiveness in war and in faction represents the hysterical condition at which point moral comment is no longer significant, since man's capacity is now entirely limited by circumstances, and neither his will nor his intention has any free play. At such a time the art of politics finds its proper exercise, since it is pre-eminently the art of understanding necessity and operating within the possibilities afforded by necessity. But the area where moral comment is in order is only that in which human beings can be regarded as in some sense operating with freedom to choose between one alternative and another without the direct force of necessity constraining them.

This latter is the case with the Constitution of the Five Thousand. It was, in a way, an academic experiment, since it tried to cure, in a root-and-branch fashion, the basic disease of the Athenian state, the conflict of the few and the many. It did this in preference to setting the winning of the war first, as the democrats would have it, or the establishment of a stable government, by fiat, as the extreme oligarchs wanted. It belongs in one of the rare breathing spaces between the compulsive assaults of necessity and embodies an effort by men consciously and freely to choose, theoretically, a better state. And it is in this spirit that Thucydides comments on it.

Summing up the three passages, we can state the result like this. Thucydides saw a struggle between good and bad in an individual man or a situation as worthy of comment only when the man or the situation belongs in the region which lies outside the direct control of necessity. Thus the chance destruction of Mycalessus and the chance which carried Nicias to be commander of the disastrous Sicilian expedition show, briefly, a piece of history which might have been different. In the light of its hypothetical difference the historian may and will comment morally. Again when an action can actually be consummated with the true possibility of choice—that is, when it proceeds from men's freedom of decision rather than the compulsion of necessity—a moral comment can be significant. But moral comment is out of place in the discussion of the war and the empire, for here are only the final and natural responses to a continuous process of circumstances, and what men ought to do in regard to the war and the empire should be dictated only by the necessity of coping with the existing situation.

Beyond Necessity

Though the comments we have last discussed are probably to be integrated in this theory of history as I have shown, they do not reveal the most significant attitude of Thucydides as a historian. In a sense this is quite evident in the light of the manner in which they have been traditionally explained. Had there not existed a very marked contradiction between these passages and the general spirit of the rest of the narrative, so many scholars would not have tried to see them as sentimental inserts or taken them at their face value as sarcastic comment. The analysis we have pursued so far does in fact show why there is this discrepancy of tone. In the passages on Nicias, Mycalessus, and the Constitution of the Five Thousand, Thucydides is remarking on phenomena which in a special way belong outside the realm of necessity. The Archaeology and the Fifty Years combined with certain of the speeches indicate to us what he considered the necessity of history to be and the qualities required by statesmen who would be true statesmen in the light of this necessity. What we must try to do now is to discuss where within this area—the necessity of history—the highest praise is given—to statesman and to state. When men's free will is effectually curbed by circumstances, and when chance does not obviously confuse the issue—in other words, in the true domain of politics—where does Thucydides find his highest value?

We can start from a passage which is puzzling enough in itself, unless we find the explanation we are seeking. Antiphon, according to Thucydides, was the intellect that dominated the extreme party of the oligarchs, the party, that is, that installed and maintained the reign of terror in 411. Here are the historian's own words: "The man who brought forward the proposal and to all outward appearance was the most energetic in destroying the democracy was Peisander; but the one who engineered the whole business and the manner in which it was brought to this pass and had thought most deeply about its contrivance was Antiphon, a man among the Athenians of his day second to none in virtue."

The word "virtue," unqualified, stands in the sharpest contrast to that in the verdict on Nicias, "what is considered virtue." A little research into the deeds chronicled of each figure amplifies what our conception of the two virtues should be. The violence of the oligarchs of Antiphon's party is quite clearly noted by Thucydides. There was a reign of terror in which order was maintained by judiciously selected secret executions. Thucydides' cool words of this demand attention: "And they killed certain men, though not very many, who seemed to be suitable ones to remove, and threw others into prison and banished others." In a sense, the whole record of Nicias, with his hesitation and irresolution and general tendency not to do the effective and ruthless thing, stands in the strongest contrast to this; but it is capped, as it were, by the pathetic note in his last speech to his soldiers: "I am in the same danger and hazard as the lowliest of you; I am no stronger than any of you—indeed you can see how my sickness prostrates me. Yet in my private life and otherwise I think my good fortune has previously been second to none. I have lived with much devotion to the gods and much justice in the sight of men and have merited no man's grudge."

