SOURCE: "Speeches and Personalities in Thucydides," in The Ancient Historians, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970, pp. 88-101.

[In the following excerpt, Grant defends the "accuracy" of Thucydides's speeches, basing his argument on an examination of contemporary Greek notions of the purpose of public speech. He speculates that Thucydides believed that individuals in history were "there to reveal underlying causes " of the course of history; therefore, their speeches are not only vital to written history, but also are accurate inasmuch as they articulate those underlying causes.]

Thucydides' history would not have been at all the same without the speeches. This device, which seems so strange to us in a historical work, had been adapted by Herodotus from Homer, and Thucydides—who after all came from Athens, where talk was a fine art— carried its employment a good deal further. Twenty-four per cent of his whole work consists of such orations, which number no less than forty, and, like his other digressions, are carefully and ingeniously spaced. Phoenix, in the Iliad, had instructed Achilles to be a speaker of words as well as a doer of deeds, and Thucydides couples words and deeds together as the materials of history.

It is very clear to him that the two forms of activity are closely linked. Diodotus, offering moderate counsel about Mytilene is made to say that 'anyone who denies that words can be a guide to action must either be a fool or have some personal interest at stake'. For one thing, speeches create action—good or evil, for Diodotus' opponent Cleon is chosen to show how disastrous the gift of the gab can be. Besides, Thucydides holds the very Greek opinion that no one will get anywhere at all unless he is articulate. 'Someone', Pericles is made to say, 'who has the knowledge, but lacks the power clearly to express it, is no better off than if he never had any ideas at all.'

Man, that is to say, is a rational being whose actions are based on decisions, and these can only be the outcome of verbal formulations. Speech is the root of all political life, and the point had never been so evident as it was at this time. For professional rhetoricians were intensely active, and the practical fruit of their efforts, formal speech-making, also underwent far-reaching developments. Pericles, whose orations play such a leading role in Thucydides' work, was said to have been the first to deliver a written speech in court—and the fact that he had learnt philosophy from Anaxagoras (who was also Thucydides' teacher) inspired Plato to describe him as the greatest of orators. The earliest Greek speech which has come down to us—relating to the murder of a certain Herodes—likewise belongs to the period of the Peloponnesian War (c. 417). It was delivered by the rhetorician Antiphon of Rhamnus, whose style has a good deal in common with Thucydides; and indeed it was from him that the historian was reported to have learnt his rhetorical skills.

Apparently Thucydides recited parts of his work; and surely these recitations included some of the speeches which were so appropriate to such a medium. Moreover, these orations form a perfect illustration of his view that the whole of history is based on articulateness—on words as well as deeds. A historian, therefore, must take pains to record what people said. The method he himself uses is a carefully calculated one.

In this history I have made use of set speeches, some of which were delivered just before and others during the war. I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches which I listened to myself, and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty. So my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation.

Perhaps Herodotus had been criticised for inventing speeches; and that may be why Thucydides felt it incumbent on himself to explain how he is going to proceed. He admits that his speeches do not set out to represent the exact words of the speakers, for this, as he reasonably says, would have been impossible. He aims, instead, at conveying a general impression—the essence rather than the substance.

The additional indication that he included 'what was called for' might be held to mean that he tells us what the speakers 'had to' say, and therefore what they did say. But the phrase seems more likely to signify 'what the various occasions demanded'. If that is so, he is admitting that scope has been given to his imagination. Such a criterion could clash with the requirement that the general sense of what had actually been said should always be reproduced. And indeed, just as Herodotus had included purely mythical orations, it is pretty clear that Thucydides very often pays more attention to what a situation seems to him to 'call for' than to any texts of actual discourses that could have been available to him.

