Vision, Fear, and Knowledge in Thucydides' History

Bradley Kenneth Hald

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Classics University of Toronto

Bradley Hald

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Classics University of Toronto

2020 Abstract In this dissertation I explore sense perception and emotional psychology in Thucydides’ History from several angles. My primary sensory focus throughout is the visual, while the principal emotion I examine is fear. Vision, as W. R. Connor noted, is “the privileged sense” in the

History, just as fear is the text’s most pervasive and most frequently cited emotion. I show that vision is not isolated from the other senses, nor is fear from other seemingly discrete—or antithetical—emotions. Rather, in the historical world Thucydides fashions, multiple senses and emotions consistently exhibit interactive and even complementary relationships with one another. Furthermore, as I emphasize in every chapter, both the senses and the emotions depicted in Thucydides’ text are consistently entwined with cognitive processes, both in the narrative and in the recorded speeches. Each chapter focuses on passages of vividly depicted human sensory perception and psychology. The first half of the study seeks to use some of the historian’s battle narratives to draw certain metatextual conclusions about the work and our approach to it as readers. I argue that by looking closely at the sensory and psychological processes that

Thucydides attributes to the agents of history, we are able to gain insights into the historian’s narrative self-positioning as well as into aspects of the intellectual and emotional utility he claims for his text. The second half of the study engages with both rhetorical and narrative

ii passages in order to examine the visual, epistemological, and emotional dynamics at play in two particularly ideologically charged moments within the History. I argue that Thucydides uses these moments, in part, to demonstrate the limits of ideological structures, whose highly prescriptive modes of seeing, knowing, and feeling struggle to sustain themselves against the exigencies of the historical world he depicts.

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For my parents, and for Poppa-Bill

iv Acknowledgments

This project has followed a long and winding road, one whose end I could not have hoped to reach without the support of more people than I can name. Each shares a part in this accomplishment, and my few words of thanks here are only a small token of my gratitude. It was in a graduate seminar of Victoria Wohl’s where the ideas for this dissertation first began to take shape. Without her generosity, patience, unflagging support, and always-incisive commentary, none of this work would have been possible. Whatever I have accomplished here owes an immense debt to her sharp and penetrating mind. This work is further indebted to the members of my committee, Ben Akrigg and Ryan Balot, and to my external reader, Karen Bassi, all of whose guidance and occasional skepticism challenged me to more deeply interrogate my conclusions and sharpen my readings of Thucydides’ text. I am grateful also to Erik Gunderson for agreeing to read the dissertation and for suggesting several lines of future inquiry. I could not have finished this project, completed the PhD program, or, indeed, accomplished anything else in the Classics Department without the reliable help of Coral Gavrilovic and Ann-Marie Matti, whose patience, energy, and optimism have never ceased to amaze me. Several institutions provided the resources for me to complete this dissertation. First and foremost, the generous support of the Classics Department at Toronto has allowed me to explore every avenue I wanted to during this research. I am also indebted to the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for broadening my horizons immeasurably and providing both time and space to read and write, and to the Jackman Humanities Institute for providing further time and space during the crucial period when this project began to take its final form. More good friends and colleagues have played a part in this journey than I can list here— certain core groups of friends from Boulder to Berkeley to UCLA to Toronto to Athens: Josh Hyden, Kimberly Merryman, and Catherine Weaver; Marissa Henry and Josh Smith; Adam Barker, Marion Durand, Alex Milodowski, Maria Oberlinner, and Katie Sutor; Brigidda Bell, Alison Cleverley, Alex Cushing, Nicole Daniel, John Fabiano, Chiara Graf, Janet Mowat, Ted Parker, Mike Pawliuk, Tim Perry, and Alessandro Sisti; John Campbell, Bridget Tobin, Tucker, and even Oliver; Michele Asuni, Jeff Banks, Bill Beck, Brandon Braun, and Tania Contrucci. I

v would not have made it through the most difficult stages of this process without the support and patience of Efi Tsiolaki. For the encouragement, commiseration, inspiration, and most of all, for the friendships of these remarkable people, I am inexpressibly grateful. My brother Dave has given me consistent support, and frequent sass, throughout this journey. I am grateful for both.

I would never have thought to choose this path if not for the curiosity to read, question, and understand instilled in me by my parents, and I could not have finished this PhD if not for the inspiration provided by my grandfather. This dissertation is dedicated to them.

vi Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Darkness Visible: Vision, Knowledge, and Fear in Thucydides’ Plataean Episode ...... 14 Introduction ...... 14 Plataea as Paradigmatic ...... 24 (In)visibility and Fear in the Dark...... 31 Two Conclusions ...... 50 Affective Soundscapes: Auditory Epistemology and Fear at Sphacteria and Epipolae ...... 59 Introduction ...... 59 Theoretical Approach: “Auditory Affect” ...... 64 Shouting, Shock, and ‘Pure’ Affect: Sphacteria ...... 73 Subversive Epistemologies of Sound: Epipolae ...... 83 Conclusion ...... 96 The Emotional Economy of the Citizen Gaze in Pericles’ Funeral Oration ...... 101 Introduction ...... 102 Idealized Viewing: Citizens and City ...... 106 Idealized Viewing on the Battlefield (2.42.4) ...... 122 Idealized Emotion: Eros over Deos ...... 139 Conclusion ...... 150 Futures Real and Unreal: Fear and Hope in the Sicilian Expedition ...... 154 Introduction ...... 154 Constructing a Hopeful Gaze: the Sicilian Debate ...... 159 Performing the Optimistic Gaze: 6.24 ...... 170 A Spectacle of Conquest ...... 179 Conclusion: The End of the Expedition and the Collapse of an Ideology ...... 192 Conclusion ...... 198 Bibliography ...... 206

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Introduction

τὸ μὲν Ἡροδότου κάλλος ἱλαρόν ἐστι, φοβερὸν δὲ τὸ Θουκυδίδου.

While (the work) of Herodotus is a thing of cheerful beauty, that of Thucydides is fearsome. (Dion. Hal. Pomp. 3.21)

For the final major battle of the ill-conceived Athenian campaign to Sicily, Thucydides offers one of his most vividly detailed, and most extensively celebrated, narrative passages in the entirety of the History of the Peloponnesian War. After the disastrous defeat at Epipolae, the

Athenians have been blockaded in the Great Harbor at Syracuse. Their last chance to escape

Sicily, and to salvage the campaign with anything other than total defeat, is to fight their way through the combined Syracusan and Peloponnesian navy. Notably, however, rather than focusing his attention exclusively on the tactical and strategic elements of this confrontation,

Thucydides turns his narrative gaze to the battle’s participants, bringing us inside the hearts and minds of the combatants and observers. Divided into two chapters of narrative (7.70-1), the bulk of the episode, in fact, does not focus on military maneuvering but on the subjective experience of the agents participating in this momentous historical event. Thucydides details, for instance, how the ‘great crashing’ sounds of Athenian and Syracusan ships colliding reverberate out from the midst of the battle and across the water, spreading terror among the sailors and marines embroiled in the action. But this is not vividness of narration for its own sake: the shared sensory

1 experience of the actors has tactical consequences as well. The din overwhelms the fighters’ ability to distinguish articulate human voices, and so potentially disrupts formal chains of command (τὸν κτύπον μέγαν ἀπὸ πολλῶν νεῶν ξυμπιπτουσῶν ἔκπληξίν τε ἅμα καὶ ἀποστέρησιν

τῆς ἀκοῆς ὧν οἱ κελευστὰι φθίγγοιντο παρὲχειν, 7.70.6). In this pivotal confrontation,

Thucydides emphasizes, the subjective experience of the agents plays a role comparable to, and inextricably interwoven with, the objective circumstances on the water.

Meanwhile, we are told, the soldiers left on the land have arrayed themselves along the edge of the rounded bay, where they observe the drama like spectators seated around the orchestral space of a Greek theater.1 The men on shore, an audience internal to the narrative whose view of the event parallels our own, look out upon the uncertain battle, itself a ‘spectacle’

(θέα, 7.71.3) in Thucydides’ description, and they feel a spectrum of emotions based on what they are witnessing. Like a tragic chorus, this crowd of deeply interested witnesses focalizes the event through its collective sensory and emotional experience, thus guiding the reader’s own experience of the battle.2 Some see a scene of their own side victorious, and they are encouraged

(τινες ἴδοιέν πῃ τοὺς σφετέρους ἐπικρατοῦντας, ἀνεθάρσησαν), while others see a scene that looks to them like defeat, and they are driven to desperate fear (δεδιότες, φόβος, περιδεῶς,

7.71.2-3). Although they witness different parts of the battle at different times, the thoughts and feelings of all alike are united in their emotional ‘enslavement’ (ἐδουλοῦντο, 7.71.3) to what they see. The intensity of the visual spectacle bleeds into other sensory phenomena, ‘compelling’

1 Greenwood 2006: 40: “the crews and hoplites behave, self-consciously, as though they are putting on a play for the armies spectating on the shore; concomitantly, the armies on shore act like spectators of a play.” Cf. also Davidson 1991, 21 on the “reflexive gaze” in Polybius. 2 See Walker 1993: “Thucydides seems particularly interested in the crowd’s conflicting and volatile emotions, its almost desperate susceptibility to what it sees,” and the historian thus uses this passage to thematize the “connection between visual perception and emotional subjectivity” (355). Cf. Davidson 1991 on how internal audiences in historiography allow the author to provide “an audience for the readers to model themselves on… together with a paradigmatic gaze and exemplary responses” (14).

2 vocal outbursts (ἀναγκάζοιτο φθέγγεσθαι, 7.71.4) from the soldiers on the shore, of both verbal and nonverbal sound. Some direct desperate prayers to gods (ἀνάκλησιν θεῶν, ibid.), while others shout their lamentations aloud (ὀλοφυρμος, βοή, 7.71.3-4). The sensory and emotional experience ultimately exceeds the psychological altogether and encroaches into the somatic, as the spectators’ bodies ‘sway together’, performing physically both the precarity of the battle and of their collective emotional state (τοῖς σώμασιν αὐτοῖς… ξυναπονεύοντες, 7.71.3).3

The passage as a whole, one of the longest battle sequences in the History, treats the reader to a scene of typically Thucydidean enargeia. Characteristic of this narrative technique is

Thucydides’ close attention to the sensory and the affective, both of which elements he thematizes throughout the Great Harbor episode.4 In his battle narratives, Thucydides regularly allows the technical details of military strategy to recede in order to foreground vivid depictions of the psychological engagement of history’s actors.5 The episode at the Great Harbor brings out clearly that, for Thucydides, both history and its written documentation consisted of more than the bare bones of objective fact. Devoting equal narrative space to the battle and to the crowd observing it, Thucydides indicates that an historical event—and this was one of the most momentous in the History—cannot be fully understood or appreciated without understanding the subjective experience of the people participating in it.6 By emphasizing the sensory and

3 In addition to the sensory and affective language I have cited, the following terms and phrases also occur in the episode. Visual: θέα (again), ὁράω (again), φαίνομαι, ὄψις, ἔποψις, σκοπέω, ἀφοράω, βλέπω. Auditory: οἰμωγή, στόνος. Affective: θαρσεῖν (7.69.3), ἔκπληξις (again), φιλονικέω, φόβος, προθυμία, προθυμέω, προθύμως, ἀγών καὶ ξύστασις τῆς γνώμης. 4 Plut. uses the scene as a case-study in Thucydidean enargeia (de Glor. Ath. 347a). The scene has attracted ample attention from modern readers as well: see de Romilly 1967, 95-102, 161-5; Walker 1993; Bakker 1997, 40-8; Jordan 2000, 71-6; Kallet 2001, 163-6; Hornblower 2004: 342-6; Greenwood 2006, 38-40; Harman 2018, 279-86. For a recent study on enargeia in ancient literature generally, see Webb 2009. 5 On the experiential dimension in ancient historiography, see Grethlein 2013a. Stahl’s (2003) narratological approach to Thuc.’s text is in some ways similar and provides a useful complement to Grethlein. See further Brock 2013; Hau 2013. 6 I refer only to the objective/subjective distinction within the narrative, in which the contrast between, say, the number of either side’s ships at the Great Harbor falls on one side, and the crowd’s emotional reactions to what they see fall on the other. History for Thucydides consists of the synthesis of both categories of information. On the

3 emotional dynamics of historical experience, Thucydides collapses the distance between reader and agent of history, situating us as close to the action as his written medium allows, and thereby offering a way of understanding history that transcends intellectual engagement alone.7

Each chapter in this dissertation focuses on passages of vividly depicted emotional experience. Some depict battle scenes and the sensory engagement of internal audiences, such as what we see at the Great Harbor. Other passages involve spectatorship and viewing in a more abstract sense, such as the ideological mode of viewing we encounter in the funeral oration of

Pericles, which I examine in chapter three. In every case, however, my focus is on the psychological dimension of the text’s depictions, not only the sensory and affective, but the cognitive as well, which I argue throughout plays an indispensable role as the link between sense perception and emotion. My basic thesis is that examining the intersection of the senses, thought, and feeling can be both a novel and profitable way of looking at this text. Reading the History in this way brings into clearer focus the constitutive role of the emotions in the production of human history as Thucydides saw it.8 Moreover, thinking about how the dynamics of seeing, knowing, and feeling extend beyond the limits of the internal narrative and implicate the reader him/herself can, I think, elucidate not only the ways of knowing about history that Thucydides’ interpretations to some extent prescribe for us, but also help guide how we ultimately feel about what we have seen and learned through our engagement with this endlessly complex text.

My interest in Thucydides thus falls principally on the so-called ‘literary’, rather than the

‘historical’, side of Thucydidean scholarship.9 Modern readers of the History have been

broader impossibility of objectivity in historiography, see Connor 1985; Hornblower 1994, 148 ff.; Gribble 1998. Cf. Genette 1980, 189; Bal 2009, 128. 7 Cf. Connor 1985, 42: “Such a narrative mode offers not objectivity, but a rhetoric which encourages readers to believe they are being given direct access to the facts.” 8 Cf. Wohl 2017, 453: “Emotion plays both an expository role in this narrative, marking its major milestones, and an explanatory role, as affect and event work upon each other to produce history.” 9 Dover 2009 remains the classic treatment of the ‘literature or history’ question.

4 increasingly willing to break away from the old model of Thucydides as the ‘most scientific historian’, and to examine his text also for its uniquely complex literary character.10 Tim Rood helpfully points out that this modern distinction would have been lost on the ancient historian himself, whose work, even in the late fifth century, was still relatively early in the development of historiography as a well-defined literary genre.11 More than likely, as Rood notes, Thucydides would have distinguished his work by its use of prose rather than poetry. In any case, Thucydides was certainly unaware of the generic constraints that have been developed by historiography in modern times, constraints which were, for many years, regularly applied anachronistically to

Thucydides’ text.12 W. R. Connor has reached, perhaps, the furthest extreme of ‘literary’ readings of the text with the reader-response approach he employs in his 1984 monograph.

Whereas Connor’s method demands reading the History in the order it was written, the analysis I employ in this dissertation takes a synoptic approach to the text, assuming the sort of repeat engagement Thucydides must have had in mind when he addressed his work to ‘whoever will want to examine the clear truth of what happened’ in the Peloponnesian War (ὅσοι δὲ

βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, 1.22.4).13 While my project is committed to the literary and thematic aspects of the text, however, I would suggest that these commitments are not strictly divorced from the ‘historical’ side of the dichotomy. Indeed, as Kenneth Dover

10 The ‘scientific’ Thuc. is associated with Cochrane 1929. Already by 1907 Cornford was engaged in a committedly ‘literary’ reading of the text. Stahl 2003 (translated from his 1966 dissertation) represents one of the most influential of such readings to emerge from the German tradition. Cf. the similarly ground-breaking literary-focused readings of, e.g., de Romilly 1963 (first published 1947, but composed ten years earlier) in France; Finley 1942 in America. 11 Rood 1998, 4: “The distinction… would have meant nothing to Thucydides himself, whose criteria for assessing narratives are metre and degree of embellishment (i. 21. I), and it hinders our understanding of his work.” Cf. Hornblower 2009; Grethlein 2013b, esp. 134-7. 12 See Rusten 2009, 6-11. Cf. Ellis 1979, 40: “We know perhaps what ‘history’ means to us, but have we any reason to suppose that it meant the same to our author?” 13 Stressing the written aspect of the text, see Crane 1996; Moles 1999; Morrison 2006; Bakker 2006; Edmunds 2009.

5 asserts, “all classicists, whether they know it or not, are historians.”14 By reading closely a text such as Thucydides’ History, we gain not only insights into this fascinatingly intricate work from the ancient world—valuable in themselves—but also insights into the structures of thought that helped to shape that world. For example, although Thucydides is not identified by modern scholars as an ancient philosopher, the ideas his text expresses about politics and human nature aim for just the sorts of universal truths that concerned Plato and Aristotle. Thucydides’ central thesis on the universality of human nature, in fact, collapses the dichotomy between history and poetry that Aristotle would famously mark out in the Poetics.15 The History argues not for a strict dichotomy between particular and universal, as Aristotle prescribes, but rather that the particulars of history contain and illuminate universal truths.

We can be even more precise in identifying ‘intellectual affinities’ between the fifth century historian and fourth century philosophy.16 Although Aristotle has frequently been the locus for discussions of sense perception, cognition, and emotion in antiquity, my readings in this study demonstrate that Thucydides was not only interested in these same questions but that he was thinking about them in equally sophisticated ways.17 Specifically, in the passages I examine, we consistently see Thucydides incorporating depictions of both sensory perception and evaluative processes into the formation of characters’ emotions. Like Aristotle, Thucydides envisioned cognition as intricately involved in human emotion.18 However, as I argue in the second chapter, Thucydides marks a significant difference in the cognitive capacities of different

14 Dover 2009, 46. 15 Arist. Poet. 1451b4-6: τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο. διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν (‘the [historian] speaks of things that happened, while the [poet] speaks of what may happen. Hence, poetry is both more philosophical and worth more serious attention than history’). 16 Hornblower 2009 employs the phrase “intellectual affinities” in the title of his chapter examining the fifth century thinkers and writers who may have influenced Thuc.’s work. 17 See esp. Rh. 2, EN 2.5, De an., Sens. 18 On Arist. as a ‘cognitivist’, see Fortenbaugh 1975; Konstan 2006. Some scholars have used Arist. as a starting point for interpreting emotions in Thuc.: see Balot 2001a, 136-78; Visvardi 2015, 6-18, 44-93.

6 modes of sensory perception. Thus, Thucydides’ characterizations do not simply rehearse or confirm Aristotelian theories, but rather, they complicate the later philosopher’s ideas. Pointed interest in human psychology and behavior was not limited either to the fourth century or to strictly philosophical treatises. The committedly ‘literary’ readings I present in this study thus, in some ways, help to historicize discussions of the senses, the mind, and the emotions that we find in later thinkers like Aristotle.

Many of the questions that interested these ancient thinkers remain relevant today in such fields as affect theory, with which I occasionally engage in this study. If ancient thinking about the senses and emotions forms one pole of this dissertation, then this modern field of cultural study forms the other. Although affect theory is not as focused on sense perception per se, one of the three central elements of my examination, it is nevertheless deeply interested in the cognitive dimension of emotion. Cognition in fact marks one of the principal terminological distinctions for many scholars of affect theory, who differentiate between the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ precisely according to their relations with cognition. While emotion is properly the result of processes of reasoning and judgment, affect occurs as a generalized precognitive sensation, preceding both the filtering mechanism of rational thought and, therefore, language itself.19

Affect thus constitutes a category of feeling in the abstract, a response to sensory experience that has not been funneled through cognitive processes. By distinguishing between affect and emotion in this way, affect theorists foreground the question of cognition, a central question for my examination of Thucydides’ text (as it was for Aristotle as well). While the affect/emotion distinction does not have any clear parallel in ancient thought, I employ it to a limited extent in my second chapter, where I think it helps to describe some of the phenomena we encounter in

19 See, e.g., Flatley 2008, 11-27; Gregg & Seigworth 2010, 1-29. For a recent treatment of the relation between emotion and the language we use to describe it, see Theodoropoulou 2012.

7 Thucydides’ depiction of Spartan feelings in the scene at Sphacteria in book four. My general practice, however, has been not to distinguish schematically between the two terms, and so, as I have done so far in this introduction, I tend to use both interchangeably. On the few occasions when I mark a distinction between the two terms, I am explicit about the hermeneutic benefit I think it provides.

In recent decades, several scholars have looked at aspects of emotionality in Thucydides’ text, but there has not been the sort of sustained examination of its close interrelationship with sense perception and cognition that I argue is crucial to gaining a fuller understanding of the

History.20 Connor has acknowledged that, in Thucydides, vision is “the privileged sense… most commonly invoked and most directly linked to the emotions.”21 Likewise, as William Desmond has observed, of the many specifically identified emotions invoked within the text, fear is far and away the most prevalent.22 One of the main aims of my study is to explore how these two dimensions of experience, vision and fear, are connected in Thucydides’ narrative. However, unlike Desmond (and others), I am not interested in excavating Thucydides’ moral judgments of his characters’ thoughts and feelings, or his critique—ubiquitous in the History—of the Athenian demos and its uninformed, emotional manner of determining policy.23 Many readers of the text, in fact, have sought to identify the prescriptive force of Thucydides’ depictions of human psychology, looking for political ‘lessons’ embedded in the narrative of events.24 By contrast, my

20 Important work on emotions in Thuc., which I do not elsewhere cite: Hunter 1988; Crane 1996, 209-58; Rood 1998, 61-82; Balot 2014; Ludwig 2002, 121-69; Wohl 2002, 2017; Foster 2010. 21 Connor 1985, 10. See further the discussions of vision by Kallet 2001; Greenwood 2006; as well as Walker 1993. 22 Desmond 2006: “the History is from one angle a meditation upon fear—its varieties, ubiquity, potency, and even rational necessity.” See further: Proctor 1980, 177-91; Hunter 1982, 33; Luginbill 1999, 65-81; Visvardi 2015. On the terminology of fear in Thuc., see further Romilly 1956; Huart 1968, 114-41. 23 See, e.g., Ober 1993 on Thuc.’s critique of ‘democratic knowledge’. Kallet 2001 identifies the same epistemic failings of the Athenian demos in the context of the Sicilian expedition. 24 Desmond 2006 uses the phrase “lessons of fear” in the title of his article. Visvardi 2015 sees the Hist. as a prescriptive text addressing “the challenges of creating a truly shared perspective that allows for competent collective judgment and feeling and thus true emotional and social cohesion.”

8 guiding interest lies in trying to reconstruct the mechanics of fear as they are depicted throughout the work, rather than in speculating as to the role Thucydides thought fear should have in history and politics. I begin from the hypothesis that the constitutive parts of fear’s anatomy, in

Thucydides’ depictions, are frequently sense perception and cognition. In this way, my study seeks to avoid normative readings of Thucydides’ text by attempting, instead, to read between the prescriptive lines and seek out the sorts of tacit assumptions about fear that informed

Thucydides’ own understanding of human psychology. When I discuss issues of normative readings of the text, it is in order to speculate on how Thucydides’ depictions of fear within the text help to condition our own engagement with its literary and historical material. My hope is, therefore, that this study proves useful to both the literarily- and the historically-inclined reader, insofar as the discussions and conclusions I present address literary themes within the text which have important ramifications for our understandings of the broader intellectual history of the ancient world.

Chapter summary

Scholars like Andrew Walker and Emily Greenwood have observed the metatextual character of episodes like the Great Harbor, in which an internal audience watches, interprets, and reacts to an historical event unfolding in real time.25 It is a process of reading and interpreting that, as these scholars have recognized, has inherent parallels to the experience of the reader of an historical narrative. In the first chapter of this study, I look at some of these metatextual dynamics in the narrative of the Theban night assault on Plataea in book two of the History, another scene in

25 Walker 1993, Greenwood 2006: Thuc. suggests that “the historical participants themselves viewed the events in which they were involved as a quasi-theatrical arena in which the visual was an all-important factor. These same events are also paradigmatic for the reader, if only he or she can work out how to interpret Thucydides” (26). See further Kallet 2006 and 2001, 82: “the purpose of [Thuc.’s] emphasis on opsis is to transport the external audience into a visual scene or episode that the internal audience is interpreting--in a sense, to say to the reader: Here is the visible; how are you going to interpret it?” Cf. Woodman 1988, 23-8, and the recent chapter by Harman (2018).

9 which Thucydides explores the interactivity of visual understanding and fear. Having grounded his historical-analytical project in a metaphor of visual and epistemic clarity (τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν,

1.22.4), Thucydides then produces a narrative episode at Plataea in which his historical actors perform the evaluative processes the author avows for his work. But they are forced to do so in the dark of night. The lack of visual clarity in the episode allows Thucydides leeway to explore the space between literal and metaphorical ‘clear vision’, between sight and insight. I argue in this chapter that the visual and cognitive activities performed by the historical agents within the scene—their ‘reading’ of their surroundings—resonate with fundamental aspects of Thucydides’ historiographical agenda. The interactions between visual evaluation, on the one hand, and the fluctuating fears of the characters within the episode, on the other hand, further suggest a certain emotional utility for the reader external to the text, whose own fears concerning the future may perhaps be allayed by the superior understanding of historical processes offered through close examination of Thucydides’ text. I conclude the chapter by proposing some ways in which

Thucydidean enargeia, like that we encounter in the Plataea episode, can serve as a historiographical device to collapse the distance between the participant and the reader of history.

The second chapter also takes vision as its sensory starting point, but with the purpose of comparing its epistemological value and emotive potential with audition, the History’s second most prevalent sensory cue. The primary focus of this chapter is on two more battle narratives in which Thucydides exploits a setting of compromised visibility to thematize what he conceives as the unique role of vision in the acquisition of knowledge and the formation of emotion. In this chapter I first examine the Spartan defeat on the island of Sphacteria in book four, where, I argue, Thucydides produces an implicit comparison between the clear vision permitted the

10 Athenian soldiers and the Spartans who have been blinded by dust and ash and are compelled to rely on audition to understand their surroundings. The result is an intense sense of fear that has been cut off from any basis in visually verifiable information. Next, I look at the Athenian defeat in the night battle at Epipolae in book seven, where the Athenians’ inability to discern the reality of their situation visually leads to an emotional and epistemological chaos, and to a surprising

(for the Athenians) military disaster. In the absence of visual discernment, the Athenians allow fear to become the basis for interpreting their environment. Through these episodes, there emerges an epistemological hierarchy of sense perception that reinforces, again via performance within the narrative itself, the distinct preference for the visual Thucydides expresses frequently in his methodological preface. I conclude this chapter by suggesting that Thucydides’ disparagement of the auditory is grounded in what he viewed as its direct attachment with a sort of affect that was untethered to cognitive evaluation.

The first two chapters thus deal with episodes of battle narrative, and they each pivot around the problems of visual acuity in settings of compromised or impossible visibility. The second half of this study, chapters three and four, shifts away from battle scenes and look instead at how seeing, knowing, and fearing operate in some of the History’s more detailed presentations of Athenian ideology. I have focused on the Athenians because, as the primary protagonists in

Thucydides’ work, the Athenians’ ideological formations are presented with greater frequency and in more detail than those of any other political collective. The third chapter examines

Athenian civic ideology while the fourth looks at Athenian imperial ideology. In chapter three, my focus is on the famous funeral oration of Pericles in book two, in which the orator constructs an idealized image of Athenian identity—what Nicole Loraux called the city’s “ideality.”26 In

26 Loraux 1986a.

11 this chapter I attempt to outline Pericles’ construction of an idealized ‘citizen gaze’, a way of viewing and understanding the world that defines a distinctive element of Athenian identity in the speech.27 My argument is that this normative mode of seeing and knowing for the Athenian citizen is fundamentally tied, throughout the speech, to an equally normative mode of feeling. In this ostensible eulogy over the recently killed in action, I argue, Pericles mobilizes a highly prescriptive way of seeing and knowing whose target is precisely the citizen-soldier’s natural fear of death in battle. Pericles’ rhetoric, in other words, crafts an ideological lens through which the Athenian citizen is meant to see and understand his reality in such a way as to be able fearlessly to emulate the noble and glorious deaths of the recently buried, exemplary Athenian soldiers. I conclude this chapter by suggesting that Thucydides saw Pericles’ ideological project as an unsustainable product of rhetorical craftsmanship that, nearly as soon as its presentation is complete, crumbles under the realities of the Athenian plague of 430.

In the fourth and final chapter, I explore the roles played by both fear and hope in

Athenian imperial ideology, attempting to reconstruct an Athenian ‘imperial gaze’ from

Thucydides’ narrative of the early stages of the Sicilian expedition in book six. I argue that this ideological mode of viewing, like the civic gaze crafted by Pericles, enforces certain ways of looking at, thinking, and feeling about the prospect of Sicilian conquest. Unlike the Periclean ideal, however, the ideology of the imperial gaze struggles to subdue or redirect fears, despite the

Athenians’ prevailing sense of hope and optimism throughout the expedition’s planning phase.

Thus, I argue, characteristic Athenian pleonexia is a psychological disposition comprised of, paradoxically, both hope and fear at once, each emotion responding to a competing vision of the future. I further argue that, by the end of the Sicilian narrative, Thucydides will have revealed

27 For the term, and the concept of, the ‘citizen gaze’, see Goldhill 1998 and 2000, and further notes in chapter three of this thesis.

12 that the Athenians’ hopeful vision of imperial conquest has been fueled by a fantasy, one which cannot withstand the fearsome and eminently visible realities of foreign war. Thus, hopefulness ultimately fails as an ideological bulwark against fear. I conclude the chapter by suggesting that this failure further points toward the fragility of ideological structures generally in the History.

Chapter 1

Darkness Visible: Vision, Knowledge, and Fear in Thucydides’ Plataean Episode

ὁ γοῦν Θουκυδίδης ἀεὶ τῷ λόγῳ πρὸς ταύτην ἁμιλλᾶται τὴν ἐνάργειαν, οἷον θεατὴν ποιῆσαι τὸν ἀκροατὴν καὶ τὰ γιγνόμενα περὶ τοὺς ὁρῶντας ἐκπληκτικὰ καὶ ταρακτικὰ πάθη τοῖς ἀναγιγνώσκουσιν ἐνεργάσασθαι λιχνευόμενος.

Thucydides always strives for this vividness in his work, such that he makes the listener into a spectator, eager to make the experiences that concerned the eyewitnesses astounding and terrifying to readers. (Plutarch, De Glor. Ath. 347a)

Introduction

Readers since antiquity have recognized the pervasive confluence in Thucydides’ work between visuality and emotional experience.1 Plutarch, in the epigram above, famously extolled

Thucydides for his ability to vividly convey to his reader the emotions his historical agents are feeling, a narrative technique capable of ‘turning the listener into a spectator’ of historical events

(θεατὴν ποιῆσαι τὸν ἀκροατὴν).2 Plutarch is sensitive to the link, implicit throughout the History, between emotionality and visuality, which he extends from the characters embedded in the

1 I use the terms emotion and affect interchangeably in this chapter. 2 Plut. further compares historical narrative to visual art, claiming the two ‘differ only in material and manner of imitation’ (ὕλῃ καὶ τρόποις μιμήσεως διαφέρουσι). Lucian Hist. Consc. 51 echoes Plut.’s comparison between historical writing and visual art. Dion. Hal. (de Thuc. 13-14) was less enthusiastic about Thuc.’s characteristic vividness, and more concerned with aspects of what now falls under the purview of narratology; on which, see Rood 1998, esp. 24-57. On enargeia generally in Thuc., see esp. Walker 1993.

14 narrative to the reader who shares vicariously in their experience.3 For Plutarch, this phenomenon is twofold. In the first place, it is a visual experience for both the reader-turned- spectator and for the historical agents, the ‘ones who saw’ the event themselves (τοὺς ὁρῶντας).

But it can also be an emotional encounter, characterized by ‘astonishing and terrifying passions’

(ἐκπληκτικὰ καὶ ταρακτικὰ πάθη), which are felt by the participants witnessing historical events and conveyed to a reading audience via vivid narration. Thus, seeing and feeling are mutually entailing, in Plutarch’s reading, via an implied equation between vision and presence.

Thucydides’ characteristic enargeia is the narrative technique that serves to place the reader on the very scene of history, side by side and in literal sym-patheia with the historical participants.4

In this way, Thucydidean enargeia uses the visual and the emotional elements of narrative to bridge the gap between the text and its reader.

In the following chapters I will argue that both emotionality and vision operate in close connection with a third factor Plutarch leaves out, but which is foundational to Thucydides’ project, namely cognitive function. Plutarch suggests that the spectator who witnesses an event, either as reader or participant, experiences it with a greater degree of clarity than one who hears about it, and he identifies this notion of clarity as a privileged channel for readerly sympathy.

However, as I argue in each of these first two chapters, vision also occupies a privileged

3 The connection between narrative vividness and readerly sympathy has been reaffirmed by modern literary scholars. See, e.g., Jauss 1982, 85 on narrative as “a way of experiencing oneself in the experience of the other.” See further Foster 2017; Liebert 2017, 107-8; Grethlein 2015a/b; Stueben 2008. 4 Plut. was not alone among ancient thinkers in observing this literary-experiential phenomenon: see Gorg. 11.9 DK; Arist. Rh. III.7, 1408a23-5: ‘the hearer always feels in sympathy with the person who expresses emotion’ (συνομοπαθεῖ ὁ ἀκούων ἀεὶ τῷ παθητικῶς λέγοντι). By contrast, Plato emphasizes the heard experience of literature: Pl. Rep. 10, 605c-d: ‘when the best of us listen to Homer or some other tragic poet… we take pleasure, surrendering ourselves, and suffer along with [συμπάσχοντες] the characters’. Ps-Long. Subl. 22.4 describes readerly sympathy as an experience ‘forced upon’ the reader by the vividness of narrated human experience (συναποκινδυνεύειν ὑπ̓ ἀγωνίας τῷ λέγοντι συναναγκάσας), and he especially associates the phenomenon with Thuc.

15 epistemological position in Thucydides’ text.5 As is frequently noted, in Greek the close connections between ‘seeing’ (εἶδον) and ‘knowing’ (οἶδα) were embedded into the structure of the language.6 Visual language is of course marked throughout the methodological chapters of the History.7 Thucydides couches his historiographical program in visual metaphor, claiming that his text will convey to the willing reader ‘a clear view of the events that transpired’ (τῶν

γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν… 1.22.4).8 He offers us a glimpse at ‘the deeds themselves’ (τὰ δ᾽

ἔργα τῶν πραχθέντων, 1.22.2), gathered and presented ‘out of the most manifest evidence’ (ἐκ

τῶν ἐπιφανεστάτων σημείων, 1.21.1). The text is thus presented as a transparent lens through which the reader is offered an unobstructed view of the historical landscape.9 Careful scrutiny of this landscape offers the one path to a clear understanding, not only of this particular war between Athens and Sparta, but of broader truths of human behavior. Thus, for Thucydides, clarity of sight stands for clarity of comprehension, and the contemplation he demands is at once both visual and intellectual. Thucydides uses the verb σκοπεῖν to convey the complementary senses of vision and critical evaluation he imagines in his ideal audience. As scholars have noted, the verb is programmatic throughout the text for this reason.10

It is telling that the two emotional states Plutarch explicitly identifies are parallel incarnations of fear, the emotion that is omnipresent and most historically causative throughout

5 Connor 1985, 10: “Vision is the privileged sense, most commonly invoked and most directly linked to the emotions.” 6 See Squire 2016, 13; Kallet 2001, 21-3, with further bibliography. 7 Moles 1993, 107 and 2001, 200. 8 Moles 1999 suggests that Thuc. presents his History in the language of Greek inscription, a literary medium whose visibility in the world is self-evidently central to its function. For history of the scholarship on τὸ σαφές in Thuc., see Moles 2001, 200, with bibliography and notes. 9 So, Connor 1985, 12: “The illusion created by Thucydides… is one of immediate presence, of our participation in the events described.” 10 Bakker 2006, 116-23: “This verb denotes a critical looking into matters that do not provide ready or obvious evidence” (117). See further Crane 1996, 236-45.

16 Thucydides’ History.11 Thucydides declares that it was fear (φόβος), above all else, that compelled the Athenians and Spartans to war in the first place.12 The causal role of fear in historical events is foregrounded as early as 1.9, in the Archaeology, where Thucydides presents it as the principal reason Agamemnon was able to muster the Trojan expedition.13 It appears again at 1.18, where Thucydides implies that it was fear of ‘the great impending danger’ from

Xerxes’ invasion that persuaded the Greeks to align themselves behind Spartan leadership during the Persian Wars.14 By the time Thucydides reaches the Peloponnesian War, then, fear has assumed a primary role in historical processes. In this most recent war, he claims, it was the

‘truest pretext’ for the conflict, even though it was the ‘least visible in speech’ (1.23.6):

τὴν μὲν γὰρ ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ, τοὺς Ἀθηναίους ἡγοῦμαι μεγάλους γιγνομένους καὶ φόβον παρέχοντας τοῖς Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀναγκάσαι ἐς τὸ πολεμεῖν.

For the truest reason, but least manifest in what was said, I consider to be that the Athenians, becoming powerful and inspiring fear in the Spartans, compelled them to war.

Contrasting visual obscurity (ἀφανεστάτην) with historical truth (ἀληθεστάτην), Thucydides aligns his own, paradigmatic, act of critical evaluation (ἡγοῦμαι) with truth. Moreover, this truth will be, implicitly, an eminently visible one, not made invisible in logos but revealed by it.

Fashioning itself as an object to be looked upon and examined, the text aims precisely to render visible the central causal role of fear in this war, which has not yet been exposed for critical scrutiny. However, as I discuss in these first two chapters, the dynamics of fear Thucydides

11 General studies on fear in Thuc.: Romilly 1956; Huart 1968, 114-41; Proctor 1980, 177-91; Rood 1998, 78-82; Konstan 2006, 153-5; Desmond 2006. On the prominent role of fear in Roman historiography, see Levene 1997. 12 On terms πρόφασις and αἴτια, the classic treatment is Pearson 1952, but see further St. Croix 1972; Rhodes 1987. 13 1.9.3: …ἅ μοι δοκεῖ Ἀγαμέμνων… τὴν στρατείαν οὐ χάριτι τὸ πλέον ἢ φόβῳ ξυναγαγὼν ποιήσασθαι. 14 1.18.2: μεγάλου κινδύνου ἐπικρεμασθέντος οἵ τε Λακεδαιμόνιοι τῶν ξυμπολεμησάντων Ἑλλήνων ἡγήσαντο. See Hunter 1982, 29-34 on both these passages from the Archaeology.

17 identifies on the global scale of the war are played out and magnified over and again in the smaller episodes that make up the narrative whole.

My interest in this chapter, then, is with the intersection of these three threads I have so far identified: the visual, the epistemological, and the emotional. As I outlined in the introduction to this project, one of my central contentions is that Thucydides envisions a close and dynamic connection between these three categories of human experience. Examination of their causal interrelationships can help us to better understand the individual affects, like fear, that recur throughout the History. I suggest in the conclusion to this chapter that this examination can also offer insights into the historiographical stakes of rational judgment and the emotional utility of the text.

In this chapter I look at the extended episode at Plataea in book two (2.2-6), the event that inaugurates the war proper, when a band of Theban soldiers and conspirators make an attempt on the city by night. I argue that the visual-evaluative processes portrayed in the historical agents in this scene perform the sort of visual contemplation Thucydides outlines for the reader of his text.

Awareness of this metatextual dimension helps to explain Plataea’s foregrounded position at the start of the war narrative. The cognitive work performed by the historical agents in the narrative has important ramifications not only for the emotional responses the characters manifest, but for the model reader Thucydides imagines for his text. In this way, the authorial narrative interacts concertedly with the characterological narrative, and historiographical problems are refracted through historical events. The Plataea episode itself is paradigmatic of this interplay. Throughout the scene, clarity of vision for the historical agents aligns with improved understanding and a decrease in the fear they are subjected to. Understanding and knowledge, enabled by clear sight, thus allow the scene’s participants to resist the encroachment of fear. I would like to suggest in

18 this chapter that this dynamic relation between seeing, understanding, and fear, illustrated so vividly within the scene at Plataea, can shed light on what I earlier called the ‘emotional utility’ of the work. Committed to combatting historical ignorance by revealing ‘true’ understandings of history (cf. ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, 1.20.3), Thucydides’ text makes the human world knowable to the reader, and as the characters in the Plataea episode repeatedly demonstrate, what is known and understood is no longer fearsome. And so, the psychological processes put on display at

Plataea help to elucidate what I suggest is the History’s utility as a bulwark against an inherently fearsome world of war, politics, and human nature. To see and understand clearly the mechanics of this world, as the History reveals them, relieves our ignorance and, consequently, mitigates our fear.

For convenience, I draw on Mieke Bal’s narratological work for the terminology I employ here. I refer to the authorial voice as the ‘external’ narrative, originating as it does from a source external to the narrative’s characters and events.15 The section of text from the

Archaeology through the methodological chapters in book one (1-23), for example, is the clearest extended passage in the History of Thucydides’ external narrative voice. The characterological voice, i.e. the narrative voice predominant in such sustained episodes as the one at Plataea, I call the ‘internal’ narrative.

The historiographical stakes of seeing and knowing

The historiographical significance of the relationship between seeing and knowing is enunciated in the Archaeology when, at 1.10, Thucydides juxtaposes the appearance of political power with

15 See Bal 1997, 150-2 on external and internal narrative focalization. Although Thuc.’s habit (outside of speech or methodological contexts) is generally to fluctuate between both of these broad narrative perspectives, a typical narrative vignette will be characterized by predominantly internal narration, with occasional external ‘authorial’ interjections. Such is the case in the Plataean episode.

19 its reality in fifth century Greece as he knew it.16 He imagines a future in which both Athens and

Sparta have become archaeological ruins, and he argues that an observer would not be able accurately to infer the two cities’ power relative to one another based on the visual evidence they have left behind. Having asserted that Sparta’s architectural footprint in the southern

Peloponnese would present a visual impression that ‘seems somewhat lacking’ (φαίνοιτ' ἂν

ὑποδεεστέρα) in comparison with the city’s actual political influence, Thucydides points to the same problem of interpretation with the architectural remains at Athens (1.10.2):

Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων διπλασίαν ἂν τὴν δύναμιν εἰκάζεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς φανερᾶς ὄψεως τῆς πόλεως ἢ ἔστιν… εἰκός, οὐδὲ τὰς ὄψεις τῶν πόλεων μᾶλλον σκοπεῖν ἢ τὰς δυνάμεις…

If Athens had suffered the same, one would infer from the visual appearance that the city’s power was twice what it actually is… [therefore] one should not look to the appearances of cities more than to their power…

The appearance alone of a city’s power can be deceiving, Thucydides argues, unless one looks upon the evidence in such a way as to be able to understand its significance. As elsewhere in the text, the programmatic term Thucydides employs for the ideal of vision-cum-critical judgment is the verb σκοπεῖν. He deploys the term twice in this chapter, emphasizing its close tie to cognition by pairing it repeatedly with the terminology of ‘inference’ (εἰκάζεσθαι, εἰκός). Thucydides contrasts the evaluating, inferring gaze of σκοπεῖν against the comparatively superficial appearances embodied by the term φαίνομαι. However, Thucydides is not using this historical exemplum to disavow the epistemological value of visual evidence altogether; rather, he is pointing to the necessity for critical viewing: sight married with insight. The opsis/dynamis opposition Thucydides lays out in the passage at 1.10 is offered as a case study in seeming versus being, an extension of the fundamental logos/ergon opposition he develops throughout the

16 On this passage, see the discussions in Kallet 2001, 56-9 and Bassi 2016.

20 History.17 As Lisa Kallet observes, the passage at 1.10 functions as a foundational lesson in “how to read and interpret visual signs.”18 In this way, Thucydides establishes the task of discerning appearance from reality as critical to his project, while at the same time spotlighting the fundamental relationship he sees between seeing and knowing.

As the episode at Plataea demonstrates, this is a task equally relevant for the historical actors within the text, who are challenged to read and react to the contingencies of their environment. The link between the external and internal dimensions of the text is foregrounded in the episode, when Thucydides implicitly contrasts the two modes of seeing and knowing tied to each. The Thebans, he says, have ‘foreseen’ the inevitability of this war and want to strike first, before the Plataeans are on their guard (2.2.3):

προϊδόντες γὰρ οἱ Θηβαῖοι ὅτι ἔσοιτο ὁ πόλεμος ἐβούλοντο τὴν Πλάταιαν αἰεὶ σφίσι διάφορον οὖσαν ἔτι ἐν εἰρήνῃ τε καὶ τοῦ πολέμου μήπω φανεροῦ καθεστῶτος προκαταλαβεῖν… φυλακῆς οὐ προκαθεστηκυίας.

For the Thebans, having foreseen the war was coming, wanted to bring Plataea over to their side, since they were constant rivals while in peace time and the war had not been made manifest… since (the Plataeans) had not yet set up a guard.

Positioned at the start of the episode, the verb προεῖδον establishes the thematic confluence of seeing and knowing: foresight stands for (presumed) fore-knowledge. The Thebans here share, to a distinctly limited extent, the foresight of the author himself, who began this text by asserting his claim that he ‘expected the war to be big’ (ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι, 1.1). Similarly, even though ‘the war had not yet been made visible’ (τοῦ πολέμου μήπω φανεροῦ καθεστῶτος), the

Thebans can ‘see’ it approaching. However, whereas the war did in fact turn out to be ‘big’, as

Thucydides predicted at its outset, the Thebans’ expectation of a quick victory over the Plataeans

17 Parry 1981, 101; on the logos/ergon antithesis, Parry remains seminal. 18 Kallet 2001, 22.

21 proves to have been deeply misguided. Exceeding the limits of the Thebans’ ability to know, the author’s knowledge is thus presented as transcendent within the narrative construction of the

History. Whatever the Thebans see or know within the narrative is therefore mediated through the external narrator’s own omniscience.19 On the one hand, this disjunction between the epistemic worlds inside and outside the text exposes the inevitable breach in the purported transparency of the narrative, from which the narrator’s presence cannot be entirely occluded.

His (historiographical) vision is the necessary precondition to authorize and legitimate his characters’ (historical) vision. At the same time, however, Thucydides’ implicit acknowledgement of this discrepancy reaffirms the significance to this text of correctly understanding history, and it emphasizes the necessity of a properly critical readerly gaze in that pursuit. In other words, the interaction between the internal and external narrative gazes, for

Thucydides, is potentially productive of historical knowledge.

