UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Heroic Democracy: Thucydides, Pericles, and the Tragic Science of Athenian Greatness Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1t1337hx Author Fisher, Mark Douglas Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Heroic Democracy: Thucydides, Pericles, and the Tragic Science of Athenian Greatness By Mark Douglas Fisher A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kinch Hoekstra, chair Professor Shannon C. Stimson Professor Giovanni R. Ferrari Professor Leslie V. Kurke Summer 2017 Heroic Democracy: Thucydides, Pericles, and the Tragic Science of Athenian Greatness Copyright 2017 by Mark Douglas Fisher Abstract Heroic Democracy: Thucydides, Pericles, and the Tragic Science of Athenian Greatness by Mark Douglas Fisher Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Kinch Hoekstra, Chair Employing the tools of both textual and contextual analysis, this dissertation demonstrates that a central project of Thucydides’ work was to reexamine and radically reinterpret the essential features of Athenian democracy, its relationship to other regime types, and the conditions for its success by considering it as a type of collective hero. It argues that, against the grain of fifth- century democratic ideology, Thucydides developed an account of the imperial democracy that placed it within the tradition of Greek heroism and autocracy, thereby contesting the belief that democracy should be characterized primarily as a form of egalitarian rule antithetically related to kingship and tyranny. In undertaking this project, however, this dissertation shows that Thucydides was less a critic of Athenian democracy than of Athenian democratic ideology. He conceived of his city as a collective autocrat not in an effort to denigrate it, but to better understand the apex that it achieved. This dissertation further demonstrates that, in redescribing Athenian democracy as a heroic autocrat, Thucydides also set out to reinvent the Greek tradition of heroic autocracy. His commitment to a rationalistic and naturalistic mode of inquiry practiced by fellow fifth-century thinkers such as the Hippocratic medical writers appears to have provided some of the impetus for this ambition. However, this dissertation shows that it also stems from Thucydides’ deep and careful contemplation of the Athenian experience of the war itself. Recognizing that many of the central fixtures of the heroic worldview offered a helpful frame for thinking about the causes and pitfalls of democratic greatness, Thucydides nevertheless perceived that these could get him only so far. This dissertation tracks the crucial differences between a collective, democratic autocrat and an individual hero that had to be accounted for if the rise and fall of Athens was to be made fully intelligible. Many of these flowed from the democratic hero’s ability to selectively incorporate egalitarian practices into its domestic organization. At the most basic level, some degree of equality allowed for greater inclusivity, cooperation, and collective action in the heroic project, which translated directly into greater power. This was an unambiguous good, but the same cannot be said of all manifestations of equality within the democracy. In the deliberative sphere, the possession of an equal vote by all citizens created a variable dynamic between people and leaders, resulting in either excellent or catastrophic policy depending on the relative merit of those who vied for popular leadership. For Thucydides, this dissertation shows, the success of the democratic hero depended on the maintenance of a delicate balance between egalitarian and autocratic relationships among citizens, and the eventual tragic fall of the democratic hero could be traced to the overextension of equality in the deliberative sphere, which led to untrammeled autocratic ambitions abroad and ruinous civil war at home. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Part I: Athens as a Hero Chapter 2: Equality, Autocracy, and Athens: The Archaeology 11 Chapter 3: Between Heroism and Tyranny: Athenian Character and Policy 39 Part II: The Hero as a Democracy Chapter 4: Equality, Autocracy, and Democracy: The Funeral Oration 68 Chapter 5: The Tragic Science of Democratic Defeat 96 Chapter 6: Conclusion 124 Bibliography 135 i Acknowledgments Much of this dissertation was written in Athens, and the whole was edited with a view of the Acropolis out my window. For this extraordinary privilege, I would like to thank the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies, who jointly provided the dissertation completion fellowship that made my stay in the city of Themistocles possible. I am grateful to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the staff of the Blegen Library for use of their research facilities, and to Andronike Makris and her family, who not only made my