His speeches make little attempt to reproduce speakers' individual characteristics or probable styles. Like a simple nurse in Aeschylus, and a policeman in Sophocles, the speakers talk the language not of themselves but of their author. Their orations are closer in structure to rhetorical textbooks than to any genuine extant speech. They are also much shorter than the sort of harangues that were actually delivered on public occasions—as we can tell from those that have survived. Moreover, some of Thucydides' speeches are singularly out of place, indeed tactless, in relation to their occasion. For example the admiral Phormio's address to his sailors could not possibly have been delivered to any crowd of mariners in such a form, though it is apt enough as an explanation of Athenian policy for the benefit of the reader. And the Assembly meeting to discuss Mytilene surely cannot have proceeded as Thucydides said it did. Moreover, Attic oratorical style had been moving rapidly during the war, but the style of Thucydides does nothing of the kind; quite apart from the question of whether their substance is authentic, the speeches in later books such as VI and VII must have been, stylistically, far removed from any possible originals. But some of the speeches quoted in Thucydides may never have been delivered at all.

If they were delivered, the fact that he does not exactly reproduce them does not necessarily mean that he was ignorant of what had been said. He may sometimes, it is true, have written down a version while his memory was vivid. But even then, like other ancient historians, he felt free to select, add and elaborate before transcribing the oration for his history. The fact that a speech may have been known, so that any alterations he introduced could be detected, constituted no objection. For verbatim inclusion would have been artistically damaging.

He had quite other purposes in mind; and they were purposes which entirely overrode and overruled the criterion of mere fidelity to what had actually been said. In his view, the speakers are not just there in their own right. To a certain extent, they are mouthpieces of the historian, in that they provide the medium for a substantial part of his huge contribution to the development of abstract and rational thinking. But they are much more than merely his mouthpieces. They are there to reveal underlying causes; to display the characters and tempers and motives of individuals and nations; to penetrate to general truths which might not have emerged from the details of the narrative; to get the participants in events, political or military, to speak for themselves; and to bring out, by methods impossible for a mere chronicle, subjective elements that are indispensable to our understanding.

We shall win, and why, explain typical speakers. And then subsequent developments show whether their calculations were good or bad—ostensibly without the historian intervening, so that the reader is given the illusion of independence. In this way, for example, we are introduced to the essence of Athenian power and to its gradual deterioration from the Periclean ideal. The clashes of opinion at Sparta before the war, and the reactions to these various views expressed by Pericles on the Athenian side, show an interlocking arrangement of one point answering another, often at a distance of time and place: and in reporting one oration the historian sometimes shows foreknowledge of a later one.

The influence of contemporary sophists—described by one of their number, Prodicus of Ceos, as men half-way between philosophers and political scientists—is clearly detectable in the manner in which close concentration is focused upon a single argument. The method used is often that of 'ring' or 'loop' composition: statement, proof, restatement. By these means, unarguable truth being so elusive, the attempt is made to achieve the 'probability' stressed by the sophistrhetorician Gorgias, like philosophers before him, as the best attainable ideal. The potentialities and powers of the spoken and written word were now appreciated as never before. And so colliding intellectual theses are stated, by Thucydides, in extreme forms—corresponding with the antithetical tastes of this age in which Protagoras of Abdera (an Ionian town in Thrace) (485-415) was admitting the possibility of opposite views on any and every question. Consequently, Thucydides' speeches often occur in pairs. But sometimes, for example when Pericles is speaking, or the able Syracusan Hermocrates, the cogency of what they say is implied by the omission of any riposte from another orator. The same expository technique, without reply or antitheses, is adopted for additional set-pieces of special significance, for which, although speeches are not involved, the technique of speeches is used: such as the plague at Athens, and civil strife in Corcyra, and the dispatch sent by the Athenian general Nicias from Sicily.

To identify the historian's speeches with the choral odes of tragedy would be going too far. Yet they do owe many features to the tragic dramatists. They, too, for several decades past, had been introducing imaginary forensic speeches into their plays. The whole procedure of Thucydides is theatrical, bringing the past vividly before the reader like a drama on the stage, with the intention of revealing character and not just recording events. The whole depiction of national and personal psychologies in these speeches is analogous to the practice of the tragedians. In particular, on a great many occasions, we are strongly reminded of Euripides (c. 485-406 BC), who was essentially the dramatist of the Peloponnesian War. Thoroughly Euripidean, for example, is Thucydides' debate on the doom of rebellious Melos, in which sophisticated arguments are put forward in a dramatic dialogue form. Reminiscent of tragedy, also, is the historian's unmodern tendency to generalise, to seek the eternal in every event, often coining abstract terms for the purpose, again in the manner of Euripides. The reputation of Thucydides throughout the ages has scarcely fallen short of the tragedians, with whom he has so much in common; and this reputation has largely been due to the impact of his speeches.