Moreover, for a history writer so concerned with ‘seeing the clear truth’ of historical events, the night-time setting of the Plataean episode provides both an immediate problem and a useful opportunity. On the one hand, clear vision for the characters within the scene will be problematic in the dark. On the other hand, however, this difficulty for the internal actors serves only to accentuate the disparity between the internal and external gaze, which is itself the grounding condition of Thucydides’ History. Conflicts in the dark are not especially common in

Thucydides, but two of them occur at Plataea (another at 3.20-4, when a group of the besieged

19 See, e.g., Greenwood 2006, 13: Thuc. projects “an all-seeing, all encompassing perspective on the events that he narrates, which ranged from enabling the reader to ‘see’ what was going on inside the head of the different generals, to giving the reader a quasi split-screen perspective…” Thuc. therefore reaffirms his own omniscience every time he provides multiple (limited) perspectives from the vantage point of his characters. Cf. ibid.: 18: “Thucydides…uses the focus on the visual to differentiate the perspective of the historian and his readers from the myopic perspective of the participants in the war.” Cf. also Rood 2006, who compares Thuc.’s narrative stance to “the divine omniscience of the novelist.”

22 Plataeans and Athenians breaks out from the city).20 The most famous night action in the

History, though, is undoubtedly the climactic battle between Athenians and Syracusans at

Epipolae (7.43-4), where the Athenian forces suffer a decisive defeat that effectively brings the disastrous Sicilian expedition to an ignominious end.21 The episode also contains Thucydides’

(qua external narrator) most concise remarks on the twin problem of historical and historiographical seeing and knowing: ‘In a night engagement’, he asks the reader, ‘how could anyone know anything with clarity?’ (ἐν δὲ νυκτομαχίᾳ, … πῶς ἄν τις σαφῶς τι ᾔδει, 7.44.1). At

Epipolae, as at Plataea, seeing and knowing are deeply confounded by the cover of darkness and lack of ‘clarity’ for the participants, who are themselves subjected to the emotional forces of fear. It is not only that scenes like these serve to model the historian’s task of discerning and judging the ‘truest’ story to write, among the noise of hearsay and partisanship, a task centered around the goal of ‘clear’ understanding. It is that, in these scenes, Thucydides particularly draws our attention to the actors’ inability to know what is correct and what is not, what is the right strategic move and what is not. And it is primarily their vision—or, typically, their lack of clear vision—that is directly linked to their knowledge or ignorance, and consequently to their emotional states.22 In short, the vivid visuality of such scenes is deeply enmeshed thematically with Thucydides’ methodological commitment to the ‘clarity’ of his historiographical project.

For Thucydides, the night battle at Plataea, which is situated as the first act of open hostility in the war, thus represents a paradigmatic instance of the author’s historiographical vision.

20 See Strassler 1996, 681-2, s.v. “night actions.” Note, however, that only a small number on this list represent a violent confrontation between hostile parties. 21 I examine this episode more thoroughly in the next chapter. 22 Cf. Greenwood 2006, 30: “Clarity is both a historiographical desideratum in Thucydides’ account and a positive advantage on the battlefield.”

23 The Plataea episode can also help us to understand the emotional stakes of visual evaluation in the text, rich as the passage is with invocations of fear among the scene’s participants. In episodes like those at Epipolae and Plataea, where darkness or blindness is involved, Thucydides sets emotionality on center stage. At Plataea, fear is the principal emotion set on vivid display, as it circulates between the two groups, Thebans and Plataeans, mobilized by both their perceptions and interpretations of the scene as it develops. The characters are placed in this highly emotionally charged setting and faced with evaluative dilemmas in which they struggle to discern appearance from reality. Cognitive evaluation plays the middle-man in the economy of vision and fear at Plataea, mediating the exchange between collective perceptions of events as they unfold and the parties’ consequent feelings about those events.

Changing perceptions, in fact, structure the action at Plataea, as information perceived interacts proportionally with the fear characters feel, both phenomena together precipitating collective actions and reactions.23

Plataea as Paradigmatic

Scholarly interest in the Plataean episode’s exemplarity has tended to emphasize its prominent position at the start of the war narrative and to de-emphasize its unique content.24 Close literary- thematic analyses of the episode have been uncommon.25 At the conclusion of the first book of the History, the Athenians, persuaded by Pericles, have decisively rejected the Spartan request to

‘let the Greeks be free’ (εἰ τοὺς Ἕλληνας αὐτονόμους ἀφεῖτε, 1.139) and continue the Thirty

23 On perception and misperception in various episodes of the Hist., see Rood 1998, 61-108. 24 West 2003, 446 points out that Thuc. could just as easily have begun with the Spartan campaign and informed us later about Plataea, whenever that information became relevant to the narrative. Such is his regular narrative technique, which notably led him to omit (until 3.56) the fact that the Thebans invaded on a Plataean religious holiday, an omission Badian 1993 attributed to Thuc.’s “prejudice” against religion (112). 25 See, however, Stahl 2003, 65-73; and the brief remarks in Foster 2010, 152-7 and Bassi 2007, 180-2.

24 Years’ Peace.26 Although some semblance of normal interaction continues between the two cities

(though ‘not without suspicion’: ἀνυπόπτως δὲ οὔ, 1.146), the Peace has effectively been dissolved and the pretext for war established (σπονδῶν γὰρ ξύγχυσις τὰ γιγνόμενα ἦν καὶ

πρόφασις τοῦ πολεμεῖν, 1.146). And indeed, the first sentence of the second book has the war

‘begin from this point’ (ἄρχεται δὲ ὁ πόλεμος ἐνθένδε). However, the Plataean episode, the first notable action of this war between Athens and Sparta, has little direct relation to either of the major players in the conflict.27 Plataea itself had been an ally of the Athenians since 519 BCE, and therefore an enemy to neighboring Thebes.28 Nevertheless, the strategic advantage Athens gained from this alliance may have been, as Ernst Badian put it, “rather trivial.”29 And as of spring 431, Archidamus had yet to invade Attica in open hostility, as he and the Spartan army would do later that same summer. The foregrounding of a comparatively small-scale skirmish at

Plataea as the event to begin this avowedly superlative war (see 1.23), then, comes as something of a surprise.30 Why forego beginning the action of this ‘most noteworthy’ (ἀξιολογώτατον, 1.1) of wars with the first major action between its principals—the physically and geographically significant Spartan incursion into sovereign Athenian space—and instead zoom in on a peripheral city in Boeotia?

26 The Spartan ultimatum in 1.139 also demanded that the Athenians raise their siege of Potidaea, restore Aegina to independence, and rescind the Megarian decree. The city votes to follow Pericles’ advice to the letter (ἐψηφίσαντο ἃ ἐκέλευε, καὶ τοῖς Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀπεκρίναντο τῇ ἐκείνου γνώμῃ, καθ᾽ ἕκαστά τε ὡς ἔφρασε καὶ τὸ ξύμπαν, 145). 27 The story of the Theban raid on Plataea appears also in Diod. Sic. 12.41-2, and in a speech of Apollodorus ([Dem.] 59. 98-106), on whose relation with Thuc. see Pelling 2000, 61-7. 28 Evidence for this dating comes from 3.68.5, when Thuc. places Plataea’s destruction in 427 in the ‘93rd year after her alliance with Athens’. See Badian 1993, 111-23 on the nature of Plataean-Athenian alliance. 29 Badian 1993, 111. See ibid., 109-24, more generally. On the strategic significance of Plataea, cf. Bloedow 1983, 30, with references. 30 Connor 1984, 53: “The Theban attack on Plataea is a double surprise. A sudden night offensive at a place to which little attention has been paid encourages the reader to react like a contemporary with surprise at the unexpected form taken by the outbreak of war.”

25 The prevailing interpretive strategy among commentators has been to emphasize the rigidity of Thucydides’ chronological structure and his stubborn adherence to it. A. W. Gomme is typical:

Thucydides decided… to put the attack on Plataea among the events of the war proper as fitting better with his chronological scheme, ‘year by year and by summers and winters’; by which scheme the attack was naturally taken as the first event of year one…31

Others have attempted to explain the Plataea episode’s prominent position in the narrative in terms of the contrast its relatively small scale makes against the backdrop of the superlatively large conflict (κίνησις μεγίστη, 1.1.2) it initiates. Christopher Pelling, for example, claims that for Thucydides, Plataea signifies a new kind of war in Greece, one which differs markedly from the “old-fashioned war of large-scale army movements,” and instead is characterized by “furtive plotting, the local hatreds…the stealth, the dagger in the back in the middle of the night.”32

Pelling’s remarks point to the dramatic, literary character of the History, but his primary referent nevertheless remains historical: the “old-fashioned wars” of the past.33 Like Pelling, Jeffrey

Rusten also focuses on the apparent disparity in scale between Athens and Sparta and the “minor

31 Gomme HCT, ad 2.19.1, who differs very little from nineteenth century scholarship: see, e.g., Müller Strübing 1883, 669 (cited by Rawlings 1981, 24): To begin the war with the Plataean episode “ist willkürlich, ist unhistorish… und so vermute ich den dasz es ihm zunächst darum zu tun war, für die dauer seines krieges eine runde… zahl zu erhalten…” On Thuc.’s application of Hippocratic methods to his Hist., see Moles 2001, 201 n. 12, with bibliography. See Stahl 2003, 70-2, with notes and bibliography for a survey of some of the early twentieth century scholarship on the question. Smart 1986 constructs a chronological argument drawing on the concept of physis: “The Theban attack on Plataea at the beginning of spring… provided a natural arche to a natural process” (33). Smart reads Thuc.’s chronological scheme as a polemical move against Hellanicus. For a strictly structural argument on Thuc.’s placement of the episode, see Konishi 2008-9, 360ff., though his scheme is frequently overly rigid and lacking in nuance; see reviews by Rood 2009 and Stronk 2011. 32 Pelling 2000, 69-70 and, similarly (ibid.): “Little people start big conflicts; but eventually the world is dominated by the bigger folk, and the role of the small fry is to suffer.” Cf. Rood 1998, 110: “The anachronic start to the Plataean narrative gives emphasis to the Thebans’ glaring violation of peace, the start of Thucydides’ war—and then exposes how small-scale hostilities precipitate it.” 33 It may be worth pointing out too that Thuc. includes battles on both land and sea which, “old-fashioned” or not, certainly qualify as large-scale (Delium, Mantineia, Syracuse, to name a few). Nor does Thuc. give us any indication that political rivalry and subterfuge were unique to this war: on the contrary, his emphasis routinely falls on the universality of human motivation and behavior (as, e.g., in the plague and stasis episodes).

26 stasiotai” at Plataea in 431, whose savagery, he asserts, ultimately “infects” the larger powers.34

Also like Pelling, his point of reference is the historical fact of the battle, rather than the themes evinced by its narrative in Thucydides’ text. Still others, like Colin Macleod, have had recourse to comparisons of literary genre, arguing for instance that “the destiny of Plataea is one of those sufferings which for Thucydides makes the war worth recording and gives history the status of epic.”35 While these scholars’ observations offer provocative descriptions of the text, they tend to stop short of concrete analysis as to why Thucydides saw fit to give the Plataea episode such evident pride of place in the war narrative.36

H-P. Stahl addresses this question more directly, suggesting a reading of the episode that attempts to account for both its chronological placement and its internal thematic coherence. He argues that Thucydides sets up the episode as an exemplary case of frustrated planning (on the part of the Thebans), a theme he has claimed is pervasive throughout the History.37 The episode thus allows Thucydides, “without abandoning the self-imposed order of strict chronology,” to

“hint at the broad variation and complexity of the courses of events (together with the irrevocability of their results) as they fall out in this war.”38 In short, war is a complex process and even the best-laid plans fall through, due either to strategical mistakes on the ground (e.g. the

Thebans’ mistaken belief that they can achieve their goal at Plataea peacefully) or unforeseeable circumstances (e.g. the rains that delay the Theban reinforcements). In Stahl’s reading,

Thucydides’ emphasis on the sensory and psychological details of the scene illuminates this

34 Rusten 1989, 97. 35 Macleod 1977, 229 ns 18. Cf. Parry 1972; Macleod 1983, 156-8; Connor 1984; Pelling 2000, 69: “Plataea is a tale of human suffering, one of those evils which, as with the Iliad, gave the story its importance…” Cf. Rood 2006, 246, who links the theme of human suffering in the episode to what he calls “a Herodotean manner of writing history.” 36 See further Hornblower 1991, 236-7, citing “literary reasons” for Plataea’s position which he does not elaborate. Cf. Rhodes 1988, 183-4, who alludes to “moral and political lessons” that could be drawn from the episode, but does not articulate the nature of these lessons. 37 See Stahl 2003, 65-73 and 2012. 38 Stahl 2003, 72.

27 complexity and demonstrates that history is more than a simple, straightforward chain of cause and effect.39

My interpretation argues that reading the episode as, in part, a metatextual commentary on historical knowledge and understanding can help further explain its prominent position in the narrative. Rather than illustrating complexity for complexity’s sake, the details of vision, cognition, and fear so heavily emphasized in the episode provide the beginnings of a blueprint of human psychology whose ramifications transcend the internal world of the text. Stahl’s reading touches upon the possibility of foresight in historical events, something both the Thebans (in the short-term) and the Plataeans (in the longer-term) fail to fully grasp before it is too late. As I described above, for Thucydides, foresight is a concept couched in processes of critical evaluation and, at Plataea, re-inscribed metaphorically throughout the episode in the two sides’ struggles with literal vision in the darkness. But it is also closely related to the ideal of historical insight that the text as a whole purports to teach: the failures of foresight Thucydides portrays in the text offer the potential to improve the reader’s retrospective insight into the processes that shape history. By introducing the variable of human emotion into a scene of problematic seeing and knowing at Plataea, Thucydides elucidates a link that is equally programmatic for the utility of his text, namely a basic relation between knowledge and fear that reaches across the space between the participant and the reader of history.

39 Stahl 2003, 69: “From the interweaving of the tiniest details (psychological as well as concrete) the reader… has an impression of a complexity which in its dimensions seems to transcend an orientation according to mere facts and an organizational schema.”

28 Plataea as a second beginning

Plataea’s status as the exemplary arche of the war is in fact announced from the very start of the episode. The first sentence of the second book conspicuously recalls the opening sentence of the work:40

Θουκυδίδης Ἀθηναῖος ξυνέγραψε τὸν πόλεμον τῶν Πελοποννησίων καὶ Ἀθηναίων, ὡς ἐπολέμησαν πρὸς ἀλλήλους, ἀρξάμενος εὐθὺς καθισταμένου καὶ ἐλπίσας μέγαν τε ἔσεσθαι καὶ ἀξιολογώτατον τῶν προγεγενημένων… (1.1.1)

ἄρχεται δὲ ὁ πόλεμος ἐνθένδε ἤδη Ἀθηναίων καὶ Πελοποννησίων καὶ τῶν ἑκατέροις ξυμμάχων, ἐν ᾧ οὔτε ἐπεμείγνυντο ἔτι ἀκηρυκτεὶ παρ᾽ ἀλλήλους καταστάντες τε ξυνεχῶς ἐπολέμουν: γέγραπται δὲ ἑξῆς ὡς ἕκαστα ἐγίγνετο κατὰ θέρος καὶ χειμῶνα. (2.1.1)

Several verbal correspondences between the two introductory sentences help to link them closely across the (145 chapters of) intervening narrative. ‘The war of the Athenians and

Peloponnesians’ at 2.1 is the same war that the author ‘began straightaway from the outset of hostilities between the two sides’ at 1.1. Those hostilities ‘begin now’ in earnest, at 2.1, when the two sides finally ‘settled in to fight continuously against one another’.41 The verbal echoes are evident in Thucydides’ repeated use of ἄρχω, καθίστημι, πολεμέω, and the phrases πρὸς

ἀλλήλους/παρ’ ἀλλήλους, as well as in his reintroduction of the two primary protagonists,

Athens and Sparta. He marks our entry into the Plataean episode as both a new beginning and a continuation of the project already begun at the work’s inception, and he thereby situates the initiation of the episode within the self-reflective methodological context established at the outset of the narrative. Verbs of ‘writing’ and verbs of historical ‘happening’ further tighten the bond between the two passages, and at the same time reiterate the text’s most fundamental task, viz. the ‘writing up’ of what ‘happened’ (γέγραπται and ἐγίγνετο 2.1, ξυνέγραψε and

40 I have set off some of the clearer comparanda with matching textual formatting. The formatting in the quoted passages corresponds to the formatting in my translations. 41 See Rawlings 1981, 19-36 for the chronological problems surrounding the term ἐνθένδε, which I do not examine here.

29 προγεγενημένων, 1.1). But here at the outset of the war narrative, the grammatically active author who ‘wrote up’ the war (ξυνέγραψε, 1.1) has been displaced from view, the narrative now having instead ‘been written’ (γέγραπται, 2.1). The shift in syntactical construction brings to the fore the actors and actions of the upcoming episode, while removing to the background traces of the author’s overt intervention in the text.42 In other words, ‘the events themselves’ move to the foreground, as the author exploits the illusion of narrative transparency that is central to his rhetorical motif of ‘clarity’ and, as the episode itself demonstrates, effected by the vividness of narration Plutarch so admired.43

Thucydides begins the episode with a flourish of “chronological fanfare,” in which he lays out a series of independent temporal markers unmatched in either volume or density elsewhere in the History.44 Brief though it is, the passage is a rhetorically charged tour de force of historiographical accuracy that further flags the episode that follows as highly significant.45

Thucydides provides no fewer than six markers: the fifteenth year of the Peace between Athens and Sparta, five months since the battle at Potidaea, and the spring of the current year, and he further names a priesthood at Argos, an Ephorate at Sparta, and an archonship at Athens.46 He then embarks into the historical episode proper by setting out the political motivations at play.

The Thebans aim to exploit the nominal peace still in place before the open outbreak of war to subdue their long-time enemies. What’s more, the Theban contingent has the help of a self-

42 Connor 1984, 29: “The third-person narrator of the opening sentence yields to a new speaker, the war itself. And again, Connor 1985, 15: “we are in the war itself. We see; we hear; we even know the plans and thoughts of the participants.” Similarly, Loraux 1986b, Bakker 2006, Edmunds 2009. Cf. Allan 2007 for Thuc.’s use of “typical oral features” in his prose “to create the effect of a somewhat naïve and artless style” (105 n. 12). 43 See Rood 1998, 248: “his reason for this covert narratorial stance is often that he was aiming at vividness—a vividness that would convey something of the suffering caused by the Peloponnesian War. To interfere too often in his own person… would have been to spoil some of his greatest effect.” 44 Quote from West 2003, 446. 45 Smart 1986 sees the excess of chronological information as likely an agonistic gesture towards Thuc.’s (perceived) literary competition, specifically Hellanicus. 46 See Hornblower 1991, 237-40 for a review of the problems historians have cited in Thuc.’s chronology.

30 interested Plataean faction within the city, who are intent on destroying their political enemies

(βουλόμενοι ἰδίας ἕνεκα δυνάμεως ἄνδρας τε τῶν πολιτῶν τοὺς σφίσιν ὑπεναντίους διαφθεῖραι,

2.2). Thus, as Rusten and Pelling observed, Thucydides sets small, local disputes (both cities are in Boiotia) against the backdrop of the major players in the war. It is not exactly a “proxy fight” for the larger powers, as one commentator puts it, although Athens and Sparta will eventually become involved in the affairs of both cities.47 But the incident at Plataea nevertheless foregrounds important historical evidence for Thucydides’ assertion about the ‘pan-Hellenic’ nature of this conflict: ‘it was the greatest disturbance for Greeks, a certain portion of the barbarians, and for practically all of mankind’ (κίνησις γὰρ αὕτη μεγίστη δὴ τοῖς Ἕλλησιν

ἐγένετο καὶ μέρει τινὶ τῶν βαρβάρων, ὡς δὲ εἰπεῖν καὶ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἀνθρώπων, 1.1.2).48 In this way, the episode is linked further to the History’s opening chapter: it signals the first piece of exemplary (internal) narrative evidence in support of the author’s (external) claims about the size and scope of the conflict he has chosen to record.

(In)visibility and Fear in the Dark

Throughout the five chapters of action in the Plataea narrative, Thucydides has positioned frequent verbal reminders of the clarity motif, as well as of the two other thematically central elements of the episode, cognition and fear. It will be useful briefly to list these occurrences here, since these terms will appear often in my analysis. It is the interactivity between these various concepts, their causal relationships to one another, that will be significant in what follows.

47 Konishi 2008-9, 378 calls the Plataean conflict “proxy fighting.” 48 Cf. the Mycalessus episode (7.29-30), another instance of a small town deeply affected by the war, even though seemingly safely removed from the line of fire. On Plataea’s political position within Boeotia, see Hornblower 1991 ad 2.2, with bibliography, who asserts that Plataea “was certainly not a member of the Boiotian Confederacy at this time.”

• Perception: seeing, seeming, and darkness.

o Seeing: the verbs ὁράω and its compounds (2.3.1, 2.3.3, 2.4.6, 2.7.3); προεῖδον

(2.2.3); and αἰσθάνομαι (2.3.1, 2.5.4); the adjective φανερός (2.2.3, 2.3.3).

o Seeming: the verbs φαίνομαι (2.3.3) and δοκέω (2.3.3, 2.6.2); and the noun

αἴσθησις (2.4.4).

o Darkness: the noun νύξ appear six times in the five chapters (2.3.1, 2.3.4 [twice],

2.4.2, 2.5.1 [twice]); σκότος (2.4.2); περίορθρον (2.3.4); the phrase περὶ πρῶτον

ὕπνον (2.2.1); the phrase μὴ κατὰ φῶς (2.3.4); and the phrase τελευτῶντος τοῦ

μηνὸς, indicating there was no moon on this night (2.4.2).49

• Cognition: thinking and knowing.

o Thinking: the verbs νομίζω (2.2.4, 2.3.1, 2.3.2) and οἴομαι (2.4.5).

o Knowing: the verbs γιγνώσκω (2.4.1) and οἶδα (twice in 2.6.3); the nouns γνώμη

(2.2.4) and ἐμπειρία (2.3.4); the adjectives ἄπειρος/ἔμπειρος (2.4.2).

• Fear:

o Derivatives of φόβος: φοβερός (2.3.4) and φοβέω (2.4.2); and compounds of

δείδω: καταδείσαντες (2.3.1) and δείσαντες (2.5.1).

Fear and optics

Chronological and political contexts thoroughly established, Thucydides quickly transports the narrative within the walls of Plataea and into the agora itself, where the Thebans gather and deliberate. As Edith Foster points out, the Thebans’ first collective action upon entering the agora is highly self-conscious and directed entirely toward the optics of the scene, calculated to

49 Rusten 1989 and Fantasia 2003, ad locc.

32 shape a visual narrative for the Plataean citizens inside the city.50 Laying down their weapons upon the ground, the Thebans proclaim their willingness to receive Plataean defectors into their ranks (2.2.4):

θέμενοι δὲ ἐς τὴν ἀγορὰν τὰ ὅπλα… γνώμην δ' ἐποιοῦντο κηρύγμασί τε χρήσασθαι ἐπιτηδείοις καὶ ἐς ξύμβασιν μᾶλλον καὶ φιλίαν τὴν πόλιν ἀγαγεῖν (καὶ ἀνεῖπεν ὁ κῆρυξ, εἴ τις βούλεται κατὰ τὰ πάτρια τῶν πάντων Βοιωτῶν ξυμμαχεῖν, τίθεσθαι παρ' αὑτοὺς τὰ ὅπλα), νομίζοντες σφίσι ῥᾳδίως τούτῳ τῷ τρόπῳ προσχωρήσειν τὴν πόλιν.

Placing their weapons in the agora… They came to the decision to use heralds for their purpose, and by bringing the city to terms, to make it an ally (and a herald announced that if anyone wanted to join forces on behalf of the Boiotian fatherland, to set his weapons beside their own), thinking that in this way they would easily bring the city over to themselves.

Ceremoniously grounding their weapons, the Thebans perform a deceptive act of friendship the intent of which is to allay Plataean fear. By projecting friendliness, the Thebans encourage the

Plataeans to read the situation so as not to fear the hostile invaders in their city. They urge the

Plataeans to act on this fearlessness by joining the outsiders rather than resisting them. Moreover, by grounding their weapons in the agora, the Thebans perform a piece of diplomatic theater which is intended to be seen by their Plataean opponents. If unwitnessed, the significance of the performance cannot be understood and serves little purpose. Thucydides does not indicate how the Plataeans learn of the Thebans’ act, though we can presume the heralds have announced it and the Plataeans have only ‘seen’ it via these announcements. In any case, by underscoring this as the Thebans’ first deliberate action taken upon entering the city, Thucydides situates their act firmly within the visual-performative context that will characterize the strategic approaches of both sides through much of the episode.

50 Foster 2010, 152-7.

33 And indeed, the first performance then immediately demands another, as the Thebans instruct the Plataean defectors to perform their own fearlessness by ‘laying their weapons down beside ours’ (τίθεσθαι παρ' αὑτοὺς τὰ ὅπλα). Up to this point in the episode, the Thebans have exploited a visual and epistemological advantage over the Plataeans, having ‘foreseen’ the coming war and used their knowledge to calculate political and, here in the Plataean agora, military strategy. Thucydides highlights the role of calculation throughout the episode with an abundance of cognitive language. Here he uses the verb νομίζω, which recurs throughout this passage, as well as the thematically loaded term γνώμη, which, throughout the History, has distinctive ties to notions of rational thinking.51 Along with their clear (fore)sight, then, the

Thebans demonstrate clear thinking that has been, so far, absent of fear. Furthermore, by attempting to exploit the visual dynamics of the scene, they have tacitly acknowledged the power of visual information to shape fear in a viewing audience.52

From the beginning of this episode that itself begins the war, then, Thucydides highlights the interactive relation between seeing, knowing, and feeling. As the narrative shifts from the

Theban to the Plataean perspective, we witness the effectiveness of the Thebans’ performance and the power that accompanies their position of visual and epistemological advantage. From the

Plataeans’ position of relative ignorance and visual obscurity, they at first make the (mistaken) inference that their only prudent move is to capitulate and accede to terms (2.3.1):

οἱ δὲ Πλαταιῆς ὡς ᾔσθοντο ἔνδον τε ὄντας τοὺς Θηβαίους καὶ ἐξαπιναίως κατειλημμένην τὴν πόλιν, καταδείσαντες καὶ νομίσαντες πολλῷ πλείους ἐσεληλυθέναι (οὐ γὰρ ἑώρων ἐν τῇ νυκτί) πρὸς ξύμβασιν ἐχώρησαν καὶ τοὺς λόγους δεξάμενοι ἡσύχαζον, ἄλλως τε καὶ ἐπειδὴ ἐς οὐδένα οὐδὲν ἐνεωτέριζον. πράσσοντες δέ πως ταῦτα κατενόησαν οὐ πολλοὺς

51 The term is especially closely linked with the figure of Pericles. See Edmunds 1975, esp. 7-88; cf. Huart 1973. 52 A useful comparandum for the tactical use of visual manipulation occurs in Nicias’ speech early in book six, when he advises the Athenians that the theatrical display of their naval strength would be a more effective medium for the exercise of power in Sicily than an actual ‘boots on the ground’ invasion (6.11.4). I discuss this passage in chapter four.

34 τοὺς Θηβαίους ὄντας καὶ ἐνόμισαν ἐπιθέμενοι ῥᾳδίως κρατήσειν: τῷ γὰρ πλήθει τῶν Πλαταιῶν οὐ βουλομένῳ ἦν τῶν Ἀθηναίων ἀφίστασθαι.

The Plataeans, when they perceived not only the Theban presence inside, but also the city suddenly seized, in their terror believing many more had entered (since the night obscured their vision), they acceded to the [Theban] offer; and, accepting negotiations, they held their peace, particularly because the Thebans were making no attempts against anyone. But somehow, while carrying out these [talks], they discerned that there were not many Thebans, and they determined that if they attacked, they would easily overcome them, the reality being that there was no desire among the Plataean populace to secede from Athens.

Thucydides points out that the Plataean decision to accede is based in a mixture of fear and unfounded belief, which combine to produce the impression that ‘many more Thebans had entered’ the city than actually had (καταδείσαντες καὶ νομίσαντες πολλῷ πλείους ἐσεληλυθέναι).

Moreover, he is quick to identify the role of visual perception as the decisive factor in both the

Plataeans’ knowing and fearing, pointing out that they were unable to see clearly in the night (οὐ

γὰρ ἑώρων ἐν τῇ νυκτί).53 The Plataeans manage quickly to correct their initial misperceptions, but in these first moments of the confrontation in the agora, the Thebans and Plataeans already have begun to shape our understanding of the causal relations between vision, knowledge, and fear.

Throughout the Plataea episode, fear is the singular emotion that dominates the “affective economy” of the setting.54 Although other emotions emerge implicitly, as we will see below, fear is the only explicitly enunciated emotion in Thucydides’ narrative of the scene. Sara Ahmed has examined affect as a force that takes shape around collective subjects, defining their relation with perceived objects.55 Thucydides regularly groups peoples together and defines them, collectively,

53 Fantasia 2003, 233-4 rightly notes the causal force of the darkness in this scene, its immediate benefit to the Theban contingent, and the irony inherent in that immediate impression: “un’errata valutazione determinata dall’oscurità sta per risolvere la situazione a vantaggio de Tebani; in seguito, il buio di una notte senza luna sarà un ostacolo alla fuga dei Tebani…” 54 I adopt this phrase from the title of Ahmed 2004. 55 See esp. Ahmed 2004, 22: “emotions are not simply ‘within’ or ‘without’,” she argues, but rather they “create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.” She focuses in this essay especially on the affective dynamics of fear.

35 according to the dominant emotion at work among them.56 In the scene at Plataea, the Plataeans’ perceptions of the suddenness and early success of the incursion into their city (ἐξαπιναίως

κατειλημμένην τὴν πόλιν) produced a fear that has so far defined them as a single collective subject. In fact, there is no individuation among the Plataeans throughout the episode.57 In this highly affectively charged atmosphere, everything the Plataeans do, they do as a single entity.

Reading the Plataea episode through Ahmed’s conception of collective emotion not only helps to accentuate the centrality of emotional experience to the narrative of this episode, but it also brings out an important characteristic of fear that recurs in Thucydidean battle narrative, namely its evident lability.58 Fear is not a static force in Thucydides’ depiction of the Plataea episode, but an emotion liable to shift its allegiances from one side to the other, defining whomever it has affected. Furthermore, it becomes clear that fear’s mobility between the two sides in this conflict depends wholly upon visual information. The shifting visibility within the scene provides the precondition for the movement of collective fear from the Plataeans to the Thebans.

In Thucydides’ depiction, the Plataeans’ fear is channeled specifically through their perception of the Thebans, the collective subject set in opposition to them. As Thucydides underscores, it is only after they have perceived (ὡς ᾔσθοντο) a large group of Thebans that terror begins to take hold, and this combination of sense perception and fear defines the

Plataeans as historical agents. However, Thucydides is careful to indicate the non-specific nature of this initial sensory perception: he does not say the Plataeans ‘saw’ (ὁράω) the Thebans for themselves, but rather that they ‘perceived’ them (αἰσθάνομαι). Indeed, he has pointedly alerted

56 See, e.g., 6.88, where the Camarinaeans are grouped together by a litany of emotions (goodwill, hostility, and fear). 57 The closest we come to differentiation within the Plataeans is when Thuc. sets the πλῆθος against the partitive genitive τῶν Πλαταιῶν (quoted above). 58 I return to this framework briefly in the next chapter as well.

36 us to the fact that they did not see, interjecting parenthetically at this crucial moment to remind us again that this incursion came under cover of night (οὐ γὰρ ἑώρων ἐν τῇ νυκτί). At the level of its content, this parenthetical intervention into the narrative serves to contrast the Plataeans’ necessarily partial perception (in the dark) with the ideal of clear vision, while at the same time flagging the interconnectedness in the scene between perception, cognition, and fear. Because the Plataeans were unable to see in the darkness, he implies, they formed an incorrect impression of reality, which consequently produced fear, and further induced their political decision to open talks with the Thebans.59 At the level of its form, however, the parenthesis represents an un- focalized interpretive evaluation of the Plataeans’ collective sensory and psychological experience, inserted into the focalized (from the Plataean standpoint) narrative. The external narrator breaks the illusion of narrative transparency, overtly here, in order to attribute causality to the sequence of events. He inserts his own boundless vision in place of the limited visibility of the internal agents, the Plataeans: he sees not only that they fail to see, but also what they fail to see. In so doing, he draws attention again to the incomplete vision and knowledge of the characters within the narrative, thereby stressing the superior visual capability of the well- informed observer of history.

Thucydides has mentioned already early in the account that the Thebans invaded ‘around the first watch’ (περὶ πρῶτον ὕπνον, 2.2.1), and so after dark, but his parenthetical remark reiterates the fact of darkness again at the point when it begins to have a direct effect on the characters in the scene. Moreover, this remark, in which he restates the particular detail of the setting that will prove decisive for the whole episode (i.e. darkness), has been carefully positioned in the sequence of the Plataeans’ actions. Before we have been reminded explicitly of

59 Compare the misperception, also at night, of a Macedonian and non-Greek army at 4.125.1, which induces fear and flight.

37 the pervasive darkness of the scene, we have seen the Plataeans (1) form an impression of their situation (ὡς ᾔσθοντο), (2) react affectively (καταδείσαντες) to that impression, and (3) draw an incorrect conclusion from it (νομίσαντες πολλῷ πλείους ἐσεληλυθέναι). Thucydides’ placement of the parenthetical reminder of darkness, then, underscores the epistemological problem of non- visual sensory impressions, which lead to incomplete understanding of the world and, consequently, fear.60 In other words, Thucydides demonstrates the difference between seeming and being. How it seemed to the Plataeans at first is not how it actually was in reality. To frame it in Thucydidean programmatic language, here is an instance of the gap between logos and ergon, where what is apparent may not correspond to what is true.61 What Thucydides has added to this programmatic antithesis in the scene at Plataea, however, is the emotional byproduct that emerges out of the disconnect between subjective appearance and objective reality, which is in this case fear.

So then, although at first subjected to fear and shown to act on the basis of that fear, the

Plataeans acquire further knowledge (κατενόησαν) about their situation, namely that their original fears were not proportional to the reality of the threat facing them. With this newfound knowledge, fear subsides and is replaced by a confident prediction for the future: ‘they thought they would easily prevail in a counter-assault’ (ἐνόμισαν ἐπιθέμενοι ῥᾳδίως κρατήσειν). Thus believing in the ease of their task, the Plataeans assume the same sort of confidence the Thebans possessed at the start of the affair, where they too ‘thought they would easily’ prevail (νομίζοντες

ῥᾳδίως, 2.2.4). The Plataeans’ belief is ultimately proved right by their success: they thought they would prevail and they did prevail. As visual advantage and knowledge shift sides

60 This epistemological problem appears more than once in the Hist.: see my discussions in chapter two. 61 Cf. Walker 1993, 356 on the Athenian spectators on shore during the decisive sea battle at Syracuse (7.71): Thuc. “draws into relief the disparity between the incidents (ergon) and their visual perception (opsis).”

38 throughout the scene, fear traverses a parallel path. This dynamic relation is highly characteristic of Thucydidean battle narrative generally (we will encounter it again at Sphacteria and

Epipolae), and it thus demonstrates another way in which the Plataea episode is exemplary within the narrative of the History.

It is worth noting, however, that the Plataeans’ ultimate success in this conflict was not an inevitability: the Thebans, we recall, felt the same confidence in their own ‘foresight’ before the skirmish began. As Stahl emphasizes in his reading of the episode, historical processes are, for Thucydides, both complex and difficult to predict.62 The contingency of the episode thus brings into clear focus the discrepancy between the relative opacity of the present, for the contemporary agents of history, and the twenty-twenty vision of historiographical hindsight. In other words, Thucydides’ historiographical vision pierces the darkness of the scene in order to illuminate its basic mechanics for the reader to observe and understand. This metaphorical visuality, a central conceit in Thucydides’ Methodology, is literalized in the visual dynamics of the scene, where characters’ vision and comprehension are foregrounded throughout the episode.

As we have seen, however, these visual-epistemological dynamics within the scene entail fear as well, an emotional dimension Thucydides leaves out of his discussion in the Methodology chapters. Yet, the strong bond we witness in the scene between vision, cognition, and fear indicates emotion plays a basic role in the relation between seeing and knowing. For the characters in the scene, visually acquired knowledge, that is ‘clear sight’, leads predictably to the elimination of fear. If we take the characters’ ‘reading’ of their environment as an analog for the interpretive act more broadly, then the reading of history is implicated in the psychological dynamics of the scene. As an extended display of historical knowledge, set out to be scrutinized

62 Stahl 2003, 65-73.

39 and understood, the text may thus serve as a ‘light against the darkness’ of historical inquiry, combatting both the ignorance Thucydides decries in the Methodology and, at the same time, the fears we will continue to see surfacing from ignorance and inexperience at Plataea. I return to this metatextual argument at the end of this chapter, but it is worth keeping in mind the notion of this analogy between internal and external ‘readers’ as we continue through the remainder of this episode.

To return to the narrative: having gained a firmer understanding of their surroundings, then, the Plataeans in their turn proceed to engage in their own program of visual manipulation.

The Plataean plan for counterattack is formed largely around controlling the optics of the scene.

In this way, their strategy is just as self-consciously theatrical as the Thebans’ conspicuous grounding of their arms in the agora earlier in the episode. Moreover, their strategy proves in the end also to have an equal affective impact on its (Theban) viewing audience (2.3.3):

ξυνελέγοντο διορύσσοντες τοὺς κοινοὺς τοίχους παρ᾽ ἀλλήλους, ὅπως μὴ διὰ τῶν ὁδῶν φανεροὶ ὦσιν ἰόντες, ἁμάξας τε ἄνευ τῶν ὑποζυγίων ἐς τὰς ὁδοὺς καθίστασαν, ἵνα ἀντὶ τείχους ᾖ, καὶ τἆλλα ἐξήρτυον ᾗ ἕκαστον ἐφαίνετο πρὸς τὰ παρόντα ξύμφορον ἔσεσθαι.

They gathered by tunneling through their common walls to [reach] one another, in order to stay out of plain sight walking along the roads, setting in the roads wagons without their yoked teams, to take the place of walls, and readying other things how it seemed each would be beneficial in the present situation.

Excavating tunnels between houses and stationing wagons as visual screens in the roadways, the

Plataeans take specific action to make sure they remain as invisible as possible to the Thebans. In that way, their every effort is directed toward controlling what the Thebans do and do not see.

They are careful not to grant the Thebans the same sort of visual information they had themselves just benefitted from.63

63 Cf. Stahl 2003, 66: “The new moon (4.2) and the night… are deliberately appropriated from the Theban plan as well as the impetus of surprise.”

40 When all is prepared for their assault, the Plataeans take further steps to exploit their perceptive and epistemic advantages by turning them into affective advantage (2.3.4):

ἐπεὶ δὲ ὡς ἐκ τῶν δυνατῶν ἑτοῖμα ἦν, φυλάξαντες ἔτι νύκτα καὶ αὐτὸ τὸ περίορθρον ἐχώρουν ἐκ τῶν οἰκιῶν ἐπ᾽ αὐτούς, ὅπως μὴ κατὰ φῶς θαρσαλεωτέροις οὖσι προσφέροιντο καὶ σφίσιν ἐκ τοῦ ἴσου γίγνωνται, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν νυκτὶ φοβερώτεροι ὄντες ἥσσους ὦσι τῆς σφετέρας ἐμπειρίας τῆς κατὰ τὴν πόλιν.

When things were as ready as possible, ensuring that it was still dark and waiting for the pre-dawn hour itself, they went from the houses against the Thebans, in order to carry their assault before they [the Thebans] gained confidence in the light of day and found themselves on equal footing [to the Thebans]; and that the Thebans, instead, because of their fearfulness in the night, should be inferior to their own [the Plataeans] knowledge of the city’s layout.

Thucydides four times emphasizes the scene’s darkness in these lines (ἔτι νύκτα, αὐτὸ τὸ

περίορθρον, μὴ κατὰ φῶς, ἐν νυκτὶ), marking it as the key factor in the Plataean plan. Their plan depends not just upon night, but upon what Gomme called “the darkest hour before the dawn”

(αὐτὸ τὸ περίορθρον).64 Gomme’s translation may have exploited some dramatic license, as

ὄρθρον seems to signify a time of night very near to the dawn, and perhaps extending even until the sky has begun to lighten.65 Nevertheless, Thucydides has here doubly emphasized the visual detail of the scene’s lighting (or rather, lack of light). What’s more, he provides a causal and syntactical link between the darkness itself and the expected emotional state of the Thebans. The

Plataeans reckon the Thebans will be ‘less courageous’ specifically because they lack the light to see and judge clearly. There is an implicit causal link between the phrase κατὰ φῶς and the adjective θαρσαλεωτέροις: the Thebans will be ‘more courageous’ because it is light out. So then, the earlier phrase μὴ κατὰ φῶς θαρσαλεωτέροις οὖσι perfectly parallels the later phrase

ἀλλ᾽ ἐν νυκτὶ φοβερώτεροι ὄντες, establishing the double juxtaposition between (1) ‘more

64 Gomme HCT, ad loc. 65 See LSJ s.v. ὄρθρος. The term περίορθρος appears to be a Thucydidean coinage.

41 courageous’ and ‘more fearful’, and (2) the light and the dark.66 At the same time, the Plataeans are effectively re-appropriating the visual-affective dynamics of the earlier scene in which their own fear of the Thebans had been activated by the very darkness they intend now to exploit

(καταδείσαντες… οὐ γὰρ ἑώρων ἐν τῇ νυκτί, 2.3.1). The relation between darkness and fear we saw earlier, then, leads us (like the Plataeans) to expect that the Thebans now ought to be both

‘not very courageous’ and (additionally) ‘rather fearful’, and that both emotional responses will be directly caused by their inability to see clearly in the dark. For the Plataeans, the lack of light gives them a tactical advantage (μὴ… ἐκ τοῦ ἴσου) at every level of the seeing-knowing-feeling triad. At each step, they contrive to regulate what the Thebans see, and thereby to control their perceptive and emotional experiences.67 In short, they attempt to control the circulation of both knowledge and affect.

Thucydides is explicit about the strategic importance of controlling knowledge when he concludes the three-part purpose clause with the phrase ἥσσους ὦσι τῆς σφετέρας ἐμπειρίας τῆς

κατὰ τὴν πόλιν (‘[in order that] they be worsted by [the Plataeans’] knowledge of the city’68).

Thucydides’ construction of the sentence positions the Theban lack of ἐμπειρία as the final link in a chain of causality that joins darkness, ignorance, and fear: the first causes the second causes the third. Thus, darkness becomes a symbol of the impossibility of knowing-through-seeing, the consequence of which, here in Plataea, is subjection to the influence of fear. If the Plataeans succeed in their plan, then the fear that had defined their collective identity earlier in the narrative will be reversed and mobilized instead around the Thebans. For Thucydides, the key

66 Fear and courage regularly emerge as emotional opposites on the battlefield, and we will encounter this opposition again in the next chapter. See, however, my final chapter, which in part addresses the problem of singular emotional opposition. Fear in fact may have several apparent ‘opposites’. 67 Cf. Greenwood 2006, 33: “…several of the battle narratives in the History are framed by a contest for clarity, where power and success consist in depriving the enemy of vision and sight, while at the same time gaining insight into their planning and actions.” 68 Adapted from Rusten 1989, ad loc.

42 element to the affective economy at Plataea is the relation between seeing/not seeing and knowing/not knowing. And throughout the episode, as both sides implicitly recognize, control of the scene’s optics yields epistemic and affective advantages that serve also as concrete tactical advantages.

Fear and the physical city

Karen Bassi remarks on the Plataean episode, “the unexpectedness of events and their consequences are elaborated in terms of the physical confines of the city…. The Thebans are captured and killed because, like the Athenians during the plague, they are trapped within the city walls.”69 In this way, the city walls of Plataea also figuratively define the affective space within which the whole episode unfolds. Just as the Athenians will be confined within the city through the horrors of the plague, so are the Thebans trapped inside Plataea. Both groups are subjected to emotional distress and fall victim to aporia: the Athenians have no cure for the plague, and the Thebans have no escape from within Plataea. Fleeing the confines of the agora, the Thebans then find themselves trapped within the spatial limits defined by Plataea’s defensive walls. In Thucydides’ presentation, they are equally impotent to escape these walls as they are to outrun the fear that harries them. Some resort to mounting the city walls and hurling themselves over, but the majority die from the fall (2.4.4):

οἱ μέν τινες αὐτῶν ἐπὶ τὸ τεῖχος ἀναβάντες ἔρριψαν ἐς τὸ ἔξω σφᾶς αὐτοὺς καὶ διεφθάρησαν οἱ πλείους.

69Bassi 2007, 181; see also ibid.: 182: “The spatial contingencies that structure the Plataean narrative are not simply statements of historical fact. Rather…they signify the potentially dangerous effects of a city’s physical boundaries in the time of war.” Stahl 2003, 80 likewise notes the similarity in “the unforeseen element” between the two episodes, Plataea and plague. Cf. also Visvardi 2015, 92: “The spatial and time-related constraints during the major battles consistently challenge the ability of the participants to see clearly and thus trigger intense fear and misdirected tactics.”

43 Some of them, climbing up the wall, threw themselves out (of the city), and many were killed.

Like the Athenian plague victims, whose land is under siege by the Spartan army, the Thebans face death within and death without. In short, there is no ‘outside’ of the affective space at

Plataea. Thucydides describes the physical environment inside the city via a series of vividly depicted images, which he uses to elaborate the sensory, epistemic, and affective dynamics playing out through the episode. In other words, he deploys imagery of the urban space of

Plataea as a narrative mechanism for conveying to the reader the subjective experience of the historical agents. As Plutarch avowed, such vividness of detail works to convey a sense of presence within the narrative world to the reader outside of that world.

The first of these images follows directly upon the Plataeans’ successful counterattack, which, at first, compels the Thebans to join up into a tight formation (2.4.1):

οἱ δ’ ὡς ἔγνωσαν ἐξηπατημένοι, ξυνεστρέφοντό τε ἐν σφίσιν αὐτοῖς καὶ τὰς προσβολὰς ᾗ προσπίπτοιεν ἀπεωθοῦντο.

(The Thebans) knew they had been deceived, and they joined up among one another and were repelling the assaults wherever they struck.

The Thebans at last grasp something of the reality of their situation. Their understanding is ironically undercut by the fact that what they now recognize is only that they have been deceived

(ἔγνωσαν ἐξηπατημένοι). As they form up into a tight unit, they enact a physical manifestation of the fear that continues to result from their lingering ignorance and continues to define their collective emotional identity. The Thebans attempt to exert some control over the physical space they occupy by, in a manner, shaping themselves into their own fortification wall. Ultimately, however, they will only be controlled by the urban space enclosing them. Thus, this first moment of physical cohesion is short-lived, though the Thebans’ emotional cohesion endures.

44 The Thebans’ repeated attempts to escape the spatial bounds of the city are physically

‘beaten back’ (ἀπεκρούσαντο) by the Plataeans, and they are eventually driven to flight through the city streets (2.4.2):

ἐφοβήθησαν καὶ τραπόμενοι ἔφευγον διὰ τῆς πόλεως, ἄπειροι μὲν ὄντες οἱ πλείους ἐν σκότῳ καὶ πηλῷ τῶν διόδων ᾗ χρὴ σωθῆναι (καὶ γὰρ τελευτῶντος τοῦ μηνὸς τὰ γιγνόμενα ἦν), ἐμπείρους δὲ ἔχοντες τοὺς διώκοντας τοῦ μὴ ἐκφεύγειν, ὥστε διεφθείροντο οἱ πολλοί.