stay in Athens more pleasant than it otherwise would have been, but afforded me the chance to speak about Thucydides in spectacular settings such as the Municipal Theatre of the Piraeus and the ancient theatre of Dodona. I will cherish these memories always. Earlier versions of these chapters were presented to audiences at Cambridge, Queen Mary (London), Stanford, and the Freie Universität Berlin. I thank all of those who offered helpful questions and feedback. I am also grateful to John Dunn, the late Geoffrey Hawthorn, Seth Jaffe, Melissa Lane, and Josiah Ober for their willingness to read and discuss my work at various stages in this dissertation’s development. At the University of California, Berkeley, my debts are more extensive. I would like to thank the Department of Political Science and the Graduate Division for funding my research and for giving me such a congenial place to pursue my graduate studies, and the Department of Classics for their interdisciplinary camaraderie. I am grateful to Derin McLeod, Rosemary Wagner, and Samuel Zeitlin for reading early drafts and offering helpful comments, and for their friendship and encouragement over the years. Wendy Brown provided useful feedback on the dissertation prospectus. Conversations with Mark Griffith and Nikolaos Papazarkadis proved crucial for my thinking about certain aspects of this project. Nabil Ansari, Richard Ashcroft, Ali Bond, William Callison, Nicholas Gooding, Nina Hagel, and Nathan Pippinger all made my time in Berkeley appreciably more enriching and enjoyable than it otherwise would have been. Finally, I would like to thank Hanna Pitkin, who not only read numerous chapter drafts, and sacrificed a great deal of red ink in doing so, but whose conversation and reminders that I was writing a political theory dissertation helped to keep me on track over the years. All of my committee members offered stimulating conversation, a willingness to read proposals and chapter drafts, and valuable critical feedback. More specifically, I would like to thank Shannon Stimson for first encouraging my interest in Thucydides, providing unwavering support as the project took shape, and helping me to secure the institutional aid necessary to embark on the serious study of ancient Greek political thought. Leslie Kurke provided a model of what excellent historical work on ancient political thought might look like and achieve, and it was in her intensive ancient Greek course that many of the seeds were planted from which this dissertation grew. John Ferrari shared with me his love of Plato, a love which I now cultivate as my own, and helped me to hone my skills as both a reader of ancient Greek and an interpreter of philosophical literature. ii My greatest debt is owed to Kinch Hoekstra, who acted as my dissertation chair and oversaw nearly every aspect of this project. He has been an inexhaustible source of professional and personal support throughout this process, an inspiring teacher, a challenging interlocutor, a charitable critic, and a stimulating co-author. It has been a great honor to work so closely with a scholar who combines such curiosity, integrity, generosity, and rigor. Finally, I must thank my family, and especially my parents, for the support they have shown me while working on this project. It has been a turbulent ride at times, and I could not have made it to the end without their love and encouragement. I would like to extend a special thank you to my sister Elizabeth for the material and emotional support she showed me during a particularly trying period during the final year of writing this dissertation. Thank you also to my former partner, Zoë, and the Long family for the support they showed me through most of my time in graduate school. Last but not least, I must express my gratitude to Charlie, my dog, who entered my life as a six-week-old puppy while I was writing the prospectus for this dissertation, and who has been a constant companion ever since. Much of what follows was first considered on our walks, and nearly all of it was written while he slept my side. He has convinced me, not least because of his insatiable appetite for journal articles, that Socrates was speaking the truth when he suggested that dogs are the most philosophical of animals. iii Chapter 1: Introduction As the Funeral Oration approaches its rhetorical climax, Pericles forecasts the legacy of the imperial democracy: “We will be a source of wonder for present and future generations, needing neither a Homer to sing our praises nor any other poet to gratify us momentarily with words that truth will later reveal as a distortion of deeds, rather we have forced every sea and land to oblige us by our daring and have together established everywhere eternal memorials of our capacity for good and evil.”1 With these words, Pericles grandiloquently draws his audience’s attention to the greatness of Athens.