Moreover, there is a strong poetic, tragic tinge about his actual language, and this feature, too, is particularly accentuated in the speeches; their precision and passion are those of poetry. Gorgias observed that the effects of orally delivered poetry upon audiences included 'fearful anxiety, tears and lamentation, and grief-stricken yearning'. His own success owed a lot to poetical effects; and so did the emotional highlights of Thucydides' story.

And yet this style is archaic and harsh. Crammed with meaning and overtone, sentence after sentence possesses the astringent conciseness of a gnomic utterance. The order of words is unnatural, and diction is contorted almost to the breaking-point of the language—and the translator. These elaborate, twisted antithetical rhythms are very different from the loose and easy fluency of Herodotus. They breathe the spirit of an age of rhetoricians and sophists which had only dawned at Athens after Herodotus wrote. Gorgias was the first to speak of 'figures of speech', and Thucydides noted and adapted not only his methods of argument but his diction. The historian's aim, says H. C. Baldry, 'was to master the new-fangled game of abstract thought'.

And yet his response was entirely his own. For example, he characteristically avoided the normal symmetry of the antithetical style, breaking up its formal balance. The whole effect is one of estrangement, individual and wilful. This surprising method has even inspired conjecture that Thucydides, whose father had a Thracian name, only learnt Greek as a second language. That is unlikely, but it does so happen that two antithetical and epigrammatic writers who influenced him, Protagoras and Democritus, were fellow-Thracians, both from the city of Abdera. And, without accusing Thucydides of writing pidgin Greek, it is possible to suppose that his insistence on a curiously old-fashioned idiom—the feature that particularly struck ancient critics—reflects the geographical and spiritual isolation of his banishment from Athens. Exile had not affected Herodotus, or at least not in this way—it had broadened and not soured him. The experience has seldom failed to leave its stamp, in one way or another, on any writer; and it marked Thucydides with an alienation that is reflected in his peculiar, unnatural Greek.

His narrative style possesses the same characteristics as his speeches and set-pieces, but to a far less extreme degree. The language is still compact, but not so much contorted as succinct. His writing was also famous for its speed, a quality likewise attributed to Democritus. Severe, grave, and terrifyingly intense, Thucydides presses on with inexorable rapidity. Occasionally, if the dramatic requirements of the narrative demand it, there is instead a slow and halting march. But when he has something terrible to write about, such as the final destruction of the Athenian expeditionary force in the Sicilian river Assinarus, the tale rushes ahead.

When day came Nicias led his army on, and the Syracusans and their allies pressed them hard in the same way as before, showering missiles and hurling javelins in upon them from every side. The Athenians hurried towards the river Assinarus.

Once they reached the river, they rushed down into it, and now all discipline was at an end. Every man wanted to be the first to get across, and, as the enemy persisted in his attacks, the crossing now became a difficult matter. Forced to crowd in close together, they fell upon each other, trampled each other underfoot. Some were killed immediately by their own spears, others got entangled among themselves and among the baggage and were swept away by the river.

Syracusan troops were stationed on the opposite bank, which was a steep one. They hurled down their weapons from above on the Athenians, most of whom, in a disordered mass, were greedily drinking in the deep river-bed. And the Peloponnesians came down and slaughtered them, especially those who were in the river. The water immediately became foul, but nevertheless they went on drinking it, all muddy as it was and stained with blood. Indeed, most of them were fighting among themselves to have it.

In his account of the Sicilian expedition the historian deploys all his talents, because the Syracusans were the only people in whom Athens met its match. Full of tragedies and dramatic ironies, this account of an utter catastrophe which wisdom could have avoided was the climax of Book VII. Macaulay described the book as the summit of human art.

Thucydides' way of telling the story is cerebral, the product of an exceptionally powerful mind. It conveys the intellectual effort which had given birth to the work.