Routed and terrified, they fled through the city; on the one hand, the majority of them were unfamiliar—in the darkness and the mud—with the paths by which they ought to have been saved (for in fact, these events took place at month’s end), but on the other hand, they also had pursuers whose experience prevented their escape. The result was that many of them were killed.

Thucydides describes the Thebans’ flight through the city in the language of fear (ἐφοβήθησαν) and ignorance (ἄπειροι), re-inscribing this basic relation we have watched play out since the start of the episode. Experience, in this context, signifies knowledge of the urban landscape, and

Thucydides crafts an explicit contrast between this knowledge and the lack thereof, reflected in the structural syntax of the passage (ἄπειροι μὲν… ἐμπείρους δὲ).70 And here too lack of knowledge, formulated as ‘inexperience’, is causally linked to the darkness itself (ἐν σκότῳ), which Thucydides reemphasizes by supplying the additional detail that there was no moon at this particular time of the month (τελευτῶντος τοῦ μηνὸς). The further consequence of the Thebans’ unfamiliarity with the urban topography, besides their pervasive terror, is of course their eventual deaths, which Thucydides attaches syntactically via the ‘actual result’ clause that concludes the passage. The deaths of ‘many’ Thebans directly result from the fatal combination of their own

ἀπειρία and fear in the darkness.71 Thucydides juxtaposes this combination against the ἐμπειρία

70 Stahl 2003, 67 marks Thuc.’s use here of rhetorical paranomasia to express thematic concept. 71 Note the similar situation at 3.112.6-7, where a group of Amphilochians, routed, afraid (ἐν φόβῳ), and unfamiliar (ἀπείρων) with the lay of the land, are killed in greater numbers for their ignorance of the landscape. The connection between fear and ἐμ/ἀπειρία is regularly invoked elsewhere in the text: 1.81.6 (Archidamus insists the Athenians’ experience in war will prevent them from being frightened by it); 4.126.5 (Brasidas noting that foreign soldiers are only frightening to those inexperienced of their sound and appearance); 6.70.1 (the Syracusans’ inexperience makes

45 and implied lack of fear among the Plataeans, who have not been described as fearful since the reversal of their initial fright (καταδείσαντες) early in the episode.

Thucydides also mentions specifically in this passage that the Thebans are hindered in their flight by the mud (πηλῷ) that has formed in the streets of Plataea. He has just mentioned for the first time that there had been rain during the night (ὑετοῦ ἅμα διὰ νυκτὸς πολλοῦ

ἐπιγενομένου, 2.4.1), and we learn shortly that the flooding it caused has also slowed the advance of a Theban relief party (2.5.1-3).72 Thucydides mentions the rain and its effects four times in the episode, including the two instances in close succession here (also 2.5.2, 2.5.3), but it seems to adversely affect only the Thebans. They are the party under increasing duress throughout the bulk of the episode, and so, from a characterization standpoint, their added difficulty with the rain and mud serves to increase the sense of disaster and hopelessness the narrative has attached to them. But the rain and mud that hinder them also stand in as physical indices of the epistemic deficit, and its affective consequences, which they have been struggling to overcome ever since losing control of the visual narrative of the scene. The sluggishness of mobility through the streets forced upon them by the mud enacts physically their slowness of comprehension in the darkness throughout this scene, both the dark and the mud obstructing their escape from ignorance and fear. Both the emotional and epistemic forces constraining them, then, are paralleled—indeed, concretized—in the material objects that hamper them: walls and swollen rivers from without, muddy streets, and, as I discuss below, projectiles, and shouting from within.

them afraid when a thunderstorm strikes in the midst of a battle with Athenians); 7.61.2 (Nicias exhorts his troops not to be fearful after a single defeat, like ‘men without experience’). 72 See Funke and Haake 2006 on Thuc.’s tendency to withhold topographical detail “until it becomes absolutely essential to the narrative.”

46 Only a small handful of Thebans (οὐ πολλοί) manage to escape undetected from the

(literal and figurative) confines of the city, and they only with some anonymous help from the

Plataean side (γυναικὸς δούσης πέλεκυν, 2.4.4). ‘Perception [of the Thebans] comes swiftly’ to the Plataeans (αἴσθησις γὰρ ταχεῖα ἐπεγένετο, 2.4.4), just as we might expect given the

Plataeans’ superior ability throughout this episode to control the economy of visual perception and knowledge. So then, most of these Theban fugitives are quickly discovered, and the breach in the physical and affective space promptly re-sealed. By closing the gates, the Plataeans have effectively blinded the Thebans again, this time to the outside world, showing them instead only the inner surfaces of the walls, the city’s structures, and its roads, none of which provide the

Thebans any reliable guidance. Subjected to this visual world they are unable to read or understand, the Thebans make repeated interpretive mistakes. Meanwhile, the Plataeans’ superior perception sustains their superior knowledge of the situation (and their continuing strategic advantage), a point Thucydides drives home in the climactic scene of the Thebans’ final surrender (2.4.5-7):

τὸ δὲ πλεῖστον καὶ ὅσον μάλιστα ἦν ξυνεστραμμένον ἐσπίπτουσιν ἐς οἴκημα μέγα, ὃ ἦν τοῦ τείχους καὶ αἱ θύραι ἀνεῳγμέναι ἔτυχον αὐτοῦ, οἰόμενοι πύλας τὰς θύρας τοῦ οἰκήματος εἶναι καὶ ἄντικρυς δίοδον ἐς τὸ ἔξω. ὁρῶντες δὲ αὐτοὺς οἱ Πλαταιῆς ἀπειλημμένους ἐβουλεύοντο εἴτε κατακαύσωσιν ὥσπερ ἔχουσιν, ἐμπρήσαντες τὸ οἴκημα, εἴτε τι ἄλλο χρήσωνται. τέλος δὲ οὗτοί τε καὶ ὅσοι ἄλλοι τῶν Θηβαίων περιῆσαν κατὰ τὴν πόλιν πλανώμενοι, ξυνέβησαν τοῖς Πλαταιεῦσι παραδοῦναι σφᾶς τε αὐτοὺς καὶ τὰ ὅπλα χρήσασθαι ὅτι ἂν βούλωνται.

The greater part of them, and as many as had especially rallied themselves together, came upon a large structure, which was built into the wall, and whose doors happened to be open; they believed the doors of the structure were the gates [of the city], and that straight on through them was a way out. But the Plataeans, when they saw that [the Thebans] had been cut off, deliberated whether they should burn them, just as they were, by setting fire to the structure, or employ some other tactic. In the end these, and whichever others of the Thebans remained wandering the city, agreed to surrender themselves and their weapons to the Plataeans to do with what they pleased.

47 The Thebans’ series of mistakes culminates here in this exemplary misperception of the reality of their physical surroundings. Thucydides redeploys the same imagery of the Thebans he used earlier in the scene, describing them again as a tightly concentrated unit (μάλιστα ἦν

ξυνεστραμμένον). Blind in the darkness, ignorant of the topography they inhabit, and beset with fear, the best the Thebans can do is to ‘fall into’ (ἐσπίπτουσιν) whatever chance sets before them, which at this point takes the form of yet another bounded physical space (οἴκημα μέγα). The verb

Thucydides employs to characterize their encounter with this structure is the term εἰσπίπτω, and it is one he typically associates not with acts of conscientious deliberation, but rather with the uncontrollable and nonrational.73 Thus, as in the previous passage, the Thebans here continue to be distinguished by their aimlessness and inability to know anything certain about their environment. Thucydides again draws a sharp contrast between this ongoing Theban misperception and the Plataeans’ clarity of vision (ὁρῶντες δὲ αὐτοὺς οἱ Πλαταιῆς

ἀπειλημμένους). This clarity further allows the Plataeans to deliberate and plan (ἐβουλεύοντο), a level of cognitive capacity no longer available to the Thebans. The Plataeans see and understand, and they are further able to make calculations on the basis of their understanding.74 The Thebans, by contrast, unable even to identify what they see, can only fall upon whatever tyche presents them with. Thucydides uses the term τυγχάνω to flag the fact that the doors to this particular structure were open due only to happenstance (αἱ θύραι ἀνεῳγμέναι ἔτυχον), and not as a result of any Theban forethought. The picture of the Thebans’ behavior throughout this passage is thus

73 The plague, for instance, is a sudden and unforeseen event whose symptoms ‘fall upon’ its victims (2.48.2, 48.3, 49.4, 49.6). The verb is also associated with the Corcyrean stasis episode: see Hornblower 1991 ad loc. 74 The Plataeans in this scene exemplify the Athenian ideal set out by Pericles in the Funeral Oration, according to which the Athenian citizen is capable of both daring and deliberation (διαφερόντως γὰρ δὴ καὶ τόδε ἔχομεν ὥστε τολμᾶν τε οἱ αὐτοὶ μάλιστα καὶ περὶ ὧν ἐπιχειρήσομεν ἐκλογίζεσθαι 2.40.3).

48 characterized by its desultory, ‘wandering’ (πλανώμενοι) quality. They are guided more by fear and blind chance than by clear-sighted deliberation.

Their epistemic state here, at the end of the episode, stands as a clear reversal of the

‘foresight’ (προίδοντες, 2.2.3) with which they were earlier characterized. With the deprivation of their literal vision, Thucydides seems to indicate, the Thebans have also lost touch with their ability to know, now, either their long term or immediate futures. The enclosed structure of the

οἴκημα presents a smaller incarnation of the city’s wall circuit, which confines the men in the broader scale of the scene, and it thus stands in as a further analog in the physical environment for the Thebans’ enduring sensory and epistemic limitations. Not only does the structure further restrict their vision, surrounded as it is by walls (including the city wall to which it is attached), it lends concrete physicality to the sense of terror that has inescapably encircled the Thebans ever since they yielded the sensory and epistemic advantage. And so in the end, ironically, thinking they have found the way to freedom, the Thebans exchange the confining walls of the city of

Plataea for the even smaller confines of a room within those walls. The reversal of fortune reaches its culmination when the Thebans are forced to come to terms with their Plataean pursuers (ξυνέβησαν τοῖς Πλαταιεῦσι παραδοῦναι σφᾶς τε αὐτοὺς καὶ τὰ ὅπλα, 2.4.7), just as the

Plataeans themselves had been compelled to do at the episode’s outset (πρὸς ξύμβασιν

ἐχώρησαν, 2.3.1).75

Beyond the bounded space of the city, the Theban reinforcements fare only marginally better. In an added twist of irony that further underscores the Plataeans’ epistemic superiority throughout the episode, the Theban relief party is able, at last, to accurately perceive the situation within Plataea and deliberate about it (ἐπεβούλευον, 2.5.4), but only after it is too late to have

75 Cf. Stahl 2003, 67: “…Thucydides wishes his reader to visualize the reversal (the μεταβολή), the complete disorientation of those who had at first been so well oriented.”

49 prevented it. Fittingly, it is now the Thebans who are characterized as ‘perceiving’ (ᾔσθοντο) rather than ‘seeing’ (ὁράω): ὡς δ᾽ ᾔσθοντο οἱ Θηβαῖοι τὸ γεγενημένον (2.5.4). Even now that the

Thebans understand what has happened, not only will they be powerless to do anything about it, but even the course of action they decide upon will ultimately fail them: they surrender as a group to the Plataeans, only to be slaughtered by their captors a few days later.76 The main thread of the story then comes to an end, and Thucydides thus puts a striking punctuation mark on the disparate power dynamic he has developed throughout the scene. The Plataeans maintain their position in the active role, while the Thebans remain passively subjected—to blindness, ignorance, and fear, and at the same time, to the will of their enemies.

Two Conclusions

Metatextuality, enargeia, and the “didactic arena” of the text

At the very close of the Plataea episode, Thucydides steps out of the internal narrative and assumes again the external ‘authorial’ voice in order to do something he does nowhere else in the

History.77 He reveals that there are conflicting accounts—specifically on the detail of the alleged

Plataean promise not to harm their Theban prisoners—which he could not (or would not) resolve

(2.5.6):

Θηβαῖοι μὲν ταῦτα λέγουσι καὶ ἐπομόσαι φασὶν αὐτούς· Πλαταιῆς δ᾽ οὐχ ὁμολογοῦσι τοὺς ἄνδρας εὐθὺς ὑποσχέσθαι ἀποδώσειν, ἀλλὰ λόγων πρῶτον γενομένων ἤν τι ξυμβαίνωσι, καὶ ἐπομόσαι οὔ φασιν.

Now, the Thebans tell it this way, and they say [the Plataeans] swore an oath. However, the Plataeans do not allow that they promised straightaway to return the (captive) men, but only after negotiations took place first, if there were some agreement; and they say that they never swore it on oath.

76 On the Plataean promise to preserve their Theban captives, which they quickly renege upon, see Macleod 1977, West 2003, Hornblower 2011, responding to West. Cf. Williams 1998, 161-7 for an ethical-philosophical approach to the dispute. 77 West 2003.

50 Hornblower observes on this passage, “What is unusual is not so much that he gives two versions, but that he does not decide between them.”78 Could Thucydides, here at the conclusion of the opening episode of his war narrative, be demonstrating for the reader one of the basic interpretive difficulties of the historian’s task, namely, that ‘different people said different things’ about their experiences in the conflict—as Kallet has phrased it, letting us into his

“workshop of history”?79 In this battle narrative which has thematized the subjective interpretation of visual signs and the problematic attainability of truth, disputes over historical truth continue even after the event itself: both sides dispute the promises and oaths made about the Theban prisoners. With fear having dissipated from the scene, historical knowledge nevertheless retains at least an implicit attachment to such affective forces as the resentment and anger that subtend and fuel this ongoing disagreement, long after the fact, between the two sides.

The History has often been interpreted as a textual “didactic arena,” constructed for the reader’s edification.80 W. R. Connor, for example, explains how Thucydides “replicates the intractability of historical experience,” thereby leaving it to the reader “to react, to assess, and thereby to learn.”81 Plataea, then, would provide a rich arena for thematic issues that are closely linked to the author’s literary-historiographical program. In particular, the conflict he reveals here at the end of the episode offers a case study for the potential disparity between rhetoric and truth. The Plataeans are alleged to have made certain guarantees ‘in words’ which they failed to abide by ‘in deed’. As Adam Parry demonstrated, the discrepancy between what is said and what is done, typified in the logos-ergon opposition, is perhaps the central antithesis—both logical and

78 Hornblower 2011, 164. Cf. 8.87 in the History, where Thuc. relates differing accounts, but also states his own. 79 Kallet 2006. Quoted text from 1.22.3: οἱ πάροντες τοῖς ἔργοις οὐ ταὐτὰ περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν ἔλεγον. 80 The term is originally Davidson’s (1991), and it describes Polybius’ Histories, but some Thucydidean scholars have appropriated the phrase. See, e.g., Rood 1998, 66. 81 Connor 1985, 6-7. Cf. Forsdyke 2017; Grethlein 2013b, 135: the “text incites readers to engage in constructing meaning themselves.”

51 rhetorical—around which the History is constructed.82 The end of the Plataea episode, then, may represent an ‘internal narrative’ instantiation of a thematic component central to the author’s

‘external’ claims for his text. If so, then Thucydides is further accentuating the interdependency between internal and external narrative by inviting the reader into the historiographical process, as it were, to ‘look upon the clear truth’ for him/herself and draw an independent conclusion.83

In order to ‘look upon the clear truth’, then, the reader must engage actively and critically with the text, ‘become an observer’, like Plutarch described. But as John Moles pointed out, observation is not a passive activity; rather, ‘looking’ critically “requires active discrimination.”84 And indeed, Thucydides’ language frequently enforces its pedagogical task, demanding the reader’s utmost attention and compelling him/her into closer engagement with the prose.85 In other words, Thucydides requires of his reader the same care and diligence in reading the text that he himself so expressly claims to have employed in the painstaking task of its writing, undertaken ‘with difficulty’ (ἐπιπόνως, 1.22.2) and devotion to ‘accuracy concerning each detail’ (ἀκριβείᾳ περὶ ἑκάστου, 1.22.2). The enargeia for which Plutarch praised

Thucydides was an indispensable strategy in this task, insofar as it invited “intense imaginative involvement with the scenes described” by the author, and in that way served as a didactic tool to draw the reader closer to the events set on display in the text.86 Ruth Webb has recently argued that in ancient theories of ekphrasis and enargeia, “it is the act of seeing that is imitated, not the object itself.” By transmitting an event through vivid images, the author is

82 Parry 1981. 83 Moles 2001, 219: The Hist. must “put readers (all readers) inside the text, so that that text is always in a sense contemporary and they see and experience the problems, as they unfold, for themselves.” 84 Moles 2001, 218. See also Yunis 2003b; Kallet 2006. 85 Parry 1989, 194, compares Gorgias’ rigidly antithetical style: “The style of Gorgias was bland assurance. That of Thucydides, using much the same forms of language, is struggle.” His abstractions “resist the intellect which wants to put them into order…” Kallet 2006, 337 observes Thuc.’s “insistence on hard work on the reader’s part.” 86 Webb 2009, 19.

52 not primarily attempting to convey information about a specific reality, but rather to prompt his audience to re-enact internally the act of seeing such a sight, and therefore to achieve an approximation of what an actual witness might have felt. 87

Thus, enargeia effectively works to align reader with (dramatic/historical) actor, situating the one within the subjective experience of the other.88 This is particularly the case at Plataea, where we ‘read’ the unfolding scene alongside the historical actors, encouraged to see and feel along with them, and ultimately, to learn with them to discern the reality of the situation by means of our perception.89

One further snapshot from this episode may help to clinch the model of narrator/reader interaction I am suggesting. In about the middle of the episode, once the Thebans have been terrified and put to flight through the darkness of the city, Thucydides briefly introduces a scene of vividly narrated imagery and multiple sensory experience. As we have seen, the Thebans are assailed, in a manner, by the fears that persistently encircle them throughout the scene. At 2.4.2 the affective bombardment on them becomes reified in the image of stones and roof tiles assailing them from above (λίθοις τε καὶ κεράμῳ βαλλόντων), and, as I noted above, muddied streets hindering their movement from below (πηλῷ τῶν διόδων). Thucydides then adds the vividly auditory detail of slaves’ and women’s ‘screaming and shouting’ (τῶν γυναικῶν καὶ τῶν

οἰκετῶν … κραυγῇ τε καὶ ὀλολυγῇ χρωμένων, 2.4.1). Echoing Plutarch’s assessment of

Thucydides, Stahl remarks on the vividness of this scene that “Thucydides wishes his reader to visualize” the scene as it unfolds.90 However, Thucydides seems to indicate that vision has

87 Ibid., 128: Cf. Scarry 1999, 6: “We habitually say of images in novels that they 'represent' or 'are mimetic of' the real world. But the mimesis is perhaps less in them than in our seeing of them... Imagining is an act of perpetual mimesis." 88 See Connor 1985 on how this technique contributes to the author’s (perceived) credibility. 89 Cf. Kallet 2001, 82: “The purpose of [Thuc.’s] emphasis on opsis is to transport the external audience into a visual scene or episode that the internal audience is interpreting--in a sense, to say to the reader: Here is the visible; how are you going to interpret it?” 90 Stahl 2003, 67. Cf. Walker 1993, 375, who characterizes Thuc. as a historian “passionately engaged in the events that he sought to place ‘before the reader’s eyes’.”

53 become insufficient, already as a sensory medium for the Thebans to acquire knowledge, but now too as the sole sensory detail in a vividly depicted and highly emotionally charged scene.

Vision, in other words, requires a synaesthetic supplement. Sean Gurd has recently pointed out how in Greek tragedy, during moments of especially intense pathos, usually discrete sensory experiences could become “deterritorialized.”91 Thucydides engages in a similar narrative technique here, as the sense of vision, so highly emphasized up to this point, gives way to descriptions of the auditory and the haptic—the wailing of women and slaves, a physical assault of stone and tile projectiles, and wet, sticky mud underfoot. The sounds of feminine wailing, in fact, recall instances of ὀλο- and οἰμω- terminology from tragedy,92 thus perhaps recalling for the reader the multi-sensory space of the ancient theater.93 By invoking such a multi-sensory experience, then, Thucydides invites the reader not just to visualize the scene but to become immersed in it through a broader spectrum of sensory engagement—contrary to Plutarch, to become both spectator and listener. These sorts of depictions, I suggest, work actively toward shrinking the gap between the narrative and its reader by appealing to a more thoroughly sensual encounter with the text, thereby encouraging a mode of reading history that engages not only the cognitive, but also the sensory and emotional experience of the reader. In this way, Thucydides presents the opportunity for a reading of historical events that engages the same experiential elements as those which operate among the agents of history. Vision retains the primary position

91 Gurd 2016, 82-90: “In tragedy… synesthesia was actualized by moments of intensity: extreme experience provoked transitions between hearing and sight” (84). 92 The noun ὀλολυγή, signifying a distinctly feminine sound of lament, appears once in tragedy (Eur. Med.), but the verb ὀλολύζω (absent from Thuc.) occurs six times (four in Eur., twice in Aesch. Eum.); see Pulleyn 1997, 178-81. Derivations of the terms οἰμώζω/οἰμωγή (twice in Thuc.) appear twenty-five times across fifth century tragedy. 93 Greenwood 2006, 24 observes that the actors in the Hist. “have watched drama and it informs the way in which they respond to events” narrated in the text. See ibid., 19-41 for further discussion. For a study on the interrelationship between Thuc.’s History and the tragic chorus, see Visvardi 2015.

54 in the scene, as it does throughout the History, but Thucydides’ vivid depiction nevertheless points the way to a multi-sensory and highly experiential way of knowing history.

The emotional utility of the text

I hope to have shown in this reading of the Plataean episode that visuality is not only a central metaphorical conceit for Thucydides’ claims for the work (‘whoever will want a clear view of the events…’ 1.22.4), but also a central motif for the internal narrative of the History. In

Thucydides’ depiction, moreover, fear is an essential element enmeshed throughout the visual- evaluative process at all levels of the narrative. It is not that we, as readers, necessarily feel the same shock and terror as the characters themselves, vividly detailed though the scenes may be.

The point is rather that those feelings (‘most invisible in speech’) have been made manifest in the narrative in such a way as to encourage readerly empathy on several experiential levels. By looking upon the dynamics of the seeing-knowing-feeling complex in action (at Plataea), the reader has been afforded the opportunity to understand the importance of those dynamics to this particular episode of this particular war. But within the universalizing framework of the text, this

‘possession for all time’ (κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, 1.22.4), the significance of fear to vision and cognition is no less universal than human nature itself. Fear played a basic causal role in this war, just as it will in future wars, just as it does in the workings of τὸ ἀνθρώπινον. Thus, the vividness of emotional detail we encounter at Plataea (and elsewhere) is linked directly to two of the author’s guiding theses on (1) the underlying causality of this particular war, and (2) the basic framework of human nature. The role fear plays in the action at Plataea is necessarily paradigmatic for its role both in the Peloponnesian War and in human affairs generally. The enargeia that so impressed Plutarch therefore served a central purpose in Thucydides’ narrative method. It allowed him to render visible in words previously unseen processes of historical

55 causality. And for the reader-turned-spectator to be able to look upon and examine (σκοπεῖν) the dynamics of human emotionality in action, from a vantage point that exceeds the vision of any historical agent, is to understand its significance to historical events.94

The cover of darkness at Plataea serves only to underscore the importance of clear sight for the reader, who watches and interprets events even as the characters themselves do the same.

How, then, does the relation between clarity of comprehension and emotionality play out at the level of readerly engagement with the text? The History is a text that uses an isolated, albeit extended, historical event to shed light on a set of human universals whose significance transcends the particularity of any single war. As such, it does not offer the possibility to prevent such wars from again befalling mankind; on the contrary, it guarantees they will recur (1.22.4):

ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι.

However many people will want to examine the clear truth of what happened and will happen again one day, in accordance with human nature, in similar ways.

What it offers instead is a framework for understanding such events within the universalized picture of human motivations it presents, in part, by repeatedly plunging us into detailed narratives of human experience.95 Unlike the historical actors, however, whose understanding of their own situations is as limited as their immediate perspective, the reader has been guided by an all-seeing and omniscient narrator, whose gaze purports to encompass the broad vista of human history. The text itself, then, is a didactic project of critical intellection and evaluation

94 On this point, see Greenwood 2006, 20-6: “Like the spectator (theates) of Greek drama who sees more and knows more than the characters in the drama, the reader of Thucydides views a replay of the war that offers much fuller coverage than the limited perspectives of those involved in the war” (20). Cf. Dewald 1985, 56, who observes that Thuc. rejects the Herodotean model of the “disengaged savant,” such as Solon, who can observe and interpret events from within the narrative. By contrast in Thuc., “there are no knowledgeable onlookers.” 95 See Kallet 2006: “the historian is showing the reader how to engage in the critical inquiry and discovery that comprise historical investigation,” and in that way demonstrating “how to think about other events” in history (337- 8, emphasis hers).

56 that offers to provide the ‘willing’ reader with the tools to make sense of both the past and the future it promises will look ‘such and similar’ (τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων).96 The proffered desideratum of clear understanding, embodied in the programmatic phrase τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, I suggest, has an evident corollary in the mechanics of seeing, knowing, and fearing I have examined in the scene at Plataea. In this episode we watched as fear shifted sides in the conflict in precise opposition to the balance of visuality and understanding. The Plataeans’ fears were dispelled after they were able to get a clearer picture of their Theban opponents, and conversely, the Thebans became afraid when they were denied visual information and subjected to a state of relative ignorance. While the History as a whole cannot hope, nor does it claim, to prevent future wars from occurring, it may offer a certain emotional utility to its prospective readership: by providing its reader with a framework for making sense of the mechanics of such future catastrophes, it can serve to alleviate the subjective fears that, as the text itself demonstrates, arise from failures of clear understanding. Breaking down the otherwise inscrutable complexities of historical causation, Thucydides’ text presents itself as a comprehensive vision of humanity, a powerful tool for the discerning reader against the anxieties of his/her present day.97 In short, it offers to shine a light onto the processes that propel human events, and in so doing, to render the darkness of history clearly visible, knowable, and less daunting. Thus, against the inherently fearsome world of human history that Thucydides presents, the text’s analytical framework for understanding both humanity and history serves as, if not a built-in remedy, at least a balm.

96 On the historiographical utility of future time, see Bassi 2016 and Greenwood 2016; and cf. Rood 1998, 286: “Thucydides does not just try to make the past comprehensible by the way he tells his story, he also tries to make the future comprehensible by the broader categories to which he appeals.” 97 In a different literary context, Nietzsche (2001, 355) expressed a related sentiment: “Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?”

57 We have seen at Plataea something of the crucial role of visual information and fear on the battlefields of the History. In chapter three, I will look at their equally important role in Pericles’ crafting of an idealized Athenian identity—and with it an idealized citizen gaze—in the funeral oration, where I argue for a similar relation between viewing, knowing, and fear as that which I have suggested in this chapter. In the next chapter, however, I look at two more battle episodes in which the ideal of clear vision is compromised, those at Sphacteria and Epipolae. In these episodes, auditory stimuli assume a more significantly causative role than anywhere else in the text, and I argue that their prominence poses important problems for the sensory and epistemological ideals set forth by Thucydides for his historiographical project.

Chapter 2

Affective Soundscapes: Auditory Epistemology and Fear at Sphacteria and Epipolae

Θάλης ὁ Μιλήσιος ἐρωτήθεις πόσον ἀπέχει τὸ ψεῦδος τοῦ ἀληθούς. “ὅσον” ἔφη “ὀφθαλμοὶ τῶν ὤτων.” (Stob. Flor. 111.12.14)

ὦτα γὰρ τυγχάνει ἀνθρώποισι ἐόντα ἀπιστότερα ὀφθαλμῶν. (Hdt. Hist. 1.8.1)

Introduction

When asked how far a lie was from the truth, Thales of Miletus is reported to have responded ‘as far as the eyes are from the ears’. Like other Presocratic philosophers, Thales was skeptical about the reliability of the senses generally.1 But his remark is nevertheless indicative of what was, through much of antiquity, a widely accepted epistemological hierarchy of sensory perception.

Vision, not hearing, was the sense most closely linked to ideas of knowledge and truth.

Herodotus’ Lydian king Candaules, certain his confidant Gyges cannot appreciate feminine beauty through hearsay accounts alone, invites him to peep on his naked wife, repeating the adage that ‘the ears are less trustworthy than the eyes’. Even Plutarch’s admiration for the ability of Thucydidean enargeia ‘to turn the hearer into a spectator’ implicitly endorses the

1 Cf. Heraclitus’ similar observation that ‘the eyes are more accurate witnesses than the ears’ (ὀφθαλμοὶ γὰρ τῶν ὤτων ἀκριβέστεροι μάρτυρες), reported at Pol. Hist. 12.27.1 (= DK 22 B101a). See also Xen. Mem. 3.11.1, with Goldhill 1998; Arist. Metaph. 980a; De An. 3.3, 429a. Useful overviews of the relevant ancient material include Segal 1995; Marincola 1997, 63-86; Cairns 2005; Squire 2016, 8-19.

59 subordination of the auditory to the visual.2 As I argued in the last chapter, the History is deeply committed to the conventional correlation between sight and knowledge. It is worth revisiting briefly the confluence of visual language in the opening pages of the work. In the Methodology chapters (1.20-23), the historian grounds his investigative project in visual metaphor: it is a work that has been constructed ‘out of the most manifest evidence’ (ἐκ τῶν ἐπιφανεστάτων σημείων,

1.21.1), and it purports to expose to view the ‘least visible’ but ‘truest cause’ of this war (τὴν γὰρ

μὲν ἀληθεστάτην πρόφασιν, ἀφανεστάτην δὲ λόγῳ, 1.23.6). Moreover, the reward for whoever is willing to contemplate the written text of the History will be ‘a clear view of the events that transpired’ (ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, 1.22.4), a view enabled by a text that claims to offer an unmediated portrait of ‘the deeds themselves’ (τὰ δ᾽ ἔργα τῶν

πραχθέντων, 1.22.2). With the Greek phrase τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, Thucydides exploits a semantic overlap between visual and intellectual scrutiny: clarity of vision, in this rhetorical construction, equates to clarity of understanding.3 The audience Thucydides prescribes for his work will be deeply engaged with the parallel processes of observation and critical judgment.4

However, in contrast to his promotion of visual modes of understanding, Thucydides repeatedly denigrates the epistemological value of hearing. People tend to believe ‘hearsay accounts’ about their own history (τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, 1.20.1), a mode of historical investigation Thucydides sets in stark opposition to the ‘search for truth’ his own text claims to undertake (ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, 1.20.3). Nor is the History a composition that has been

2 Plut. De Glor. Ath. 347a. 3 The verb σκοπεῖν is programmatic for Thuc.’s historiographical method, occurring in the work’s opening chapter (1.1.3) and twice more in the methodological chapters (1.20.2, 1.22.4). See Crane 1996, 236-47; Bakker 2006, 116- 23; Edmunds 2009. On the idealized transparency of the narrative, see Connor 1985; Loraux 1986b. For the “inscriptional inheritance” of Thuc.’s text, see Moles 1999. On the relation between “visibility and legibility” in the text, see Bassi 2016. 4 Kallet 2001 argues that for Thuc. “opsis always involves interpretation” (22), for external reader as well internal actor. Cf. ibid., 55-8. See further Moles 2001; Yunis 2003b; Kallet 2006.

60 adorned with the affecting sounds characteristic of ‘poetic hymns’ (ὡς ποιηταὶ ὑμνήκασι,

1.21.1), which represent, for Thucydides, the prioritization of listening pleasure over veracity

(ἐπὶ τὸ προσαγωγότερον τῇ ἀκροάσει ἢ ἀληθέστερον, ibid.). On the contrary, Thucydides concertedly distances his text from auditory enjoyment, suggesting (with some smug irony) the work’s lack of mythological material might make it ‘less enjoyable for listening to’ (ἐς μὲν

ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον, 1.22.4). Such auditory pleasures are ideologically opposed to his own historiographical project, itself an object intended for continuous visual (re)examination rather than a one-time oral recital (κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἤ

ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν, 1.22.4).5 Audition thus emerges in the opening chapters as a mode of sensory perception that is, in the first place, antithetical to the discovery of truth, and secondly, closely tied to affective experience. While clear vision maintains a close link with knowledge and historical truth in Thucydides, audition is attached to the passionate impulses that characterize lack of critical judgment.6

In the Methodology, Thucydides’ mistrust centers on a specific kind of alluring sound, poetic and hearsay accounts of Greek history. In this chapter, I argue that his critique extends to other sounds in the History as well, and that Thucydides’ anxieties over audition are directly related to the problematic relation he sees between sound, knowledge, and emotion. My contention is that Thucydides’ prioritization of the visual is not simply a replication of the intellectual and philosophical commitments of his own time, but rather that Thucydides sets up vision as the normative pathway to rationally conceived thought and emotion. Sounds, however, have the capacity to short-circuit this normative evaluative process by circumventing cognition

5 On the Hist. as a text “ideologically opposed to the spoken word,” see Greenwood 2006, 37. 6 The reason/passion antithesis has been examined by many readers of Thuc. See, e.g., Orwin 1994; Ober 1998, 52- 121; Foster 2010.

61 and eliciting unmediated affective responses in hearing subjects—that is, emotion lacking cognitive grounding. As we saw in the last chapter, visual perception in the scene at Plataea was conspicuously tied to both the inferential and the emotional capacities. In this chapter, I contend that for this historical text, whose fundamental aim is to demonstrate a model of critical evaluation based on clear-sighted, rational analysis, auditory perception poses a singular problem for its regular resistance to the rationalizing mind. This contrast between visual and auditory information is put on clear display in the narrative episodes I examine in the later sections of the chapter.

Hence, my focus in this chapter will be on examining the different relationships between the two senses, vision and audition, and the emotional responses they elicit. In the first part of the chapter, I lay out my theoretical approach, which builds on recent scholarship on the close relationship in ancient thought between sounds and emotions, and I provide a representative

(though not comprehensive) survey of examples of this relationship at work with a range of emotions in Thucydides’ text. In the second and third sections, I present in detail two case studies drawn from the two most fully developed sections of battle narrative in the History in which sounds play a decisive role, not only in the historical outcomes but also in the cognitive and emotional experiences of the participants. Fear plays a significant thematic role in both episodes. My case studies in this chapter are two more pieces of battle narrative: the skirmish on the island of Sphacteria in book four (4.31-38), and the battle at Epipolae in book seven (7.42-

44). The two episodes share an important motif: like the Plataea episode in book two, both

Sphacteria and Epipolae are scenes with profoundly impaired visibility for one or both parties involved. Epipolae is one of the few night battles in the History. Visibility is problematic from

62 the start.7 And at Sphacteria, although the battle unfolds in broad daylight, the Spartan army has been all but blinded by a stifling cloud of dust and ash stirred up in the commotion of battle. We have just seen in the episode at Plataea some of the effects of darkness and blindness on the

Theban contingent, whose sensory and epistemic failures contributed to both their emotional state and their strategic disadvantage. However, although sounds did have a thematic role to play at Plataea, they did not factor significantly into the characters’ attempts to gain knowledge. By contrast, at Sphacteria and Epipolae Thucydides explores the epistemology of auditory perception more thoroughly, sufficiently I think for us to begin to draw some broader conclusions about some of the problems he envisions in human interaction with an acoustic environment. I suggest that in these two narratives of problematic visibility, the dichotomy between visual and auditory perception established in the Methodology is reconstructed, put on display, and performed by the historical actors. This performance of sensory experiences allows

Thucydides to stage contrasting epistemological accounts of sense perception, showing us how vision and audition interact in different ways with both cognition and fear. What emerges from these passages is a disruptive potential of sound not only to directly affect characters’ emotions, but also to overturn conventional structures of meaning and construct alternate sets of belief in their place. Both scenes, then, implicitly reconfirm sight as the normative evaluative mode in the

History and the sense most closely associated with the text’s foundational claims to dispassionate and objective truth. At the same time, they illustrate the causative, deeply impassioned, and potentially subversive role of sound and fear in historical events.

7 The only other fully developed night episodes in the Hist. occur at Plataea (2.2-6 and 3.20-24). Minor night actions occur more frequently: Demosthenes exploits the cover of darkness for strategic advantage at 3.112, as does Brasidas at 4.103.5, 110.1, and 120.2. The retreating Athenian army in Sicily marches out by night and then succumbs to panic in the darkness at 7.80.

63 Theoretical Approach: “Auditory Affect”

As Sean Gurd has recently shown, audition and emotion were closely connected in ancient Greek thought and literature, a relation he calls “auditory affect.”8 Gurd’s phrase serves as a convenient catch-all for the spectrum of emotional forces at play in the passages he examines, and I use it in that same capacity in this chapter. However, I will note that scholars of affect theory distinguish between the two terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ according to their relations with cognition: affect occurs as a generalized precognitive sensation, while emotion is the result of processes of reasoning and judgment.9 Affect thus constitutes a category of feeling in the abstract, a response to a sensory experience that has not, or has not yet, been filtered through cognitive processes. By distinguishing between affect and emotion, affect theorists thus foreground the question of cognition that is elided in Gurd’s phrase. While the affect/emotion distinction does not have any clear parallel in ancient thought, it can help to describe some of the phenomena we encounter in, e.g., Thucydides’ description of Spartan feelings in the scene at Sphacteria. That said, I do not as a rule make a regular theoretical distinction between the terms; where I do distinguish, I am explicit about the hermeneutic benefit I think the distinction provides.

I do however argue that the relation between cognition and emotionality is what is at stake in the text’s contrasting demonstrations of visual and auditory perception, and that the scenes I examine highlight the complexities of that relationship. To anticipate my argument: the scene at Sphacteria depicts Athenian sounds as eliciting a visceral fear response (ἔκπληξις) from the Spartans that compromises their capacity for dispassionate reflection and leaves them in a dazed state between sense perception and rational understanding. They experience a sensation

8 Gurd 2016, esp. 58-96. 9 See, e.g., Flatley 2008, 11-27; Gregg & Seigworth 2010, 1-29. For a recent treatment of the relation between emotion and the language we use to describe it, see Theodoropoulou 2012.

64 closer to the ‘pure affect’ that some theorists of affect have argued precedes named emotion.10 In short, sound at Sphacteria forecloses the possibility of perfectly rational judgment without desensitizing the Spartans to affective experience. The sounds that assault the Athenians at

Epipolae, on the other hand, do not preclude cognitive judgment altogether, but instead pervert it by failing to separate it cleanly from emotion. Fear and confusion pervade the scene and hijack the Athenians’ capacity for understanding, resulting in a construction of beliefs that deeply distorts reality. I argue that this replicates the corrupted epistemologies of the Corcyraean stasis and Athenian plague episodes. The problematic relationship established between acoustics, affect, and cognition at Sphacteria is thus pushed further still at Epipolae, where fear and reason become indistinguishable, mutually causative, and mutually corrupting. For Thucydides, the absence of visual information and ubiquity of auditory sensation combine to produce an epistemological scenario which, like poetic and hearsay accounts of history, proves hostile to the discovery of truth, for both the reader and agent of history.

Auditory Affect in Thucydides’ Text

Gurd’s study of auditory affect in archaic and classical Greek poetry illustrates that sound, for many authors, was conceived of as a medium capable of transmitting feeling across physical space. In his reading of the opening of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, for instance, he shows how the martial din of the Seven outside Thebes’ walls reaches the population inside the city, in whom it causes fear, civic unrest, and, in reaction, a swell of affectively charged sound in the form of lamentation.11 Sounds cross the topography of the play’s setting and work on the emotions of the characters who occupy its civic space. A similar understanding of acoustics as

10 See, e.g., Massumi 1995. 11 Gurd 2016, 62-89.

65 mobile and conducive to affect underlies Thucydides’ descriptions of auditory dynamics throughout the History. This is particularly well illustrated in the episodes I examine in this chapter, where sounds move through the physical landscape from multiple directions, both expressing and eliciting affect. In the narrative of the scene at Sphacteria, Thucydides exploits the idea of mobile and transmissible emotion to structure the narrative in this passage, constructing and deconstructing the battle lines between the opposing armies according to the different ways they see, hear, and feel their environment. Similarly, in the narrative of the

Epipolae battle, a series of auditory stimuli and receptions gives shape to both the Athenians’ subjective experience of the fight and their perceptions of allies and enemies.

Although the scenes at Sphacteria and Epipolae are unique in the History for the vividness and detail with which they depict the dynamics of auditory affect, they are typical of the close connection between sound and affect evident throughout this text. Elsewhere in the

History, sounds of many kinds are regularly linked directly with a range of emotions. The examples I survey below represent only occurrences of non-linguistic sound. If voiced, they are either inarticulate, like laughter or weeping, or unarticulated by Thucydides, like the shouts, prayers, or whispers whose exact words are left out of the narrative. Thucydides expresses the fact of these auditory phenomena, but he withholds their linguistic content. This stands in contrast to, for example, pre-battle exhortatory speeches, which can be presented as both shouted sound and articulate language.12 Thucydides provides the logic and argumentation for these utterances, and so grants explicit access to the cognitive bases for the emotional responses they

12 See, e.g., 7.76.1, where Nicias ‘uses shouting’ (βοῇ χρώμενος) as the verbal means to raise his troops’ morale (ἐθάρσυνε τε καὶ παρεμυθεῖτο).

66 seek to produce in their audiences.13 Sounds lacking articulate language have a more precarious and inconsistent relationship with conscious thought.

The following list, classified into several broad categories, is intended to demonstrate the first premise of my argument, that Gurd’s notion of auditory affect is readily present in an array of historical settings in Thucydides’ work:

Martial shouts

At Torone in book four, a scene unfolds that strikingly resembles the mobility and transmissibility of auditory affect in the Seven against Thebes as well as in the Sphacteria episode. The sounds of Spartan shouting outside the city, as the general Brasidas leads an assault, project terror (ἔκπληξιν) over the city walls and into the hearts of the citizens within.14 Sound is able to traverse the physical space of the setting and convey a charge of fear along with it. A few chapters later, in a speech to his troops, Brasidas himself acknowledges the emotional effect of such martial shouting, which he describes as ‘unbearable’ (ἀφόρητος, 4.126.5).

At other times in the History, collective war cries ring out in the midst of battle, not as calls demanding courage but as verbal manifestations of it. When Phormio’s troops perceive their victory in a naval battle against Peloponnesians in book two, their feeling of courage ‘seizes them’, and compels them to shout aloud in their enthusiasm (θάρσος ἔλαβε… ἐμβοήσαντες).15

The syntax of the sentence, in which ‘daring’ has seized the position of agency, offers a striking analogue for the motivational power wielded by emotions in Thucydides’ conception of human behavior. A similar sense of collective confidence elicits a vocal outburst from the Athenians at

13 Exhortatory speeches in direct speech: 2.87-9, 4.95, 6.68, 7.61-8, 7.77; in indirect: 4.114.3-5, 7.69. 14 4.112.1: ὁ Βρασίδας ἰδὼν τὸ ξύνθημα ἔθει δρόμῳ, ἀναστήσας τὸν στρατὸν ἐμβοήσαντάς τε ἀθρόον καὶ ἔκπληξιν πολλὴν τοῖς ἐν τῇ πόλει παρασχόντας. 15 2.92.1: τοὺς δ’ Ἀθηναίους ἰδόντας ταῦτα γιγνόμενα θάρσος τε ἔλαβε καὶ ἀπὸ ἑνὸς κελεύσματος ἐμβοήσαντες ἐπ’ αὐτοὺς ὥρμησαν.

67 Sphacteria in book four. The war cry is not inherently fearsome in Thucydides’ depictions, but it tends to be an auditory event immediately linked with emotion of some kind.

Other nonverbal human sounds (lamentation, laughter, murmur)

Further emotionally charged sounds occur regularly in the narrative in the forms of wailing and lament. As we saw in the scene at Plataea, these human sounds (κραυγή, ὀλολυγή, 2.4.2) expressed the agitation and fear of the Plataean citizens defending their city from Theban invaders. Elsewhere in the History, similar cries convey the suffering of Athenian plague victims

(ὀλόφυρσις, 2.51.5), whose agony is further illustrated through the sounds of their physical symptoms (πταρμός, βήξ, λύγξ, ἀποκαθάρσεις χολῆς, 2.49). Lamentation also issues from the ritual mourning over the Athenian war dead before Pericles’ funeral oration (ὀλοφύρομαι,

2.34.5),16 and it characterizes the tragic pathos of the wounded, dying, and defeated Athenian army in the final stages of the Sicilian campaign.17 These pathetic human sounds, heard in a variety of narrative contexts throughout the work, embody the close connection between the auditory and the affective.

Sound and affect also occupy political spaces in the History. The Athenian Assembly rings out with derisive laughter (γέλωτος, 4.28.5) at the demagogue Cleon’s bombast in book four. In book six, the same term for laughter again conveys derision and contempt in a democratic assembly, when the Syracusans laugh down the idea that the Athenians would be daring and foolish enough to mount a military expedition to Sicily (6.35.1). Furthermore, the political support for that very expedition, back at Athens, is cultivated through sound of a lower

16 On feminine lament in archaic and classical literature, see Loraux 1998, Alexiou 2002. Pericles himself twice invokes lamentation in the speech, both times to discourage his audience from further indulging in it (2.44.1, 46.2). 17 See esp. the vivid and pathetic soundscapes Thuc. constructs at 7.70-1 and 7.75 (βοή, οἰμωγή, στόνος, ὀλοφυρμός), the latter of which includes the Hist.’s only instances of weeping (δάκρυα).

68 register, whispers and rumors (διαθροέω) of Egestaean wealth, auditory information that serves to spread imperialist desires through the Athenian demos.18 Although Thucydides provides a sense of the rumor’s subject matter, he withholds its verbatim content while taking care to underscore both the distinctive character of its sound and its emotional effect on its auditors.

Music, prayer, and paean

Only rarely does music occur in the text, but when it does it tends to convey feeling. The

Spartans at Mantinea employ aulos music before the battle, not to incite fear or boldness, but specifically for the emotional calm and organizational composure it induces in the advancing army.19 By contrast, for Athenian and Syracusan troops on Sicily in book six, the music of trumpeters (σαλπικταί) serves not to calm but to rouse both sides to enthusiastic action.20 Like the sounds of shouting, then, musical sounds in the text open to a range of feelings.