It is hazardous, of course, to take a man's own judgment on himself as the historian's, but when the narrative, the historian's verdict, and the general's own speech all jibe, there can be little reason for rejecting the total portrait of Nicias as the presentation of a well-meaning incompetence, just as surely as Thucydides' comments on Antiphon and his party lead us to form a picture of ruthless efficiency. In other words, "conventional virtue" and the virtue of the statesman according to necessity are at opposite poles. We might notice too that the phrase in the general description of Antiphon, "the ablest in forming conceptions and in giving them voice," recalls another similar passage. This is Pericles' description of the duties of statesmen, in which the emphasis falls exactly on these two qualities with the same words: the need for forming conceptions and being able to express them. We might remember also the passage on Themistocles:

"Themistocles was a man who showed most certainly the strength of a native talent and for this is more worth our admiration than any other. By virtue of his peculiar understanding, without previous study to better or supplement it, he was the shrewdest judge of those crises that admit of virtually no deliberation and the best guesser at the future to its utmost limit. That which he had in hand he was always able to give an account of and was not incompetent to judge sufficiently well even that of which he was inexperienced. The future he foresaw, both for better and worse, to a remarkable extent. In a word, by brilliant natural gifts with the minimum of application he was the ablest man at improvising necessary measures."

The negative part of an inference from the use of "virtue" in the Antiphon passage is thus established. It is clear that the virtue Thucydides is praising in Antiphon has essentially nothing to do with mercy or humanity. We can also be sure of this in regard to Pericles, whose words on the empire we would do well to remember: "To acquire the empire may have been unjust: it is dangerous to let it go. You must remember that you hold a tyrant power." Is there any other attribute which can be exercised from the blanket definition of Antiphon's virtue which will help us to understand Thucydides' comment in a more general way?

Yes. Surely, according to Thucydides, the virtue of the statesman need not carry with it success. Neither Themistocles, Pericles, nor Antiphon was successful— personally successful, at least. That is to say, each of them achieved an enormous political task, the one the building of the long walls and the fleet to make the new empire, the second the extension of the empire and its preparation for the war, and the third the destruction of the democracy. But, in each case, the judgment of the multitude at some point intervened to wreck the purely personal satisfaction in achievement. Themistocles died in exile, a guest of the Persian king he had helped to defeat; Pericles at the end of his life was disgraced by the democracy he had led so long, even though in the last few months of his life he was reinstated; Antiphon was finally tried and executed by the people. Yet Thucydides tells us that Themistocles was "more worthy of our admiration than any other man in history," that Pericles was a single statesman of unique caliber in Athens' record, and that Antiphon was second to none of the Athenians in his day in virtue. Personal success, then, cannot be a necessary factor in the attributes of greatness, according to Thucydides. This is the more noteworthy, since, for him, foresight and efficiency are the prerequisites of a good statesman.

What do we find, then, positively, on the side of the statesman who commands Thucydides' admiration and the attribution of admiration? The achievement of a deed notable in terms of his own History, be that deed good or bad according to conventional Greek morality. More than that. The achievement must rise to the stature of uniqueness. As Thucydides felt that the historical significance of his time with its clash of these two great empires was unique, so uniqueness is for him, in a way, a guaranty of the importance of a given event. The fleet and the long walls; Athens' extraordinary endurance in the war; the destruction of the Athenian liberties of a hundred years' duration—all these have, for Thucydides, the stamp of singleness and the stamp of greatness. This is perhaps the very key to the personal failure of the statesmen, for the multitude cannot be taken along as a willing partner in the achievement of unique greatness. They constitute the difficulties to be overcome, the barrier that tests the strength of the assailant. And so, when the task is done, the many and the one relapse into their natural condition of antagonism, and, when the conflict becomes personal, the one must be beaten. But in the strange impersonality of selfsacrifice, in the desperate power and will to create something greater than the reach of a single man's ambition or benevolence, Thucydides found that which he called "virtue."

The life of nations for Thucydides is all of a piece in the early stages: the struggle for existence and then the struggle for supremacy. The object of interest for the nation in its historical development is dynamis, power, and this means dominion over others. Fear and greed are the driving motives on the road to imperialism, and there is no turning back. Yet in the course of the development there is a moment when these two factors are not the only ones. There is, as the Athenian envoys state it, honor. In the greatness of the thing created, the empire, there is a quality different from the qualities which created it; it is great in itself and for itself, and honor is its due from all.