For his history, throughout, is a glorification of intelligence. Its purpose is not only to enable people to know. That is not enough, being a mere meaningless accumulation. The aim is also to make readers understand. In keeping with Gorgias' teaching that full, total knowledge is beyond attainment, the task must be tackled in a humble spirit. When, therefore, Thucydides has general laws in mind, he does not lay them down dogmatically, but only suggests what is likely. Thucydides agreed with Democritus' assertion that to understand the cause of any one thing was worth more to him than the whole kingdom of the Persians—and another contemporary, Socrates, was reported to have expressed similar sentiments.

For these men lived in an epoch when the Ionian spirit of investigation had finally taken deep rots in the fertile soil of Athens. People were prepared to investigate everything; and the comparatively few years that had elapsed since Herodotus composed his work had established great gains in the efficiency of their techniques. And so, just as Thucydides probes incessantly to comprehend events, this capacity to understand is also the quality he admires most in the characters of his history. Protagoras was now asserting that man is the measure of all things, but his fellow-townsman Democritus added that no one is likely to prevail by native qualities alone without training. Thucydides, however, believed that even an untutored person could succeed if only his intellect was powerful enough. The career of Themistocles, for example, seemed to him to show how mind, granted perseverance and subtlety, is capable of rising even above the disadvantage of a deficient education.

But it is far better to have the opportunity to learn, and Thucydides above all wants his readers, whether students or statesmen, to be given the greatest possible opportunities of comprehending what is going on. For all attendant circumstances are merely subordinate, or should be made subordinate, to the minds of man. Thucydides, says Antony Andrewes, 'sees events as one great dialectical argument in which human intelligence is the final arbiter in the seat of judgment'. His insistence on reason as the ideal anticipates Aristotle's emphasis both on wisdom and on practical intelligence. The distinction was a refinement that came after Thucydides; he is content to stress the cerebral quality in general as the criterion by which people and causes must be judged.

All his important personages, therefore, are shrewd planners and calculators, and the word for 'understand' or 'judgment' (gnomai, gnome) occurs 305 times in his work. The Greeks admired the middle course so much because they found it hard to achieve; and similarly Thucydides appreciated intelligence because he knew that even in his own city, crammed with intelligent people, it did not by any means always prevail. Instead he felt, as Cornford says, that 'human affairs move along a narrow path lit by a few dim rays of foresight (gnome) or the false, wandering fires of hope'. Most of all was this true of politics, the sphere which Thucydides had chosen for his analysis of the applications of human reason.

To understand the successes and failures of this power, it was obviously necessary to study psychology. Earlier philosophers had concentrated on physics and metaphysics, but now Socrates and Democritus and the sophists had turned the eyes of the Greek world on to human behaviour. We have the former's views filtered through (or invented by) Plato, and Democritus' ethical and psychological works survive in fragments, which, although numerous, are not numerous enough to enable us to reconstruct his system. As for Thucydides, this interest in the human personality is deficient in a certain necessary quality of variegated untidiness, because his pursuit of this aspect is subordinated to other aims. He likes biography; his delineations of famous men contributed to the formation of that literary genre. But everything judged to be irrelevant and trivial is rigorously excluded. For what the historian wants to do is to elucidate, through his characters, the types of person who react to given sets of circumstances, who fix the characters of states, who decide the features which oppose Athens to Sparta. This is to say, we are far, deliberately far, from Herodotus' preference for more personal and private factors. Thucydides judges men not as individuals but as politicians.

That, for example, is how he sees Pericles. Only two years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles was already dead. Yet he is the central figure of the work, and in a sense its hero. There is no knowing what Thucydides thought of the earlier, pre-war Pericles, the young, demagogic, imperialist on the make; for he does not choose to tell us. But about his conduct of the initial period of the war we are told a good deal; and the background of these events is described in the speeches attributed to him. Two of these orations, it seems, only reached their present form many years after his death. Yet it is difficult to read the Funeral Speech without feeling that Thucydides had to some extent, later if not sooner, become infected with the glory of the imperial state. The ideal may not have been perfect, but it was magnificent; and, looked at in retrospect, it provided a dramatic foil to the disastrous present.