The only other instance of the trumpet in the text occurs in the vivid scene at the Piraeus at

6.32, where its sound calls first for silence and then for collective prayers (εὐχάς, συνεπηύχοντο) from the citizen body on behalf of the impending expedition to Sicily. Prayers are rare in the

History and occur predominantly in moments of intensified emotion. Hence, they cluster around the beginning and end of the Sicilian expedition. At the Great Harbor battle in Syracuse, the spectators lining the shore call to the gods for the salvation of the fighters on the water

(ἀνάκλησις, 7.71.3). Later, after their defeat, some of these same men utter prayers to the gods

18 6.46.4: ...ἀφικόμενοι ἐς τὰς Ἀθήνας διετρόησαν ὡς χρήματα πολλὰ ἴδοιεν. Cf. 5.7.2, where ‘rumor’ (θρόος) reaches the general Cleon of his army’s unhappiness and lack of confidence, motivating him toward the series of tactical decisions that will lead to his death in a battle against the Spartan Brasidas. 19 5.70.1: Λακεδαιμόνιοι δὲ βραδέως καὶ ὑπὸ αὐλητῶν πολλῶν ὁμοῦ ἐγκαθεστώτων, οὐ τοῦ θείου χάριν, ἀλλ' ἵνα ὁμαλῶς μετὰ ῥυθμοῦ βαίνοντες προςέλθοιεν καὶ μὴ διασπασθείη αὐτοῖς ἡ τάξις. The Spartans also rely upon ‘war songs’ (πολεμικῶν νόμων, 5.69.2) for encouragement in the same battle. 20 6.69.2: σαλπικταὶ ξύνοδον ἐπώτρυνον τοῖς ὁπλίταις.

69 on behalf of the wounded and dying they have been forced to leave behind in their retreat

(ἀντιβολία and ἐπιθειασμός, 7.75.4, both Thucydidean hapaxes).21

In addition to prayers, the religious music of the martial paean occurs regularly throughout the text, also in moments of increased emotionality either before or during a battle.22 I will have more to say about the martial paean generally in my discussion of the Epipolae battle below, where its music, ironically, plays a principal role in spreading Athenian fear. For now it is worth observing that while Thucydides never enunciates the specific content of a prayer or a religious hymn, he regularly takes care to situate such utterances within an affectively charged historical context, as these few examples illustrate.

Nonhuman noises

Nonhuman sounds in the History can also be deeply affecting. At the Spartan siege of Torone in book four, cited above, the sudden collapse of a defensive structure produces a ‘noise’ that causes ‘more vexation than fear’ (ψόφος… ἐλύπησε μᾶλλον ἤ ἐφόβησεν, 4.115.3) for the

Athenians fighting near it and leads directly to their flight from the field of battle. Sound again inspires fear at a battle outside Syracuse in book six, when the crash of thunder leads to φόβος in the Syracusan army (6.70.1). Later in the Sicilian narrative, the same sound causes despondency

(ἀθυμέω, 7.79.3) for the Athenian army. In both scenes, then, the sound of thunder produces marked affective reactions in the characters who perceive it. Similarly, the din of battle (κτύπος)

21 The sounds of ‘ominous words’ (ἐπιφημίσμασιν, 7.75.7) accompany the prayers in this scene. Only two other instances of prayer occur (both using the verb ἐπιθειάζω): Archidamos offers a prayer to the gods before commencing the siege on Plataea (2.75.1); the Eumolpidae and Kerykes, presumably the most offended by the scandal of the Mysteries, pray for Alcibiades not to be reinstated at Athens (8.53.2). 22 1.50.5, 2.91.2, 4.43.3, 4.96.1, 6.32.2, 7.44.6, 7.83.4.

70 at the Great Harbor spreads terror (ἔκπληξις, 7.70.) among the soldiers and sailors of both the

Syracusan and Athenian navies.23

This partial survey shows how thoroughly the History is suffused with a steady background of auditory affect. The above examples can be further classified in a number of ways that may help to make more sense of their significance in the text. First of all, there is a distinction, elided in my classification above, between sounds causing emotion and sounds caused by emotion. The crashing together of ships in naval battle at Syracuse and the shouting of Spartans outside Torone directly cause the intensely fearful reaction of ἔκπληξις in the characters who hear them.

Conversely, the weeping and lamentations in the text are depicted exclusively as vocally manifested effects of emotional distress. The categories of sound on either side of the cause/effect divide nonetheless illustrate the broader phenomenon, consistent throughout the text, of auditory affect. Both categories come into play in the case studies of Sphacteria and Epipolae.

Most significant for my argument in the remainder of this chapter, however, is how we might classify these various sounds according to their relationship with the cognitive processes associated with them in the narrative. Thucydides employs two differently aligned categories: sounds depicted with cognitive processes and those depicted as lacking conscious reflection altogether. On the one hand, the crashing sound of ships in the Great Harbor and the Spartan shouting at Torone, for example, produce their terror without any explicit cognitive intervention on the part of the hearing subjects. Likewise, the sounds of music at Mantineia and, later,

Syracuse elicit affective response in the characters in both scenes without the accompaniment of any expressly stated cognitive recognition in the scenes’ actors. In short, these examples provide

23 On the vividness of these passages, see Paul 1987, 311 who cites Thuc.’s desire to reconstruct “the atmosphere of contemporary battle.”

71 a glimpse into the potential of sounds to circumvent conscious thought and to influence emotion directly in their auditors. This non-cognitive category of emotional response will be especially significant for interpreting the scene at Sphacteria.

On the other hand, even when sounds are subjected to cognitive reasoning, they can prove to be highly unreliable sources of information for historical actors, leading them to mistaken inferences and conclusions about events. For some of the Athenians defending Torone in book four, the crashing sound of a single collapsing building prompts their mistaken inference

(νομίσαντες, 4.115.3) that the whole place has been lost, and it leads them to the misguided decision to flee the battle in fear. Later in the text, Thucydides specifically flags the lack of cognitive understanding among the Syracusans when he cites their ‘inexperience in war’ as the cause of their fear of the thunderstorm they hear overhead (τοῖς μὲν πρῶτον μαχομένοις καὶ

ἐλάχιστα πολέμῳ ὡμιληκόσι... 6.70.1). Unable to reason that the stormy weather is the result of seasonal patterns, like their ‘experienced’ (τοῖς δὲ ἐμπειροτέροις) Athenian opponents, the

Syracusans become subjects of a fear Thucydides presents as irrationally founded. In clear contrast, Thucydides grounds the Athenians’ emotional responses in this scene in what they are able to see, namely the unexpected tenacity of the Syracusans in the battle, which briefly causes the Athenians terror (ἔκπληξιν).24 This problematic relation between auditory information and rational understanding is put on vivid display in Thucydides’ depiction of the night battle at

Epipolae.

In fact, several of the sounds and emotions listed here reappear in the scenes at Sphacteria and Epipolae. However, as this survey indicates, these two episodes, although unique in their

24 Although emotionality is not explicitly involved, a useful comparandum for the epistemic effectiveness of visual information is Thuc.’s depiction of signal fires at 3.80 and 8.102. In each scene, naval commanders are able to clearly see and understand the information transmitted to them via the visual medium of signal fires. However, cf. Moore 2018, who has recently argued that, on other occasions in Thuc., signal fire information is less reliable.

72 vividness, are typical in the History for the close ties between hearing and feeling they depict. In the case studies that follow, I look in closer detail at the sensory, cognitive, and affective dynamics Thucydides showcases in these episodes, dynamics which we may now situate within their proper context in this work.

Shouting, Shock, and ‘Pure’ Affect: Sphacteria

The vividly depicted episode on the island of Sphacteria marks the culmination of an extended narrative sequence that has tracked the political and military events surrounding the Athenian occupation of Pylos in 425 B.C. (4.2-41).25 At this stage in the narrative, the Athenians have fortified the site of Pylos (4.4), fended off a Spartan attack (4.11-13), and cut off a force of some

420 Spartan hoplites on the island (4.14).26 After a chance fire burns away most of the vegetation on Sphacteria, the Athenian generals Demosthenes and Cleon opt to land an assault force on the island and confront the stranded Spartans (4.30). After surprising the Spartans in the early morning, the Athenians divide into companies of about 200 men, seize various high points on the island, and encircle their enemies in the valley below (4.32). The Spartans are compelled to retreat to an elevated fortress at the north end of the island (4.35), where, in the end, they surrender to the Athenian/Messenian forces attacking them (4.38). Thucydides colors his extended narration of the climactic battle sequence thoroughly with the sensory and affective experiences of the scene’s participants. I examine several of these vivid passages below, arguing that these sensory and affective experiences portrayed in the historical actors demonstrate the

25 The episode has attracted considerable attention from commentators. Literary and/or narratological analyses include: de Romilly 1963, 172-92; Hunter 1973, 61-84; Babut 1981 and 1986; Connor 1984, 108-18; Rood 1998, 24-57; Stahl 2003, 138-53; Allan 2013, 379-82. Wilson 1979 reconstructs the episode from a military historical perspective, following Pritchett 1965, 6-29; see also Pritchett 1994, 145-77. 26 Note that Thuc. gives us the number 420 at 4.38.

73 disparate relationship Thucydides envisions between vision and audition, on the one hand, and cognitively grounded emotion on the other.

Visual advantages: the Athenians

On the morning of the Athenian landing on Sphacteria, after the Spartans are initially caught off guard, their main body of hoplites rallies and tries to engage the Athenian heavy infantry. The

Athenians refuse to engage their own heavy troops, however, and rely instead on their more mobile light-armed troops (ψιλοὶ) to harass the Spartans with sallies from every side. As the battle drags on in this way, the Spartans become increasingly exhausted, while the Athenians become increasingly confident (4.34.1):

γνόντες αὐτοὺς οἱ ψιλοὶ βραδυτέρους ἤδη ὄντας τῷ ἀμύνασθαι, καὶ αὐτοὶ τῇ τε ὄψει τοῦ θαρσεῖν τὸ πλεῖστον εἰληφότες πολλαπλάσιοι φαινόμενοι καὶ ξυνειθισμένοι μᾶλλον μηκέτι δεινοὺς αὐτοὺς ὁμοίως σφίσι φαίνεσθαι, ὅτι οὐκ εὐθὺς ἄξια τῆς προσδοκίας ἐπεπόνθεσαν, ὥσπερ ὅτε πρῶτον ἀπέβαινον τῇ γνώμῃ δεδουλωμένοι ὡς ἐπὶ Λακεδαιμονίους, καταφρονήσαντες καὶ ἐμβοήσαντες ἁθρόοι ὥρμησαν ἐπ' αὐτοὺς καὶ ἔβαλλον λίθοις τε καὶ τοξεύμασι καὶ ἀκοντίοις, ὡς ἕκαστός τι πρόχειρον εἶχεν.

The light-armed troops, knowing [the Spartans] were now slower in their defense and seeing their own far superior numbers, took considerable courage at the sight; and because they had grown more accustomed to [the Spartans], they no longer seemed quite so terrifying, since [the Athenians] had not straightaway suffered what they had expected, given that when first they landed, they had been enslaved to the notion that they were up against Lacedaemonians; therefore, feeling contempt and shouting out in unison, they charged and hurled stones and arrows and spears—whatever each had at hand.

Their elevated positioning on the island provides the Athenians with a vantage point from which to observe their numerical superiority, which, in turn, both boosts their confidence (αὐτοὶ

τῇ τε ὄψει τοῦ θαρσεῖν τὸ πλεῖστον εἰληφότες) and dispels their fear (μηκέτι δεινοὺς αὐτοὺς

ὁμοίως σφίσι φαίνεσθαι).27 Their clear view permits the Athenians a correspondingly clear understanding of their situation. For the first time, they have the opportunity to familiarize

27 On viewing and vantage points in Thuc., see Greenwood 2006, 19-41.

74 themselves (ξυνειθισμένοι μᾶλλον) with the aspect of the Spartan hoplite army, and this leads directly to their ability, now, to ‘know’ (γνόντες) their opponent. This knowledge provides them with an empirical basis for the confidence they consequently feel. Indeed, their clear vision is presented as liberating for Athenian γνώμη, which had previously been ‘enslaved’ to their anxieties over facing Spartan troops in a land battle (τῇ γνώμῃ δεδουλωμένοι).

The verb γιγνώσκω is etymologically related to the term γνώμη, which in Thucydides’ text frequently denotes reasoned judgment. The term is especially closely tied to the figure of

Pericles, whom Thucydides presents as an idealized exemplar of clear-sighted rationalism.28

However, the cognitive processes of γνώμη and γιγνώσκω are not divorced from emotional processes; rather, as this scene indicates, the two tend to be mutually entailing.29 On the basis of their newly gained visual understanding of their situation, the Athenians are freed from their fears and afforded the emotional support of both daring (θαρσεῖν) and contempt

(καταφρονήσαντες) for their Spartan opponents. Clarity of vision in the scene allows for a distinct cognitive link between Athenian sense perception and emotional response.30 The

Athenians see their position and their numbers, and they evaluate and interpret this visual information to signify their own tactical superiority in the battle. Their collective emotional response of courage and contempt is, thus, presented as thoroughly rational, grounded in visual perception, and a product of cognitive processes.31 The equation of clear vision with the clear knowledge the Athenians enjoy aligns with the rhetorical and interpretive conceit Thucydides has constructed for his project in the Methodology chapter, where the text itself was presented as

28 See Edmunds 1975, esp. 7-88; cf. Huart 1973; Farrar 1988, 158–77. 29 See Kallet 2001, 145-82; Wohl 2017. 30 Both contempt and courage are defined elsewhere in the Hist. as calculated emotions based on intelligent observation: see Pericles’ third speech (2.62). On “rational courage” in Periclean rhetoric, see Balot 2014, 25-46. 31 Cf. Konstan 2006, 140f., outlining a similar process of visual evaluation in the naval battle between Corcyraeans and Corinthians at 1.49.

75 a visual object set out for contemplation (both visual and intellectual) by a rationally-minded audience. The Athenian soldiers perform just such analysis as they gaze down upon the battlefield at Sphacteria and correctly interpret the significance of what they see. That is, they perform on the battlefield a process of visual understanding similar to what Thucydides has established as essential for the evaluation of historical events.

Furthermore, the close causal relation between visual perception and confident action depicted in the Athenian soldiers also resonates with the earlier experience of their commander,

Demosthenes. Although a chance fire, which burns much of the heavily wooded island, ultimately dispels Demosthenes’ hesitance to attack, he had initially been reluctant to assault the

Spartans with his army, for fear that the island’s underbrush concealed their numbers and movements (4.29.3-4):

πρότερον μὲν γὰρ οὔσης αὐτῆς ὑλώδους ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ καὶ ἀτριβοῦς διὰ τὴν αἰεὶ ἐρημίαν ἐφοβεῖτο καὶ πρὸς τῶν πολεμίων τοῦτο ἐνόμιζε μᾶλλον εἶναι· πολλῷ γὰρ ἂν στρατοπέδῳ ἀποβάντι ἐξ ἀφανοῦς χωρίου προσβάλλοντας αὐτοὺς βλάπτειν. σφίσι μὲν γὰρ τὰς ἐκείνων ἁμαρτίας καὶ παρασκευὴν ὑπὸ τῆς ὕλης οὐκ ἂν ὁμοίως δῆλα εἶναι, τοῦ δὲ αὑτῶν στρατοπέδου καταφανῆ ἂν εἶναι πάντα τὰ ἁμαρτήματα, ὥστε προσπίπτειν ἂν αὐτοὺς ἀπροσδοκήτως ᾗ βούλοιντο… λανθάνειν τε ἂν τὸ ἑαυτῶν στρατόπεδον πολὺ ὂν διαφθειρόμενον, οὐκ οὔσης τῆς προσόψεως ᾗ χρῆν ἀλλήλοις ἐπιβοηθεῖν.

Since (the island) had before been heavily wooded in most places, and untrodden on account of it never having been inhabited, he was afraid and reasoned this would prove more to the enemies’ advantage. For even disembarking with a substantial army, they might attack and harm him from an invisible position. For the mistakes and preparations of (the enemy) would not be as clearly visible as their own, whereas every mistake of their own army would be patently visible, the result being that (the enemy) would attack them unexpectedly wherever they wanted… And despite his army’s superior numbers, it might imperceptibly be destroyed, since the men would not be able to see where they should help one another.

Visual information is central to every step of Demosthenes’ reasoning, here presented as a series of logical inferences in indirect discourse. In Demosthenes’ assessment, the wooded character of the island presents several levels of visual disadvantage, expressed repeatedly in the language of

76 the passage. Enemy attacks are liable to arrive unexpectedly from ‘unseen places’ (ἐξ ἀφανοῦς

χωρίου); Spartan tactical blunders will be concealed from view (οὐκ ἂν ὁμοίως δῆλα), while the

Athenians’ missteps will be openly exposed (καταφανῆ); and the places in the Athenian lines where aid might be required will be hidden from view (οὐκ οὔσης τῆς προσόψεως) by the island’s vegetation. Demosthenes’ fears are the direct emotional consequence of the limits imposed on the visible information allowed him by his environment. As elsewhere in the History visual limits double as epistemic limits on historical agents.32 Nevertheless, his fear in this scene, based as it is on visual perceptions, is presented as rationally grounded. Even though it is based essentially on ignorance (of the Spartans’ disposition on the island), Demosthenes is acutely aware of what he does not yet know. That is, he recognizes his own epistemic deficit, and so his emotional response is grounded in a sort of Socratic knowledge of his own ignorance. In this way, the scene reenacts the visual-affective dynamics of fear we saw in the scene at Plataea in book two, where visual and epistemic clarity worked in an inverse proportion with subjective fears. Both the Athenian soldiers’ confidence and Demosthenes earlier fear, then, are portrayed as conscious and rational because they are based upon visual observation.

When Demosthenes is presented with a visually clearer picture, after the fire burns away the island’s underbrush and exposes the Spartans’ numbers and positions, his fear is replaced with the confidence to launch an attack upon the island (4.30.3):

οὕτω δὴ τούς τε Λακεδαιμονίους μᾶλλον κατιδὼν πλείους ὄντας… τήν τε νῆσον εὐαποβατωτέραν οὖσαν, τότε ὡς ἐπ' ἀξιόχρεων τοὺς Ἀθηναίους μᾶλλον σπουδὴν ποιεῖσθαι τὴν ἐπιχείρησιν παρεσκευάζετο, στρατιάν τε μεταπέμπων ἐκ τῶν ἐγγὺς ξυμμάχων καὶ τὰ ἄλλα ἑτοιμάζων.

32 See the discussion in my previous chapter.

77 Thus seeing now the Spartans’ numbers… that a landing could easily be made on the island, and that now the Athenians were significantly eager, he made preparations for the attempt, sending for troops from the neighboring allies and readying other things.

Able to see clearly for the first time (κατιδὼν), a visual revelation whose significance

Thucydides highlights with the particle δή, Demosthenes is supplied with the information he had previously been lacking. The Spartan troop dispositions as well as the island’s topography are revealed to him, and armed with this new information, his former fear turns into confidence sufficient to commence assault preparations. This process too recalls the Plataeans in book two, who, once they are able to discern the Theban numbers accurately, turn their previous fear into confidence and action. Demosthenes’ own newly found confidence seems further to spread to his troops, whose demeanor now becomes particularly enthusiastic for the venture (τότε ὡς ἐπ'

ἀξιόχρεων τοὺς Ἀθηναίους μᾶλλον σπουδὴν ποιεῖσθαι). This confidence will be redoubled, and its relation to visual information reiterated, once these men have attained the high ground on the island and discerned their marked strategic advantage, in the passage with which we began this section.

Visual disadvantages and audition: the Spartans

Following this extended reflection on the cognitive relation between vision and emotion through the early stages of the scene at Sphacteria, Thucydides proceeds to set the portrayal of visual evaluation against a vivid depiction of auditory affect. In this way, he implicitly encourages the reader to compare the two sections, and the two modes of understanding they represent, against one another. The confidence and contempt of the Athenian soldiers atop the hills of Sphacteria, which had been calculated using visual data, beget a vocal outburst from the Athenian army

(ἐμβοήσαντες). The Athenians unleash a war cry as they charge the Spartan force and attack with whatever implements they have at hand. As Thucydides has already explained, the Athenian

78 troops are stationed in several different elevated positions around the island. The war cry, however, is issued ‘altogether’ (ἁθρόοι), as a group effort which identifies the geographically scattered Athenians as a single collective entity. The Athenian collective is defined by the sound it produces—a sound which is presented as a vocal expression of Athenian feeling.

As I outlined in the last chapter, Sara Ahmed argues that emotions do not move between predetermined subjects and objects but themselves determine and delineate the boundaries between perceiving subjects and perceived objects.33 What defines a collectivity, in her view, is the feeling its members share in relation to a common object of perception. The feelings shared by a group are what unify them as a group. Different groups feel differently, even about the same object of perception, and those differences of feeling have the effect of creating “surfaces” around the collectively feeling subjects.34 If we again apply Ahmed’s framework to the troops and topography on the battlefield at Sphacteria, it can be as useful as it was in our examination of the scene at Plataea. Reading the battle in this way helps to expose how the narrative defines the dividing line between opposing armies not only in political (Athenians vs. Spartans), tactical

(light-armed vs. hoplite troops), and topographical terms (the high ground vs. the low), but also in sensory and affective terms. Indeed, during the climactic chapters of the Sphacteria episode, the political, military, and topographical details fade from the narrative, which instead emphasizes the drastic and defining differences between what the two armies see, hear, and feel.

The Athenians occupy disparate spaces in the topography of the island, but they are united experientially by their common object of perception, the Spartan hoplite force, and their shared emotional response to it. Like the cry of Phormio’s marines in book two (2.92.1), the

Athenian cry here manifests collective emotion as an auditory object, disembodied and projected

33 Ahmed 2004. See further Ngai 2005, 1-37; Ahmed 2014, 1-19. 34 Ahmed 2004, 117: “emotions… create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.”

79 outward (note the directional prefix ἐν- attached to the verb of shouting, ἐμβοάω at 4.34.1).

When that object reaches its target, the Spartans react with further, but very different, emotion.

As an auditory object received, rather than emitted, the sound has a different meaning and a different affective charge for the Spartans than it did for the Athenians. In this way, the same sound is shown to occupy two of the categories of auditory affect I outlined above, those of both effect and cause of emotion. While it manifests a clearly formed sense of confidence and security for the Athenians, the shout elicits a sense of terror for its Spartan auditors that resembles a physical blow. Moreover, the distinctly different emotional value attached to the single shout creates the effect of a surface that emerges between Athenian and Spartan collective subjectivities. The shouted sound, imbued with ‘good’ Athenian feeling, collides with Spartan perception, where it simultaneously sounds (and feels) ‘bad’. The distance separating Athenian and Spartan in the scene is in a literal sense spatial, but the narrative encourages us to conceptualize the divide on the battlefield in terms of the two sides’ distinctly different subjective experiences of sensory input (4.34.2-3):

γενομένης δὲ τῆς βοῆς ἅμα τῇ ἐπιδρομῇ ἔκπληξίς τε ἐνέπεσεν ἀνθρώποις ἀήθεσι τοιαύτης μάχης καὶ ὁ κονιορτὸς τῆς ὕλης νεωστὶ κεκαυμένης ἐχώρει πολὺς ἄνω, ἄπορόν τε ἦν ἰδεῖν τὸ πρὸ αὑτοῦ ὑπὸ τῶν τοξευμάτων καὶ λίθων ἀπὸ πολλῶν ἀνθρώπων μετὰ τοῦ κονιορτοῦ ἅμα φερομένων… εἶχόν τε οὐδὲν σφίσιν αὐτοῖς χρήσασθαι ἀποκεκλῃμένοι μὲν τῇ ὄψει τοῦ προορᾶν, ὑπὸ δὲ τῆς μείζονος βοῆς τῶν πολεμίων τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς παραγγελλόμενα οὐκ ἐσακούοντες…

With the shout coming at the same time as the charge, terror befell [the Spartans], who were unaccustomed to this style of battle, and the large cloud of recently burned wood ash rose up, and it was impossible to see in front of oneself because of the arrows and stones from many attackers, along with the dust cloud… And because they were shut out from seeing before them, they had no resources at their disposal, unable to heed commands due the overpowering shout of their enemies…

The commotion of battle has kicked up a cloud of dust and ash that effectively blinds the

Spartans positioned inside it; the Athenians can see them, but they themselves have ‘no way to

80 see’ (ἄπορόν τε ἦν ἰδεῖν) and are ‘shut out from looking forward’ at the Athenians

(ἀποκεκλῃμένοι μὲν τῇ ὄψει τοῦ προορᾶν).35 In this visually compromised environment, the

Spartans’ sense of hearing becomes their primary means of contact with their assailants. The shout is shown to have traversed the physical topography of the setting, from the scattered,

Athenian-occupied high ground to the Spartan formation below, where it encounters a new subjectivity with the force of a quasi-material impact. When the sound reaches its target, it is described not in the terms of cognition and judgment that were associated earlier with Athenian vision, but in terms of the feeling it elicits among its Spartan listeners. The war cry is both heard and strongly felt by the Spartans, who experience a jarring terror (ἔκπληξις). Thucydides reserves the terminology of ἔκπληξις/ἐκπλήσσω for moments of the most profound affective impact, most often signifying an intensely felt combination of surprise and terror.36 But these terms also embody a metaphor of physicality that envisions impact with a solid surface (from the verb ἐκ-πλήσσω, ‘to knock out’).37 The Spartans are struck by the sound in a way that merges literal and figurative senses and depicts their experience as verging toward the synesthetic.

Hearing nearly coincides with the haptic in this moment of high emotional intensity, and the

35 The visual dynamics of the scene recall the mist-enshrouded struggle over Patroclus’ body in Il. 17. But unlike Thuc., Homer does not exploit the visual obscurity in his scene to thematize auditory perception. Auditory affect does enter the stage after the mist has cleared, when Achilles lets out a terror-inducing cry of lament over Patroclus’ death (18.217-18). A few, among many, other exempla in the Homeric epics include: Il. 2.87-100 (discontent in the Achaean army manifests in a sonic uproar likened to a swarm of bees); Il. 20.56-66 (Zeus’ thunder, coupled with Poseidon’s quaking of the earth, causes Hades to cry out in fear); Od. 12.201-5 (the Symplegades’ crashing sounds spread terror in Odysseus’s crew); Od. 23.146-7 (the house of Odysseus itself groans with distress). Cf. also the terrifying sounds of the Typhoeus at Hes. Theog. 820-35, 850-2. 36 Cf., however, the most notable exception at 6.46.4, where ἔκπληξις describes the Athenians’ pleasant surprise at the volume of gold and silver vessels put on display for them by the Egestaeans. Ἔκπληξις is associated with auditory phenomena three other times in the Hist.: 4.112.1 (martial shouts); 6.70.1 (thunder); 7.70.6 (the din of naval battle in the Great Harbor at Syracuse). For a more complete list of occurrences, see Allison 1997, 62-5. 37 The physical metaphor is operative also at, e.g., 2.38.1, where Pericles describes the daily entertainments at Athens as capable of ‘knocking out the painful’ from Athenian life (καθ’ ἡμέραν ἡ τέρψις τὸ λυπήρον ἐκπλήσσει).

81 distinction between physical and psychological feeling becomes blurred.38 Thus, Thucydides figures the subjective surface dividing Athenian from Spartan as both sonic and quasi-physical.

Reproducing the physical metaphor embedded in the Greek term, Virginia Hunter explains the phenomenon of ἔκπληξις as “a blow to the wits or a shock” that signals the wholesale loss of deliberative and cognitive ability.39 Notably in this passage, and throughout the climactic chapters of the Sphacteria battle episode, Thucydides withholds vocabulary of cognition to describe the Spartans.40 The cognitive relationship with sound for the Spartans in the scene thus contrasts sharply with the model of visual evaluation attributed to the Athenians.

Where the Athenians’ clear vision had earlier allowed them to ‘know’ (γνόντες, 4.34.1) the reality of their situation, and to form their emotions accordingly, the blinded Spartans are denied the possibility of such knowledge. Instead, their reception of the Athenian cry is unmediated by any explicitly named cognitive processes. Like Brian Massumi’s “sheer intensity,” this is unreflective affect, unmistakably shaded in this particular case toward angst.41 By cutting out the cognitive link between sense perception and affective response, the war cry has disabled rationally informed emotion for the blinded Spartans. Audition thus emerges not as a dispassionate evaluating sense, but rather a sense dominated by feeling. The war cry has the effect of short-circuiting the normative process Thucydides imagines for vision, according to which the capacity for reason mediates between sense perception and emotion. In this way, the

38 For many natural scientists and philosophers of the late archaic and classical periods, audition was conceived as a haptic encounter. See Gurd 2016, 90-6; Beare 1906, 93-130. 39 Quote from Hunter 1986, 418. See further Kallet 2001, 78; Konstan 2006, 152: ἔκπληξις results “less from deliberation than a kind of shock… which drives out reflection and either causes an instinctive impulse to flee or leaves one dazed.” Cf. Huart 1968, 77. 40 Spartan judgment is only mentioned twice: once before the battle itself and once after. Before the battle begins, the Spartans wrongly ‘suppose the [Athenian landing] vessels were sailing to their customary mooring for the night’ (οἰομένων αὐτῶν τὰς ναῦς κατὰ τὸ ἔθος ἐς ἔφορμον τῆς νυκτὸς πλεῖν, 4.32.1). At the end of the battle, the Athenians hope to ‘bend the Spartans’ judgment’ into accepting terms (ἐπικλασθεῖεν τῇ γνώμῃ, 4.37.1). 41 Massumi 1995.

82 sensation of ἔκπληξις captures and names a moment of affective response that escapes cognitive processes of judgment. In other words, the Spartans’ reality is heard and felt rather than seen and rationally understood.

However disruptive the sound of the Athenian shouting has been to the Spartans’ psychology, it seems to cause only minimal direct harm to the hoplites. The war cry interferes with their chain of command, impairing the soldiers’ ability to give and receive orders shouted to one another

(ὑπὸ δὲ τῆς μείζονος βοῆς τῶν πολεμίων τὰ ἐν αὐτοῖς παραγγελλόμενα οὐκ ἐσακούοντες,

4.34.3), but they nevertheless maintain sufficient order and discipline to retreat with most of their force to a stronghold at the northern end of the island, where they are eventually driven to surrender.42 So while the scene at Sphacteria demonstrates that sounds can cause affective processes to replace proper evaluation, it stops short of expounding on the potential dangers of that cognitive disruption. The Epipolae narrative explores these dangers thoroughly, depicting a scene in which sounds not only transmit disruptive emotion but also create destructive misunderstandings of reality.

Subversive Epistemologies of Sound: Epipolae

In his narrative of the Epipolae night battle in book seven, Thucydides again employs a thematic opposition between visual and auditory evaluation. The scene at Epipolae develops the theme further by emphasizing the harmful potential of knowledge constructed primarily through audition and emotion. Sounds in the Epipolae episode mislead the Athenians into a series of misconceptions that, in the end, drive soldiers and citizens to physical violence against one

42 Cf. 7.70.6, where the din of naval battle in the Great Harbor similarly disrupts men’s abilities to give and receive commands.

83 another. Like the Spartans at Sphacteria, the Athenians at Epipolae are deprived of clear vision and therefore compelled to interpret their surroundings through what they can hear. Also as at

Sphacteria, audition proves more conducive to generating feeling than clear understanding. In contrast to the Sphacteria passage, however, the emotions at Epipolae contribute to the formation of knowledge. The sounds in the scene do not disable cognition, but rather enable confusion and fear to take its place and construct beliefs about reality that are, on the one hand, detailed and concrete but, on the other hand, thoroughly distorted versions of the truth. In the darkness and cacophony of the setting, friends and fellow citizens become enemies, and opponents become indistinguishable from allies. Whereas sound eliminated cognition altogether at Sphacteria, it has the effect of corrupting both the cognitive process and its product, knowledge, for the Athenians at Epipolae. Furthermore, as Athenian self-knowledge and identity are destabilized, so are the subjective ‘surfaces’ that so neatly divided the battle lines at Sphacteria. In the Epipolae narrative, the most detailed description of auditory dynamics in Thucydides’ work, sound emerges as a volatile, destabilizing, and impassioned sensory mode of understanding.

Primacy of vision reiterated

The episode depicts the sort of unexpected reversal of fortune that is characteristic of

Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian campaign.43 Although the Athenians are at first successful in capitalizing on the surprise of a night assault, they are ultimately defeated and put to panicked flight. The reversal occurs when their initial advance is halted by a company of Boeotians fighting on the Syracusan side (7.43.7). The subsequent Athenian flight from the Epipolae plateau is characterized by a combination of confusion and fear, each spread and channeled through the darkness by a series of harmful sounds that assault the Athenians. Sounds of three

43 See, e.g., Avery 1973; Kirby 1983; Rood 1998, 198-201; Kallet 2001, 160-73.

84 distinct characters emerge consecutively in the scene: (1) nonverbal shouting (βοή, κραυγή); (2) the verbal ‘watch word’ of the Athenians (τὸ ξύνθημα); and (3) the musical sound of the Dorian paean. Thucydides presents the three acoustic phenomena in a broad tricolon crescendo that tracks their increasing emotional impact on their Athenian auditors.

However, before describing the acoustics of the scene, Thucydides reemphasizes the epistemological primacy of vision (7.44.1-2):

…οὐδὲ πυθέσθαι ῥᾴδιον ἦν οὐδ' ἀφ' ἑτέρων ὅτῳ τρόπῳ ἕκαστα ξυνηνέχθη. ἐν μὲν γὰρ ἡμέρᾳ σαφέστερα μέν, ὅμως δὲ οὐδὲ ταῦτα οἱ παραγενόμενοι πάντα πλὴν τὸ καθ' ἑαυτὸν ἕκαστος μόλις οἶδεν· ἐν δὲ νυκτομαχίᾳ… πῶς ἄν τις σαφῶς τι ᾔδει; ἦν μὲν γὰρ σελήνη λαμπρά, ἑώρων δὲ οὕτως ἀλλήλους ὡς ἐν σελήνῃ εἰκὸς τὴν μὲν ὄψιν τοῦ σώματος προορᾶν, τὴν δὲ γνῶσιν τοῦ οἰκείου ἀπιστεῖσθαι.

…Nor was it easy to learn—not from either side—how everything happened. For, though in the daytime things are clearer, still, even those present scarcely know everything (that happens) beyond their own immediate vicinity. But in a night battle… how would anyone know anything clearly? For the moon was bright, but they saw each other as is to be expected in moonlight: they could make out the appearance of a body but distrusted its recognition as a friend.

Adopting a generalizing tone that clearly recalls the Methodological discussions in book one,

Thucydides draws attention to the difficulties of the historian’s task, a problem he had flagged already in the earlier chapters.44 But this familiar theme is here reformulated in specifically visual terms: clarity of sight is directly equated with historical knowledge. In this case, the lack of the one directly compromises the other. The obscure visibility at Epipolae thus compounds the already difficult work of excavating historical fact from eyewitness accounts.45 In this way, the passage reconfirms the epistemological hierarchy established in the Methodology chapters and performed by the historical agents in the Sphacteria narrative episode.

In the passage’s final sentence, Thucydides reemphasizes the dependent relationship

44 1.20.1. See Rood 2006; Kallet 2006, 339-44. 45 Biffis 2008.

85 between sight and knowledge by pointing out that although the moon shone brightly, its light was inadequate to allow for any clarity of discernment. The μέν/δέ syntax of the sentence positions sight (τὴν μὲν ὄψιν) in an oppositional—rather than equivalent—relationship with judgment (τὴν δὲ γνῶσιν). In the darkness at Epipolae, vision (τὴν ὄψιν) has been compromised to the point that it is no longer sufficient to enable rational judgment (τὴν γνῶσιν). In contrast to the clear-seeing Athenians at Sphacteria, vision for the Athenian characters at Epipolae fails to provide an unobstructed conduit for the rational knowledge that, both in this passage and in the earlier episode, has been associated with the language of γνώμη. The Athenians’ ignorance in the darkness, moreover, disconnects them specifically from knowledge of what is most familiar, τὸ

οἰκεῖον, ‘their own’. The term invokes the familiarity of household and kinship relations, those ties that are closest—both emotionally and physically—to oneself and one’s identity within a broader community. The darkness of the scene has alienated the Athenians from such identifying bonds. As the scene plays out, this alienation extends to their very identity as Athenians, as they struggle to distinguish ‘their own’ from their enemies. In Ahmed’s terms, the surfaces defining

Athenian subjectivity have been broken down by the scene’s pervasive panic, which identifies anything and everything as an object of fear.46 The very distinctions between self and other disintegrate: instead of defining Athenian against non-Athenian, subjective surfaces emerge that cut through and divide the Athenian collective from itself. In fact, this estrangement from the close and familiar reenacts one of Thucydides’ criticisms of hearsay reports in the Methodology: people have a tendency to accept as truth the incorrect accounts they hear (τὰς ἀκοὰς), even

46 Cf. Borgeaud 1988, 88f.: “a panic is always an irrational terror involving noise and confused disturbance that unexpectedly overtakes a military encampment, usually at night… any noise is immediately taken as the enemy in full attack.”

86 when the events recounted concern ‘their own native country’ (ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν).47 Auditory information in each case impinges upon hearers’ most intimate epistemological relationships, at both local (οἰκεῖον) and regional (ἐπιχώρια) levels of familiarity.

Audition and epistemic disruption

The emphasis on visually accessed information, with which Thucydides introduces the scene, then provides the thematic backdrop for the rest of the chapter, which is constructed around the problem of stable knowledge in a setting of compromised visibility. After establishing vision as the principal means of evaluating and acquiring knowledge, the passage moves into a vivid and lengthy depiction of the auditory dynamics of the scene. Thus, the narrative replicates the thematic opposition between visual and auditory perception that also structured the Sphacteria narrative. Also like the earlier scene, the soundscape at Epipolae includes martial shouting, which is the first sound encountered by the Athenians (7.44.3-4):

καὶ τῶν Ἀθηναίων οἱ μὲν ἤδη ἐνικῶντο, οἱ δ' ἔτι τῇ πρώτῃ ἐφόδῳ ἀήσσητοι ἐχώρουν... ἤδη γὰρ τὰ πρόσθεν τῆς τροπῆς γεγενημένης ἐτετάρακτο πάντα καὶ χαλεπὰ ἦν ὑπὸ τῆς βοῆς διαγνῶναι. οἵ τε γὰρ Συρακόσιοι καὶ οἱ ξύμμαχοι ὡς κρατοῦντες παρεκελεύοντό τε κραυγῇ οὐκ ὀλίγηι χρώμενοι...

And some of the Athenians were already being defeated, while others were still advancing unbeaten in the first rush… For now that the rout had occurred in the front lines, everything was confused, and because of the shouting, it was difficult to discern. The Syracusans and their allies, thinking they were winning, were exhorting with loud cries…

Like the Athenian war cry at Sphacteria, the shouts in this scene are experienced differently by the different parties to the action. For the Syracusans and their allies, the shouts are employed and received as encouragement (παρεκελεύοντο). The sounds project the positive feelings resulting from the Syracusans’ impression that they are winning the battle (ὡς κρατοῦντες), an

47 1.20.1: οἱ γὰρ ἄνθρωποι τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, καὶ ἢν ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν ᾖ, ὁμοίως ἀβασανίστως παρ' ἀλλήλων δέχονται.

87 impression the narrative confirms as objective fact. For the Athenians, the same sound conveys different feeling and, ultimately, different meaning. Rather than helping them understand their surroundings, it confounds their cognitive ability and adds to their general sense of disarray. At

Sphacteria the Athenians had recourse to visual observation, and from it they gained rational knowledge (γνόντες, 4.34.1). In the darkness at Epipolae, however, their capacity for such cognitive discrimination, embedded in the verb διαγνῶναι (from διαγιγνώσκω), is explicitly denied: χαλεπὰ ἦν ὑπὸ τῆς βοῆς διαγνῶναι. The result is a pervasive tactical confusion among the soldiers on the ground that enacts their mental confusion. Imagery of chaos serves as the leitmotif throughout the scene; the terminology of disarray, including ταράσσω (ἐτετάρακτο in the above passage), ταραχή, and θόρυβος, occurs repeatedly to capture both dimensions of the

Athenians’ pervasive disarray, the organizational and the psychological.48

So far, then, the narrative structure of the episode is familiar. Thucydides has set up a comparison between visual and auditory perception that underscores the two senses’ differing relationships with cognition. As the narrative proceeds, however, Thucydides pushes the theme further and suggests that, in the absence of clear visibility, the combination of sound and feeling carries the potential not only to obscure reality but to construct new and disconcerting truths for the Athenian actors in the scene. Two new sounds, the verbal watch-word and the martial paean, engage the Athenians’ senses in the height of the battle. Unlike the inarticulate shouting we have so far encountered in both episodes, these are sounds with embedded cultural significance. In the darkness and chaos of the scene, however, these sounds are dislodged from the culture and conventions that normally give them meaning. Instead of facilitating their intended feelings of

48 The noun ταραχή occurs at 7.44.1, the verb ταράσσω at 7.44.3, 44.7. The two terms regularly accompany defeat in Thucydidean battle narratives (e.g. 2.84, 4.25.11, 4.96.3, 7.23.3, 7.84.4). Note that Athenian disorder had already begun in the previous chapter (ἀταξία, 7.43.7).

88 confidence, security, and courage, the watch-word and paean further unsettle the Athenians.

While it is the lack of good visibility that provides the setting for this epistemological slippage, it is the constant presence of sound in the scene that provides the means for the perversion of linguistic and religious function that ensues.

The Athenian watch-word (τὸ ξύνθημα) is a pre-determined linguistic device whose sole reason for being is to verbally identify friend from enemy, and to generate confidence in that identification.49 In this scene, however, the watch-word fails altogether to define identities and, instead, only destabilizes them (7.44.4):

οἵ τε Ἀθηναῖοι ἐζήτουν τε σφᾶς αὐτοὺς καὶ πᾶν τὸ ἐξ ἐναντίας, καὶ εἰ φίλιον εἴη τῶν ἤδη πάλιν φευγόντων, πολέμιον ἐνόμιζον, καὶ τοῖς ἐρωτήμασι τοῦ ξυνθήματος πυκνοῖς χρώμενοι διὰ τὸ μὴ εἶναι ἄλλῳ τῳ γνωρίσαι σφίσι τε αὐτοῖς θόρυβον πολὺν παρεῖχον ἅμα πάντες ἐρωτῶντες καὶ τοῖς πολεμίοις σαφὲς αὐτὸ κατέστησαν· τὸ δ' ἐκείνων οὐχ ὁμοίως ἠπίσταντο… ὥστ' εἰ μὲν ἐντύχοιέν τισι κρείσσους ὄντες τῶν πολεμίων, διέφευγον αὐτοὺς ἅτε ἐκείνων ἐπιστάμενοι τὸ ξύνθημα, εἰ δ' αὐτοὶ μὴ ἀποκρίνοιντο, διεφθείροντο.

And the Athenians sought after their own and everything before them, and if he were a friend, from among those now in flight, they took him for an enemy; and by repeatedly requesting the watch-word (since there was no other means of recognition), with everyone asking at once, they were causing themselves significant confusion, and they revealed the watch-word to their enemies. But they did not know their enemies’ watch-word… so that if they encountered any inferior enemy force, (the enemies) escaped, since they knew the watch-word, whereas if they themselves failed to respond, they were killed.

Rather than providing clarity, the watch-word generates further disorientation (θόρυβον πολὺν), compounding the psychological and tactical disarray already permeating the Athenian ranks. As

Gurd points out, the term θόρυβος signifies a specifically auditory brand of disorder in fifth- century Greek: it “nearly always refers to sounds produced by a multitude of human voices— language in origin but inarticulate in its cumulative effect.”50 The term is also closely linked with

49 Ξύνθημα occurs five times in the text, and only here does it refer to a verbal signal. The term is once a visual signal (4.112.1), and three times refers to agreements made in advance, without any sensory signal involved (4.67.4, 6.61.2, 7.22.1). 50 Gurd 2016, 87. See further Wallace 2004.

89 feelings of alarm, and it is no coincidence that it becomes increasingly attached to the Athenians in the later stages of the Sicilian campaign, as their initial hopefulness and military success gradually give way to a series of defeats and a steadily increasing sense of dread.51 In the scene here at Epipolae, θόρυβος embodies the basic overlap between sound and feeling we have been tracking through the History. The watch-word, which is the most immediate cause of Athenian

θόρυβος, has thus become an impossible game for the Athenians and an auditory symbol of the knowledge disparity in the scene. The Syracusans know the Athenian watch-word as well as their own, and they are able to employ their knowledge of both for strategic gain. The Athenians know only their own watch-word, but even with this information they cannot construct an accurate understanding of their reality. Rather than serving as a means for maintaining military cohesion, the watch-word becomes an agent of disruption in the Athenian battle lines, recalling the effects of the war cry at Sphacteria on the Spartan chain of command.

Furthermore, Thucydides again deploys the language of cognition in this passage, citing the watch-word as the Athenians’ only means of attaining knowledge by means of ‘recognition’

(γνωρίσαι). However, he invokes the notion of γνώμη-based knowledge only to underscore its inaccessibility to the Athenians in this sensory environment of diminished visibility and overwhelming sound. Auditory information not only fails to provide the Athenians with an accurate understanding of their surroundings, but it constructs an alternate set of facts that subverts reality: as the Athenians lose contact with ‘their very selves’ (ἐζήτουν τε σφᾶς αὐτοὺς) in the darkness, the sounds they hear lead them to believe (ἐνόμιζον) that their allies are actually

51 See, e.g., 7.3.1, 22.1, 40.3, 44.4, 81.4. By contrast, throughout book six, Thuc. never uses the term to characterize the Athenians on Sicily. θόρυβος is regularly paired with fear in tragedy as well: Soph. Aj. 134-71; Eur. Hec. 1109- 13, Supp. 160-1.

90 their enemies (εἰ φίλιον εἴη τῶν ἤδη πάλιν φευγόντων, πολέμιον ἐνόμιζον).52 Again, as

Thucydides alluded to at 7.44.2, the Athenians’ collective failure of self-recognition stands in as a paradigm of the lack of knowledge more broadly. The nighttime setting of the battle at

Epipolae has created a gap in the (idealized) seamlessness between seeing and knowing, and this gap opens a space for the disruptive intrusion of sound and affect. The Methodology already anticipated this complication with its critique of the popular desire to hear the pleasing music of poetry (1.21.1), the attractive rhetorical stylings of the logographers (ibid.), and the charming stories of myth (1.22.4)—all modes of knowing about history that potentially endanger the visual ideal of truth because they introduce the destabilizing and, for Thucydides, nonrational forces of auditory affect. In the darkness at Epipolae, the epistemological gap between seeing and knowing, for the Athenians, is similarly occupied by the distorting influence of sound and fear.

Their failed ‘searching’ (ἐζήτουν) for truth in the dark thus makes a striking contrast with the central claim of the text, which purports to be a ‘search for the truth’ set out for visual and intellectual inspection (ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, 1.20.3). Like the undisciplined student of history whose reliance on hearsay causes alienation from knowledge of his/her own country (ἐπιχώρια,

1.20.1), the Athenians at Epipolae, already cut off from the familiar (τὸ οἰκεῖον), come to embody the impossibility of self-knowledge without visual clarity.