The historical moment cannot, perhaps, last long; yet its greatness and dignity is the magnet of the historian's attention, and its decline the most penetrating exhibition of political motives, failures, and successes that can be offered him. Here is the significant recurring thing for Thucydides. That men struggle to live and then to dominate one another individually and nationally is a recurrent theme but does not attain any precision of form until their concerted and collective efforts have built a great monument to their individual greed and fear. In the hour that they honor that monument not only as the source of their own material well-being but as something apart from them, greater than them and worthy of their sacrifice, the greatest development of man, as Thucydides saw him, greatest politically and socially, has been attained. And, correspondingly, as the moment has called forth the most subtle and sophisticated sentiments of man living in a political society, its balance is rare and precarious. Overnight it dissolves again into an association of men, fearful and greedy.

History would be, then, for Thucydides, a series of significant mountains, the peaks rising at intervals in the endless chain. And, for the historian, the greatness and symmetrical proportions of the great thing that was made became valuable for their own sake, though, of course, the very appreciation of the greatness and the proportions implies a historian's emphasis. It is not hard to put this aspect of Thucydides' study together with his avoidance of conventional moral judgments, both on men and on the corporate political entities which they constitute and, more important still, with the inclusion of the few rather strange judgments we possess. The conventional moral judgment is, from his point of view, a failure on the level of significance. The ordinarily denominated virtues of man are not significant, in Thucydides' eyes, since they are not for him the genuinely predisposing factor in the creation of power; and only in power, in the building of something bigger than himself, is the peculiar excellence of the pressure of truly compulsive forces, fear and greed and their occasions—and the ability to transcend them within limits.

Yet the transcendence has no object; it must be its own object. This will hold good for the statesman and the state and the historian alike. The great statesman is the man who governs, not for his own advantage or necessarily for the good of the governed (which would be the classical statement), but for the continued dignity and survival of the state which in Athens has its characteristic expression in power, wealth, and extent. The great state, like Athens, will seek no models but in itself be the object of imitation, living in the radiance of its own beauty and magnitude. The greatness of the history is in its truth and its significance; that it serves no man's delight or vanity or affiliation; that thus the events were and thus they will be again, since they are truly described and of the order that will recur.

Among statesmen a unique position in the history is occupied by Pericles, and it is to Pericles and Periclean Athens that we must look for the most significant expression of Thucydides' admiration.

There are only three speeches of Pericles reported in the History. They are the speech in which he advocates the declaration of war, the famous Funeral Speech, delivered over those that had fallen, and the speech in which he defends himself against the people's dissatisfaction with his conduct of the war. These three speeches peculiarly express the spirit of the city of Athens as she entered on her long struggle, and, apart from their significance inside Thucydides' History, they probably constitute the most extraordinary document we possess revealing the relation between the leading statesman and his people in a naked and unqualified democracy.

The first aspect of all three speeches that may surprise us is their frankness. It is not often that before a democratic electorate a politician can reveal his hopes and fears almost exactly as they must appear to himself, though perhaps in this there are signs of what Thucydides describes as Pericles' odd attitude to the people: "He dominated them, but in a spirit of freedom." For instance, in the first speech—that in which he urges the declaration of war—he warns the assembly that they may be inclined to feel quite different about the war when they are in it than when they are contemplating it as a future possibility. This, he tells us, is the wrong thing to do. "For it is possible for the outcome of events to proceed no less stupidly than the plans of men: that is why we are used to blame chance for whatever happens to us unexpectedly."

In the last speech in the History, where Pericles is forced to defend himself against unjust resentment in the early years of the war, he unhesitatingly lays the blame where it belongs: on the plague and the people's suffering under it which makes them unfair in their estimate of himself. He then proceeds to try to make them realize the true possibilities of success temporarily concealed from them by their immediate defection. Yet, as he does so, he cheerfully reveals to them that there is a secret in mastering them; that he is not handling them as man to man.