Admiration of the departed order implied respect for the man who had brought it into being. And indeed, when we come to the actual subject of the history, namely the war, its outbreak is not regarded as Pericles' fault. There is no suggestion that he could have avoided it, and the gossip that he started hostilities from private motives of his own is dismissed with contempt. As regards the actual conduct of the military operations, the verdict of Thucydides, at whatever date or by whatever stages it was reached, again spoke unequivocally in favour of Pericles. 'During the whole period of time when Pericles was at the head of affairs the state was widely led and firmly guarded, and it was under him that Athens was at her greatest. And when the war broke out, here also he appears to have accurately estimated what the power of Athens was.' In the end the Athenians lost the war, it is true. But they only lost it many years after Pericles' death. And, although his calculations had admittedly been turned awry by the plague, it was not because of him that they failed. On the contrary, if he had continued to be in charge, they would have won. They lost because his successors did everything he had told them not to do. He had counselled them to look after the navy, but to refrain from imperial expansion during the war (though perhaps he was less purely defensive than Thucydides made out). He also advised them to avoid taking any action which might risk the safety of Athens itself. But they did the exact opposite, in all respects. They, not Pericles, pursued private motives; and they fell fatally into civil strife. Pericles, with his 'position, intelligence and human integrity', had been able to respect their liberty and yet lead them at the same time. Those who followed him could not.

Of these successors to Pericles we know very little. Except for some caricatures by the comic dramatist Aristophanes, there is scant information except from Thucydides himself—and his pictures merely consist of a few malevolent flashes. After Pericles' death, the leading politician for some years was Cleon. Thucydides brings him to our notice in three episodes. He was the man who, in 427, proposed the decree to execute the rebellious Mytileneans, which was passed but rescinded the next day. In 425 it was he who won a considerable victory at Pylos on the western coast of the Peloponnese, when members of the Spartan military élite were (exceptionally) taken prisoner on the island of Sphacteria. And in 422-421 it was again Cleon who proceeded to Macedonia to win Amphipolis back from the Spartan Brasidas. But on this occasion he failed, and the enemy killed him.

Like the conservative Aristophanes, who treated Cleon as a lamentable and violent demagogue, Thucydides has the lowest possible opinion of the man, and says so in lethal asides. He is degraded to the status of a clown unworthy of the dignity of history—someone who throve in an atmosphere of disturbance, because 'in a time of peace and quiet, people would be more likely to notice his evil doings and less likely to believe his slander of others'.

In regard to Mytilene, Cleon was unnecessarily brutal and revengeful—which was an unwise way of treating allies. He also proclaimed a deplorable desire to prevent his fellow Athenians from engaging in free discussion. At Pylos he was grasping and arrogant, and made a 'mad' promise (though it came off). And thereafter, when we learn of his sordid end in Macedonia, it is hard to forget that Amphipolis, which Cleon had failed to recover, was the very same place which Thucydides himself had lost. The recovery of the town might have meant his return from the exile his failure had earned him. Moreover, the circumstances that had led to the city's loss and Thucydides' disgrace could reasonably be ascribed to Cleon's overbearing measures against the allies. These were all reasons for regarding Cleon acrimoniously.

Coarse fellow though he may have been, he was able, particularly as a financier—and he earned respect from orators in the following century. However, his merits were of no concern to the purpose of Thucydides. His point was that Cleon displayed a dramatic antithesis, a debased perversion, of Pericles: vulgarian contrasted with man of culture, secondrate with firstrate, inferior demagogue with enlightened guide. Cleon's savagery towards the allies was a typical example of how he did everything Pericles told his successors not to do. The violence of his domestic and foreign policy over a period of years could, in the view of the historian, be partially blamed for the lapse into civil strife which was really what cost Athens the war. And the same sort of censure was merited by his successor Hyperbolus, another butt of comic poets, who was exiled (ostracised) in 417, 'not from any fear of his power and influence, but for his villainy, and because the city was ashamed of him'.