‘The greatest and not least harmful paean’

The spatial and psychological displacement the Athenians suffer takes on a religious dimension with the introduction of the final and most devastating auditory event, the Dorian paean (7.44.6):

μέγιστον δὲ καὶ οὐχ ἥκιστα ἔβλαψε καὶ ὁ παιανισμός· ἀπὸ γὰρ ἀμφοτέρων παραπλήσιος ὢν ἀπορίαν παρεῖχεν. οἵ τε γὰρ Ἀργεῖοι καὶ οἱ Κερκυραῖοι καὶ ὅσον Δωρικὸν μετ' Ἀθηναίων ἦν, ὁπότε παιανίσειαν, φόβον παρεῖχε τοῖς Ἀθηναίοις, οἵ τε πολέμιοι ὁμοίως.

52 The stylistic construction of the passage further performs the identity confusion playing out in the scene, as the grammatical subjects of Athenian and Syracusan become increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another.

91 ὥστε τέλος ξυμπεσόντες αὑτοῖς κατὰ πολλὰ τοῦ στρατοπέδου, ἐπεὶ ἅπαξ ἐταράχθησαν, φίλοι τε φίλοις καὶ πολῖται πολίταις, οὐ μόνον ἐς φόβον κατέστησαν, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐς χεῖρας ἀλλήλοις ἐλθόντες μόλις ἀπελύοντο.

But the greatest and most harmful was the paean. Since it was similar on both sides, it caused perplexity. Both the Argives and the Corcyraeans, and whatever Dorian peoples were with the Athenians, whenever they raised the paean, it would strike fear into the Athenians, just as when their enemies would [raise it]. The end result was that, having fallen together throughout the army—friends with friends and citizens with citizens—when once confusion took hold, not only did fear set in, but also those who had come to blows could scarcely disengage themselves.

The Ionian Athenians are in battle against Dorian Syracusans, but as Thucydides notes, the

Athenians have Dorian Corcyraeans and Argives fighting as allies on their side as well.

Consequently, when the Dorian peoples of both sides in the conflict sing out a similar martial paean, it produces uncertainty (ἀπορίαν) in the Athenians as to who is a friend and who an enemy. In this way, the paean, which resounds clearly through the visual obscurity of the night, paradoxically inflicts further blindness on the Athenians. It effectively eliminates the distinctions between friend and enemy, a perceptual blurring that is materialized in the overlapping of both physical bodies and words (note the polyptoton in the phrase φίλοι τε φίλοις καὶ πολῖται

πολίταις), as allied soldiers and citizens become entangled and inseparable from one another. Not only does fear take hold of them, but they take violent hold of one another and, now, can neither be differentiated visually nor separated physically (καὶ ἐς χεῖρας ἀλλήλοις ἐλθόντες μόλις

ἀπελύοντο). Like the watch-word, then, the paean fails to clarify Athenian understanding of the scene and compounds their already confused experience with further uncertainty, disarray, and fear (ἀπορίαν, ἐταράχθησαν, φόβον). Also like the watch-word, the paean facilitates the construction of an alternate and perverse reality in which friends and fellow-citizens have become objects of fear and targets for violence.

92 The scene of linguistic and religious breakdown at Epipolae resonates with two episodes from earlier in the text, the Athenian plague in book two and the Corcyraean stasis in book three.

Both earlier episodes in the History are paradigmatic of the breakdown of cultural practices that regularly occurs in time of war, and both are re-inscribed onto the scene at Epipolae.53

Thucydides employs resonances at the level of rhetoric and imagery, which serve to signpost deeper thematic links with the two earlier episodes. At Corcyra, for example, familial relationships break down to the point that ‘fathers were killing sons’ (πατὴρ παῖδα ἀπέκτεινε,

3.81.5), a phrase echoed in the polyptoton of ‘friends coming to blows with friends, and citizens with citizens’ in the Epipolae passage above (φίλοι τε φίλοις καὶ πολῖται πολίταις… ἐς χεῖρας

ἀλλήλοις ἐλθόντες, 7.44.6).54 Another verbal echo connects the paean itself to Thucydides’ description of the plague.55 Although the plague narrative is developed fully in book two of the

History, it is first announced as a significant event in the Methodology section of book one. Like the paean, the plague is a devastating event that was ‘not the least harmful’:

ἡ οὐχ ἥκιστα βλάψασα καὶ μέρος τι φθείρασα ἡ λοιμώδης νόσος.

That most harmful and broadly destructive pestilence, the plague. (1.23.3)

μέγιστον δὲ καὶ οὐχ ἥκιστα ἔβλαψε καὶ ὁ παιανισμός.

The greatest and most harmful was the paean. (7.44.6)

The latter phrase employs the same verb (βλάπτω) as the former, with the same emphatic litotes

(οὐχ ἥκιστα), and both phrases postpone the nominative subject for increased dramatic impact. In

53 On the thematic resonances between the plague and stasis narratives, see Cochrane 1929, 133-7; Connor 1984, 99- 105; Swain 1993. 54 Cf. the ‘friendly fire’ at Delion, which results from similar confusion of identities (4.96.3): ταραχθέντες ἠγνόησάν τε καὶ ἀπέκτειναν ἀλλήλους (‘they failed to recognize, in their confusion, and killed one another’). 55 Plagues and paeans were closely associated in ancient Greek literature and medical thought. See Webster (forthcoming 2019): paeans were deployed as “sonic-cures” for the public, “in the face of plagues and other moments of collective crisis.” Literary examples include: Il. 1.4.73f.; Soph. OT 4f. The paean in Homer is personified as an actual god of healing, Παιήων (see Il. 5.396-403, Od. 4.232).

93 the first phrase, following the extended description of devastation, we expect something that is typically harmful, like plague, and so we are not surprised to encounter the phrase ἡ λοιμώδης

νόσος. Thus, the latter passage, which explicitly recalls this rhetoric of devastation, is calculated to shock with the appearance of ὁ παιανισμός at sentence end. The delayed placement of ὁ

παιανισμός thus enforces on the reader, for a moment, the disorientation playing out within the scene, as we grapple with the paradox of a paeanic appeal to the god of healing that has been recast as a direct catalyst of ‘the greatest and not least harm’.

These verbal echoes, then, flag the important thematic resonance between the episodes.

Under similarly described conditions of ‘confusion and fear’ (ἐν πολλῇ ταραχῇ καὶ φόβῳ,

3.79.3), Corcyraean citizens turn on one another, ‘slaughtering those of their own who appear to be enemies (Κερκυραῖοι σφῶν αὐτῶν τοὺς ἐχθροὺς δοκοῦντας εἶναι ἐφόνευον, 3.81.4). It is an inversion of civic relationships that reappears among the Athenian soldier-citizens at Epipolae.

Cultural disruption continues at Corcyra when, famously, the relationships between words and customary meanings become dislodged, a phenomenon reflected in the failure of the Athenian watch-word at Epipolae.56 Furthermore, both the plague and stasis episodes portray the widespread upending of religious practices, as the sacred spaces of the two cities are filled with sacrilegious killing.57 The paean at Epipolae is a religious ritual whose function becomes similarly destabilized. Embedded in the ritual of the martial paean is the idea of divine protection, the knowledge of which dispels the fear of bodily harm in combat and inspires feelings of safety and confidence.58 For the Athenians at Epipolae, however, the paean effects the

56 3.82.4: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ ἔργα ἀντήλλαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει (‘they also exchanged at will the customary meaning of words with respect to deeds’). See Loraux 2009, with further references. 57 See 2.52; 3.81.2-5; 3.82.8. 58 See Pritchett 1974, 105-8; Käppel 1992, 45f. For the Greek paean more generally, see Rutherford 1993, 1994, 2001; Schröder 1999. On their medicinal and public health uses, Perrot 2016, Webster (forthcoming 2019).

94 opposite on both accounts: it cultivates fear (φόβον) and causes harm (ἔβλαψε) to the Athenians.

They hear only that it is sung by their traditional ethnic rivals the Dorians, and because they are denied the capacity for reasoned reflection in their blinded state, the knowledge of their having brought Dorian allies with them into this battle is replaced by a fear that has remade everyone, friend or foe, into a potential enemy.59 Sound becomes a stand-in for fear, since every sound, to the blinded Athenians, now signifies the threat of harm. The linguistic and musical sounds of the scene have thus enabled a series of affective responses to supplant reasoned judgment and introduce an appraisal of reality grounded in panic and fear.

The passions play a similarly destructive role in the plague and stasis episodes, where they threaten wholesale undermining of the capacity for rational thought. The plague, for instance, is described as a force ‘greater than logos’ (κρεῖσσον λόγου, 2.50.1). It defies not only language but logical analysis itself.60 Similarly, as Nicole Loraux has argued, stasis can be read as the violent clash between the blind passion of ὀργή and the judging faculty of γνώμη.61 Thus, in both earlier episodes the overthrow of cultural norms is facilitated by the incursion and domination of the passions in human processes of judgment. A potent combination of fear and desire recalibrates the characters’ interpretations of their world by redrawing the bounds of moral behavior. In other words, these historical episodes are exemplary in the text for what they reveal about the power of emotions to (re)construct methods of evaluation and structures of meaning.

The Athenians at Epipolae, like the characters in both these earlier episodes, find themselves in a situation of high psychological stress and mortal danger. Deprived of clear

59 The ironic link between paeans and fear is not unprecedented in Greek literature. At Aesch. Pers. 391f., the Greeks at Salamis sing out a paean that spreads fear (φόβος) and uncertainty through the Persian host (see Gurd 2016, 65-7). 60 Connor 1984, 100-1. See further Edmunds 1975, 7-88 on logos as rational calculation. 61 Loraux 2009, 263.

95 vision, they are deprived also of the ability to make rational sense of their world. When auditory perceptions become their primary means of experiencing their environment, emotions move in to take the place of cognitive judgment. Like in the plague and stasis episodes, passions construct a version of reality for the Athenians that is deeply perverse, in which both linguistic and religious modes of understanding are disrupted. The auditory invocations of the watch-word and the paean, each in its own way intended to procure safety and cultivate confidence, instead become the scene’s primary conduits for fear, and this spreading fear, in turn, recalibrates and distorts the characters’ understanding of their reality. Sound itself becomes a kind of disease, at once both physical and corrupting for the Athenians, whose only perceptual resource is to listen.

Conclusion

Within a paradigm of sensory perception in which, as Thales put it, vision is as closely linked with truth as audition is with untruth, blindness and darkness make for a convenient and fitting metaphor for ignorance—as my reading of the Plataea episode in the last chapter has also indicated. And indeed, the blinded characters at both Sphacteria and Epipolae also struggle to ascertain knowledge about their worlds. In my analysis of these two vividly depicted soundscapes, however, I have attempted to show the contrasting ways in which the two most prevalent sensory modes on display in the History, seeing and hearing, interact with the dynamics of fear for the agents of the narrative. I have argued that Thucydides envisions a close link between hearing and feeling that has profound implications at several levels of his text, from the author’s own discourse on the challenges of historiography to the working-out of historical events on the battlefield. The auditory dynamics of the scenes at Sphacteria and Epipolae allow

Thucydides to stage certain historiographical concerns in the historical narrative itself. In other words, the historian grounds the epistemological problems of auditory perception in the self-

96 proclaimed truth of the text—in the ‘deeds themselves’ of history. From our vantage point outside the text, then, we are allowed to see and to scrutinize for ourselves the sounds of

Thucydides’ war and the complexly emotional and causative force they exert on the agents and events of history.

The thematic resonances I have examined in these first two chapters, between (1)

Thucydidean historiographical claims to true and accurate analysis and (2) the interpretive actions undertaken by historical agents on the battlefields of the History, suggest an important broader conclusion for the text. Readers of Thucydides routinely observe the author’s apparent hostility to emotional forces tout court, but I want to suggest that the case is more complicated, and that it is not affect so much as epistemology that is the historian’s chief concern.62 As

Thucydides explains, not only do people tend to be ‘careless’ (ἀταλαίπωρος, 1.20.3) in their understanding of history, attracted by the alluring adornments of poetic hymns and the misleading accounts of hearsay evidence, but what’s worse, such sounds have the pernicious tendency to form the epistemic foundations for their faulty historical understanding. In the

Methodology chapters, the real-world consequences Thucydides outlines are the patterns of historical misunderstanding so common among readers of history. In 1.20 he offers as his paradigmatic example the anecdote of the Tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, a story he claims has become so far removed from historical fact as to have prevailed into the realm of legend, τὸ μυθῶδες. He returns to the same story of the Tyranncides in book six, at greater length and with further evidence (6.53-9).63 The historical anecdote and its embedded critique of

62 See, e.g., Rawlings 1981, 102-17; Hunter 1988; Orwin 1994; Ober 1998, 52-121; Luginbill 1999; Stahl 2003. Cf. Romilly 1956, Desmond 2006. 63 Much has been written about this ‘second introduction’. See discussion and references in Hornblower 2008, 433- 40, and more recently Bassi 2016, 232-41 (with notes). For discussion and references to older, and esp. German, scholarship, see Stahl 2003, 1-11.

97 popular historical knowledge make clear the historiographical stakes of Thucydides’ project, which he positions as an intervention against these sorts of erroneous beliefs that, in each case, compromise historical accuracy (ἡ ἀκρίβεια, 1.22.1; τὸ ἀκριβὲς, 6.54.1).

What is less immediately clear in Thucydides’ introductory remarks on the Tyrannicides is the relation between these erroneous beliefs about history and the emotional responses they have the potential to elicit in a falsely-believing public. However, Thucydides uses the second

Tyrannicides excursus to elaborate this highly significant connection between knowledge and affect. If his discussion of the Tyrannicides in the Methodology was predominantly ‘theoretical’, that is, limited to literary and historiographical concerns, then the excursus in book six demonstrates erroneous historical belief in practice, setting on full display its emotional and political consequences in the Athenian democracy. As Thucydides frames it, the Athenian people in 415 BCE, based on a series of misconceptions about their own history—further failures of self-knowledge—have arrived at an equally misconceived understanding of their present. H-P.

Stahl has observed that the Athenians’ misunderstanding centers around an erroneous displacement of historical cause and effect: the Athenians believe “that the (supposed) tyrant

[Hipparchos] was killed because his regime was oppressive rather than allowing the murder to be the cause of the regime’s harshness. In other words, cause and effect have traded places”

(original emphasis).64 This historical misconstrual has led the contemporary Athenians to irrational fear and suspicion of the institution of tyranny, even though, as Thucydides affirms, the notion that tyrants were unpopular because they ruled harshly is false.65

64 Stahl 2003, 8. 65 On the contrary, Thuc. affirms that the Peisistratids ruled with ‘virtue and intelligence’: οὐδὲ γὰρ τὴν ἄλλην ἀρχὴν ἐπαχθὴς ἦν ἐς τοὺς πολλούς, ἀλλ’ ἀνεπιφθόνως κατεστήσατο. καὶ ἐπετήδευσαν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὴ τύραννοι οὗτοι ἀρετὴν καὶ ξύνεσιν (6.54.5).

98 Moreover, not only are the Athenians’ beliefs largely unexamined (οὐ δοκιμάζοντες,

6.53.2), demonstrating the same sort of carelessness Thucydides has earlier disparaged in students of history, they are also based on the same sorts of hearsay accounts he condemned in the Methodology (6.53.3):

ἐπιστάμενος γὰρ ὁ δῆμος ἀκοῇ τὴν Πεισιστράτου καὶ τῶν παίδων τυραννίδα χαλεπὴν τελευτῶσαν γενομένην… ἐφοβεῖτο αἰεὶ καὶ πάντα ὑπόπτως ἐλάμβανεν.

For knowing by hearsay that the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons at its end became harsh… the demos was constantly afraid and taking everything with suspicion.66

As I have argued, non-visual sources of information, like hearsay reports of history, are problematic for Thucydides because of their compromised epistemological value for historians and historical actors alike. What becomes especially clear in this passage on the Tyrannicides, however, is the direct link between knowledge and emotion. The demos’ ‘knowing’

(ἐπιστάμενος) is incorrect, but it nevertheless forms the basis for the fear and suspicion which now surround the figure of Alcibiades and drive the city’s politics (ἐφοβεῖτο αἰεὶ καὶ πάντα

ὑπόπτως ἐλάμβανεν)—fears which are, moreover, stirred up by the shouted sounds of

Alcibiades’ political enemies (ἐβόων, 6.28.2).67 This relation stands in stark contrast to what we saw with the clear-sighted Athenian actors at Sphacteria, whose emotional responses, both courage and fear, were founded on the solid epistemological foundation of visual observation.

The Athenian demos of the Tyrannicides excursus resemble much more strongly the blinded

Athenian soldiers at Epipolae, whose emotional relation to their environment has been shaped by a series of epistemologically suspect verbal cues. In each case study of emotional behavior we have seen, then, emotions are depicted in a relation of interdependence with subjects’

66 Cf. 6.61.4: πανταχόθεν τε περιειστήκει ὑποψία ἐς τὸν Ἀλκιβιάδην. 67 Alcibiades presents himself as particularly harassed by the shouting of his enemies after the incident of the Herms and the Mysteries (ἐπιβόητός εἰμι, ἐπιβοώμενος, 6.16).

99 understandings of their world. However, although these emotional orientations have the potential to disrupt everything from military strategy to political behavior, I want to suggest that emotion per se is not the primary target of Thucydides’ criticism. Of paramount importance to the historian is not emotionality itself—whose ubiquity throughout the text suggests Thucydides accepted it as a basic component of historical processes—but the epistemic grounding for it, which people have an overwhelming tendency to get wrong. To cite emotion alone as the target of Thucydides’ critique is to make the mistake of the Athenian demos in 415 and confuse cause and effect. But I do not mean simply to re-inscribe notions of a strict and unbridgeable divide between reason and emotion: fear, as well as the other emotions we have seen in this chapter, do not operate in isolation from epistemological processes. Rather, emotion is an effect of one of the basic difficulties with which Thucydides’ History is concerned, that is, the unavoidable complexities of sensing and knowing about the world.

In the next chapter, we move on from Thucydidean battle narrative and begin to examine how this relation between sensing and knowing functions in the ideological settings of the History. In chapter three, I look at how Pericles constructs an idealized ‘citizen gaze’ in the Funeral Oration of book two, and how this very particular mode of viewing interacts with equally idealized forms of emotional response. In chapter four, I look at the role of fear and its counterpart, hope, in representations of Athenian imperial ideology.

100

Chapter 3

The Emotional Economy of the Citizen Gaze in Pericles’ Funeral Oration

ἐλευθέρως δὲ τά τε πρὸς τὸ κοινὸν πολιτεύομεν καὶ ἐς τὴν πρὸς ἀλλήλους τῶν καθ' ἡμέραν ἐπιτηδευμάτων ὑποψίαν, οὐ δι' ὀργῆς τὸν πέλας, εἰ καθ' ἡδονήν τι δρᾷ, ἔχοντες, οὐδὲ ἀζημίους μέν, λυπηρὰς δὲ τῇ ὄψει ἀχθηδόνας προστιθέμενοι.

We perform our duties to the city freely and without suspicion toward one another in our day-to-day pursuits, not harboring resentment for our neighbor if he does something for pleasure, nor even putting those annoying looks on our faces that, while harmless, are nevertheless distressing. (Thuc. Hist. 2.37.2)

This chapter begins part two of this study, in which I examine the dynamics of vision, cognition, and fear in a different context from Thucydidean battle narrative. This chapter and the next look at this same set of variables for its important role in certain manifestations of Athenian ideology as Thucydides presents them. The current chapter offers a reading of Pericles’ funeral oration from book two of the History, a passage that distils a version of Athenian democratic ideology and presents it as a rhetorical set piece. In the next chapter I think about the role of fear and its opposite, hope, in Athenian imperial ideology. There, I look at how both fear and hope operate in combination on the collective Athenian psyche in the emotional fervor leading up to the Sicilian expedition. However, as I argue in the current chapter, notions of hope and desire already occupy a complementary position alongside fear in Pericles’ funeral oration.

101 Introduction

The Periclean epitaphios logos has been one of the main focal points of scholarly commentary since antiquity.1 Moderns have been equally drawn to the speech, which has occasionally been treated as a lens through which to understand the rest of the History.2 Moreover, as many studies have shown, the Periclean funeral oration is suffused with emotions.3 My intent in this chapter is to build upon these studies by drawing out the role of fear in the rich emotional politics of the oration, the emotion which I suggest implicitly subtends the rest.

Furthermore, this chapter maintains focus on the intersection of fear with knowledge and vision. Most significant, then, are the ways in which the idealizing discourse of the speech constructs normative modes of citizen viewing—an idealized “citizen gaze”4—and how such viewing further structures ways of citizen knowing and fearing. The speech is broadly interested in engineering a narcissistic gaze, with which the citizen-subject views an imaginary construction of himself reflected in Pericles’ idealizing discourse.5 Part of that imaginary image, however, consists of prescriptive modes of literal seeing—how citizens should gaze at one another and how Pericles imagines both citizens and foreigners gazing into and upon the city of

Athens. I argue that these two versions of viewing, the literal and imaginary, correspond to a distinction between seeing-as-sensory perception and seeing-as-knowing. The speech’s

1 Dion. Hal. Thuc. 18. 2 See, e.g., Parry 1972, Orwin 1994. Most book length studies of Thuc. have addressed the funeral oration in some capacity. 3 On love/desire: Monoson 1994; Wohl 2002; Ludwig 2002; Farenga 2006. See further the examinations of courage and cowardice in Christ 2006, 124-42; Balot 2014. 4 Goldhill 1998 employs the term to describe the multiple dimensions of visuality with which Athenian democratic culture was infused. From the law-courts to the assembly to the theater, he argues, participation in the democracy was thoroughly performative and, thus, visible: “In the democratic polis, the scene of viewing has a new political constitution… [a] new sense of public, civic gaze… Democracy made the shared duties of participatory citizenship central elements of political practice, and thus to be in an audience is not just a thread in the city’s social fabric, it is a fundamental political act.” 5 See Wohl 2002, 30-72; Ludwig 2002, 327-58; Farenga 2006, 424-535.

102 deployment of visuality operates on a continuum between these two categories, and in this chapter I will be interested both in distinguishing their significant divergences as well as identifying their points of overlap in Pericles’ rhetoric. And in examining both aspects, my goal will be to shed light on their relation with fear.

In this chapter, I examine how Pericles’ oration aims to generate and enforce a mode of understanding for the Athenian citizen that (re)calibrates in a uniquely Athenian way his emotional responses to what he sees. My broad argument is that the relation between seeing, knowing, and fearing forms one of the thematic centers around which Pericles’ speech is built. I suggest that reading the oration in this way elucidates its function as a ‘prescriptive epistemology of viewing’, that is, a particular mode of seeing and interpreting the world which Pericles demands his Athenian audience accept and perform. Citizen fear is the primary target of the elaborate epistemological edifice Pericles creates. In a speech ostensibly eulogizing casualties of war, Pericles seeks to demonstrate a way of both seeing and understanding the world that allows his citizen audience to face the same mortal dangers as these exemplary war dead without fearing their own deaths. In each movement of the speech’s visual program, seeing and fearing are mutually imbricated, and conscious deliberative processes are shown to mediate the space between them. This idealized fearlessness comes by means of a conscientiously reconfigured emotional economy in which death becomes a less fearsome thing than shame and dishonor. In this way, Pericles deliberately reshapes what Peter Goldie terms the “narrativity” of Athenian emotion: he conditions the Athenian fear response by manipulating the narrative normatively attached to it.6 Pericles’ rationalizing discourse thus offers an antidote to the soldier’s natural

6 Goldie 2000.

103 fear of harm and a pathway to courage.7 Furthermore, it is an antidote the citizen cannot refuse to take, for his status as an Athenian hangs in the balance. In this way, what I have called the speech’s program of ‘prescriptive epistemology’ is highly coercive, both in the sensory and psychological demands it levels at its audience and, as I argue, in the pressure it exerts on the language of the speech.

As Nicole Loraux has demonstrated, and most scholars agree, the funeral oration genre served as an ideological mouthpiece for Athenian democracy, enabling the discursive construction of what Loraux has called the “ideality” of the city.8 Many modern theories situate ideological subjectivation/interpellation at the level of the unconscious,9 but as the speech makes clear, Periclean ideology also operates largely through the citizen-subject’s conscious capacity for rational, deliberative thought and choice—relying on a process akin to what Aristotle termed prohairesis.10 Central to the speech’s didactic program is its visual-cognitive lesson in the properly Athenian way of seeing and knowing, and the practical target of that lesson is the rational decision-making capacity Pericles prescribes for the idealized Athenian citizen-subject.

Contingent upon the modes of proper seeing and understanding the speech articulates, in each case, is not only the citizen-subject’s fear responses, but also his membership within the

Athenian ideality Pericles envisions.

7 Compare Pericles at 2.62.5, on the epistemological foundations of Athenian courage. The connection between courage and knowledge was noted already in Immerwahr 1960, 285; but see the more extensive studies of Sharples 1983 and Balot 2014 (esp. 25-46). My discussion here owes much to Balot’s reading of the oration, and my emphasis on fear as a central theme of the speech is, to some extent, the obverse of Balot’s examination of “democratic courage.” On courage in Periclean discourse and in Thuc. more generally, see further Avramenko 2011, 87-98; Romilly 1980. 8 Loraux 1986a. Cf. Thomas 1989, 196-237. 9 See, e.g. Althusser 1971, with Ricoeur 1994; Zizek 1989. Wohl 2002, 30-72 discusses at length the engagement of ideology with the Athenian collective unconscious in P.’s oration. For a useful and detailed summary of theoretical work on ideology, beginning with Marx, see Rose 1992, 1-42 (with references). 10 Arist. addresses the concept of prohairesis in several places, but see esp. NE 3.2.11 12a15-17. Further references: Chamberlain 1984.

104 In the first section of this chapter, I examine how both the theatrical setting and the speech itself work to enforce normative modes of citizen visuality and paint a vivid picture of idealized civic fearlessness. In the second section I focus on the climactic scene depicted in

2.42.4, where Pericles shows the essential epistemological dimensions of both vision and fear in action on the battlefield. This passage illustrates the culmination and enactment of Pericles’ coercive visual discourse, when idealized ways of seeing and knowing compel radical recalibrations of the citizen-soldier’s fears and desires. I argue here that one of the results of this highly normative recalibration is a complication in the distinction between rational and irrational fear. I conclude by looking at the modes of citizen viewing evoked in the following chapter,

2.43, which re-centers both the citizen gaze and the city itself as a visible object, famously configuring the two in a relation of eros.

The question of the authenticity of the speech is not one I address in this chapter.11 There is little doubt that the historical Pericles delivered traditional epitaphioi, probably on more than one occasion in the mid-fifth century.12 However, the numerous rhetorical and thematic resonances between the speech we have in the History and the surrounding text indicate that the speech of 431 is Thucydidean in design and composition.13 The fact that vision, knowledge, and fear play such a prominent role in this speech, just as they do in the broader thematic structure of the History, argues for a common author for both. My operating assumption is that Thucydides

11 Dion. Hal. Thuc. 18 already questioned its authenticity in antiquity. Modern scholarly consensus is that the speech lies somewhere between authentically Periclean and entirely Thucydidean. Brunt 1993, 160 is representative: Pericles’ structure of thought “is too redolent of Thucydides’ own ideas and fits too neatly into the economy of his history to be a largely authentic report.” A handful of scholars remain convinced of its authenticity: see e.g. Kagan 1975, Alfageme 1997. Sicking 1995 and Bosworth 2000 argue for a degree of authenticity by attempting to situate the speech in its contemporary historical context. The full bibliography on the speeches in Thuc. is too vast to list here. A convenient starting point is Rusten 2009, 492, but see further the extensive references in Wohl 2002, 31 n. 1. 12 Arist. Rh. 1365a30-3, 1411a2-4; and Plut. Per. 8.9 and 28.4 reference an epitaphios logos delivered during the Samian war of 440/39. 13 E.g.: Macleod 1983, 149-53 notes the ironic echo of the phrase σῶμα αὔταρκες of the epitaphios (2.41.1) in the plague narrative (2.51.3). See further Flashar 1969; Immerwahr 1960, 284-9 and 1973, 26.

105 did compose the speech, and that he did so with a deliberate eye to its position and purpose in the text’s broader narrative framework.14 Thus, the thematic resonance between the vision- knowledge-fear nexus within the speech and without is not coincidental, but rather a basic element of Thucydides’ work and of his interpretation of history. A further methodological consequence for this chapter is that when I refer to Pericles and ‘his’ oration, I am referring to the character in Thucydides’ History, rather than the historical figure.

Idealized Viewing: Citizens and City

Thucydides introduces us to the oration by situating it in its civic and historical context within the city of Athens, where it served as merely a single act in an extended public memorial service held annually during war time (2.34).15 As Thucydides highlights in his description, the ceremony was a carefully orchestrated spectacle produced by the city for viewing by Athenians and non-Athenians alike. The epideictic speech, the denouement of the ceremony, was itself a further element of the spectacle put on for the viewing audience.16 The funeral service as a whole deployed an elaborate program of visual symbols in its presentation of Athenian ideology, shaping its narrative around a programmatic interplay between the visible and the invisible. It was a civic display for which citizen modes of viewing and understanding were carefully controlled. Several of the visual details emerge from Thucydides’ vivid description: the two-day display of remains, followed by a highly visible procession through the city and into the

14 So, e.g., Yunis 1996, 64-5: “the speeches are fictitious and serve Thucydides’ own artistic and didactic ends.” 15 The ceremony also included funeral games and sacrifices (Arist. Ath. Pol. 58.1; Pl. Menex. 249b3-6; Lys. 2.80; Hsch. s.v. ἐπ’ Ἐυρύγυῃ ἀγών). The sequence of events is not known definitively: see Loraux 1986a, 37-9; Tsitsiridis 1998, 409-12. 16 Bosworth 2000 argues without citing a specific passage that Thuc. is “explicit that the audience was particularly large” (2). It is likely enough, as he observes, that the crowd of citizens and foreigners gathered in the Kerameikos must be larger than one of the typically closed-door assembly speeches at Sparta, which were deliberately shut away from public view (e.g. Archidamus’ speech at 1.79.1). But I see no evidence in the text of 2.34 for the size of this particular audience.

106 demosion sema in the Kerameikos, a district of the city which Thucydides implies was chosen especially for its visual appeal (‘the most beautiful suburb in the city’, τοῦ καλλίστου

προαστείου τῆς πόλεως).17

He draws particular attention to the ten cypress-wood caskets set out on display, which correspond to the ten Cleisthenic tribes (a point he emphasizes twice: φυλῆς ἑκάστης μίαν…

ἕκαστος ἦν φυλῆς). The display of the ten tribal caskets as the central visual element throughout the ceremony produces a distinctive historical and ideological narrative of Athenian identity in the late fifth century, one that effaces the monarchies of Athenian myth and the tyrannies of the sixth century and defines Athenian politics instead according to democratic practices. This selective historical narrativizing is accomplished largely through visual display, by imposing upon the viewing audience a particular and partial mode of seeing and understanding the

Athenian past and, thereby, the Athenian present.18 Thucydides alludes to the importance of the visual narrative in this ceremony when he notes that an eleventh casket is set out on display to symbolize the missing in action, whom he notably calls ‘the unseen’ (τῶν ἀφανῶν). The invisible is as meaningful as the visible in the spectacle of the funeral ceremony, a point Thucydides reemphasizes when he explains that it is not until the caskets have been ceremoniously removed from view (‘concealed with earth’, κρύψωσι γῇ) that the speech is allowed to begin.19 In this way, the visual semantics of the ceremony set the stage for a dialectic between the visibility of democratic ideals and the effacement of citizen death that will be mirrored in the speech itself.

Throughout the epitaphios, then, notions of Athenian identity emerge as the stakes of the visual

17 There is some debate about whether the adverb πρότριτα indicates one or two days here. See Loraux 1986a, 19; Alexiou 2002, 207 n. 30; Rusten 1989 ad loc. 18 Reconfiguring history was routine in Athenian identity construction after the Persian Wars, and the funeral was an official participant in this discourse: see Boedeker 1998; Hölscher 2018, 95-150. See Shear 2013 on the politics of memory in the epitaphios. 19 Further details of the ceremony’s program are known from archaeological evidence. See Jacoby 1944; Arrington 2010 and 2011.

107 discourse Thucydides depicts, as both citizen and non-citizen viewing is carefully directed toward certain understandings—and away from others—of what it is to be Athenian.

Citizen visuality

Pericles’ oration deploys a similarly ideologically charged prescription for citizen viewing, and this visual program operates in direct relation with the speech’s emotional program. Like the surrounding ceremony Thucydides describes, the speech is deeply concerned with presenting to its audience a specifically Athenian way of viewing the world. However, the speech offers a further reward: if the Athenian chooses to see the world in the way Pericles prescribes, then he will be able to live his public and private life, and face his death, without fear.20 Distinct from the visual display that precedes the oration, this neutralization of fear is the primary didactic aim of

Pericles’ speech. Nevertheless, the speech uses similar tools to achieve its aim, attempting to enforce ways of seeing, knowing, and feeling.

Citizen vision and fear make their first significant appearances early in the speech, during

Pericles’ praise of Athenian democracy at 2.37. The passage marks a shift from the concretely visible dimension of the funerary spectacle described in 2.34, and reiterated by Pericles himself

(...οἷα καὶ νῦν περὶ τὸν τάφον τόνδε δημοσίᾳ παρασκευασθέντα ὁρᾶτε, 2.35.1), into the mode of

‘ideological’ viewing his speech will aim to articulate. In 2.37 Pericles shifts his audience’s attention to objects less immediate than those arrayed in the demosion sema, but no less concrete in the everyday life of his Athenian listeners. Indeed, no sooner has Pericles applied the name demokratia to Athenian government than he ties its practices to distinctive modes of citizen viewing and fearing. In one of the more frequently analyzed passages of the speech, Pericles

20 However, cf. Balot 2001b and 2014, 25-46 on the place of fear in the anatomy of democratic courage Pericles outlines.

108 offers a description of democracy as a government unique among Greek states (οὐ ζηλούσῃ τοὺς

τῶν πέλας νόμους) and exemplary (παράδειγμα) for its orientation towards the interests of the multitude over the minority (καὶ ὄνομα μὲν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐς ὀλίγους ἀλλ' ἐς πλείονας οἰκεῖν

δημοκρατία κέκληται, 37.1). He goes on to explain how citizens share equally in their privileges under Athenian law, in their access to the fundamental virtue of arete, and in their freedom from being hindered in public service by personal penury or ‘invisibility of position’ (ἀξιώματος

ἀφανείᾳ, ibid.). For its capacity to elucidate Pericles’ or Thucydides’ own ideas, or other historical truths about Athenian democratic theory and practice, this passage has been endlessly dissected by scholars.21

What comes next in the passage has been of less interest to readers of the oration, but for my purpose here, it marks the introduction of the speech’s most important theme. Having contrasted ‘the few’ with ‘the many’ and situated democratic ideals within a traditional (and aristocratic) value system of arete, Pericles moves into a portrayal of the daily life of the

Athenian citizen.22 In a recent article, W. R. Connor expresses surprise that Pericles’ description of the democracy in this section is so brief and lacking in technical details as to the actual functioning of the government.23 As Loraux has shown, however, the funeral oration as a genre tended “not to go beyond generalities” in its presentation of Athenian political and military ideology, and so we should not expect the sorts of historical details whose absence Connor

21 Most recently Connor 2018. More thorough summaries of the scholarship can be found in Andrews 2000 and Winton 2004. 22 See Loraux 1986a, esp. 180-202 on aristocratic representations in the oration, already noted in Gomme HCT, II.126. 23 Connor 2018, 171: “The treatment of democracy is… surprising both for the brevity of what is said, and for what is not said. Pericles is shown as praising democracy but avoiding what is often regarded as its core: decision-making through democratic institutions. Instead, apart from the allusion to ‘the greater number,’ that is, majority rule, there is not a word about how Athenian democracy made or implemented its decisions; no claim about its ability to formulate wise policies, or foster intelligent debate; no praise of its institutions, notably the Council where legislation was drafted and the agenda set, and the Assembly where after often contentious debate the voting took place.”

109 marks.24 In this absence of concrete technical detail, it is notable what Pericles does prioritize in his depiction of life in the city. At 2.37, he pinpoints, and extols, three specific facets of Athenian democracy. First, in 37.1, he avers its alignment with the interests of the majority, as opposed to the minority (ὄνομα μὲν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐς ὀλίγους ἀλλ’ ἐς πλείονας οἰκεῖν δημοκρατία κέκληται).

After this very broad definition of democratic government, however, he emphasizes only two further points in his eulogy: the roles of (1) visual appearances and (2) fear in maintaining political stability. First, he describes the reciprocal phenomenon of the citizen gaze (2.37.2):

As Douglas Cairns and others have demonstrated, for the ancient Greeks, ways of looking—directly or askance, with eye contact or without, and so forth—were inextricably tied up with a complex network of culturally-determined significances, as well as with emotionality.26 This passage in the funeral oration richly illustrates the importance of these visual dynamics in Athenian citizen life as Pericles envisions it. From his brief description, distinct modes of citizen viewing emerge. The passage spotlights people’s individual facial expressions, which are both projected outward and received and interpreted by others. Although Pericles

24 Quotation from pg. 77, but see Loraux 1986a, 77-131 for the rhetorical topoi of the epitaphioi. 25 Interpretations of the phrase λυπηρὰς δὲ τῇ ὄψει ἀχθηδόνας προστιθέμενοι differ slightly among commentators. The point of contention is whether to construe the dative τῇ ὄψει with the participle προστιθέμενοι (as Rusten 1989) or with the adjective λυπηρὰς (as Fantasia 2003). The sentence’s meaning seems not to be greatly altered either way: Pericles is referring to the emotional impact of individuals’ visual appearances to one another. 26 See Cairns 2005, with extensive references to the ancient material, and, now, Hölscher 2018, 1-13. Stewart 1997, 13-23 is useful for visuality in ancient Greek art. On the visuality of self-presentation more generally, see Goffman 1959.

110 denounces ‘harmless but distressing’ (ἀζημίους μέν, λυπηρὰς δέ) facial expressions as non- democratic, his assertion of their absence from Athenian life not only exposes the importance of individual visuality to the democratic ideal he is crafting, but further implies widespread and shared awareness—if not scrutiny and regulation—of a citizen’s ‘public face’. For as the passage makes clear, visual appearances are closely linked with affective responses, and the look on one’s face is enough to cause (at least the potential for) emotional distress in an onlooker.

This link between viewing and feeling is embodied in the term ὑποψία, the other mode of viewing from which Pericles tries to distance the ideal citizen. The suspicion, or simply bad feeling, which Pericles describes with the noun ὑποψία, is built etymologically out of visual language, but it also entails critical judgment of the object toward which it is directed. It is a way of looking defined by its negative affect. However, as we have just seen, Pericles has already shaped his rhetoric so as to distance citizen viewing from bad feelings, and he does so again here. Elaborating on the dual affective and judgmental capacities of ὑποψία in the next clause, he attempts to recalibrate this particular mode of viewing by disassociating its visual dimension from the bad feeling it entails. As far as citizens’ mutually held suspicions of their daily pursuits, he says, ‘we do not harbor resentment for our neighbor’ (οὐ δι' ὀργῆς… ἔχοντες). Pericles does not deny the existence of ὑποψία itself, but rather the negative feeling (articulated here as ὀργή) embedded in it. There is a certain tension inherent to this rhetorical move, in which Pericles denies or transforms the affective content immanent in the words and concepts he deploys. The upshot here is that while stopping just short of denying the existence of suspicious viewing practices per se, Pericles instead targets the feelings they entail. The semantic tension that results, here and in the passages I will discuss below, is symptomatic of the normative force of

Pericles’ ideological agenda, in which citizens will be asked repeatedly to reconfigure—by re-

111 thinking—their emotional responses in such a way as to align themselves with the ideality

Pericles describes. And like here, ways of seeing will be central to this ideological project.

So then, while denying the resentment that comes with mutual suspicion, Pericles nevertheless does not distance his ideal citizen from the culture of viewing that his description exposes. When a citizen observes another enjoying himself, he does not judge his neighbor frivolous and suspect him of squandering time and resources that would be better directed elsewhere. Indeed, Pericles claims, he does not even look askance at his neighbor. Nevertheless,

Pericles’ assertions here imply that, while your neighbor may not be resenting you, he is certainly watching your behavior. The Athens that Pericles describes thus emerges as a society of collective observation, where visuality and feeling are tightly bound together, and both are in turn tied to democratic ideology.

However, mutual visibility is even more pervasive in the life of the citizen, as Pericles here depicts it. The rhetorical structure of the passage at 2.37.2 has typically been interpreted as working around a contrast between the public and private spheres, an antithesis Pericles relies on frequently in the speech.27 But the distinction is only implicit and, in fact, breaks down slightly upon closer inspection. The phrase πρὸς τὸ κοινόν situates the first part of the sentence on the side of public life, but the implied semantic contrast with its rhetorical counterpart, the phrase

πρὸς ἀλλήλους, is asymmetrical. ‘The shared’ (τὸ κοινόν) is not mutually exclusive from ‘one another’ (ἀλλήλους), but Pericles avoids more explicit language for this contrast, such as the antithesis τὰ ἴδια/τὰ δημόσια, which appears in the next sentence.28 Moreover, the verb

πολιτεύομεν, which signifies active membership in a civic collective, governs both phrases and the remainder of the sentence. Thus, rather than cleanly dividing the public from the private,

27 See, e.g., Rusten 1989 and Fantasia 2003, ad locc. 28 Cf. also 2.40.2: ἔνι τε τοῖς αὐτοῖς οἰκείων ἅμα καὶ πολιτικῶν ἐπιμέλεια...

112 Pericles actually situates the whole passage within a distinctly political context, in which public and private viewing overlap, and the audience is made to envision a private life that is exposed to as much visual scrutiny as public life. Pericles’ formulation permits no real shelter from public viewing and thus works toward eliminating the private altogether. An Athenian citizen cannot be hindered by the ‘invisibility of his position’ (ἀξιώματος ἀφανείᾳ), as Pericles earlier put it, because, in the civic space he describes, citizen invisibility does not exist. In the setting of highly controlled visual theater at the public funeral, where citizens and foreigners have come to be spectators, Pericles has turned the viewing lens back onto his audience, who are encouraged to visualize the city and society he describes, and to imagine themselves seeing and being seen within it. In the context of this fundamentally ideological rhetoric, description and prescription are inseparable, and thus the modes of viewing in the democracy Pericles sketches are imbued with normative value.

The denial of non-normative, that is transgressive, ways of seeing, a denial which

Pericles has made explicitly political and democratic, further allows the Athenian to live his citizen life ‘freely’. To be sure, Pericles’ reference to freedom here must refer “to both the freedom of the citizen (as opposed to the noncitizen slave) and also a freedom from economic or other necessities.”29 However, in the context of citizen visuality, which is the focus of this passage, ἐλευθέρως refers also to the citizen’s freedom to see and be seen without fear—of suspicion, resentment, or reproach (or more precisely, δι' ὀργῆς) from his fellow citizens.30 To this extent, then, the as-yet unnamed specter of fear subtends Pericles’ rejection of certain types of viewing and the negative feelings tied to them. However, the implicit is made explicit in the

29 Wohl 2002, 37. 30 The ideal itself of fearless civic interaction is not uniquely Athenian: cf. 1.68.1, 3.37.2, 4.114.1, 6.92.4.

113 next sentence, when Pericles names, for the first time in the speech, the sort of fear he envisions for the Athenian ideal (2.37.3):

ἀνεπαχθῶς δὲ τὰ ἴδια προσομιλοῦντες τὰ δημόσια διὰ δέος μάλιστα οὐ παρανομοῦμεν, τῶν τε αἰεὶ ἐν ἀρχῇ ὄντων ἀκροάσει καὶ τῶν νόμων, καὶ μάλιστα αὐτῶν ὅσοι τε ἐπ' ὠφελίᾳ τῶν ἀδικουμένων κεῖνται καὶ ὅσοι ἄγραφοι ὄντες αἰσχύνην ὁμολογουμένην φέρουσιν.

Although in private life we interact without offense, in public life we are the most law- abiding, out of fear, because we attend to those in power as well as to the laws, especially those that have been set down for the assistance of the wronged and those which, though they are unwritten, bear acknowledged shame.

Pericles begins by reiterating the claim that Athenians associate with one another in an inoffensive manner (ἀνεπαχθῶς) in their private lives, here deploying the phrase τὰ ἴδια to express an unambiguous contrast with public life, τὰ δημόσια. The adverb ἀνεπαχθῶς picks up the earlier term ἐλευθέρως (both adverbs placed in first position and followed by δέ), and it points back to the importance of proper visual modes in achieving the ideal of a private life that is both free from fear (of suspicion, resentment, reproach) as well as from the giving or receiving of offense. But whereas private life was regulated by a fear that was left unnamed, public life is organized around fear explicitly, τὸ δέος. As the sentence continues, however, it becomes clear that, like he did with the term ὑποψία above, Pericles is again attempting a certain sleight-of- hand in his use of deos in this context. Rather than the sort of visceral fear that turns up later in the speech, at 2.42.4, this deos has usually been interpreted as something like “a positive concept of restraint.” 31 By the end of the sentence, it has been effectively glossed as the ‘acknowledged shame’ that accompanies law-breaking.32 Pericles reveals the specter of fear only to immediately

31 So Gomme HCT and Rusten 1989, ad locc. See further Edmunds 1975, 58-61. Romilly’s 1956 case for deos equating to a notion of rational or “intellectuell” fear, as versus the “affectif et irrationnel” phobos, has been refuted by Konstan 2006 (see pp. 153-5). The (imperfect) distinction traces back to the Alexandrian philosopher Ammonius. 32 Cf. 3.83.2, where part of the societal breakdown in Corcyra involves the detachment of fear from sacred oaths (ὅρκος φοβερός). Without the fear of reprisal, oaths lose their power to encourage stability in social and political relations.

114 obscure and reconfigure it, and thereby efface it from the civic ideal he is outlining. As Bernard

Williams observes, however, the ‘shame’ Pericles invokes is a further instantiation of visuality:

“the basic experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition.”33 While the most immediate source of citizen fear appears on the surface to be the magistrates and the laws themselves, it is in fact this ‘acknowledged shame’, the socially enforced consequence of transgression, which Pericles positions as the normative object of fear. And this object, shame, thus emerges as a social fear that is linked inextricably to social visibility. By exercising such control over citizen visuality, the threat of public shame regulates the Athenian citizen gaze and maintains law, order, and social cohesion. What emerges clearly in both these passages, then, is that in Pericles’ depiction of the Athenian ideal, citizen viewing and fearing are mutually entailing.