"As to your fears of your sufferings in this war, lest it grow so great that we can no longer surmount it—let suffice for you what I have told you before on the many occasions when I proved that your suspicions about the war were incorrect: yet I will add this one further matter on the greatness of your empire, something I am sure you have not thought of before yourselves nor have I made mention of it in my former speeches to you. Even now I would not have introduced this thing; for its presentation is somewhat too imposing—but that I see that you are unreasonably depressed. You think that your empire is over the allies alone; but I will show you this: there are two elements of the world for use, land and sea, and of the one you are total masters for as far as you now exercise that mastery and further if you please. No one, neither the Great King nor any other people on earth at present, will successfully repel you if you sail against them with the fleet you have now."

Here we are not concerned for the moment with the calm arrogance of the speech—that will be important later—but with the frankness it exhibits toward his audience. There is so clearly the implication that he is managing them, as of right of character and talent; that he knows the correct parts of the case to put now and at another time. And he tells them just this: I would not have thought it advisable to produce an argument that is so arrogant in fact but that I see you irrationally depressed, and so I find that a little more of the naked truth than usual is necessary to restore you to a sensible frame of mind. Here is the note of complete personal responsibility, without the blessing of divine sanction or hereditary legitimacy; and here is equally the undeviating openness of one who informs those whom he controls that his judgment is better than theirs and that only exceptional circumstances such as the present make it necessary for him to show them the deepest factors in his calculations.

But the frankness of these speeches is only one side of their basic character, and that may be summed up by saying that they are concerned with man and nothing but man. It is extraordinary in such speeches as these— one contemplating the city's engagement in a long war, one spoken in praise of the dead, one defending a leader suspected because of what was accidental mischance— that, with the exception of one insignificant and quite colorless reference, there should be no mention of divine guidance, divine blessing, or even, in a merely sentimental allusion, fatherland's gods.

That this is no general Greek practice, if we need convincing on the matter, we can see from Thucydides' own observations on the last speech of Nicias to his troops before their final battles in Sicily: "He said other things which men in such a contingency are apt to say, not guarding against appearing to anyone to talk platitudes, about women and children and gods of our country, things continually brought forward in the same form on behalf of all causes, yet in the presence of an existing emergency men judge them useful and urge them." But Pericles even in crisis will guard against seeming to talk platitudes. He shares with his hearers—knows it and draws his power from it—the knowledge that he and they are not like those of another age or another state who will bolster their hopes or their fears or even their sorrow by reference to beliefs outworn and dead. The city which is committed to the war, the city whose lovers the dead were over whom Pericles made his speech, was a manmade thing and existed only by the will and sacrifice of its men.

Here is the explanation of the strength of the materialistic appeal of Pericles to the citizens of Athens. They enjoy the products of the ends of the earth as natively as those of Attica. They may live their lives as they please, and no one may interfere. They are not harried by the demands of a harsh and continuous military service. Because, in a certain sense, the city is theirs and from beginning to end exhibits the immediate choice of its inhabitants, not the influence of tradition or sanctions imposed from outside. And in his final assessment of the city's chances against Sparta, Pericles, in the spirit of his city, describes the world as something essentially for use: earth and sea are for use, either in war or peace. In such a statement there is nothing of a reverence or an awe before something greater than man or even merely alien to him; nor is there any hesitation involved in balancing various intricate factors, some subject to human control and some not, which can go to the resolution of a military dilemma. There is the starkly bare statement of basic determining areas of conflict and power. Athens is master, absolute master, of one element. She is therefore virtually bound to win the war, in a land like Greece where in war or in peace the sea is the source of power. These speeches are exceedingly direct, and man is the center of the universe in the mouth of the speaker and the minds of the hearers.

Yet there is a very remarkable impersonality in the man-made object, the city for which the human sacrifice is demanded. The fathers and mothers who have lost their sons are urged to have more children: "For as far as you are concerned as individuals the children that are successors to those that are gone shall be a forgetfulness of these, and, for the state, this will profit her doubly, since she will not be left empty of men and shall be safer besides; for there is no giving of just or even counsel on the part of those who risk their children on the consequences of their advice and those who do not: these two parties are not on the same footing." Here we see that the reason for new children is largely at least to preserve the city and not only in respect to numbers but, subtly, because only those who have their most precious human possessions to lose will take sufficient thought for the considerations of state policy! The more one thinks of this, the more one sees that the city, "the praises of which, as I have spoken of them, are such in virtue of the fair deeds of her sons," is not only man-made; she has attained an independent existence such that her preservation means more than the happiness or misery of all her inhabitants.