Thucydides' characterisation of two other leading Athenian figures in the war is more subtle. One is Nicias, who was responsible for the Peace of 421 but met with utter disaster in the expedition to Sicily, and was executed by the Syracusans (413). The historian's verdict is an unexpected and cryptic one: 'Nicias was a man who, of all the Hellenes in my time, least deserved to come to so miserable an end, since the whole of his life had been devoted to the study and practice of virtue.' Not a word, here, about the usual political and military subjects, or about his gifts in those spheres—gifts which were adequate but not brilliant, and earned him a reputation of respectable timidity from Aristophanes. The comment of Thucydides, as far as it goes, is accurate enough. But its omissions and implications are significant. First of all, there is a tragic contrast between his pious, conventional virtues and his appalling end. But, above all, it is implied, with a grim and ironical clearsightedness, that these qualities, excellent though they are in their way, will not guarantee the intelligent and effective conduct of affairs. The Sicilian catastrophe had proved as much, with terrifying finality. 'Thucydides' epitaph on Nicias', remarks C.M. Bowra, 'is the verdict of a man who knew that, in the destinies of peoples, goodness is not enough.'

All the same, even if not enough, it is a useful thing to have. For example, the absence of these standard, solid merits in Nicias' young opponent Alcibiades was a serious political handicap both to himself and to Athens. Before the Sicilian expedition, says the historian, Alcibiades had not been given important commands because of his debauched personal habits. Obviously these were bound to intensify his estrangement from the very proper Nicias, and so they contributed to dangerous dissension in the State. And the radicals disliked his extravagances quite as much as Nicias did.

Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides does not usually go into a man's private life. But in this case he had to, since it affected Alcibiades' career and consequently exercised a direct influence on the war. For when, in 415, Alcibiades was withdrawn from the Sicilian expedition and took refuge with the enemies of Athens, it was again suspicion of his lack of principles which had turned his fellow-citizens against him. Ostensibly, the charge was impiety, but what really inspired his opponents was the generally unreliable unsolidity of his character. However, after Alcibiades had come back to an Athenian command (411), he deserved well of his fellow-countrymen. For when the fleet at Samos wanted to attack their own city of Athens—temporarily under an oligarchic dictatorship—he refused to let them. Politically unprincipled though he was, by this intervention, says Thucydides, 'he rendered as eminent a service to the state as any man ever did'. This exceptionally high praise prepares us for the conclusion that, in spite of the flaws in his private life, his rejection and dismissal by his own people (repeated all over again in 406) was ruinous to Athens. And the historian is probably thinking of Alcibiades (and deliberately speaking in warmer terms than Herodotus) when he praises Themistocles, that equally brilliant and unsound figure of the earlier war. Here was another man whose unreliable, hazardous character and conduct had likewise helped to drive him into the arms of Athens' enemies. And yet, when not hampered by this defect, he too had performed splendid actions.

How had Themistocles managed to achieve these things? Not because of his background, because he had none, but because of his intellect, foresight and ability to make quick decisions. This continual emphasis on brain-power sometimes makes Thucydides' verdicts rather disconcerting. The standard translation of arete is 'virtue'. But the term is applied not only to the devout Nicias, but also to Antiphon, who, whatever the merits of his prose style, was a sanguinary, treacherous plotter, the leading oligarchic extremist of 411. The surprising attribution of virtue to such a man is intended, as Bury pointed out, 'to express the intelligence, dexterity and will power of a competent statesman, in sharp contradistinction to the conventional arete of the popular conception'. This was not virtue as most people understood it, but something more closely comparable to the virtù which Machiavelli saw in tough, skilful Sforzas and Borgias of his own day. Thucydides liked men who concentrated their energy on the tasks at hand. There is not much talk of natural benevolence. Instead, speeches prefer to harp on action-enhancing qualities such as courage.

Courage operates in the mass as well as in individuals. The psychology of masses and groups is a field in which Thucydides achieved extraordinary pioneer advances. With the acutest perceptiveness he analysed and expressed the changing attitudes of states, factions, councils, assemblies, and above all armies. Generals' speeches are skilfully adapted to the thoughts and feelings of their various contingents—unless it suits his purpose to do otherwise. The results of Greek battles depended on morale rather than tactics, and here we see the mentality of the soldiers, their excitements and exaltations and despairs. As the Sicilian expedition draws towards its calamitous close in a decisive seabattle in Syracuse harbour,there is an unforgettable picture of the agonised Athenian troops looking on, their fears for the future like nothing they had ever experienced before, their bodies agonisedly swaying this way and that to match the vicissitudes of their ships, on which everything depended.