There is a long cultural history of association between fear and shame (αἰσχύνη, αἰδώς), where fear of public reproach—being seen in the wrong way—works as a moral virtue regulating good behavior and deterring transgression.34 In one sense, then, this recalibration of fear, along the lines of shame, is a thoroughly traditional rhetorical maneuver by Pericles. However, it is also part of a systematic strategy Pericles employs throughout the speech either to reconfigure, or to distance the Athenian citizen-subject from, a more immediate and visceral kind of fear, i.e. of physical harm and death.35 His studious avoidance of invoking mortal fear and death, each

33 Williams 1993, 78. Dodds 1951 was the first to label ancient Greek society as a shame/honor-based culture. See further Balot 2014, 218-55; Cohen 1991, 70-97 on what he calls the “politics of reputation” in Athens. And cf. Cairns 1993, on the closely related term aidos, which he defines in part as “an inhibitory emotion based on sensitivity to and protectiveness of one’s self-image” (2). Konstan 2006, 91-110 provides useful summary of the similarities and differences between aischyne and aidos, with relevant scholarship. In the ancient sources, see esp. Arist. EN 1116a-b, 1128b11-13; Pl. Laws 698b and Euth. 12b9-c1. 34 See the passages discussed in Edmunds 1975, 218, which include Il. 15.656-8; Od. 7.305, 17.188, 24.435; Epicharm. Frg. 221K; Aesch. Eum. 520-8, 693-709; Soph. Ajax 1073-80; Pl. Rep. 465a11. See further Pl. Euth. 12b9-c1 and Laws 646e-47a. 35 Cf. Loraux 1995, 87: “The Athenians wish to hear of nothing but courage, and fear, this undesirable word, has disappeared from the official phraseology of war.”

115 conspicuously circumscribed in the speech, demonstrate ex silentio, as it were, their paramount importance to his rhetorical program. Pericles’ eulogy to the city and its dead deliberately aims at confronting this instinctive human fear by creating a value system and incentive structure according to which the citizen-soldier should not fear death as much as public reproach. As we are beginning to see, the value system Pericles creates hinges on prescriptive modes of seeing the world. But in a speech so intimately concerned with how its hearers perceive fear and death, both fear and death are made all but invisible.36 The term deos appears only twice in the oration, and phobos not at all.37 In the current passage, Pericles invokes the notion of fear only to immediately substitute for it the more socially and politically useful alternatives of respect and shame before the established laws.38 Its only other appearance, which I discuss below, comes at one of the rhetorical acmes of the speech, where Pericles again invokes deos only to reject it in favor of the glory (δόξα, 2.42.4) with which he insists his idealized citizen-soldiers met their ends.

The careful removal of fear from Pericles’ language can thus be seen as part of the oration’s strategy to carefully control what its audience is allowed to see. For the ideal citizen, as

Pericles details later in the speech, will need to be able to face death without fearing it. He will need to see and interpret approaching danger primarily as an opportunity for glory rather than a threat of physical harm. For these reasons, danger, fear, and death are strategically effaced from the surface rhetoric of the speech and referred to only elliptically, as these passages already begin to demonstrate.

36 Loraux 1986a, 101. Strauss 1964, 194-5: noting the dearth of “the words ‘death’, ‘dying’, or ‘dead bodies’” in the funeral oration, he contrasts the imagery and language of the following plague episode, which “abounds with mentions of death, dead, dying, and corpses.” 37 Compare Lysias’ oration: twelve occurrences; Pl. Menex.: six; Dem. 60: three. In Hyperides’ oration, which is an outlier of the genre in many ways, there are also only two occurrences. 38 Visvardi 2015, 51: “Absence of anger and suspicion in private life combined with fear of law in public life thus solidifies social and political cohesion.”

116 There are two other important themes we have seen established in these early passages, and which will continue to guide the reading I am presenting here: first, viewing and fearing have emerged as operating in a close relation with one another in Pericles’ vision of the Athenian ideality. And second, as part and parcel of his construction of the ideal of Athens, for which 2.37 serves as the pointed introduction, Pericles has begun also to construct an idealized gaze of the citizen within the city.

The city as visual object

The ideological stakes of seeing and being seen extend outside the city walls as well. Having established a normative culture of inter-citizen viewing inside the city, Pericles then moves outward and constructs an idealized visuality from without. In crafting this ideal, he relies largely on the opposition between Athens and its chief rival, Sparta. This opposition does significant ideological work through the middle section of the speech. Pericles contrasts what he claims is the innate courage of the Athenian citizen with that of the Spartan, which can only be acquired through laborious and lifelong training (2.39.1). He asserts that Athenians possess the unique ability to combine thoughtful deliberation with decisive action, whereas for non-Athenians bravery only issues from ignorance (2.40.3).39 However, Pericles sketches this relationship of alterity between the two cities also in terms of their respective engagements with visuality. Just as the Athenian citizen ideal relied upon prescriptive modes of seeing and being seen, so, it turns out, does the collective identity of the city (2.39.1):

τήν τε γὰρ πόλιν κοινὴν παρέχομεν, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ὅτε ξενηλασίαις ἀπείργομέν τινα ἢ μαθήματος ἢ θεάματος, ὃ μὴ κρυφθὲν ἄν τις τῶν πολεμίων ἰδὼν ὠφεληθείη…

39 On the relationship of rational deliberation to courageous action in the oration and Greek thought more broadly, see Sharples 1983 and Balot 2014.

117 For we offer a city that is shared jointly, and never do we expel any foreigners from seeing or learning something which, were it not concealed and one of our enemies saw it, he would be aided…

The implied contrast here is with the distinctively Spartan practice of occasionally expelling non-citizens from the city, a practice Pericles explicitly disavows for Athens.40 It becomes clear, however, that this particular contrast in civic customs between the two cities hinges on their fundamentally different relationships with public visibility. The city of the

Athenians is open to all manner of viewing (θεάματος, ἰδὼν), a koine polis whose shared institutions reflect its shared visibility to all onlookers. Pericles’ assertion here elaborates a visible dimension to the city’s already avowed status as an (observable) paradeigma for Greece.

In contrast, Pericles implies, the Spartans keep their city carefully concealed from public view

(κρυφθὲν). The subtext of this inter-polis contrast is, again, a relation between visuality and fear.

The Athenians are unafraid of their city’s visibility to outsiders, whereas the Spartans are motivated by fear to hide their city from the inquisitive gaze of foreigners. When he qualifies

Athens’ imagined viewing audience as ‘enemies’ (τῶν πολεμίων), Pericles makes all but explicit the fact that fear is what is at stake in the two cities’ contrasting relations with visibility. The theme through this section of the speech is the superiority of Athenian strength and courage: friendly viewing poses no threat to the city, and so cannot serve as an advertisement of Athenian boldness. It follows, then, that a city unafraid of being exposed to the visual scrutiny of its enemies is a fearless and confident one indeed. Whereas fear drives the Spartans to conceal themselves from view, the Athens that Pericles describes dismisses any fear of being seen, and this openness to an outside gaze is thus embedded into the ideological identity of the city. Both ideal citizen and ideal city exist in a state of fearlessness to visual exposure.

40 See Gomme HCT, ad loc. for the ancient references to this Spartan practice.

118 Not only is the city fearlessly exposed to the viewing world, but, Pericles continues, it is a ‘marvel’ for the world to behold: τὴν πόλιν ἀξίαν εἶναι θαυμάζεσθαι (2.39.4). The experience of marvel/wonder is not exclusively visual in Thucydides, but the notion of visual display here proceeds easily from Pericles’ preceding language describing the city’s open visibility.41 He thus recapitulates the image he has been developing of the Athenian city as an object to be looked upon. Thauma terminology is less frequent in Thucydides’ work than in Herodotus’, a fact

Gregory Crane attributes specifically to its intrinsic connection with emotional experience. For

Crane, “Herodotean discourse is… designed to stimulate the emotions,” whereas Thucydides’ tendency was to minimize them.42 While Crane’s dichotomy between the two authors’ uses of emotion in their histories may be overstated, the connection he elucidates between wonder and affect is useful here. The idea of thauma in Greek thought signifies a particularly emotionally charged kind of sensory encounter that can extend across an array of felt experiences, including fear.43 Its invocation in the epitaphios thus imagines a sense of awe from outside viewers of the

Athenian city, but may also suggest a certain fearsomeness which the city projects visually outward to those non-Athenians who gaze upon it. By being unafraid to be seen, we may infer,

Athens becomes fearsome to behold. In this way, the city becomes not merely an object of visual perception, but its very visibility becomes a tool of its imperial ambition, one which uses fear to cow its opponents. Later, in book three, the demagogue Cleon makes this conceptual connection

41 θαυμάζω occurs as visual experience also at 1.90.5, 3.38.1, 4.85.3, 4.111.2. A potential etymological link between Greek θαῦμα and θέαμα is tempting to posit but remains uncertain. See Wilson 2000, 141-3; Beekes 2010, 535 (s.v. θαῦμα): “possible, though by no means certain.” 42 Crane 2006, 236-45. 43 See, e.g., 8.14.2 in the Hist. Wonder converges with fear regularly in archaic poetry: Il. 5.601, 10.12-13, 24.482-4, 629-32; Od. 24.370-1; Hes. Theog. 834 (to cite only a few examples). See further Prier 1989; Nightingale 2004, 253-68.

119 all the more apparent in his speech on Mytilene, where he openly invokes thauma as an instrument of imperial oppression.44

When Pericles appeals to the notion of thauma a second time in the oration, then, we are again put in mind of the power of the Athenians’ city which, he further claims, is ‘not without the witness of great signs’ and makes the citizens who wield it an object of wonder (2.41.5):

μετὰ μεγάλων δὲ σημείων καὶ οὐ δή τοι ἀμάρτυρόν γε τὴν δύναμιν παρασχόμενοι τοῖς τε νῦν καὶ τοῖς ἔπειτα θαυμασθησόμεθα.

With great signs and, to be sure, furnishing a power that is not without witness, we will be a wonder to those now and in the future.

The ‘great signs’ Pericles cites could refer to monuments in the architectural landscape of the city, which would further augment the literal image of the conspicuously visible city Pericles is conjuring for his audience.45 More likely, however, these great signs are abstractions of the

Athenian imperial power which Pericles has spent the bulk of this section of the speech extolling.46 Indeed, in the preceding sentence, Pericles has just glorified the power of the city

(αὐτὴ ἡ δύναμις τῆς πόλεως) as the strongest indication (σημαίνει) of its superior character.47

In any case, the language of ‘proof’ (σημείων) and witnessing (ἀμάρτυρόν), along with the language of thauma, is presented by means of visual imagery, which thus attaches itself to the visual dynamics of the city the orator has been describing. The precise nature of this visuality becomes increasingly blurry, however, as Pericles shifts his emphasis from a normative mode of seeing and being seen to an increasingly abstracted notion of the city as an ideality beheld by the

‘mind’s eye’. Hence, later in the speech, he will twice describe the virtues of the city and its

44 3.39.5: πέφυκε γὰρ καὶ ἄλλως ἄνθρωπος τὸ μὲν θεραπεῦον ὑπερφρονεῖν, τὸ δὲ μὴ ὑπεῖκον θαυμάζειν. 45 Ober 1998, 85. 46 Cf. Immerwahr 1960, 286-90. 47 2.41.3: …αὐτὴ ἡ δύναμις τῆς πόλεως, ἣν ἀπὸ τῶνδε τῶν τρόπων ἐκτησάμεθα, σημαίνει.

120 glorious dead as ‘adornments’ that metaphorically ‘embellish’ the ideal image he has created with his speech:

2.42.2: ἃ γὰρ τήν πόλιν ὕμνησα, αἱ τῶνδε καὶ τῶν τοιῶνδε ἀρεταὶ ἐκόσμησαν...

For the hymn I have sung about the city, these men’s virtue has adorned…

2.46.1: ’Εἴρηται καὶ ἐμοὶ λόγῳ κατὰ τὸν νόμον ὅσα εἶχον πρόσφορα, καὶ ἔργῳ οἱ θαπτόμενοι τὰ μὲν ἤδη κεκόσμηνται.

The suitable qualities these men possessed have been spoken by me with words, in accordance with custom, and with their actions the entombed have already adorned themselves.

These statements help facilitate the movement from the concretely visible city—open and inviting viewing from all quarters—to an abstraction of ideology which, nonetheless, retains its attachment to visual imagery. Pericles presents these two sides of viewing—the concrete and the abstract—as seamless and parallel, constituent parts of the same perfect whole. In presenting the concrete and the abstract as sharing a common visibility, Pericles effaces the dividing line between the seeing eye and the mind’s eye, that is, the distinction between seeing and knowing.

However, as I argue in the next section, there emerges a distinct tension between the visual and the epistemological when the two are put into practice on the imaginary battlefield conjured up for the speech’s climactic passage at 2.42.4. What the soldier sees and experiences in the midst of battle comes into conflict with what the speech requires him to know, and thus vision and knowledge become disconnected. This tension is symptomatic of the prescriptive visual mode the speech imposes upon its ideal citizen-soldier, whom it demands face death without seeing, feeling, or fearing it. Pericles will return to the parallel themes of the citizen gaze and the city as a visual object later in the speech at 2.43, when he exhorts his audience to visualize the city and the abstraction of power it embodies, and, instead of fear, to feel love for that image. Love thus serves as another visually instantiated alternative presented by Pericles, again, to conceal the

121 specter of fear from the citizen ideal. I address this important chapter in section three, so that we encounter the passage in the order Pericles presents it, and that we read it in close connection with the passage that immediately precedes it, which I turn to now.

Idealized Viewing on the Battlefield (2.42.4)

Readers of the funeral oration have long recognized that Pericles’ ostensible eulogy over the dead soldiers is articulated largely as an extended hymn to the city and the benefits and opportunities it affords its citizens.48 Pericles limits his praise of the dead themselves to only a few sentences (roughly 2.41.5-43.1).49 This emphasis on the city over the soldiers serves an important purpose in Pericles’ oration. In the first place, the many qualities listed by Pericles that make Athens unique in the Greek world are the qualities which constitute the ideal image he is crafting (2.37-41.4). But these qualities also constitute the unique value of this city, as against any other, and their enumeration through the main body of the speech builds, for Pericles, not only an ideality but an incentive structure around which the citizen is meant to frame his understanding of himself, his place, and his purpose in the city. Athens’ uniqueness in the Greek world makes it, correspondingly, uniquely worth sacrificing for.50 Furthermore, as Loraux and others have brought out clearly, this ultimate sacrifice is the only telos available within the logic of Pericles’ speech.51 For death in battle is the only means by which the Athenian citizen escapes

48 See e.g. Rusten 1989, 136. P.’s attention to the city at the expense of other conventional elements of the epitaphios is exceptional among the surviving examples from the genre: see Herrman 2003, 6; Loraux 1986a, 132-71 and 241- 51; Ziolkowski 1981, 95 49 Cf. however Bosworth 2000, who suggests that historical realities lay behind P.’s deemphasis on the deeds of the fallen: “The dead of 431 had perished in a series of skirmishes, most of them inconclusive, and the major event had been a practically uncontested invasion” (4, n. 21) and thus “Pericles wisely refrains from spelling out” (6) such dubious accomplishments. Taylor 2010, 64-74 makes a similar case. 50 Cf. 2.41.5: ‘Concerning such a city as this [which I have described], these men, nobly judging it right not to be deprived of it, died fighting’ (περὶ τοιαύτης οὖν πόλεως οἵδε τε γενναίως δικαιοῦντες μὴ ἀφαιρεθῆναι αὐτὴν μαχόμενοι ἐτελεύτησαν). 51 Loraux 1986a, 141: “there is only life on one side and the fine death on the other; but this is a false balance, and the fine death draws all the positive values to itself.” Cf. idem 100-1, 104, 127, 166, 169. See further Wohl 2002, 30-

122 shame and gains full access to the perfect image of Athenian identity Pericles has crafted. Death entails the “inevitable and incommensurable reality possessing every civic value” Pericles has used his speech to extol; it is the only way for the citizen to attain the perfection of having

‘become good’ (ἄνδρες ἀγαθοὶ γενομένοι).52

Yet the “incommensurable reality” of death is carefully hidden from view in the language of the oration, which programmatically minimizes the deadly reality of the soldiers’ experience—even as the men themselves see it clearly before their eyes—in order to maximize the ideological value of their sacrifice. Nevertheless, Pericles articulates a value system according to which the object of highest worth, namely arete, can be attained only by dying.53

The end of a soldier’s life, Pericles avows, both reveals and confirms his ultimate attainment of arete, and moreover, has the effect of effacing all his bad deeds.54 This arrangement of values and incentives yields the paradoxical scenario in which death (and thus, arete) becomes the chief object of desire for the properly initiated Athenian citizen.55 However, in avoiding naming death explicitly, Pericles’ praise of the dead soldiers’ sacrifice takes its shape not around the fact of their mortality, but around the deliberateness of their choice to die (διάνοιαν, 2.43.1; γνώμης,

43.3), as I discuss further in the next section. Within the logical structure of the oration, death is presented as the only rational choice for the soldier when he is faced with the unacceptable alternative of survival with shame. This is precisely where a certain gap between seeing and

72: “Within the terms of the Epitaphios—and it admits of no other terms—there can be, strictly speaking, no living Athenians” (50). 52 See Rusten 1986, 71-6 on this phrase, traditional in the epitaphioi and other patriotically tinged literature. Loraux 1986a, 113 notes the contrast between the Homeric hero, whose ‘good’ is immanent, and the democratic hero who must become good through his performance of self-sacrifice. 53 Cf. Bosworth 2000, 6: the oration presents itself as a “hymn to the corporate virtues of Athens, which satisfy the aspirations of its citizens and justify their death in battle as the most desirable communal service.” 54 2.42.2-3: δοκεῖ δέ μοι δηλοῦν ἀνδρὸς ἀρετὴν πρώτη τε μηνύουσα καὶ τελευταία βεβαιοῦσα ἡ νῦν τῶνδε καταστροφή… ἀγαθῷ γὰρ κακὸν ἀφανίσαντες κοινῶς μᾶλλον ὠφέλησαν ἢ ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων ἔβλαψαν. 55 For death as initiation, see Loraux 1986a, 100-1.

123 knowing appears in Pericles’ prescriptive epistemology, and it is the moment depicted at 2.42.4.

Here Pericles shows us the ideal citizen-soldier in battle, in the instant when he is tasked with weighing the idealized, normative mode of evaluating reality against the danger he sees clearly before him. Although he sees an inherently fearsome sight before him, i.e. approaching death,

Periclean logic does not allow him to judge that sight as fearsome. Rather, it compels him to desire death and the arete it can offer his memory. In other words, he is asked to see the visible specter of the fearsome but to understand it as desirable. Periclean ideology seeks to provide the cognitive tools to allow the soldier to realign what he sees with what he is tasked with knowing.

The coercive force of Periclean ideology is nowhere more clear than in this scene, which represents the ultimate trial for the citizen’s performance of the ideal.

In place of the instinctual fear of death, Pericles in this passage again offers the emotional substitute of shame. The vividly experiential scene is narrated in one of the most notoriously convoluted sentences in the History. It is a series of densely packed and overlapping antitheses that critics since antiquity have struggled to unravel.56 However, the scene is critical to the ideological program of the speech because it shows us in real time, as it were, a model of what the ideal citizen sees in battle, how he thinks critically about it, and how he calibrates both his fears and his desires accordingly.57 That is to say, it ties together the three closely related thematic threads we have been tracking in the speech, and it demonstrates their essential relation both to one another and to the ideological model Pericles has constructed (2.42.4):

τῶνδε δὲ οὔτε πλούτου τις τὴν ἔτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας ἐμαλακίσθη οὔτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κἂν ἔτι διαφυγὼν αὐτὴν πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο· τὴν δὲ τῶν

56 Dion. Hal. Thuc., 16. Flashar 1969, 19 called it “der wohl schwierigste Satz des thukydideischen Geschichtswerkes.” Dover 1973, 9-10: “it is unlikely that anyone will ever produce a translation… which will command universal agreement.” Rusten 1986, 49: the “most exasperating sentence in Thucydides.” Alfageme 1997, 37: “quite unintelligible.” 57 Cf. Pearson 1943: “This difficult sentence really contains the central thought of the whole funeral speech, for it is here that Pericles explains and justifies the heroism of those who have fallen.”

124 ἐναντίων τιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραν αὐτῶν λαβόντες καὶ κινδύνων ἅμα τόνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἐβουλήθησαν μετ' αὐτοῦ τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι, τῶν δὲ ἐφίεσθαι, ἐλπίδι μὲν τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν ἐπιτρέψαντες, ἔργῳ δὲ περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρωμένου σφίσιν αὐτοῖς ἀξιοῦντες πεποιθέναι, καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ τὸ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν μᾶλλον ἡγησάμενοι ἢ τὸ ἐνδόντες σῴζεσθαι, τὸ μὲν αἰσχρὸν τοῦ λόγου ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σώματι ὑπέμειναν καὶ δι' ἐλαχίστου καιροῦ τύχης ἅμα ἀκμῇ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῦ δέους ἀπηλλάγησαν.58

Of these men not one turned coward for the prolonged enjoyment of wealth, and not one delayed the fearsome out of hope that he might yet escape poverty and become wealthy. Taking vengeance on his enemies to be more desirable than both and considering, at the same time, this to be the most beautiful of risks, they wanted in spite of the danger to take their vengeance upon the ones and desire the others, entrusting to hope the uncertainty of future success, while as for action, resolving to trust in themselves concerning what was now visible, and by understanding that there was fighting and suffering in it more than (there was) salvation via surrender, they fled disgraceful reputation while withstanding bodily the deed; and through the fortune of the briefest moment and at the pinnacle of glory rather than fear, they departed.

The scene sets out on display an idealized performance of the normative modes of seeing, thinking, and feeling prescribed by Pericles’ discourse. Pericles foregrounds the role of deliberative thought by deploying a profusion of cognitive verbs in the passage characterizing the soldiers’ intellectual processes in action: προτιμήσας, λαβόντες, νομίσαντες, ἀξιοῦντες,

ἡγησάμενοι. The men are depicted as fully rational agents who examine and interpret what they see before them on the battlefield and, filtering it through the ideological framework Pericles has crafted for them, reason that death and glory are more valuable objectives than survival with the possibility of disgrace.59 Thus, they determine to avoid the one and pursue the other, and in so doing neutralize the power of fear to govern their decisions. At the same time, the soldiers acquire the glory of a good reputation, which Pericles has positioned as the pinnacle of citizen achievement. The density of thinking-terms makes unmistakable that these men’s acceptance of

Periclean ideology is a conscious, deliberate, and rational act. The cognitive process Pericles outlines here mediates between the fearsome sights the men see and the emotional reactions they

58 Text of Rusten 1989. 59 See Pears 1980 discussing this process of battlefield evaluation in Aristotle’s exploration of courage.

125 are permitted to feel. The cognitive process, in other words, represents not only enactment of the ideological interpellation the speech demands, but also the implied antidote to the fear it aims to suppress. Rhetorically, however, this passage admits of a high degree of ambiguity and even paradox.60 On closer inspection, fears in fact become confused with desires, even as seeing competes with knowing, complications which are symptomatic of the pressure Periclean democratic ideology levies upon the citizen-soldier to conform to its peculiar way of seeing and knowing the world.

That we are situated within a distinctively visual context is made clear mid-way through the passage with the contrasting phrases τὸ ἀφανές and περὶ τοῦ ἤδη ὁρωμένου, which indicate not only that the scene is being focalized through the visual experience of these men, but that the narrative of the soldiers’ thoughts will be tied inextricably to what they see. The adverb ἤδη indicates that both the sights and thoughts we are now witnessing are occurring in real time, and it thus becomes clear that the scene is enacting a model performance of the speech’s prescriptive modes of seeing and knowing. Pericles is deliberately vague about the specific objects of the soldiers’ gaze, signaling only elliptically their inference that the thing ‘now visible’ brings the potential for mortal danger, for it requires either ‘fighting and suffering’ (τὸ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ

παθεῖν) or ‘retreat and salvation’ (τὸ ἐνδόντες σῴζεσθαι). Rather than offer details about, for example, the identities of the assailants, the location of the battle, or the numbers on either side,

Pericles keeps his (and our) eye on the larger moral dilemma at stake in the soldiers’ choice either to live or to die. Specific details about what the soldiers see would not only muddy the rigidly schematic picture of Periclean morality the scene is meant to illustrate, but would also

60 For this reason it has been one of the most studied chapters of the Hist. See Pearson 1943; Kohl 1978; Rusten 1986 and 1989; Alfageme 1997.

126 risk shining unwelcome light on the fears of harm and death which attend such a situation and which the speech is at pains to obscure and redirect.

Yet both fear and death are present in the passage in a number of ways. In the first place, any listener or reader, ancient or modern, who imagines him/herself in the position of these soldiers as they face their own end, recognizes that some level of fear would invariably suffuse this experience. In fact, Pericles expressly encourages this degree of audience immersion when he demands that his listeners internalize and emulate (ζηλώσαντες, 2.43.4) the thoughts, feelings, and actions he attributes to the soldiers in this scene.61 Although fear is subordinated in Pericles’ rhetoric, its unstated presence is the motivating force behind the intensely rationalizing stream of consciousness this scene depicts in the hearts and minds of the soldiers. Were the danger of yielding to fear and ‘giving in’ (ἐνδόντες) not present, the epistemological system Pericles has crafted would not be necessary. The speech’s most instrumental use, then, is to provide a corrective to the natural fear of death that the citizen, if he is to take Pericles’ exhortation to heart and ‘become good’ like the dead men, must confront and surmount. This fear is never stated outright, but its motivating presence permeates the scene.

The phrase ‘to become a good man’ has been recognized as one of several ways the funeral oration alludes indirectly to the unmentionable specter of death.62 Pericles uses it only once, to inaugurate his speech at 2.35.1 (ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν... γενομένων).63 But its purpose in the oration—by moralizing citizens’ sacrifice, to distance the speech’s discourse from the fact of death and the fear linked to it—is carried out in the current passage via similarly euphemistic

61 Pericles has already acknowledged the tendency of listeners to inhabit the subject position of those whose experience they are hearing recounted (2.35.2). 62 Loraux 1986a, 101. 63 But cf. 2.43.1: καὶ οἵδε... τοιοίδε ἐγένοντο, where ‘became such men’ clearly indicates the qualities embodied in the topos of the andres agathoi.

127 rhetoric. Pericles engages in a program of reconfiguring the objects and subjects of mortal fear, on the one hand, and desire on the other. In the first sentence of this passage, Pericles asserts that

‘nobody delayed the fearsome thing’ (ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο), by which he means that none of the soldiers buried on this occasion gave into fear and fled the scene of danger. Instead of mentioning death by name, Pericles employs the euphemistic term τοῦ δεινοῦ, ‘the fearsome’.

The substantive adjective displaces fear from the feeling subjects, the soldiers, and locates it instead in a nonspecific object, to deinon. This object, though deliberately undefined, emerges a few lines later as something that is both clearly visible and immediately present (τοῦ ἤδη

ὁρωμένου). Although it is fearsome in itself, the soldiers are not shown feeling any fear from their apprehension of it. In this way, Pericles is able to acknowledge the inherently fearsome quality of this encounter while at the same time maintaining the necessary separation between fear and the idealized citizen-soldier. This arrangement is both highly prescriptive and paradoxical: fear is presented as an ‘objective’ fact which, nonetheless, does not infect

‘subjective’ emotional experience.

Rather, fear in the scene is redirected in a familiar way, away from death and, again, toward shame. Because they feel no fear in the face of the fearsome itself, we are told, none of these men ‘turned soft’ (ἐμαλακίσθη) and fled to safety. Pericles famously rejects such ‘softness’ from the Athenian ideal earlier in the speech, where he remarks that the Athenian ‘loves wisdom without softness’ (φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας, 2.40.1).64 There, the term is couched in a normative gender ideology according to which malakia signifies a set of qualities antithetical to notions of manliness.65 The ideal Athenian is defined in strict opposition to such qualities, and

64 See Rusten 1985 on malakia in the oration. 65 See Wohl 2002, 41-62: “The word embraces a whole range of qualities thought to be incompatible with manly strength: moral weakness, lack of self-control, susceptibility to the will of others, inconstancy—in short, effeminacy” (46). Cf. ead. 174-88.

128 Pericles implies that their display would lead to public disgrace. Such public shame, as we have already seen in the oration, is deeply implicated in the emotional economy of fear, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the current passage. The specter of ‘softness’ is here thrust into the life-and-death stakes of the battlefield and presented as, indeed, a fate worse than death. As such, it emerges as a more powerful object of fear than death itself, and it becomes a repelling force that drives the soldiers to their self-sacrifice. Thus, between the two alternatives, flight and death, Periclean ideology compels the soldiers toward the latter. Prohibited from fleeing death, the soldiers can only ‘flee from disgrace’ (τὸ αἰσχρὸν τοῦ λόγου ἔφυγον).

However, fear is only one part of the emotional structure motivating these soldiers’ actions. Pericles also recalibrates the objects of desire available to the men. Desire and fear operate in a careful balance through this scene: as the object of lesser fear in the dichotomy

Pericles has established, death paradoxically migrates into the field of desire. Pericles begins the passage by minimizing the soldiers’ desire for ‘continued enjoyment of wealth’ (πλούτου τὴν ἔτι

ἀπόλαυσιν), which he says could not alter their decision to die. As a target of desire for these men, wealth is subordinated beneath an object of even ‘greater longing’, namely ‘vengeance upon their enemies’ (ἐναντίων τιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραν), a desire Pericles immediately reiterates in the phrase ἐβουλήθησαν... τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι. In this way, a hierarchy of desires comes into view, situated in parallel with the hierarchy of fears the speech has been working to establish. Each reinforces the other in its motivational push upon the soldiers’ thoughts. The soldiers recognize that their desire to enact vengeance ‘involves fighting and suffering’ (ἐν αὐτῷ

τὸ ἀμύνεσθαι καὶ παθεῖν), further euphemisms for death, which emerge as the only permissible objects of the soldiers’ desire.66 This fighting and suffering is rebranded as ‘the most beautiful of

66 Kakridis 1961, 80 identifies the euphemistic use of the phrase ‘fighting and suffering’ here.

129 dangers’ (κινδύνων τόνδε κάλλιστον), effectively a gloss on the notion of arete, and Pericles shows it positioned atop the hierarchy of desires. As elsewhere, Pericles declines to name death as the logical consequence of these desires, shining the spotlight instead on the series of ideologically-informed calculations and actions involved in this highly prescriptive and exemplary moment.67

Nevertheless it is clear that, within this economy of fear and desire, for the soldier to desire to enact vengeance upon his enemies, and to confront ‘the most beautiful of risks’, is for him to desire mortal danger. As Pericles has already noted, these soldiers recognize and accept that ‘suffering’ (παθεῖν) more than ‘salvation’ (σῴζεσθαι) lies in their immediate future. Thus, as the specter of death slides down the hierarchy of fears, subordinated as it has been to shame,

Pericles simultaneously moves it onto the hierarchy of desires by linking it with the attainment of shame’s opposite, glory. As a result, Pericles has reconfigured both fear and desire such that the object of each is set perfectly opposite what we can safely assume is their most natural order as it exists outside the ideological framework of the funeral oration. Lionel Pearson clearly identified the irony inherent in this ideological demand when he suggested that, in this passage, death and salvation are oddly synonymous.68 Furthermore, both glory and shame, positioned here as the parallel objects of desire and fear, represent the antithetical poles of the civic gaze that Pericles elaborated earlier in the speech. Even beyond the city walls and in the midst of battle, these citizen-soldiers’ thoughts and actions, in Pericles’ characterization, continue to be policed by a pervasive (and perhaps invasive) normative civic gaze.

67 Loraux 1986a, 102-3 questions the free will of the soldiers’ choice to die, pointing out that P.’s civic ideology largely “decides through” the citizen, that is, over-and pre-determines his normative choice. 68 Pearson 1943, 400 (with n. 1): “in brave resistance itself, even in death… is true security… to be found rather than in surrender.”

130 This program of confounding fears with desires, in which the ‘normal’ and the

‘normative’ collide, yields certain ambiguities of meaning in the text itself. The first half of this passage has usually been interpreted as operating around a structuring antithesis of, on the one hand, the soldiers’ desire to face their enemies in the imagined battle (i.e. ‘take vengeance’), and on the other hand, their desire to prolong life and pursue the acquisition of wealth (πλούτου…

πενίας ἐλπίδι… πλουτήσειεν). None of these men, Pericles states, prioritized survival and wealth over service to their polis and the sacrifice it entailed. Yet, the standard reading of the sentence continues, even though the men had unequivocally rejected the pursuit of wealth in favor of fighting and dying, they continued still to desire enrichment (ἐφίεσθαι):

τῶνδε δὲ οὔτε πλούτου τις τὴν ἔτι ἀπόλαυσιν προτιμήσας ἐμαλακίσθη οὔτε πενίας ἐλπίδι, ὡς κἂν ἔτι διαφυγὼν αὐτὴν πλουτήσειεν, ἀναβολὴν τοῦ δεινοῦ ἐποιήσατο· τὴν δὲ τῶν ἐναντίων τιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραν αὐτῶν λαβόντες καὶ κινδύνων ἅμα τόνδε κάλλιστον νομίσαντες ἐβουλήθησαν μετ' αὐτοῦ τοὺς μὲν τιμωρεῖσθαι, τῶν δὲ ἐφίεσθαι…

The verb ἐφίεσθαι at the end of this passage has been problematic for generations of scholars. A.

W. Gomme recognized the internal logical inconsistency it represents: “it would be contradictory as well as tasteless, after asserting that both rich and poor have abjured the charms of wealth, to add that in their last fight it was still their aim.”69 Several commentators have endorsed emendation from the manuscript reading of ἐφίεσθαι to ἀφίεσθαι, in order to make better sense of the meaning in this context, which seems to demand a rejection rather than an endorsement of the allure of personal enrichment.70

However, there are ways to make sense of the passage without emendation. If the manuscript reading ἐφίεσθαι is retained, then the μέν/δέ parallel explains how the soldiers’

69 Gomme HCT, 132. 70 Poppo-Stahl first suggested the emendation, and it has since been endorsed by Hude 1913, Gomme HCT, Rhodes 1988, Konishi 2008. Kakridis 1961, Hornblower 1991, Rusten 1989, and Fantasia 2003 support the manuscript reading.

131 desired vengeance against their enemies (τοὺς μέν) does not extinguish their desire for personal wealth (τῶν δέ) but rather replaces it atop their hierarchy of desires.71 Both Simon Hornblower and Jeffrey Rusten have argued that the two desires, civic service and personal enrichment, need not be mutually exclusive in Pericles’ thought, or in Greek thought more broadly.72 Moreover, earlier in the speech, Pericles already acknowledged the importance to the democratic ideal of a poor citizen’s striving to escape poverty.73 Nevertheless, while the notion of personal enrichment and its pursuit is not at all alien to this speech, this fact alone does not resolve the logical inconsistency, observed by Gomme, of its appearance in the phrase τῶν δὲ ἐφίεσθαι, immediately following an explicit and three-fold (οὔτε πλούτου, οὔτε πενίας ἐλπίδι...

πλουτήσειεν) disavowal of these men’s pursuit of wealth. If the ideological thrust of the passage is, as we have seen, to lay out a normative value structure, it is difficult to understand why

Pericles would want to remind his audience of the desire for wealth at the very moment his model citizen-soldiers are making the conscientious decision to eschew it in favor of endangering their lives.

An alternative way of reading the phrase τῶν δὲ ἐφίεσθαι, one more in line with the recalibrated structure of fear and desire we have been examining, might address not the verb but its object. The article τῶν is universally taken by commentators to refer to the invocations of wealth Pericles has cited in the passage’s opening sentence. It thus carries the same referent as

αὐτῶν a few words earlier, where such interest in wealth is subordinated to the ‘more desirable’

71 The verb ἐφίεσθαι signifies ‘desire’ almost every time it appears in the text, and of these occurrences, each takes a genitive object of some kind, as here. It is clear enough, then, that its meaning here is the same. Cf. 1.95.6, where the term is used in a military context to mean ‘to assign’ command to a general (in the dative), and 4.108.6, where it means ‘to send dispatches’. 72 See Rusten 1986, 60-1; Hornblower 2004, 257: “pursuit of wealth could be treated as an absolute good alongside dying for one’s country.” 73 2.40.1: τὸ πένεσθαι οὐχ ὁμολογεῖν τινὶ αἰσχρόν, ἀλλὰ μὴ διαφεύγειν ἔργῳ αἴσχιον. For discussion of financial language and themes in the speech, see Allison 2001.

132 vengeance upon enemies. However, if we read the phrase against the programmatically reordered system of fears and desires that we have already seen in action throughout this passage, then we should expect these men’s desires to continue to circle around the notion of arete, which the speech has made clear can only be acquired by fighting and dying. Against this backdrop, the article τῶν aligns more satisfactorily not with wealth but with the ‘risks’ (κινδύνων) that Pericles has just explained these soldiers are ready and willing to take. Their desire to confront these dangers thereby aligns with their desire to acquire martial glory. There are further arguments for the validity of this reading. First, a grammatical observation: if the article τῶν refers to the ‘risks’

(κινδύνων), then it picks up a more syntactically proximate antecedent than the wealth referred to in the first sentence (note also the separation of thought indicated by the adversative δέ at the end of the second line, above). Second, stylistic: with this reading, the μέν/δέ pairing of the two infinitives, for ‘vengeance’ and ‘desire’, recreates the obvious parallelism of the immediately preceding thought which has just paired (1) vengeance with (2) desirable risks: τὴν δὲ τῶν

ἐναντίων τιμωρίαν ποθεινοτέραν αὐτῶν λαβόντες καὶ κινδύνων ἅμα τόνδε κάλλιστον

νομίσαντες.74 And finally, a further thematic note: Pericles has just established these mortal dangers as something superlatively ‘beautiful’ (κάλλιστον) for the soldiers to behold and therefore, implicitly, also an object of supreme desire. Read in this way, the phrase τῶν δὲ

ἐφίεσθαι would be reiterating the soldiers’ noblest of aspirations for the arete they can achieve only by welcoming mortal danger, a conspicuously beautiful object of desire in itself. It is worth emphasizing again, moreover, that by employing the verb νομίζω (νομίσαντες), Pericles characterizes this desire as consciously calculated, one which aligns with the moral-ideological

74 This parallelism is signaled by the combination καὶ ἅμα, which Rusten 1986, 55-7 shows is frequently used “as an emphatic connective of individual words as well as whole clauses” in Thuc.

133 framework he has been developing throughout. Both desires and fears, in this framework, are presented as being grounded in rational evaluation.

The reading I have suggested has further ramifications for the passage, particularly its next clause, in which the soldiers ‘entrust to hope the uncertainty of future success’ (ἐλπίδι μὲν

τὸ ἀφανὲς τοῦ κατορθώσειν ἐπιτρέψαντες). Pericles again draws the stark contrast between what the soldiers see ‘now visible’ (τοῦ ἤδη ὁρωμένου) before them and the ‘invisibility’ (τὸ ἀφανὲς) of their aspirations. But within this shifting paradigm of fears and desires, where the pressure of

Periclean ideology is actively realigning the subjects and objects of both, how is ‘success’ to be defined? Again, commentators disagree. Rusten reads κατορθώσειν as a further reference to material wealth, which the soldiers, in the midst of battle, continue to hope for in some uncertain future.75 Gomme, however, disavows any connection with wealth, claiming that the notion of success must refer to victory in the coming battle.76 Supporting Gomme’s position, Johannes

Kakridis adds that the verb κατορθόω is used in Thucydides only when “it speaks of a political or, much more often, of military success, but never in the case of personal interests,” in which case it could not refer to the soldiers’ continuing desires for personal wealth.77 On the other hand, in the moral framework of the speech, in which the glory of arete is the paramount object of desire, success ought to be defined by the acquisition of that object. As we have already seen, however, this can only involve the citizen-soldier embracing his mortality, and so we are left again with the speech’s perverse demand that the citizen-soldier redefine success as well as, in this case, hope (ἐλπίδι) according to its ideological requirements. Adding further paradoxicality to the speech’s logic, then, ‘success’ emerges as an outcome that cannot be associated with the

75 Rusten 1986, 62, but see also his translation of the passage in 1989, 164-5. 76 Gomme HCT, 132. 77 Kakridis 1961, 80.

134 soldiers’ continued pursuit of wealth, which presumes their survival in the battle and, as Pericles has made clear, risks shame. Therefore, the soldiers’ success, such as it is, appears to be intricately connected with their approaching death.

The term κατορθώσειν thus presents another locus of ambiguity within this already difficult passage. This ambiguity, however, is a further result not only of the passage’s highly condensed style of presentation, but of the highly pressurized ideological environment it depicts.

As we witnessed earlier in the speech with terms like ὑποψία and δέος, Pericles’ ideological program repeatedly compels a certain semantic dissonance in the language he employs, as he pushes against the ‘natural’ sense of words and against ‘natural’ emotional responses. The reading I am suggesting is not the only possible one for these lines, but it is significant that such a reading is both sustainable within the syntax and consistent with the thematics we have been tracking through the speech. The interpretive ambiguities in the passage, which commentators have long sought to correct, effectively reenact the ideological tensions shaping a scene in which both reader and participant are asked to realign and redefine some of the most basic human fears and desires. The ideological labor of aligning desire with death and fear with survival strains interpretation for both the characters within the narrative and the reader without.

Further logical straining follows later in the passage when the soldiers are said to have

‘fled disgraceful reputation’ while nevertheless ‘withstanding bodily’ the fight (τὸ μὲν αἰσχρὸν

τοῦ λόγου ἔφυγον, τὸ δ' ἔργον τῷ σώματι ὑπέμειναν). The expression has been called oxymoronic, since the action of ‘taking flight’ from a battle has already been defined for these soldiers as the most shameful possible action in this scenario.78 Their flight can thus be only metaphorical, but it is presented in the language typical to what Rusten calls “the oldest

78 Rusten 1986, 67 and 1989, ad loc. Cf. Pearson 1943, 401: “Paradoxically these men decided that the physical danger (τὸ ἔργον) was less to be feared than the shameful words of disgrace (τὸ αἰσχρὸν τοῦ λόγου).”

135 commandment of the Greek hoplite” to stand his ground.79 Ironically, then, by their very act of

‘standing fast’ the soldiers carry out their flight—from the only thing available to them to flee, that is, to aischron. The self-contradictory rhetorical pairing makes explicit the gap between the concrete and the abstract: the one they metaphorically flee, but only by literally enduring the other with their physical bodies. Furthermore, their act of withstanding bodily ‘the deed’ (τὸ δ'

ἔργον) brings elliptically back into focus the life-and-death stakes of this encounter, for the

‘deed’ they withstood, in this exemplary case, was nothing less than their own demise. In other words, their paradigmatic flight from disgrace leads these men straight into the arms of death. As elsewhere in the speech our gaze remains diverted from this underlying truth in the scene, both by Pericles’ concentrated antithetical style of rhetoric as well as by the elliptical representation of the soldiers’ death, as an unspecified, generic ergon.

Fear and death have both been kept carefully obscured throughout the passage and only appear explicitly in its last few words: καὶ δι' ἐλαχίστου καιροῦ τύχης ἅμα ἀκμῇ τῆς δόξης

μᾶλλον ἢ τοῦ δέους ἀπηλλάγησαν. Like much of the rest of this passage, scholarly interpretation of the grammar and syntax of this line has been fraught.80 However, as A. B. Bosworth has observed, “the variations make little difference to the sense.”81 It is clear enough that the sense of this rhetorical finale embodies a last renunciation of fear from these men’s collective consciousness, asserting that they died gloriously rather than fearfully (ἀκμῇ τῆς δόξης μᾶλλον ἢ

τοῦ δέους). If our suspicion has been that fear and death were operating just below the surface throughout this passage, studiously hidden by Pericles’ rhetoric, then our suspicions are

79 Rusten 1986, 67. References to the soldier who flees battle: Simon. PMG 524; Callinus 1.14; Tyrtaeus 10.20, 11.9, 18, Thuc. 2.61.1, Xen Cyr. 3.3.45, Plato Lach. 190e (all cited by Rusten). 80 In addition to the commentaries ad locc., see Pearson 1943, 403-4; Edmunds 1975, 217-25; Loraux 1986a, 386 n. 120; Rusten 1986, 67-71; Tsopanakis 1986. 81 Bosworth 2000, 14, n. 59.

136 confirmed by the explicit appearance of both here at the passage’s climax. Yet Pericles continues to redirect our attention away from the possibility of fear and the reality of the soldiers’ death.

Not only does he avoid the official terminology for death as it appears, for example, in the

Athenian casualty lists (ἀπέθανον), he also refrains from completing the elliptical expression he does employ: [τοῦ βίου] ἀπηλλάγησαν.82 Pericles thus mentions the citizen-soldier’s death without precisely mentioning the citizen-soldier’s death. These men are represented not as having ‘died’ so much as having ‘departed’.83 Similarly, deos, which occurs here to explicitly name the feeling Pericles’ idealized soldiers have been resisting throughout this scene, appears only to have its presence in these men’s hearts and minds finally and decisively disavowed. This is not the socially instrumental ‘respect’ we saw in the earlier appearance of deos, which encourages deference to the city’s laws (2.37). Rather, this is the sort of visceral fear of mortality that threatens to undermine the citizen-soldier ideal Pericles has constructed. It is therefore precisely the sort of fear Pericles’ oration is built to neutralize, and its appearance at the culmination of one of the speech’s most important passages helps to confirm its essential, though rarely directly acknowledged, role in Periclean ideology.

I have slightly deemphasized the visual in this section in order to explore the convolutions of fear and desire imposed upon the Athenian citizen-soldier by Periclean doctrine. But it is worth repeating that the emotional and epistemological dynamics laid out in this passage take place within an overtly visualized scene. These soldiers gaze lucidly at the enemies before them, who

82 See Arrington 2011, 183 (with notes) on the casualty list inscriptions. See LSJ s.v. II.2 on the full expression, τοῦ βίου ἀπαλλάσσω. 83 I follow Rusten (1986, 1989) in reading the final verb absolutely. Although this would be the only instance of Thuc. using ἀπαλλάσσω absolutely, the alternative readings, to my mind, do unacceptable damage to the sense: see, e.g., Pearson 1943; Gomme HCT, 133-5; Alfageme 1997.

137 Thucydides emphasizes are not unseen (τὸ ἀφανές) but clearly visible to the men in this moment of contemplation (τοῦ ἤδη ὁρωμένου), and the men recognize the mortal danger their situation signifies. But even as they see the reality of their impending death, Pericles asks them to read into the scene a different set of meanings that conforms to a different sort of image, namely the ideality his speech has constructed and imposed upon its narrative subjects. In this way, two modes of interpretive viewing are set into conflict for these soldiers, who are asked to see their impending fate not as the literal reality of their death but as the achievement of an idealized glory. As Victoria Wohl argues, the soldiers are asked metaphorically to see in this moment a reflection of their most perfect selves, and they are driven by that image to strive for the perfection it displays.84 And as Thucydides makes clear in the language of the passage, far from being either an unconscious or instinctive decision, it is the product of the “intense rationalism” the speech’s ideological agenda demands, a conscious cognitive act for the soldiers, who perform in this exemplary scene the ideal combination of seeing, knowing, and feeling.85

We have seen already, then, some of the logical straining the speech is forced to undergo in order to maintain this ideal of rationality. In the last section of this chapter, I look at chapter

2.43, where the two sides of the civic gaze Pericles earlier elaborated—the citizen as viewing agent and the city itself as visual object—are combined, brought back into the foreground of the speech, and, I argue, cast in another tenuous epistemological relation with emotion.