This position is still considerably removed from the forms of state worship we have come to know later, because, in the first place, it is a state the total scope of which is itself—it does not, for Pericles, embody an ideal that is greater than it; and, in the second place, he contemplates its destruction at some future day, when the glory of it will be the only thing left.

"You must realize that your city has the greatest renown among all mankind for not yielding to misfortune, that it has spent more men's bodies and pains on war than any other, and that it has obtained the greatest power that the world has yet seen up to now. Even if we shall one day in this time come to disaster—and this we may, for everything that is born decays too— the memory of that power shall be everlasting: that we were Greeks and ruled more Greeks than any others had; that in the greatest wars we held our own against them all and individually; and that our city was the greatest and the most abundant in everything." You must disregard the hatred of your subjects, he says, for "hatred does not abide for long, but the brilliance you have now and the repute hereafter are all that are left for everlasting memory."

The bareness of this, in all its abstractness, is terrible enough. Glory is all that remains, yet the glory is not of the victory of a principle, a faith, or a civilization; it is glory that attaches ultimately to defeat as well as to victory, a memory held in awe, in which the blackest deeds against Greek morality have their place as truly as the love of beauty and wisdom, the story of a city whose greatness is lovely and untouchable, created by man but not responsible to him, knowing no God and no life beyond itself.

And Thucydides' conception of his own worth as a writer is closely linked with the value he saw in the war and its political setting. Slowly and painfully he left behind the values of the poets and the logographers. He did not want to entertain nor did he wish to record great and glorious events, "that their memory might not be lost from among men … or fail of their due distinction." That which is true and that which is permanent are what he wanted to record, and what was true and permanent in the nature of man reflected in the deeds of fifth-century Greece was rarely entertaining and hardly ever glorious. Harsh, brutal, and bloody as the deeds were, he must face them with no comforting possibility of moralizing them away against a prospect of a necessarily brighter future or a universal good design of divine origin. To realize them in their true meaning, to divest himself of hope of things different and of unmeaning resentment at things as they were, to cling bitterly and doggedly to explaining the cold-bloodedness and brutality in terms that could at least be verified after the fashion of his world, became the whole duty of the historian. As his work attained its peculiar austere perfection, perhaps Thucydides felt a kinship with Pericles, who sought no glory and no reward except in the creation of something greater than himself, yet a something rooted in the brutal truths of the life around him.

Pericles is great because, though he rose on the fear and greed of his countrymen, though the empire he built was built on fear and greed, he and perhaps it transcended this fear and greed. He feared nothing and was greedy for nothing. He cowed the people when they were overconfident and heartened them when they were downcast. Everyone knew that money could not tempt him. And it is because of this that he stood above all his fellows, and it is through the defect of this quality of disinterestedness that his successors reduced all again to the level of their fears and greeds and ruined both the state and themselves.

And the city of Athens, the national equivalent of Pericles among individuals? Is she not the school of Greece? However she may have robbed the allies to build the Parthenon and robbed the Greek city-states of the freedom they treasured, she had become, as the Funeral Speech indicates, something greater than all this. She had become a model of human society, tolerant and gracious, now that the days of conquering were over. In the Athens of Pericles Thucydides saw something great and admirable which compelled his intellectual homage and his emotional acceptance as nothing else did. If one believed that the history of man politically is a story of greed, strife, and fear, and their working in the society created by them, there was still a time when these passions had for a historical moment been immobilized in a balanced beauty and strength, and Periclean Athens was this historical moment. The enormous wealth which the commercial democracy alone could create—as Thucydides so well knew—was here to set off dramatically the symbols of Athenian rule: The Athenian can eat at his table the fruits of the ends of the earth as commonly as the olives of neighboring Attica.

Yet the democracy whose dynamic was greed and fear and whose might was the offspring of that greed and fear was held in check by a single autocrat whose rule it accepted because he was not as other men were. In this voluntary acquiescence of the vulgar, in this submission to the statesman who neither flattered nor feared them but who put heart into them or made them tremble with the witchcraft of his own aloof certainty, Thucydides may have seen the transcendence of the materialism in which he believed. Here was power as it truthfully was, based on fear, pride, and greed, yet it touched something too magical for measurement.