84 Wohl 2002, 58: “it is in the reenactment that the citizens really come to see their reflection, and not only to identify with it but to desire it.” Cf. Goldhill 1998, 107, comparing the idealized visual display of the Parthenon frieze course with the institution of the funeral oration: each “projects the ideologically charged role of the citizen [and] binds the viewer in a reciprocal process of (self-) definition,” and thus both seem “designed to face the citizen spectator with a pattern of narrative imagery, to engage the viewer in the recognition of the military and political obligations of citizenship.” 85 Quote from Rusten 1986, 66. See also Edmunds 1975, 44-69; Balot 2014, 25-46.

138 Idealized Emotion: Eros over Deos

Pericles’ well known exhortation to his audience to ‘become lovers’ of the city and its power has generated considerable scholarly interest.86 Wohl has examined the erotic metaphor as the enactment of the citizen’s narcissistic cathexis with the perfected image of the Athenian and his city reflected in the rhetoric of Pericles’ speech.87 Others, like Sara Monoson and Ryan Balot, have been more interested in the transactional implications of the erastes/eromenos relationship in Greek society and how this dynamic of exchange shapes the civic relation Pericles is elaborating in the speech.88 My reading here aims to shed light on how this passage interacts with and re-engages the themes I have highlighted thus far. All three—visuality, cognition, and emotion—reemerge here, and they continue to interact in a way that is inseparable from the production of Periclean ideology. Even though fear again fades into the background of Pericles’ language in this passage, it nevertheless remains fundamentally involved in both the visual and cognitive dynamics Pericles prescribes.

The passage runs as follows (2.43.1-4):

’Καὶ οἵδε μὲν προσηκόντως τῇ πόλει τοιοίδε ἐγένοντο· τοὺς δὲ λοιποὺς χρὴ ἀσφαλεστέραν μὲν εὔχεσθαι, ἀτολμοτέραν δὲ μηδὲν ἀξιοῦν τὴν ἐς τοὺς πολεμίους διάνοιαν ἔχειν, σκοποῦντας μὴ λόγῳ μόνῳ τὴν ὠφελίαν… ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον τὴν τῆς πόλεως δύναμιν καθ' ἡμέραν ἔργῳ θεωμένους καὶ ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους αὐτῆς, καὶ ὅταν ὑμῖν μεγάλη δόξῃ εἶναι, ἐνθυμουμένους ὅτι τολμῶντες καὶ γιγνώσκοντες τὰ δέοντα καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις αἰσχυνόμενοι ἄνδρες αὐτὰ ἐκτήσαντο, καὶ ὁπότε καὶ πείρᾳ του σφαλεῖεν, οὐκ οὖν καὶ τὴν πόλιν γε τῆς σφετέρας ἀρετῆς ἀξιοῦντες στερίσκειν, κάλλιστον δὲ ἔρανον αὐτῇ προϊέμενοι. (2) κοινῇ γὰρ τὰ σώματα διδόντες ἰδίᾳ τὸν ἀγήρων ἔπαινον ἐλάμβανον καὶ τὸν τάφον ἐπισημότατον, οὐκ ἐν ᾧ κεῖνται μᾶλλον, ἀλλ' ἐν ᾧ ἡ δόξα αὐτῶν παρὰ τῷ ἐντυχόντι αἰεὶ καὶ λόγου καὶ ἔργου καιρῷ αἰείμνηστος καταλείπεται. (3) ἀνδρῶν γὰρ ἐπιφανῶν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος, καὶ οὐ στηλῶν μόνον ἐν τῇ οἰκείᾳ σημαίνει ἐπιγραφή, ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τῇ μὴ προσηκούσῃ ἄγραφος μνήμη παρ' ἑκάστῳ τῆς γνώμης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῦ ἔργου ἐνδιαιτᾶται. (4) οὓς νῦν ὑμεῖς ζηλώσαντες καὶ τὸ εὔδαιμον τὸ ἐλεύθερον, τὸ δ' ἐλεύθερον τὸ εὔψυχον κρίναντες μὴ περιορᾶσθε τοὺς πολεμικοὺς κινδύνους.

86 Again, in addition to the commentaries, see Scholtz 1997, 106-12; McGlew 2002, ch. 1 (with further references). 87 Wohl 2002, 30-72; cf. 171-203. See further Ludwig, Farenga (opp. cit.). 88 Monoson, Balot (opp. cit.). See further Connor 1984, 65-9.

139 And these became such men in a manner suitable for the city. But as for the rest, you ought to pray for a resolve against enemies that is safer but judge most worthy (a resolve) no less daring [than the men described in 2.42.4], scrutinizing how you might contribute not in word alone… but rather, in your action, gazing day-by-day upon the power of the city and becoming its lovers, and whenever it seems great to you, taking it to heart that men who were daring and knew what was necessary and felt proper shame in their actions acquired this. And whenever they fell short in an attempt on something, not judging it most worthy to deprive the city of their virtue, they made the most beautiful contribution to it. (2) For by giving over their bodies to the common interest they took ageless praise for themselves privately, as well as a most conspicuous tomb, not in which they themselves lie, but in which their reputation has been left behind, indelible whenever any occasion for speech or action arises. (3) For the whole world is the tomb for famous men, and not only does the epigraph on the stelai in their home advertise (their fame), but even in lands not their own an unwritten memory of each man’s judgment lives on more than his action. (4) Emulating these men now, by judging that happiness is freedom and freedom is courage, do not overlook the perils of war.

Modes of seeing and being seen reemerge in this passage as central components of the exhortation Pericles levels at his audience, whom he encourages to pursue a set of rewards defined by their visuality. The prize of everlasting glory, which Pericles lays out repeatedly in this section (ἀγήρων ἔπαινον, δόξα αἰείμνηστος, ἐπιφανῶν ἀνδρῶν), is itself a kind of perpetual social visibility, a positive public appearance that contrasts exactly with the negative visibility that defines shame. Pericles makes this connection between the socially and the physically visible all but explicit when he reifies the notion of ‘ageless praise’ in the image of a ‘most conspicuous grave monument’ (τάφον ἐπισημότατον, 43.2) in which resides these men’s undying doxa. The picture of the tomb is further embellished with the image of an inscription advertising visually the renown of its invisible occupants (σημαίνει ἐπιγραφή, 43.3). Although Pericles does not explicitly make the connection, the highly conspicuous tomb he envisions here closely describes the grave stelai adorning the demosion sema, which bear the names of the year’s war dead, and which are revealed for the first time as part of the epitaphios ceremony and form the visual backdrop for the speech itself. Thus, for the citizen to submit to the ideological modes of seeing and knowing Pericles demands is for him to embrace the possibility of becoming a visible

140 part of that same ideological program. The mise-en-abyme effect of this arrangement of reciprocal visuality neatly embodies the self-replicating compulsion of Periclean ideology itself, presented as a process of perpetual emulation and reenactment. At the same time, it points to the constitutive role of viewing in these processes of ideological interpellation.89

Visual language in fact pervades this passage of the speech, particularly in the form of exhortations and commands to the audience. Pericles issues the command to his Athenian audience ‘not to overlook the dangers of war’ (μὴ περιορᾶσθε τοὺς πολεμικοὺς κινδύνους). In this way, along with the motif of beauty (κάλλιστον, 43.1), Pericles also reintroduces the notion of martial danger to which it was joined in the preceding chapter. By urging his audience not to

‘look past’, that is refuse or ignore, the risks of war, Pericles is exhorting them to adopt the same mode of viewing he had attributed to the dead soldiers in 2.42.4, who did not see death but ‘the most beautiful of risks’ when they gazed at their approaching enemies on the battlefield. These men looked directly at polemikous kindynous but, according to Pericles, they were able to evaluate, recognize, and prioritize the ideological significance over the literal appearance of those dangers, and their fears and desires were thereby (re)calibrated accordingly. Pericles not only urges but, in fact, commands his audience in his appeal here, the only instance in the speech of a verb of seeing expressed in the imperative mood. On the one hand, the command μὴ

περιορᾶσθε is merely following the generally protreptic tone of this chapter, several of whose participles effectively carry the force of an imperative. On the other hand, we might mark its occurrence here as significant insofar as it embodies the prescriptive force behind the ideologically determined modes of seeing that we have been tracking throughout the speech.

Pericles identifies both the object of his citizens’ gaze as well as the manner in which they are

89 Cf. Wohl 2002, 55-8, who identifies this visual reenactment as a “circuit of desire” the citizen is (ideally) meant to perpetually traverse.

141 (and are not) to view it. This process, implicit throughout the speech, is here made unmistakably explicit.

Moreover, visual action remains in this section closely tied to intellectual work. More conspicuously than anywhere else in the speech, in 2.43 the praise of the dead emerges as the eulogy of a rational act more than of a group of individuals. Because these men “consciously and deliberately chose to act courageously rather than cowardly,” Pericles focuses his praise on the cognitive processes that he had so strongly emphasized in the preceding chapter.90 In 2.43, then, it is the soldiers’ dianoia, gnome, and doxa that draw Pericles’ strongest admiration. He begins the passage by encouraging his audience to emulate the dianoia of these dead men (χρὴ

ἀτολμοτέραν δὲ μηδὲν ἀξιοῦν τὴν ἐς τοὺς πολεμίους διάνοιαν ἔχειν, 43.1), further reiterating the verb ἀξιόω from the previous passage (2.42.4), where it represented one in the series of cognitive actions that exemplified the paradigmatic citizen-soldiers’ normative evaluative process.

Pericles’ language draws attention to the central role, not so much of bravery or courage per se, but of properly calibrated thinking in the heat of battle. As Balot explains, this process of evaluative judgment is inseparable from the citizen-soldier’s claim to the virtue of courageous action: authentic bravery requires rational knowledge of risk and reward.91 In this speech, however, the soldier’s knowledge is rigorously filtered through the system of moral values

Pericles has established. Thus, the soldier’s ‘knowing what is necessary’ (γιγνώσκοντες τὰ

δέοντα, 43.1) entails the acceptance and application of this idealized evaluative process, the aim of which is to recalibrate his thoughts and feelings away from fear.92 In short, what constitutes

90 Christ 2006, 125. 91 Balot 2014, 29-34. 92 Balot (ibid.) argues that this phrase signifies a two-part knowledge of both “long-term ends” and “a practical knowledge of what to do in particular situations.” For Balot, the deliberative capacity of the idealized Athenian citizen is a central component of the speech’s philosophically innovative and distinctively democratic definition of courage.

142 both ‘knowing’ and ‘necessity’ for the ideal citizen Pericles imagines depends upon the epistemics of Periclean ideology.

He elevates this process of evaluative judgment, exemplified in the sacrifice of the dead soldiers, to a status superior even to the sacrificial act itself. More than the actual deed, he says, it will be the memory of these men’s gnome that persists for posterity (ἄγραφος μνήμη παρ’

ἑκάστῳ τῆς γνώμης μᾶλλον ἢ τοῦ ἔργου ἐνδιαιτᾶται, 43.3). Mobilizing again the language of intellection—γνώμη recalling γιγνώσκω from earlier in the passage—Pericles reminds his audience of the primary importance of proper thinking to the ideal of the citizen-soldier. In

Pericles’ presentation, this rationalized decision to fight and die moves into an equivalent position with arete itself, which reappears as, again, an object of superlative beauty and desire, kalliston. By a thought, or rather a way of thinking, more than by an action, these dead men have attained the sort of enduring fame Pericles repeatedly characterizes as undying and eternal

(αἰείμνηστος, ἀγήρων, ἐνδιαιτᾶται). This quasi-immortality, then, is presented as the result of what Clifford Orwin calls a “shrewd bargain” according to which the soldier commits his physical body to the civic collective (κοινῇ, 43.2) in exchange for the reward of doxa.93 The term doxa, in fact, neatly encapsulates the mutually entailing relationship Pericles defines between the soldier’s exemplary way of thinking and his reward of public renown. Ostensibly related to the notions of fame running through the passage, doxa also signifies the sense of active cognitive evaluation.94 The citizen-soldiers Pericles eulogizes embody this ideal connection between proper deliberation and good reputation. More than that: the judgment exercised by these soldiers serves as the ideological justification for the positive judgment of them by posterity. The men’s

93 Orwin 1994, 27. 94 Note that one of the standard phrases in the Athenian assembly employed the cognate verb δοκέω to define the demos’ function as a deliberative body.

143 exemplary judgment, in this speech, resulted in a decision to die that Pericles has conceived of as a calculus of risk and reward that is undertaken with thoughtful deliberation.95 The fact that

Pericles also concludes his speech with a reiteration of this same theme of arete, civic service, and reward indicates the primacy of their roles in his ideological program (2.46.1):

ἆθλα γὰρ οἷς κεῖται ἀρετῆς μέγιστα, τοῖς δὲ καὶ ἄνδρες ἄριστοι πολιτεύουσιν

Where the rewards for arete are greatest, there also are the best citizens.

In Pericles’ presentation, the Athenian ideal requires active participation and performance on multiple levels of human experience—the visual, the cognitive, and the emotional. As we have seen, Pericles situates the challenges of conforming with this ideal not in the citizen’s unconscious mind but rather in the forefront of his conscious mind and, as we saw in 2.42.4, palpably visible in the physical world. What emerges most conspicuously from Pericles’ exhortatory rhetoric, in fact, is precisely how much conscious effort is needed on the part of the ideal Athenian to align what he sees with what he is required to know. Vision and cognition do not align seamlessly in the civic ideology Pericles presents; in fact, their distinct disjunction is what makes Periclean ideology so necessary. Furthermore, Pericles’ emphasis on the need for citizens to actively emulate the normative behavior he describes (ζηλώσαντες, 43.4) highlights what Loraux identifies as the essential contingency of Periclean ideology in the funeral oration: far from an inevitability, the oration’s prescription articulates an identity whose (visual, cognitive, and emotional) demands must be performed and reenacted ad infinitum.96 This inherent instability is exemplified in the almost superhuman demands leveled at the soldiers in the passage at 2.42.4, and Pericles’ anxiety over it resurfaces in the current passage in his

95 Like Aristotelian prohairesis: cf. n. 10, above. 96 See Loraux 1986a, 328-38.

144 repeated insistence on adopting not only those men’s behavior but their critical acumen. In

Pericles’ wording, in fact, emulation specifically entails an active process of evaluative discernment: the citizen imitates the ideal precisely by engaging in properly calibrated ‘judging’

(κρίναντες, 43.4).

Ultimately, both the visual and the cognitive in this section of the speech are put into the service of an emotional ideal which, concealing fear entirely, instead summons the Athenian citizenry to form an erotic attachment to their city and its power (ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους, 43.1).

This demand relies upon the proper (re)calibration of the citizens’ capacities for both seeing and knowing. Hence, the line between literal and metaphorical vision—between sight and insight— becomes exceptionally blurred in this passage. When Pericles asks his audience to ‘gaze upon’ the city, he is talking at once about its physical monuments, clearly visible from the Kerameikos, as well as the idealized ‘image’ of Athens his speech has constructed. These two modes of viewing, in this case, thus match the two visual modes I have examined elsewhere in the speech, and in the History as a whole: seeing qua sensory perception, on the one hand, and seeing qua knowing on the other. Pericles asks the citizens to see with their minds, not just their eyes, just as he asked them to fear a mental vision of shame instead of the death which, at 2.42.4, was visible directly in front of them.

In connection with this ideologically aligned vision, Pericles introduces the emotion of love, which he inserts here to define the visual and cognitive relation between citizen and city he is prescribing. This ‘vision’ of the ideality represents precisely the image I have suggested that the soldiers in 2.42 were asked to substitute in place of the (terrifying) reality they saw before them. The image of the city-as-ideality presented for them the rationally conceived value structure by which their fears and desires were recalibrated according to the Periclean ideal.

145 While distancing these men from fear in that passage, Pericles pointed instead to a relation of desire (ἐφιέσθαι) between them and the ideality. Here in 2.43, he provides the name of love, eros, for this relation between citizen and ideal image. The invocation of love here thus both aligns with and further elaborates upon the soldiers’ feelings of desire we saw in the earlier passage, reenacting yet again the speech’s programmatic substitution of love, desire, and longing in place of a studiously proscribed fear. By reintroducing explicitly the visual relation between citizen and city, Pericles also redeploys the notions of the citizen as viewing agent and the city as a visible object which he developed earlier in the speech.

Moreover, the love Pericles encourages continues to rest firmly upon erasing any gap between the sensory and intellectual capacities of citizen viewing. This ideal consolidation of viewing modes is brought out in the exhortatory visual language Pericles deploys. He twice asks his audience to ‘gaze upon’ the city, using two verbs, σκοπέω and θεάομαι (43.1), whose meanings differ precisely along the line that delineates vision in its concretely sensory function and vision in its intellectual capacity. As Crane and others have demonstrated, the verb σκοπέω is programmatic throughout Thucydides’ text for the sort of thoughtful and reflective viewing

Thucydides demands for, e.g., “scrutinizing and studying evidence.”97 It is the sort of critical discernment Thucydides associates with his ideal reader, who will apply a reasoning eye to a text presented as, itself, an object for visual contemplation (ὅσοι βουλήσονται… τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν,

1.22.4).98 Appropriately, then, Pericles qualifies this verb of visual discernment with the rationalizing capacity of logos, which he connects directly to his injunction to the citizens to

‘gaze not with logos alone’ (σκοποῦντας μὴ λόγῳ μόνῳ). By contrast, the verb θεάομαι, which

97 Crane 1996, 236-47. Quote from pg. 241. Cf. Bakker 2006, 117: σκοπέω “denotes a critical looking into matters that do not provide ready or obvious evidence.” 98 I discuss this point more thoroughly in chapter one.

146 appears only rarely in the text, implies the sort of unreflective spectating usually defined by its purely sensory mode of engagement.99 And Pericles most closely associates it in this passage with the erotic connection between citizen and city he is demanding: ‘gaze and become lovers’

(θεωμένους καὶ ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους). The verb θεάομαι in this passage thus appears to conflict with the rigorously rationalizing mode of viewing Pericles has been advocating throughout the speech.

However, the term’s appearance at this point in Pericles’ speech is not an indictment of his audience’s lack of critical insight, which would be an oddly incongruous condemnation in an otherwise strongly exhortatory section of rhetoric. Rather, the verb θεάομαι signifies one half of the visual ideal Pericles has been urging on his audience, that is the strictly sensory capacity of vision. Pairing it with the parallel term σκοπεῖν, Pericles signals toward the duality of the visual mode he prescribes, an ideal of, at once, sensory and cerebral viewing. Even as he invokes the concretely visible dimension of the city’s landscape and structures, which he asks his audience of spectators to ‘gaze upon’ from where they stand beside the demosion sema, Pericles asks them at the same time to reflect upon the ideological abstraction behind that concretely visual image, the ideality his speech has crafted which gives the concretely visible its uniquely Athenian meaning.

The operative meaning of both city and ideality emerges, in this striking passage, as an emotional relation, love rather than fear, which is thus set upon a foundation of normatively calibrated modes of seeing and knowing. Alongside shame, eros here serves as a further substitute for fear, no less motivated by fear’s scarcely acknowledged presence and no less rationally conceived. In this way, Pericles preempts and implicitly rejects the disparaging words

99 Cf. 5.7.4, where Cleon is shown viewing the battlefield like a spectator, rather than a rationally engaged strategist; and 5.113.1, where, in the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians employ the term specifically to highlight its distinction from what they believe is properly rational insight. These are the only other occurrences of the verb.

147 of Cleon in book three, who derides the Athenian people as unreflective ‘spectators of speeches’

(θεαταὶ τῶν λόγων, 3.38.4). He instead invokes an ideal of viewing that incorporates rational contemplation as its core principle.100

Still, the notion of an ideally rational eros is intrinsically contradictory within the framework of Greek thought.101 Throughout Greek myth and literature eros is proverbial for its hostility to reason and rationality; it proves to be no different in practice for the Athenians themselves later in the History when they become tragically enamored with the Sicilian expedition.102 And yet, this speech has already brought its rationalizing agenda to bear against other inherently irrational demands. In the scene at 2.42.4, the audience was asked to accept a rationalizing explanation for the self-evidently irrational prospects of seeking after their own deaths and fearing the possibility of survival. Similarly, here in 2.43, they are asked to apply the rhetorically constructed reasoning of Periclean ideology to the irrationality of erotic desire.

Furthermore, we have also already witnessed another technique of Periclean rhetoric which he redeploys in the discussion on eros. As with the terms ὑποψία and δέος, earlier in the speech, so with the invocation of eros Pericles seeks to emphasize certain elements of the affective terminology and concepts he deploys while deemphasizing others. The emotional recalibration project he has directed toward his audience has been effected throughout by the speech’s active shaping of meaning which, as in this example, entails in part a redefining of language. Pericles has sought to craft a notion of ὑποψία without suspicion, of δέος without fear, and, now, of ἔρως divorced from what Greek poets described as its ‘limb-loosening’ power to overwhelm reason.103

100 We might compare the sort of contemplation Plato envisions when, a few decades after Thuc., he invokes the term θεωρία, a close etymological relative of θεάομαι. See Nightingale 2004, 72-138. 101 For eros conceived of as a disease in ancient thought, see, with further references, Fischer 1973, 53-4; Müller 1980, 90-130; Thornton 1997, 33-5 (with nn. 46-52). 102 See 6.24.2. Cf. 6.59.1 (on the irrational and erotic motivation of the Tyrannicides, which I discussed in the previous chapter), with Ludwig 2002, 121-69. 103 The adjective is λυσιμελής: see, e.g., Hes. Theog. 911, Sap. Frg. 130.

148 In short, this passage reveals that the Periclean ideal entails a mode of viewing that consists, at once, of love as well as logic.

The success of Pericles’ project in each of these cases has rested upon the normative epistemological edifice his speech has sought to build. In the scene at 2.42.4, Pericles revealed to his audience that the foundations of this structure rest in the citizen’s capacity for conscious, cognitive reasoning. As that scene demonstrates so clearly, the normative intent of his project is to provide a means for the ideal citizen-soldier to explain away the unspoken, but eminently visible, fear of death in battle. Pericles offered alternative modes of citizen visuality, viz. shame and glory, as the emotional substitutes for fear. Shame in that passage was a prospect characterized as more fearsome than death itself, but one whose value could only be discerned through deliberate and conscious calculation on the part of the ideal soldier. That is to say, the substitution of shame for fear is by no means a natural move for the citizen-soldier, but rather a shift in both thought and feeling that is instigated, and indeed coerced, by the logic of Pericles’ ideological agenda. Far from portraying an easy alignment of vision and knowledge, the scene identified a distinct gap between the two that is filled and mediated by Periclean ideology. In

2.43 Pericles coopts eros as a further alternative to fear, and he thus reinforces the role of emotional recalibration in the citizen-soldier’s ability and willingness to perform the Periclean ideal in the crucible of battle, where fear is most powerful. And Pericles again asks his audience to engage with these emotions via the rational, cognitive capacities. In each passage I have presented here, the stakes of ideological assimilation are identity within the Athenian civic collective, and in order to be the Athenian Pericles demands, the citizen-soldier is repeatedly asked to see, think, and feel in the ways his speech depicts.

149 Conclusion

In this chapter I have tried to bring out the centrality of carefully prescribed citizen modes of viewing in Pericles’ funeral oration, along with their essential relationships to both knowledge and fear. Thucydides sets up the annual funeral ceremony as a scene of carefully controlled citizen visuality, and it is within this context that Pericles’ oration is delivered. The oration itself then proceeds to further construct the citizen gaze, articulating modes of seeing both within and without the city itself which, I have argued, serve a distinctive role in prescribing the relation of

Athens and its citizens with the emotion of fear. When comparing the battle narratives examined in the first two chapters of this study with what we have seen in the funeral oration, we can identify a decidedly different relation between vision and rationally-calculated fear. At Plataea, for instance, characters’ fears were the clear results of empirical analysis of the visual data available to them. Their level of fear, moreover, operated in an inverse relationship with the clarity of their sight. As the Plataeans gained increasing information about the Theban invaders, they became decreasingly frightened, and vice versa. And we have seen a similar dynamic between visual clarity and fear at play in the scenes at Sphacteria and Epipolae. In the highly pressurized ideological context of the funeral oration, on the other hand, fear seems to resist

Pericles’ attempts to explain it away. For the soldiers in 2.42, for instance, who stare down their own mortality, fear is a perfectly reasonable and rational emotional response—just as it was initially for Demosthenes in his tactical planning at Sphacteria. Recognizing the potential for danger, the Athenian general rightfully hesitated to commit his men’s lives. However, the ideological regime of the oration prohibits such reasoning and, instead, admits only of its own rationalizing program, according to which mortal fear is permitted no place. Instead, as we have seen, the speech offers emotional substitutes, particularly shame, desire for glory, and love, to

150 replace this fear and shield it from plain view. As I have argued, one of Pericles’ primary purposes in this speech is thus to provide a robust cognitive framework for converting this proscribed visceral fear into the more ideologically and politically expedient emotions the speech provides.

However, because Pericles’ civic ideality relies on rigorous cognitive work on the part of the citizenry to recalibrate these feelings, its stability is inherently tenuous and requires, as the speech makes so clear, active and conscientious (re)enactment. If the plague episode that immediately follows it is any indication, the narrative seems unambiguously to reject the durability of the Periclean doctrine of idealized fearlessness. Whereas the aim of Pericles’ rhetorical program was to rationalize away the specter of mortal fear, the plague episode foregrounds Athenian fear broken free from the taming force of Periclean rationalization. Neither fear of the gods nor the laws, as Thucydides claims, any longer have an effect on those afflicted

(θεῶν δὲ φόβος ἢ ἀνθρώπων νόμος οὐδεὶς ἀπεῖργε, 2.53.4). Instead, fear’s object reverts back to the brutal reality of a death perceived as inevitable but utterly without glory. Far from the ideal of an ‘unfelt death’ (ἀναίσθητος θάνατος, 2.43.6), those who succumb to the plague do so in visceral agony. Athenians’ fears of suffering this ignominious death, in some cases, prevent them even from visiting and caring for the sick, Thucydides explains (εἴτε γὰρ μὴ ’θέλοιεν δεδιότες

ἀλλήλοις προσιέναι, ἀπώλλυντο ἐρῆμοι, 2.51.5).104 Outside of the idealizing world of the funeral oration, itself an always receding mirage for the Athenian citizen, fear thus maintains a certain irreducible quality, a tenacity that is not itself irrational (death is in actuality impending for many plague victims, and so their fears are well founded), but resistant to rationalization.

104 The plague raging inside Athens becomes an object of fear also for the Spartan army in the Attic countryside: καὶ ἐλέχθη τοὺς Πελοποννησίους δείσαντας τὸ νόσημα... θᾶσσον ἐκ τῆς γῆς ἐξελθεῖν.

151 Immediately adjacent to the idealizing portrait of Athenian (lack of) fear, this failure of

Pericles’ program in the plague episode to fully divert fear from the citizen’s subjectivity may signal something fundamental about the ontology of fear in Thucydides’ work. In the ‘real world’, that is the world of the historical narrative outside of Periclean rhetoric, Thucydides reveals unmistakably the contingency of Periclean ideology, which, to combat mortal fears, relies upon a conscientiously applied epistemic framework that crumbles almost as soon as it has been constructed. The most pervasive and historically active emotion for Thucydides, fear thus occupies a position of inevitability in human experience, ultimately ineradicable and only partially and temporarily reducible.

In the next chapter I argue this point further by focusing on the role fear plays in Athenian imperial ideology, where it operates in exact parallel with the hopes and desires characteristic of

Athenian pleonexia. By examining several passages from Thucydides’ narrative of the Sicilian expedition in book six, I attempt to reconstruct an Athenian ‘imperial gaze’ which, I argue, shares certain aspects of the Periclean civic gaze but contrasts sharply in other important respects. In particular, the imperial gaze, unlike the Periclean ideal we have just examined, consistently fails to suppress or supplant fears in the Athenians’ collective visual engagement with the prospect of Sicilian conquest. In this way, the kernel of ineradicable fear, to which

Thucydides alludes already in the juxtaposition between the funeral oration and the plague episode, becomes one of the defining features of the Athenians’ pleonectic gaze toward Sicily.

Unable to rationalize emotions, the imperial gaze thus permits the incursion of fears, and the controlled and docile eros of the Periclean ideal becomes reformulated as an excessive and unmanageable dyseros for Sicilian conquest.

152

153

Chapter 4

Futures Real and Unreal: Fear and Hope in the Sicilian Expedition

καὶ ἃ μὲν ἂν ἐπινοήσαντες μὴ ἐπεξέλθωσιν, οἰκείων στέρεσθαι ἡγοῦνται, ἃ δ' ἂν ἐπελθόντες κτήσωνται, ὀλίγα πρὸς τὰ μέλλοντα τυχεῖν πράξαντες. ἢν δ' ἄρα του καὶ πείρᾳ σφαλῶσιν, ἀντελπίσαντες ἄλλα ἐπλήρωσαν τὴν χρείαν.

Whatever they plan but do not accomplish, they consider a deprivation of what belongs to them, while whatever having attempted they acquire, (they consider) paltry against what their activity might gain them in the future. (Speech of the Corinthians, 1.70.7)

ἥ τε ἐλπὶς καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἐπὶ παντί, ὁ μὲν ἡγούμενος, ἡ δ' ἐφεπομένη, καὶ ὁ μὲν τὴν ἐπιβουλὴν ἐκφροντίζων, ἡ δὲ τὴν εὐπορίαν τῆς τύχης ὑποτιθεῖσα, πλεῖστα βλάπτουσι, καὶ ὄντα ἀφανῆ κρείσσω ἐστὶ τῶν ὁρωμένων δεινῶν.

In all things both hope and desire, the one leading and the other following, the one conceiving the plot and the other suggesting the ease of its success, cause the most harm, and though unseen they are more powerful than fearsome things that are seen. (Speech of Diodotus, 3.45.5)

Introduction

In the last chapter I examined the complementary roles of seeing, knowing, and feeling in the context of Pericles’ funeral oration. In this speech, prescriptive modes of viewing were deeply embedded in Athenian civic ideology, which Pericles constructed as a primarily inward-looking gaze that policed citizen thought and emotion. More specifically, we saw how Pericles set up parallel ‘hierarchies’ of normative citizen fears and desires, and how those rubrics of feeling worked in tandem to calibrate the ideal citizens’ perceptions, understandings, and emotional

154 responses to the world. In this chapter I return to the opposition between the fearful and desiderative in Athenian ideology in order to explore its role in the visuality of Athenian imperialism as the History presents it. Focusing on a series of passages from the beginning of the

Sicilian narrative in book six, I argue that in the construction and performance of the Athenians’ imperialistic ideology, a certain prescriptive mode of seeing and feeling again shapes the collective consciousness of the Athenians, and at the same time actively suppresses deviation from the norms it fashions.1 An essentially outward-looking gaze, the Athenians’ imperialistic mode of viewing nevertheless participates in the same sort of emotional coercion within the

Athenian demos that we have seen so vividly depicted in the prescriptive dynamics of the funeral oration. Built essentially around hope and optimism, this ‘imperial gaze’ of the Athenians seeks repeatedly to stifle and efface the presence of fear within the demos. In this respect, it aligns strikingly with the ideological agenda pursued so forcefully by Pericles in the funeral oration.

However, in another crucial respect it differs significantly from the funeral oration. Whereas in the carefully controlled and rhetorically constructed world of the oration, in which Pericles was able to manipulate the specter of fear so as to remove it from view or redirect it away from the ideal he was crafting, in the historical world presented by the narrative—the Thucydidean ‘real world’ of history, so to speak—the Athenians’ imperialistic gaze repeatedly fails to suppress fear. By emphasizing this peculiar obstinacy of fear, just as he did in the plague episode that

1 My examination in this chapter does not aim at a comprehensive picture of Athenian imperialism and its visual modes in the Hist. as a whole, a project that would require more than a single chapter. Nevertheless, the Sicilian narrative has been regularly recognized as paradigmatic of more general psychological and political tendencies in the Athenian people, and it therefore provides some of the most fertile ground in the text for reconstructing a paradigm of Athenian imperial modes of viewing, as Thuc. presents them. See Romilly 1963, 195: “the imperialistic policy of Athens manifests itself in its purest form with the Sicilian expedition.” Cf. Macleod 1983, 141: “Thucydides’ account of the character and motives of the Athenian attack on Sicily cannot be reduced to a trite moral or literary effect: it is essential to his analysis of the Athenian democracy and empire.”

155 immediately followed Pericles’ oration, Thucydides’ narrative again suggests a certain instability inherent to ideological structures of seeing, knowing, and feeling.

Readers of the History have tended to align the Athenians’ pleonectic expansionism, a basic component of their so-called ‘national character’, with a complex of desiderative dispositional affects (hope, desire, optimism, and the like).2 A central passage for this reading of the History has been the programmatic speech of the Corinthians in book one (1.68-73), in which the anonymous speakers outline a pattern of Athenian behavior whose method is indefatigable polypragmosyne and whose goal is endless acquisition.3 The speakers ground the behavior they describe in what they characterize as a fundamental Athenian emotional disposition of elpis

(εὐέλπιδες, ἀντελπίσαντες, ἐλπίζουσιν, 1.70).4 It is a disposition which explicitly rejects the sort of fearfulness that they claim defines the Spartans’ abiding character and approach to policy decisions.5 Where the Spartans are superlatively hesitant to leave their homes (ἐνδημοτάτους), for example, the Athenians’ identity is crafted around the abnegation of such fearful hesitance

2 On pleonexia as a defining trait of the Athenians, see Romilly 1963, 322-43; Huart 1968, 388-403; Balot 2001a, 136-78; Wohl 2002, 171-214. ‘National character’ is discussed most fully by Luginbill 1999, but cf. also Pouncey 1980, 57-64; Connor 1984, 36-47; Forde 1989, 17-40; Crane 1992; Jaffe 2017. On Athenian acquisitiveness as a topos in the Classical period, see Raaflaub 1984, 1987; and cf. Arrowsmith 1973, who identifies “a politics of insatiable greed” present in Aristophanes’ Birds: “the hunger for world conquest conceals a galactic, and ultimately, a universal hunger” (130). 3 On the programmatic nature of this speech, see Edmunds 1975, 89-93; Cogan 1981, 20-33; Demont 1990, 210. Critiques of the speech’s historical accuracy: Kagan 1969, 290-1; Salmon 1984, 299. Several readers have commented on the unusually generalizing tone of the speech: see Gomme HCT (1), 233: “Thucydides was anxious to show the temper of the Athenians, Corinthians, and Lacedaemonians at the time.” Cogan 1981, 24 notes the “extreme abstractness” of argumentation. Cf. Hornblower 1991, 108. The trait of polypragmosyne is regularly linked to the Athenian character by Athenian speakers as well: 2.63-4 (Pericles); 6.18.6-7 (Alcibiades); 6.87.3 (Euphemus). See Ehrenberg 1947; Romilly 1963, 78, 127. 4 Note that in Greek literature elpis is not necessarily synonymous with English ‘hope’. In archaic literature, and occasionally in Aristotle too (see Gravlee 2000), it often signals neutral expectation. See the thorough discussion in Cairns 2016, with further references. In any case, the desiderative sense of elpis is clear in the Corinthians’ speech. 5 Thus, e.g., Luginbill 1999, 66: “Hope is active, fear is reactive. Hope acts swiftly, fear slowly. Hope is confident, fear insecure in the face of danger. Hope is inclined to take risks, while fear seeks to minimize them or else avoid them altogether.” See further Cogan 1981, 23: the Corinthians “invent two opposite characters appropriate to a situation of aggression and defense. They call one of these characters ‘Athenian’ and the other ‘Spartan’… The pointedness comes from the perfection of the opposition of these types.” Note that Thuc. endorses this characterization only once in his authorial voice (8.96.5).

156 (ἄοκνοι, 70.4). My analysis in this chapter, however, complicates the reading of an affective dichotomy divided neatly into hope and fear, and cleanly down political lines. On the contrary, the passages I examine from book six show that hope is not isolated in the Athenians’ imperialist identity, but that it competes with fear at almost every step. This emotional competition within the Athenians’ collective psyche, I argue, signals an ideological conflict the stakes of which are

Athenian identity itself. By framing Athenian emotional identity as an ideological contest,

Thucydides exposes both the constructed nature of this identity as well as its intrinsic fragility.

In Thucydides’ narration of the episodes I examine in this chapter, vision emerges as the site of this ideological contest. At the outset of the Sicilian narrative, the Athenians’ ideological attachment to hope is constructed principally by Alcibiades, but, as I argue in the first section of this chapter, it is inadvertently reinforced by Nicias too. In each speaker’s presentation, Athenian identity is tied explicitly to certain ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling that are at once both descriptive and prescriptive in their cumulative effect on the people. What emerges from these speeches is an ideological identity grounded in an essentially optimistic gaze toward Sicily and the prospect of imperial conquest.6 However, as I argue in the chapter’s second section, the optimistic gaze adopted by the Athenians is sustained by a fantasy image of Sicilian conquest that, in Thucydides’ telling, is ideologically opposed to visible reality. Refusing to see Sicily for what it is, the Athenians instead focus their gaze on this alluring fantasy, an object that is necessarily invisible because of its nonexistence in reality. In that way, Thucydides suggests that the Athenians’ imperialistic gaze is, paradoxically, the enactment of a sort of “wishful

6 On political identity as a function of ideological interpellation, see, e.g., Stavrakakis 2007, 191: “The ecumenical appeal of discourses like nationalism rests on their ability to mobilise the human desire for identity and to promise an encounter with (national) enjoyment.”

157 blindness.”7 It is a visual mode that recalls the Melians in book five, whose hopes were condemned by the Athenians as ‘invisible’ (ἀφανεῖς, 5.103.2), as well as the similar remarks of

Diodotus in book three, who denounced both eros and elpis for their reliance on ‘the unseen’

(ἀφανῆ, 3.45.5). This blind faith shapes the Athenians’ collective gaze into the future, the possibility and potential of which, as the Corinthians declared, cannot compare with any concrete object in the present (ἃ δ' ἂν ἐπελθόντες κτήσωνται, ὀλίγα πρὸς τὰ μέλλοντα τυχεῖν πράξαντες,

1.70.7). The Corinthian speakers associated this future-oriented perspective with the hopeful disposition according to which they defined the Athenians’ character. But as I argue in the final section of this chapter, Thucydides indicates unmistakably that the Athenians’ pleonectic desire, a gaze directed always toward the future, opens a space populated at once by both hopes and fears. In the vivid departure scene at the Piraeus, the Athenians are confronted for the first time with the concrete, visible manifestation of their desire for Sicilian conquest. No longer hidden by a hopeful fantasy, the undeniably visible and dangerous reality of the venture invites fears which the Athenians’ ideology of hope struggles to suppress.

By the end of the Sicilian narrative, the Athenians’ ideological attachment to hope will have been severed completely, the fantasy of Sicilian conquest that sustained it replaced with an increasingly fearsome reality. The narrative arc I trace in this chapter, then, touches at three significant points in this broader process. I begin by examining the construction of the

Athenians’ ideologically optimistic gaze in the speeches of Alcibiades (6.16-18) and Nicias (6.9-

14, 6.20-3). Next, I look at the Athenians’ collective reaction to these speeches in the assembly

(6.24), where Thucydides shows how the people themselves adopt, perform, and enforce the ideology and the visual mode it demands. Finally, I examine the Piraeus departure scene at 6.30-

7 The phrase is Stahl’s (2003, 193), which he uses to describe the Athenians’ collective aspirations in Sicily, comparing them to the Melians at 5.103.

158 2, where the Athenians’ optimistic gaze shows its first signs of a fundamental instability that will only become exacerbated by the expedition’s end. I conclude the chapter by suggesting that

Thucydides’ portrayal in this narrative sequence has something to say not only about the fragility of ideological structures generally, but about the tight bond between seeing and knowing which these structures seek, and ultimately fail, to disrupt.

Constructing a Hopeful Gaze: the Sicilian Debate

At the opening of the Sicilian narrative, Thucydides reports a debate between the statesmen

Nicias and Alcibiades, the one arguing against the prospective expedition and the other advocating for its aggressive pursuit. Nicias speaks first, pointing out the plethora of dangers involved in such a venture: many potential enemies await the Athenians in Sicily, even while the

Peloponnesians still threaten on the mainland (6.10). Alcibiades counters by highlighting, instead of the risks of the campaign, its potential rewards, namely fame, power, and profit (6.18). The two speeches thus pit two alternative visions of the future against each another, the one a picture of fear and the other of hope, and they ask the Athenian assemblymen to choose between them.

In this way, from its very outset, the expedition is cast, in part, as a prospective object capable of sustaining both fears and hopes, one whose emergence into the Athenians’ field of vision opens a contested space for both emotions to fill.

The Athenians of course opt for the hopeful vision, an eventuality that has been overdetermined in the narrative in multiple ways. In the first place, Thucydides alludes to the fact of the expedition as early as 2.65, calling it a ‘mistake’ (ἡμαρτήθη καὶ ὁ ἐς Σικελίαν πλοῦς), thus flagging not only the Athenians’ decision to undertake the venture but also its ultimate failure. The sense of inevitability in book six is supplemented further, however, by the essentialized optimism and acquisitiveness around which Athenian identity has been constructed

159 in the History prior to the Sicilian episode. The speech of the Corinthians in book one introduces this motif, but the speeches of both Alcibiades and Nicias early in book six reinvoke and reinforce it, the former deliberately and the latter, as we will see, seemingly inadvertently. In this section, I examine how both speakers reconstruct Athenian identity around notions of hope that they further tie to specified modes of viewing. In the next section, I argue that the hopeful mode of viewing assumes normative force for the Athenian audience gathered in the assembly at 6.24, who self-police against the transgressive incursion of fear. Neither an inevitable nor a natural emotional disposition, then, the Athenians’ hopeful outlook emerges in these passages as the necessary consequence of a clearly articulated ideological formation, the historian’s account of the speeches effectively de-naturalizing Athenian identity by demonstrating its laborious rhetorical construction.

Nicias

Thucydides gives us two speeches by Nicias, both ostensibly advocating against the expedition.

His first speech, like that of Alcibiades which follows, is built around the fashioning of a prospective future and the attempt to calibrate the Athenians’ thoughts and emotions in accordance with their perception of that future. Unlike Alcibiades’, however, the picture Nicias paints is one fraught with the fearsome prospects of danger (κίνδυνος, 6.12.1, 12.2, 13.1) and failure (σφάλλω, 10.2, 11.4, 11.6). Fear, he argues, is the rational emotional response to the prospect of Sicilian conquest, not optimistic ‘elation’ (χρὴ δὲ μὴ... ἐπαίρεσθαι, 6.11.6).

And yet, almost as soon as he has begun advocating for a certain prudent fear around the expedition, he invokes the powerlessness of such fears against the Athenians’ tropos of hopefulness (6.9.2-3):

160 ὅμως δὲ οὔτε ἐν τῷ πρότερον χρόνῳ διὰ τὸ προτιμᾶσθαι εἶπον παρὰ γνώμην οὔτε νῦν, ἀλλὰ ᾗ ἂν γιγνώσκω βέλτιστα, ἐρῶ. καὶ πρὸς μὲν τοὺς τρόπους τοὺς ὑμετέρους ἀσθενὴς ἄν μου ὁ λόγος εἴη, εἰ τά τε ὑπάρχοντα σῴζειν παραινοίην καὶ μὴ τοῖς ἑτοίμοις περὶ τῶν ἀφανῶν καὶ μελλόντων κινδυνεύειν.

Still, never before did I speak against my better judgment in order to gain honor, nor now will I say anything other than what I know best. And my words would be weak against your character, if I urged you to preserve what you have and not to endanger what is at hand for the sake of what is unseen and in the future.

By citing the fundamental weakness of logos against the Athenians’ ‘character’ (τρόπους),

Nicias contributes to the construction of Athenian identity as a force opposed to notions of rational argumentation. His use of the term logos is particularly loaded when set against the subsequent narrative of the expedition. The term signifies the deliberative speech itself that

Nicias is presenting to the assembly, but at the same time it indicates the ‘logic’ which this speech contains, that is, its considered evaluation of the current situation. Nicias is asserting that his evaluation, based around a claim to rational judgment, will fall short against an Athenian character that, as the Corinthians avowed in book one and Alcibiades will renew in his rebuttal speech, is constructed repeatedly out of hope, optimism, and desire. Repeatedly citing his own gnome (γνώμην, γιγνώσκω; cf. 11.5, 13.1, 14.1), Nicias establishes an opposition between the forces of reason, with which he identifies, and the Athenian’s collective character.8 That this character is a product of hope is all but explicit in Nicias’ reinvocation from the Corinthians’ speech of the juxtaposition between present circumstances (ὑπάρχοντα) and the futurity around which the Corinthians’ had framed Athenian hope (μελλόντων).9 Nicias’ implication thus marks off a strict dichotomy between the forces of reason, on the one hand, and passion, on the other.10

8 Nicias also heavily emphasizes the cognitive actions of νομίζω (6.12.2, 14.1) and νόος (6.9.2, 11.1, 13.1). 9 Note that elsewhere in the speech, he further characterizes the Athenians repeatedly as ‘eager’ for the voyage (ὥρμησθε, ibid.; ἐπιθυμεῖν, 6.10.1) and the acquisition of ‘another empire’ (ἀρχῆς ἄλλης ὀρέγεσθαι, 6.10.5). 10 Many readers have interpreted the Sicilian narrative as an examination of the conflict between reason and passion: see Ellis 1979; Kern 1989; Jordan 2000; Balot 2001a, 164-8; Kallet 2001, 21-84; Stahl 2003, 191-3; 2012, 131-2.

161 It is a dichotomy Thucydides’ narrative reinforces: while the language of feeling permeates the narrative passages that follow the debate, the language of cognition is all but entirely lacking. When it does appear, it is never applied to the Athenian demos collectively.11 In

Thucydides’ depiction, the Sicilian expedition is a product not so much of logos or gnome, but rather an endeavor linked consistently with the language of thymos.12 Mirroring the character of

Alcibiades himself, whom Thucydides will introduce with an emphatic collection of thymos- language (προθυμότατα, ἐπιθυμῶν, ἐπιθυμίαις μείζοσιν, ἐπιθυμοῦντι, 6.15), the Athenians conceive, plan, and carry out their foreign policy in book six with a series of passionate processes that have supplanted cognitive ones.13 In this way, Thucydides’ depictions of Athenian imperialism in action elaborate another striking element of the Corinthians’ assessment in book one: Athenian pleonexia is a phenomenon that not only reaches ‘beyond gnome’ (παρὰ γνώμην,

1.70.3), but which skirts gnome entirely.14 By acknowledging this dichotomy publicly, at the very beginning of his speech, then, Nicias asserts the futility of speaking at all. In short, Nicias admits defeat before he has opened his case. At the same time, though, his acknowledgement effectively authorizes the Athenians’ irrational hope while also, ironically, constructing it.

His speech also lays out, for the first time in the Sicilian narrative, the visual dynamics of the Athenians’ imperialistic impulse which, throughout these passages, are tied to both the

Athenians’ abiding hopefulness and the cognitive engagement they are shown so pointedly to

11 Cf. Kallet 2001, 182: “Thucydides highlights the critical factor of gnome, in order to show it lacking.” The ability to ‘conjecture’ is conferred on some of the Greek population at 6.31.4, but these Thuc. expressly segregates from the Athenians (τοὺς ἄλλους Ἕλληνας… εἰκασθῆναι). At 6.31.5, Thuc. uses the term ἐλογίσατο to explain that, if anyone had ‘calculated’ the expense of the expedition, they would have found it be immensely high. The clear implication, however, is that no one at the time in fact made that calculation. 12 For the thymos as the seat of emotion in Greek thought, see Cairns 2019. 13 Cf. Ober 1998, 109: “Alcibiades is epithumia personified.” 14 Romilly 1963 strongly emphasizes the Athenians’ drive to empire as a thing which exceeds the control of rationality or any single individual actor, an “almost abstract desire for conquest” (74). See further pp. 51, 59-65, 70, 235-42, 273, 288, 304, 309-12. On the particularly Periclean characteristic of gnome in the Hist., see Edmunds 1975, esp. 7-88; cf. Huart 1973; Farrar 1988, 158–77.

162 lack. The speech deploys the language of visual scrutiny that, as we have seen in previous chapters of this study, is programmatic for critical judgment in Thucydides’ text. From its first sentence, the address announces its interest in ‘looking into’ the matter of the expedition (δοκεῖ...

χρῆναι σκέψασθαι, 6.9.1). Nicias uses the verb σκέπτομαι, a close relative of the more common

Thucydidean term σκοπέω. The latter term also appears early in the speech, when Nicias reiterates the ‘need to look’ at the dangers involved in the expedition (χρὴ σκοπεῖν, 6.10.5).15

Deploying such terminology, Nicias aligns his own clarity of both thought and vision with the historian himself, whose work sets out to display the ‘clear truth’ of history for the reader to look upon and examine (τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, 1.22.4). Also like the historian, Nicias contrasts his own clarity of vision and thought with the corresponding lack of both in the Athenian demos. While he is able to see them and their behavior clearly in their present fervor ([ὑμὰς] οὓς ὁρῶν νῦν…

6.13.1), he characterizes the demos’ visual capacity as an infatuation with what is both ‘unseen’

(τῶν ἀφανῶν) and still in the future (μελλόντων). Thus, following the Corinthians from book one, Nicias cites the Athenians’ persistent interest in futurity, which he further ties to visuality, acknowledging that this invisible future is more alluring than anything clearly visible and concrete, such as the Athenians’ ‘existing possessions’ in the present (ὑπάρχοντα).

Nicias’ attribution of visual language to notions of futurity invites comparison with another trope in the text, namely the association between the language of aphanes and that of elpis. In his speech against Cleon in the Mytilenean debate, for instance, Diodotus links both elpis and eros to the invisibility of the unknown future, asserting that this lack of visibility is, for the Athenians, ‘stronger than fearsome things that are seen’ in the present (ἀφανῆ κρείσσω ἐστὶ

15 On the programmatic term σκοπέω, see Crane 1996, 236-47; Bakker 2006, 117.

163 τῶν ὁρωμένων δεινῶν, 3.45.5).16 Diodotus impugns the Athenians for this willful blindness to such visible things as they ought reasonably to fear, but which they permit their desires to remove from their view, preferring a mode of viewing grounded in hope and, paradoxically, the

‘unseen’.17 Nicias’ assessment of the Athenians on the verge of the Sicilian campaign rehearses this same critique of demotic emotionality and (lack of) vision. The image with which Nicias presents the Athenians in this first speech is one consisting of the various dangers confronting

Athens throughout mainland Greece—rebels active in Chalcidice and resentful Spartans awaiting only an opportunity to strike. It is an image of an eminently visible present circumstance, one which he supposes ought to generate fear among the Athenians of leaving such dangers behind to seek fresh ones abroad. Yet, as he preemptively acknowledges, the Athenians’ natural preference is for the unseen potential of the future, a space at once invisible and, according to the

Corinthians as well as Diodotus, filled with hope. In Nicias’ description, then, the Athenians thus rely upon a sort of delusory visual mode that has been founded on hope, desire, and the ‘unseen’ rather than on rational evaluation of the visible world.

The opposition between unseen fantasy and visible reality precisely characterizes the internal conflict of the Athenians’ imperialistic gaze in the assembly scene at 6.24, which, as we will see, further elaborates the delusory visual mode alluded to already by Nicias. It is a mode of viewing which thrives on the mutual reinforcement of hope and desire, on the one hand, and the invisible potential of the future, on the other. At its core, the Athenians’ ideologically optimistic

16 On this famous passage, see Cornford 1907, 167-72; Orwin 1994, 142-62; Luginbill 1999, 65-81; Wohl 2002, 192-4; Stahl 2003, 118-23. For the common view of hope as a delusory force in Thuc., see Cornford 1907, 167-72, 201-20; Avery 1973; Connor 1984, 131; Bedford & Workman 2001; Geuss 2005, 224; Mittleman 2009, 73-5; Cairns 2016. Cf. however the more optimistic reading of elpis in Thuc. by Schlosser 2013. 17 Hope is described with metaphors of visibility elsewhere in the Hist. as well, most notably by the Athenian envoys in Melos at 5.103.2, who describe the Melians’ hopes as ‘unseen’ (αἱ φανεραὶ ἐλπίδες... τὰ ἀφανεῖς): see Orwin 1994, 123; Stahl 2003, 193. Cf. also Brasidas’ speech at 4.108.4, which plays repeatedly on the dual antitheses between (1) the visible and invisible and (2) ‘unexamined/unseen hope’ (ἐλπίδι ἀπερισκέπτῳ) and reasoned ‘calculation’ (λογισμῷ).

164 gaze is built around an ideal that can only be seen in the abstract and fades when confronted with a concretely visible reality. In the speech of Alcibiades, which follows Nicias’ first address, we see the construction of this ideal as a two-fold project involving the definition of both a fantasy object of imperial conquest and a prescriptive mode of gazing at this object.

Alcibiades

Basing his argument around the sort of national identity construction earlier outlined by the

Corinthians, and, as we have just seen, reiterated by Nicias, Alcibiades urges the Athenians in no uncertain terms to vote in favor of the expedition. Like Pericles in the funeral oration, he crafts an ideal image of Athenian-ness which he sets before the demos, and to which he asks them to conform. And like Pericles’ ‘ideality’, it is an image in the abstract, a model for a set of beliefs and behaviors which Alcibiades encourages the Athenians to perform in the political space of the assembly.18 Distinct from the ideology laid out in the funeral oration, however, the idealized

Athenian gaze crafted by Alcibiades is directed at once both inward, enforcing conformity through social pressure within the demos, and outward, envisioning an image of easy and safe imperial conquest in Sicily. This image of Sicilian conquest, as commentators have pointed out, is a fantasy, as the subsequent narrative of Athenian difficulties and failure will vividly demonstrate.19 But it nevertheless forms the initial target around which the Athenians’ ideology of hope takes shape. It is in fact the paradigmatic object of this ideologically hopeful mode of

18 Loraux 1986a coined the term ‘ideality’ to describe the idealizing image of Athens and its citizens fashioned by Pericles in the funeral oration (see chapter three of this study). See Wohl 2002, 1-72 on the “ideological desire” this imaginary construction implants in the ideal Athenian citizen-subject. 19 Cf. Macleod 1983, 86-7: Alcibiades’ policy is based on “impressions: above all an ideal image of Athens, together with a distorted view of Sicily…” Ober 1998, 116-17 on the Athenians’ creation of “an imaginary Sicily.” Cogan 1981, 280 calls the image a “phantasm existing nowhere but in their own minds. Athenian belief in the efficacy and fearsomeness of this phantasm is indeed a substitution of fantasy for reality.” Cf. also Stahl 2003, 173-88.

165 viewing, an elusive object that can only exist for the Athenians so long as it remains unseen and in the future.

Against the picture of a fearsome present outlined by Nicias, then, Alcibiades enlists the power of hope and the allure of future gains to persuade the Athenians to sail. The Sicilians, he argues, are politically weak and unlikely to unite against the Athenian threat, and furthermore, the non-Greeks on the island are likely to join the Athenians, since they share no love for

Syracusan rule. Nor, he continues, will the Spartan navy back home prove a threat for the defensive force Athens will be able to leave behind (6.17). So Alcibiades methodically defangs every object of fear Nicias had summoned in his earlier speech. Eliminating these fearsome objects from the prospective expedition, Alcibiades seeks to reinstall hope in the Athenians’ collective perceptions of Sicily. As we have seen already, however, Nicias’ speech, while censuring the Athenians’ hope for the expedition, stopped short of denying its enduring potency in their collective disposition. In that way, Nicias himself laid the groundwork for Alcibiades’ subsequent appeal to the Athenians to embrace their ‘abiding customs and character’ (τοῖς

παροῦσιν ἤθεσι καὶ νόμοις, 6.18.7). Moreover, Alcibiades clearly defines this enduring character in the terms of imperialistic acquisitiveness and desiderative emotion.20 For instance, he exhorts the Athenians not to ‘shrink from’ (ἀποκνοῖμεν, 6.18.1) the fight on Sicily, deploying the verbal form of the same term the Corinthians earlier used to define Athenian hopefulness by its rejection of (Spartan) fearfulness and hesitation (ἄοκνοι, 1.70.4). He further reminds his audience that it is the Peloponnesians who are without hope (ἀνέλπιστοι, 6.17.8), not the

Athenians, whose character he thus repeatedly and forcefully ties to desiderative feeling.

20 Cf. the similar sentiment at 6.18.3: εἰ μὴ καὶ τὰ ἐπιτηδεύματα... μεταλήψεσθε. Compare also Cleon’s warning in the Mytilenian Debate to the Athenians ‘not to betray themselves’ (μὴ οὖν προδόται γένησθε ὑμῶν αὐτῶν, 3.40.7).

166 Furthermore, Alcibiades warns the Athenians that the stakes of their hopeful identity are no less than existential. Should they deviate from their pleonectic imperial policy, he says, they would risk atrophy and loss of their empire (τρίψεσθαί τε αὐτὴν περὶ αὑτήν, 6.18.6). The loss of imperial power is regularly invoked as a fearsome prospect for the Athenians, and one which, in the History, is often equated with the fall into slavery.21 Alcibiades himself formulates the

Athenians’ empire as a zero-sum game of ruling or being ruled: ‘if we ourselves do not hold empire over others, there is the danger of being ruled by others’ (τὸ ἀρχθῆναι ἂν ὑφ’ ἑτέρων

αὐτοῖς κίνδυνον εἶναι, εἰ μὴ αὐτοὶ ἄλλων ἄρχοιμεν, 6.18.3). Thus, summoning the potential loss of imperial power as an object of fear, and the Sicilian expedition as the antidote to that fear,

Alcibiades attempts to regulate citizen emotion in a manner reminiscent of what we have seen in the dynamics of Periclean civic ideology in the funeral oration.22 Each speaker aims to manipulate citizen fears and desires—in the current case, the desire for Sicilian conquest which

Alcibiades expressly encourages—so as to endow both emotions with prescriptive force. For the

Athenians to abandon their imperialist foreign policy, in the picture Alcibiades paints, would require not just abandoning their influential position in the Greek world but also disavowing their very identity and endangering the sense of autonomy that lies at its foundation.23 By establishing the necessity of a connection between Athenian identity and certain prescribed ways of feeling and acting, Alcibiades, just like Pericles, imposes the coercive force of normativity upon his

Athenian audience.

21 Subject states refer to themselves as enslaved throughout the text, and the specter of slavery is frequently an object of fear: see, e.g,, 1.121.5, 1.122.3, 1.124.3, 3.10.3-4, 3.63, 4.86.1-4, 4.92.4-7, 5.9.9, 5.86.1, 5.92, 5.100.1, 6.76.2-4, 6.80.5, 7.66.2, with Wohl 2002, 181-4. Cf. Romilly 1963, 80-2. 22 Pericles, likewise, links Athenian ‘ways’ (τρόπων, 2.36.4) to its acquisition of the empire; Romilly 1963, 131 comments on this passage that Athenian power, in Pericles’ estimation, thus “owes its existence to the principles on which Athens acts, to her political habits and to her way of life in general.” 23 Cf., e.g., the important roles of freedom and autonomy in Pericles’ description of Athenian democracy in the funeral oration (see esp. 2.37, 41).

167 For Alcibiades, just as for Pericles, this imperialist identity entails not just the calibration of hopes and fears, but also, in part, prescriptive ways of seeing and knowing. Not only must the

Athenians remain actively expansionist, Alcibiades avers, but they must also ‘look at/understand inactivity’ in a uniquely Athenian way and, so, ‘not in the same way as others’ (οὐκ ἐκ τοῦ

αὐτοῦ ἐπισκεπτέον ὑμῖν τοῖς ἄλλοις τὸ ἥσυχον, 6.18.3). He explains further what this mode of viewing demands when he enjoins the Athenians to ‘be seen looking with contempt’ upon hesychia, the polar opposite of the polypragmosyne with which he urges the Athenians to identify themselves (δόξομεν ὑπεριδόντες τὴν ἐν τῷ παρόντι ἡσυχίαν, 6.18.4).24 Alcibiades thus defines not only a way of viewing and feeling about hesychia—that is, disdainfully—he also indicates the importance of performing the gaze he prescribes in such a way as for it to be visually discernible to outside observers. The dual visual injunction he imposes on the Athenians requires the normative citizen both to see and be seen in proper ways. Alcibiades’ command to the Athenians to ‘look with contempt’ (ὑπεριδόντες) further evokes Pericles’ words in the oration advising the citizens not to ‘overlook the dangers of war’ (μὴ περιορᾶσθε τοὺς

πολεμικοὺς κινδύνους, 2.43.4). Both speakers’ demands, framed around compounds of the verb

ὁράω, contribute to a sketch of prescriptive modes of seeing, knowing, and feeling upon which citizen identity depends. In each context, the failure actively to perform the prescribed behavior threatens the citizen’s membership in collective notions of what it means to be an Athenian.

Alcibiades urges the Athenians to look upon the prospect of war such that it becomes an object of desire, and to see the avoidance of war as an object of fear. In this way, in the interest of his rhetorical and ideological agenda, he actively mobilizes both emotions around the prospect of the expedition. However, the ideal Alcibiades constructs is not only of the citizen himself, but

24 For Luginbill 1999, ἡσυχία represents one of the behavioral manifestations of Spartan fear (see pp. 87-94). Alcibiades repeatedly denigrates the notion of ἀπραγμοσύνη as well: 6.18.6-7.

168 also of the object upon which he is meant to target his gaze, namely the island of Sicily itself.

Therefore, in crafting a portrait of Sicilian conquest, he carefully removes from view the fearsome dangers inherent to the realities of the foreign venture, and instead realigns the concepts of both danger and safety so as to fit the alluring and persuasive ideal. On the one hand, he claims that inaction, not imperial ambition, is the truest source of ‘danger’ to the empire

(κινδυνεύοιμεν, 6.18.2; cf. κίνδυνον, above). Built out of ceaseless activity, he explains, the

Athenians’ empire is unsuited to the imposition of limits (οὐκ ἔστιν ἡμῖν ταμιεύεσθαι ἐς ὅσον

βουλόμεθα ἄρχειν, 6.18.3). It is a thing sustained, as the Corinthians earlier avowed, by a boundless expectation of future gains. Alcibiades depicts the obverse of this perpetual expansionism as imperial death itself. On the other hand, then, having reordered the Athenians’ fears, Alcibiades focuses attention on what he claims is the superlative ‘safety’ (ἀσφαλές,

ἀσφαλέστατα, 6.18.7) of undertaking the expansionist campaign to Sicily. It is a prospect that emerges as comparatively risk-free when set against the existential dangers of remaining idle at home. Replacing danger with claims of safety and security, Alcibiades thus conjures an image of prospective Sicilian conquest which he superimposes over the fearsome vision of Nicias’ speech.

This image, a fabrication imbued with ideological force, serves its purpose for

Alcibiades, emerging in the scene at 6.24 as an object of fervid desire for the Athenian people.

The Athenians embrace the image, their hopes further filling out its details, and in so doing they perform precisely the identity—in all its visual, epistemic, and emotional dimensions—that has been constructed for them by the Corinthians, by Alcibiades, and inadvertently by Nicias himself.

169 Performing the Optimistic Gaze: 6.24

Thucydides gives Nicias a second speech, a response to Alcibiades, in which he enumerates the matériel he thinks necessary for the expedition. Outlining a surfeit of preparation, Nicias trusts the sheer size of the force will dissuade the Athenians from voting in its favor. In the vivid scene in the assembly at 6.24, Thucydides shows the people reacting in precisely the opposite way, encouraged and made even more hopeful by Nicias’ recommendations. To the demos,

Thucydides explains, ‘he seemed to advise well’ (εὖ τε γὰρ παραινέσαι ἔδοξε, 6.24.2). It is an emotional response that has been both overdetermined within the text and, as we have seen, unwittingly conditioned by Nicias himself.25 Nor was this an inevitable reaction, but rather one based around the careful construction of an Athenian identity with which the demos has cathected and which it now seeks to perform. Hence, the surfeit of preparation (παρασκευῆς

πλήθει, 6.19.2) he prescribes for the expedition in the second speech, in the end, only further embellishes in the people’s minds the details of an idealized picture of (safe, easy) Sicilian conquest. Even Nicias himself succumbs to the allure of the fantasy, permitting himself to partake in a modicum of the optimism surrounding him: early in his second speech he voices his

‘hope’ (ἐλπίζω, 6.20.3) the campaign will go well. This publicly avowed hope not only reflects that of the Athenians but, again, helps to reinforce it. By the conclusion of the speech, he seems to have gone so far as to convince himself of the safety of the venture, stating his belief that his recommendation of the preparation necessary for the venture is both ‘most certain for the whole city’ and ‘safe for our soldiers’ (ταῦτα γὰρ τῇ τε ξυμπάσῃ πόλει βεβαιότατα ἡγοῦμαι καὶ ἡμῖν

τοῖς στρατευσομένοις σωτήρια, 6.23.3). In this way he too, ostensibly the voice of prudential fear throughout the debate, contributes to the prevailing vision of hope—thus assuming the very

25 On Nicias’ rhetorical strategy in this second speech, see Ober 1998, 107-13, who calls the strategy “insincere” and “overclever.” See further Kagan 1981, 186-90; Bloedow 1990.

170 Athenian identity he earlier decried. Indeed, in the end Nicias encourages Athenian optimism by insisting upon the asphaleia of the campaign (should the demos follow his advice) in the same diction as his rival Alcibiades (ἀσφαλὴς ἐκπλεῦσαι, 6.23.2; cf. τὸ ἀσφαλές, ἀσφαλέστατα, 6.18).

Before reaching the assembly scene, then, Thucydides has shown us how, from several sources, the Athenians’ collective identity is consistently fashioned around hope and optimism.

We have also seen already how this essentialized hopefulness is tied in several ways to the language of visuality and to prescriptive visual practices. In the scene at the assembly,

Thucydides puts on vivid display both the interdependence of hope and vision, and the ideological weight with which the Athenians themselves have invested this optimistic gaze

(6.24):

(1) Ὁ μὲν Νικίας τοσαῦτα εἶπε νομίζων τοὺς Ἀθηναίους τῷ πλήθει τῶν πραγμάτων ἢ ἀποτρέψειν ἤ, εἰ ἀναγκάζοιτο στρατεύεσθαι, μάλιστ' ἂν οὕτως ἀσφαλῶς ἐκπλεῦσαι· (2) οἱ δὲ τὸ μὲν ἐπιθυμοῦν τοῦ πλοῦ οὐκ ἐξῃρέθησαν ὑπὸ τοῦ ὀχλώδους τῆς παρασκευῆς, πολὺ δὲ μᾶλλον ὥρμηντο, καὶ τοὐναντίον περιέστη αὐτῷ· εὖ τε γὰρ παραινέσαι ἔδοξε καὶ ἀσφάλεια νῦν δὴ καὶ πολλὴ ἔσεσθαι. (3) καὶ ἔρως ἐνέπεσε τοῖς πᾶσιν ὁμοίως ἐκπλεῦσαι· τοῖς μὲν γὰρ πρεσβυτέροις ὡς ἢ καταστρεψομένοις ἐφ' ἃ ἔπλεον ἢ οὐδὲν ἂν σφαλεῖσαν μεγάλην δύναμιν, τοῖς δ' ἐν τῇ ἡλικίᾳ τῆς τε ἀπούσης πόθῳ ὄψεως καὶ θεωρίας, καὶ εὐέλπιδες ὄντες σωθήσεσθαι· ὁ δὲ πολὺς ὅμιλος καὶ στρατιώτης ἔν τε τῷ παρόντι ἀργύριον οἴσειν καὶ προσκτήσεσθαι δύναμιν ὅθεν ἀίδιον μισθοφορὰν ὑπάρξειν. (4) ὥστε διὰ τὴν ἄγαν τῶν πλεόνων ἐπιθυμίαν, εἴ τῳ ἄρα καὶ μὴ ἤρεσκε, δεδιὼς μὴ ἀντιχειροτονῶν κακόνους δόξειεν εἶναι τῇ πόλει ἡσυχίαν ἦγεν.

(1) Such things Nicias said, thinking to dissuade the Athenians either through the size of the preparations or, if he were compelled to undertake the campaign, they would sail out with the utmost security. (2) [The Athenians], on the other hand, were not delivered from their zeal for the voyage by the difficulty of its preparation, but were all the more incited, and the opposite result came about for (Nicias). For he seemed to advise well, and safety seemed to be all the more certain. (3) And love for the expedition befell them all alike: for the elders, since they expected either to subdue whatever they sailed against, or that a great force would not slip up; for those in the prime of life, because of their longing for far away sights, and because they were optimistic they would survive; and the crowd of soldiers hoped they would gain money in the here and now and also acquire an empire from which endless income would result. (4) The result was that, due to the excessive eagerness of the majority, if anyone disagreed, in their fear of appearing ill-disposed to the city, raising no objection he held his peace.

171 Thucydides has divided the crowd in the scene into three groups: the old (πρεσβυτέροις), the young (τοῖς ἐν τῇ ἡλικίᾳ), and the ‘crowd of soldiers’ (ὅμιλος καὶ στρατιώτης26). All three groups are shown imagining on the island of Sicily the objects of their hopes and desires. They envision the island as an easily conquerable “treasure chest” of endless wealth.27 Like

Alcibiades, whose hopes for Sicily circulate around a vision of wealth and glory (ἐλπίζων…

χρήμασί τε καὶ δόξῃ ὠφελήσειν, 6.15.2), the Athenians in the assembly focus their acquisitive gaze on the ‘endless income’ they foresee on the island (ἀργύριον… ἀίδιον μισθοφορὰν).28

Having invested in the idealizing portrait of Sicily, then, the Athenians recreate that image in the assembly and, in Thucydides’ depiction, invest it with a powerful complex of desiderative emotions (τὸ ἐπιθυμοῦν, ὥρμηντο, ἔρως, πόθῳ, εὐέλπιδες, ἐπιθυμίαν). Like the ‘ideality’

Pericles presented in the funeral oration, however, the idealized picture of Sicily is only visual in the abstract and, as commentators have noted, it is based fundamentally in the imaginary, a fantasy that has not been shaped by critical evaluation but formed out of this suite of hopes and desires.29 The only term associated with intellectual processes in the passage at 6.24 is attributed to Nicias (νομίζων) and, as we have already seen, even his thinking has at this point been conditioned by the dominant ideology of hope whose construction he contributed to.

26 I follow Hornblower’s (2008, 362-3) interpretation of καί as weakly adverbial in this phrase, but see ibid. for discussion of alternative translations. 27 Kallet 2001, 45: “most Athenians saw Sicily as a huge treasure chest.” 28 Cf. Ober 1998, 114-15: “the Assembly that voted for the expedition not only fulfilled what everyone believed about the Athenian character (daring and active), it came to resemble Alcibiades himself.” Jordan 2000, 70 reads the entirety of the Sicilian venture as a realization of the specific ambitions of Alcibiades: “The Sicilian expedition was conceived, organized, equipped, and sent on its way mainly in the spirit and image of Alcibiades, its chief advocate and the victor in the debate… This judgement may be extended to apply to the armada as well: it represented the perceptions, aims, values, and ambitions of Alcibiades.” Cf. Romilly 1963, 195-229; Forde 1989; Balot 2001a, 166- 72; Wohl 2002, 124-70. 29 Cf. Cogan 1981, 98-9: Athens becomes “a city whose political reasonings and reasonability have become unrealistic and replaced by fantasy. They have now come to resemble the picture of them that was drawn by the Corinthians at Sparta: uncontrollable in their activity and limitless in their designs.”

172 Both Alcibiades and Nicias alluded to a connection between the Athenians’ optimism and distinct modes of viewing. In the passage at 6.24, Thucydides indicates that this connection is more than metaphorical, and that the Athenians’ ideology of hope is tied, at least in part, to literal viewing. He notes that for the second grouping, the men ‘in their prime’, the infatuation with

Sicily revolves around the visual spectacle of their hope object, whose appearance they long to see (τῆς τε ἀπούσης πόθῳ ὄψεως καὶ θεωρίας).30 This object, however, like Athenian elpis and eros more broadly, lies ‘distant’ (ἀπούσης) not only geographically but also temporally. It is, at present, invisible, situated firmly in the realm of ‘the unseen’ with which, as we saw earlier, both

Diodotus and Nicias associated the delusional visuality of hope and desire. Moreover,

Thucydides has emphasized that the Sicily these Athenians ‘long to see’ is a figment of their collective imagination, a far cry from the island whose geographical and political realities the historian describes so methodically in the so-called Sikelika passage with which he introduces the Sicilian narrative (6.2-5).31 This tour-de-force of historical knowledge is clearly meant to form a stark contrast with the Athenians’ collective ignorance of the island in these early planning stages.32 Uninterested in knowing the island, these Athenians long only to gaze upon it.

In that way, their longing gaze seeks to sever the connection between seeing and knowing which, as we have seen elsewhere in this study, forms the sensory-epistemic foundation within the narrative world the History creates. This fatal separation characterizes the Athenians’ optimistic gaze throughout the planning stages of the expedition, as Athenian desires circulate blindly around a Sicily they long to see but are not willing to understand.

30 The Athenians’ interest in theoria further evokes Alcibiades, who, in his earlier speech, had advertised the ‘brilliance of his display’ at the Olympic games (τῷ ἐμῷ διαπρεπεῖ τῆς Ὀλυμπιάζε θεωρίας, 6.16.2). As Jordan 2000, 63-4 points out, Alcibiades presents himself as a visual spectacle (λαμπρύνομαι; λαμπρότητι προέσχον, 6.16). 31 Cf. Greenwood 2006, 51: “the Athenian demos looks to the future, but it does so with hope and desire, instead of with foresight and hindsight.” See further the discussion in Stahl 2003, 181-3 and 2012, 126-7. 32 Smith 2004 uses sources external to the Hist. to demonstrate that the Athenians were not as ignorant as Thuc. suggests.

173 In fact, the ideologically constructed gaze works to shield the Athenians from knowing the truth of Sicily, sustained as it is by an idealized picture of conquest. However, as the narrative of books six and seven will richly bear out, the Sicily of the Athenian imagination is decidedly unreal, an object which, like the ‘unseen future’ targeted by Athenian hope (τῶν

ἀφανῶν καὶ μελλόντων, 6.9.3; cf. τὰ μέλλοντα, 1.70.7), is by its nature invisible because it does not exist outside of the optimistic fantasy that has constructed it. The visual stimulus these men long for is thus a sort of vision for vision’s own sake, lacking any concrete object upon which to settle its gaze. Therefore, like Athenian pleonexia itself, it is both sustained by the ‘absence’

(ἀπούσης) it craves and perpetually deferred.33 In this way, the Athenians’ imperial mode of viewing performs exactly the ‘disastrous love for things absent’ against which Nicias had earlier warned them (δυσέρωτας… τῶν ἀπόντων, 6.13.1).34 And yet, within the perpetual motion machine of Athenian imperialism, this is in fact the only possible mode of viewing, one whose trajectory runs in precise parallel with the ceaseless polypragmosyne and unsatisfiable desire with which the Athenians’ identity has repeatedly been constructed. If, as Victoria Wohl has argued, Athenian imperialism is driven by a fundamentally unsatisfiable craving for more, this ceaseless desire thus constructs a vision whose object is vision itself.35

So then, the longing for opsis and theoria without object is, paradoxically, a sort of longing not for blindness exactly, but for a mode of viewing that refuses to look reality in the face.36 The ideological construct of the Athenians’ optimistic gaze is grounded, throughout these

33 Cf. Wohl 2002, 193: “Vision is reinforced by hope, which also mediates between these amorous young men and the object of their desire… hope, like vision bridges the gap of pothos, bringing near what is distant and making present what is absent.” 34 The terms eros and erastes occur only twice each in the Hist. (3.45.5; 6.24.3 and 2.43.1; 6.54.3, resp.). On the erotic metaphor for Athenian imperialism, see Romilly 1963, 77-9; Immerwahr 1973, 27-8; Wohl 2002, 171-214. 35 See Wohl 2002, 188-203. Cf. Balot 2001a, 159: “For Thucydides what is primary is the desire to have more, as a conceptual category in its own right. This desire was associated with other ideas, notably hope and overconfidence after success, but in itself desire was the fundamental drive behind Athenian imperialism” (159). 36 Romilly 1963, 296 comments on how Athens seem to be “going ahead with her eyes shut.”

174 early stages, in this mode of viewing which, we will discover, can only be sustained by unsubstantiated fantasy. The picture of Sicilian conquest Thucydides presents, for example, at the Great Harbor battle in book seven reveals the fragility of the Athenians’ ideologically optimistic gaze, when the opsis and theoria (Thucydides redeploys this same language in the scene) earlier formed around hope and fantasy collapse before the fearsome vision of reality the narrative depicts. Even before that climactic scene, however, as we will see in the next section of this chapter, Thucydides shows us in the Piraeus that, when confronted with the concrete reality of their Sicilian venture in the form of the expeditionary fleet, the Athenians’ ideological edifice of hope is already becoming an unstable bulwark against the repeated incursion of fear.

The traces of this incursion, and the ideological instability it suggests, are already evident in the assembly scene at 6.24. Despite the prevailing atmosphere of hope and optimism,

Thucydides tells us, a certain modicum of fear surfaces in an unnamed minority of the assemblymen present (δεδιὼς μὴ ἀντιχειροτονῶν κακόνους δόξειεν). That hope has assumed a sense of normativity in the scene is demonstrated most clearly by its interaction with this modicum of fear. Reluctant to reveal their opposition to the expedition by voting against it, this unidentified minority has been frightened into silence (ἡσυχίαν ἦγεν). Their most clearly expressed fear is thus not for the prospective failure of the expedition, though we may speculate that this stands behind their unspoken reluctance to vote in its favor, but rather for their reputation among their fellow citizens. As Thucydides puts it, they ‘fear to appear ill-disposed by voting against’ the expedition. Their fears evoke the visual imperative Alcibiades had earlier leveled at the citizens, to be ‘seen looking at inaction with contempt’ (δόξομεν ὑπεριδόντες

τὴν… ἡσυχίαν, 6.18.4). That these assemblymen react with fear at the prospect of violating this commandment shows both the coercive force of the ideological formation to which the

175 Athenians are subjected and also the mutually imbricated roles of visuality and emotional orientation in the performance of the ideal that has been fashioned for them.37

In this charged environment, optimism has become synonymous with patriotism: to be visibly unhopeful, that is ‘ill-disposed’ (κακόνους) toward the expedition, is to be un-Athenian.

Civic identity in the assembly has become intertwined with both affective identity and a highly affectively charged visual perspective. The scene points forebodingly forward in the text to the profoundly ideological conflict that will envelop Athens in book eight, when stasis erupts between the democrats and oligarchs, and fear again serves as a mechanism for silencing opposition voices.38 This intratextual echo lends an ominousness to the Athenians’ hopes at 6.24, and it also underscores the ideological stakes that subtend the emotional economy of this scene in the assembly. Furthermore, the scene redefines the Athenians’ optimistic gaze as a phenomenon that is aimed not only outward, toward objects of prospective conquest, but also redirected inward toward the demos itself. Its inward glance, in this scene, serves in fact to enforce its outward gaze and the ideal image of Sicily Athenian hope has constructed.

However, fear is not only present in the unnamed and silenced minority, but rather,

Thucydides indicates that it is pervasive just under the surface in the scene. Just as both

Alcibiades and Nicias sought to minimize the risks and emphasize instead the asphaleia of the expedition, so do the Athenians in the assembly seem actively to try to suppress the specter of danger and fear that accompanies the prospect of the venture, insisting frequently on their confidence in its safety. The fantasy itself of Sicily as an easily conquered land of boundless

37 Cf. Ober 1998, 117: it has become “highly dangerous to oppose the consensus in public,… political dissent loses its voice when faced by the hegemonic will of the mass of citizens.” On the silence and silencing in the political spaces of the Hist. generally, see Zumbrunnen 2008, 2017. 38 8.66.2: ἀντέλεγέ τε οὐδεὶς ἔτι τῶν ἄλλων, δεδιὼς καὶ ὁρῶν πολὺ τὸ ξυνεστηκός· εἰ δέ τις καὶ ἀντείποι εὐθὺς ἐκ τρόπου τινὸς ἐπιτηδείου ἐτεθνήκει. (“None of the others yet spoke out, afraid of the size of the conspiracy they beheld. And if anyone did speak out, he was killed straightaway by whatever means was convenient.”)

176 resources and minimal danger serves, first and foremost, as a psychological bulwark constructed out of hope and arrayed against the potential creep of fear or self-doubt. Despite this image of safety and ready acquisition, however, the Athenians in the assembly are compelled repeatedly to remind themselves, just as both speakers did, of the security of the venture. As I noted above,

Thucydides tells us that even Nicias, after his recommendation to ready a sizable force, has become confident in the safety of the impending voyage (νομίζων… μάλιστ' ἂν οὕτως ἀσφαλῶς

ἐκπλεῦσαι). Thucydides goes on to further detail both the demos’ belief that the expedition

‘seemed safe’ (ἔδοξε καὶ ἀσφάλεια), and their confidence that they ‘would not trip up’ (οὐδὲν ἂν

σφαλεῖσαν). However, as William Bluhm has observed, in Thucydides’ text fear frequently circulates around the language of security: “Thucydides often employs the term ‘fear’ (phobos, deos) interchangeably with the expressions of ‘security’ and ‘safety’ (asphaleia) since the desire for security manifests itself as fear of the loss of this value.”39 In his description of the scene at

6.24, Thucydides underscores the Athenians’ need repeatedly to reassure themselves that they are safe, and so unafraid of the impending voyage. On the one hand, this insistence on the safety of the venture, in which both Nicias and the demos trust, clearly points to the irony evident in the

Athenians’ misplaced faith in their own security in Sicily. The appearance of safety will, in the end, prove to have been just as much a fantasy as the wealth, power, and visual delights the

Athenians envision on the island. On the other hand, the evident need repeatedly to reaffirm their belief in the expedition’s safety also points toward the Athenians’ recognition of the significant dangers inherent to undertaking the venture. In short, in Thucydides’ depiction the Athenians protest too much, suggesting that fear of the opposite reality, that the venture is desperately dangerous and will fail, rests behind their compulsion to reassure themselves. In that way, the

39 Bluhm 1962, 18.

177 language of ἀσφάλεια—itself a linguistic abnegation of danger and fear (ἀ-σφάλεια)—like the silencing of fear we have just seen, represents a sustained attempt to renounce at least the visible, or voiced, presence of fear in their own ranks. Thus, the sense of hopeful optimism in the scene at the assembly further performs the coercion of normative discourse, enacting through self- enforcement an ideologically determined way of apprehending Sicily, that is with hope, and effacing any contradictory viewpoint. While the ideal image of Sicily is safe and not dangerous, the Athenians’ insistence on this safety itself reveals the precarity of both the fantasy and the ideology of hope it has been summoned to support.

Thus far in this chapter, we have seen how, following the lead of the Corinthians in book one, both Alcibiades and Nicias contribute to the construction of an Athenian identity around hope, optimism, and desire. Furthermore, both Athenian speakers, in different ways, tie this hopeful identity to modes of viewing that take on the normative weight of an ideological formation.

Following the debate, in the scene in the assembly at 6.24, the Athenians themselves have attempted to perform this ideological gaze, aligning it with the boundless optimism and desire that has been routinely ascribed to them. However, Thucydides points to the instability of this construction, which, though it is able to silence the incursion of fear, already fails to entirely eradicate it. What becomes especially clear in this scene, then, is both the contingency of the ideologically hopeful gaze upon both its proper performance—a symptom of ideological structures generally, as we saw also in the last chapter on Pericles’ funeral oration—and upon an object that is perpetually ‘unseen’ and absent, nonexistent in the ‘real world’ of Sicily

Thucydides has presented (and will continue to present) to us. Thus, we can discern clearly in these passages the mutual interdependence between the ideologically imposed optimism the

178 Athenians attempt to embrace and a mode of viewing grounded, paradoxically, in the invisible and perpetually deferred.

In the next section of the chapter, I examine the vividly visual departure scene at the

Piraeus, which closely follows the sequence of events we have looked at so far. Here the

Athenians are presented for the first time with a concrete vision of the Sicilian campaign they desire, manifested in the form of the armada assembled in the harbor. Confronted with this vision of imperial conquest, a spectacle of power that encourages and inspires hope, the Athenians nevertheless persistently struggle to suppress their fears. Thus, the ideal picture of Sicily we have seen developed and enforced comes into conflict with the tangible reality of Sicilian conquest placed before the Athenians’ eyes. As the fantasy image falters, so then does the dominance of hope within the Athenians’ collective psychology. In this way, Thucydides suggests the limits of the Athenians’ optimistic gaze, which wavers almost as soon as its fantasy object is replaced with something real.

A Spectacle of Conquest

The fear that surfaced in the scene at 6.24 was targeted at a certain social visibility within the political space of the assembly: the opponents of the expedition feared to be seen in their opposition. Nevertheless, the fact that this fear appeared in the midst of such an overwhelmingly hopeful atmosphere provided an early indication, within this paradigmatic narrative of Athenian imperialism, of a basic tension between hopes and fears in the Athenians’ collective psychology.

Indeed, as Thucydides emphasized in that passage, the fears of the minority were causally linked directly to the prevailing optimism of the scene. In the historian’s wording, the causality of this fear was doubly motivated, both by the concentration of desiderative feelings from which it

‘actually resulted’ (as indicated by the adverb ὥστε) and ‘on account of the excessive desire’ of

179 the people gathered in the assembly (διὰ τὴν ἄγαν τῶν πλεόνων ἐπιθυμίαν).40 Taken together, the two grammatical constructions point clearly toward a causal relationship between the two antithetical emotions, the one emerging directly out of the other. Thucydides seems to indicate that the Athenians’ hopes and desires, although clearly dominant in the scene, are nevertheless imbricated with fear, the one emotional category also containing a kernel of the other.41 This mutual entailment of the two antithetical emotions seems to indicate not just the fragility of a singularly hopeful ideology but in fact its impossibility. If mutually entailing, neither hope nor fear can exist in isolation, and the Athenians’ exclusively optimistic gaze has been constructed with an immanent and fatal flaw. In the Piraeus scene, Thucydides confirms these suspicions, highlighting the simultaneous and coextensive domains of hope and fear, the two emotions even more tightly bound insofar as they share the same targeted object: the prospective success or failure of the expedition to Sicily.

Piraeus departure: the fragility of hope

Furthermore, it is the manifest visibility of the expedition that enables this convergence between the desiderative and the fearful. As an ideological formation built around fantasy and so, as I argued above, a sort of un-seeing gaze, the Athenians’ hopeful identity struggles to retain its power when it is confronted with the visible spectacle of its imperial desires. Thucydides

40 The latter Greek phrase is ambiguous, as scholars have noted: the ‘excessive eagerness for more’, or the ‘the excessive eagerness of the majority’. See Connor 1984, 168; Wohl 2002, 191; and Hornblower 2008, ad loc., with references. In any case, as Romilly 1963, 49 n. 1 recognizes, the difference in sense is not substantive to the theme of Thuc.’s depiction: Athenian desires are excessive. We know from the context, as well as the preceding several books of narrative, that in either case these desires both belong to the majority of Athenians and are defined by their craving for always more—resources, power, empire. Compare the similar expressions at 4.21.2, 4.41.4, 4.65.4; and cf. 2.65.10-11. 41 This relation between the two emotions resembles the dynamic of Hegelian dialectic. See Forster 1993, 132-3: “Beginning from a category A, Hegel seeks to show that upon conceptual analysis, category A proves to contain a contrary category, B, and conversely that category B proves to contain category A, thus showing both categories to be self-contradictory. He then seeks to show that this negative result has a positive outcome, a new category, C… This new category unites - as Hegel puts it - the preceding categories A and B. That is to say, when analyzed the new category is found to contain them both.”

180 underscores how the hopefulness and optimism that dominated the earlier scene in the assembly have accompanied the crowd down to the Piraeus: he equates the expedition itself with the

‘greatest hope’ (μεγίστῃ ἐλπίδι, 6.31.6).42 However, as the crowd at the Piraeus gazes upon the assembled fleet, in spite of the prevailing atmosphere of optimism that has willed this fleet into existence, the spectators, as we will see, are struck with fears that they seem unable to escape.

The emergence of fear in the scene coincides precisely with the internal audience’s first encounter with the visual spectacle of the fleet (6.30.2-31.1):

(30.2) οἱ μὲν ἐπιχώριοι τοὺς σφετέρους αὐτῶν ἕκαστοι προπέμποντες, οἱ μὲν ἑταίρους, οἱ δὲ ξυγγενεῖς, οἱ δὲ υἱεῖς, καὶ μετ' ἐλπίδος τε ἅμα ἰόντες καὶ ὀλοφυρμῶν, τὰ μὲν ὡς κτήσοιντο, τοὺς δ' εἴ ποτε ὄψοιντο, ἐνθυμούμενοι ὅσον πλοῦν ἐκ τῆς σφετέρας ἀπεστέλλοντο. (31.1) καὶ ἐν τῷ παρόντι καιρῷ, ὡς ἤδη ἔμελλον μετὰ κινδύνων ἀλλήλους ἀπολιπεῖν, μᾶλλον αὐτοὺς ἐσῄει τὰ δεινὰ ἢ ὅτε ἐψηφίζοντο πλεῖν· ὅμως δὲ τῇ παρούσῃ ῥώμῃ, διὰ τὸ πλῆθος ἑκάστων ὧν ἑώρων, τῇ ὄψει ἀνεθάρσουν. οἱ δὲ ξένοι καὶ ὁ ἄλλος ὄχλος κατὰ θέαν ἧκεν ὡς ἐπ' ἀξιόχρεων καὶ ἄπιστον διάνοιαν.

(30.2) The natives of the country, each escorting their own, were sending off their companions, their kin, and their sons, going with both hope and lamentation at once, considering what they would gain, but uncertain if they would ever see them again, [and] thinking about the distance of the voyage from home. (31.1) And in the present moment, now that they were about to abandon one another to risks, the dangers came to them, more than when they voted for the expedition. But nevertheless, by the appearance of the present force, on account of the mass of what they saw, they took heart. The foreigners and the rest of the crowd, on the other hand, had come for the noteworthy spectacle and its incredible intention.

Arriving at the Piraeus at dawn to man the ships, the Athenians gaze upon the tangible product of their ambitions for Sicily, and immediately they are struck with both hope and fear. In fact, the two emotions simultaneously construct how the crowd sees and interprets the spectacle before them. On the one hand, Thucydides explains, the spectators send off their loved ones

42 The scene stands in stark contrast to the despair that punctuates the pathetic end of the expedition, where, instead of the ‘great hope’ with which the fleet set out (ἀντὶ μεγάλης ἐλπίδος, 7.75.2), the Athenians are gripped by fear of further suffering (δεδιότας μὴ πάθωσιν, 7.75.4 and 7.75.7, verbatim). Their fear of suffering, at the end of the Sicilian episode, is the obverse of the hope for salvation (σωθήσεσθαι) with which they set out. On this reversal, see Rawlings 1981; Kirby 1989, 77-8; Jordan 2000, 77; Kallet 2001, 166-72; Stahl 2003, 191-3; Rutherford 2012, 29- 32.

181 ‘with hope’ (μετ' ἐλπίδος), and they are reassured and confident in the appearance of sufficient preparation they see assembled before them in the harbor. The ‘abundance of each thing they saw’ implies for them the plausibility of a successful outcome in Sicily and the attainment of the various objects of desire Thucydides had outlined at 6.24, and it therefore gives them courage (τὸ

πλῆθος ἑκάστων ὧν ἑώρων, τῇ ὄψει ἀνεθάρσουν). Placing the verb of seeing (ἑώρων) directly adjacent to its cognate noun (τῇ ὄψει), Thucydides doubly emphasizes the proximity of vision and emotion.43 The spectators’ gaze produces the hope and the confidence they feel.

On the other hand, the successful outcome the crowd envisions is not a certainty. If it were, neither hope nor fear would have any place in the collective emotionality of the scene, based as they are on the uncertainty of future outcomes. Thus, the crowd of spectators gathered in the Piraeus, gazing out at the assembled fleet, recognizes that there are multiple possible futures for this expedition. These possibilities emerge not only as objects of hope and confidence but also of fear. Despite the Athenians’ hopes for conquest and riches, the risks and dangers of the expedition (κινδύνων, τὰ δεινά) break through as the spectators reflect now, for the first time, on the vulnerability of the men they are sending away such a great distance from home. Hence, the spectators begin to lament (ὀλοφυρμῶν) the possibility they will lose some of their loved- ones who have joined the expedition, uncertain ‘if they will ever see them again’ (τοὺς δ' εἴ ποτε

ὄψοιντο). Their earlier longing to take in the far-away sights of Sicily thus begins to conflict with their desires to keep friends and family firmly within view. In other words, the fantasy image of

Sicilian conquest begins to yield to a visible reality the Athenians cannot ignore.

43 See Dover HCT 4, ad loc on the apparent tautology of the paired visual terms in this sentence. But cf. Kallet’s (2001) response to Dover’s criticism “Thucydides wants to make as emphatic as possible the relationship between sight, feeling, and power, and deliberately to correlate emotion and sight” (50).

182 The laments the spectators utter occur in the present of the scene, as though the men have already been lost, and in that way they anticipate the disastrous end of the expedition.44 As

Simon Hornblower notes, the sounds thus “look ominously forward” to the lamentations, wails, and prayers the Athenian soldiers will utter near the pathetic end of the episode, when they are again bewailing the emotionally moving sights before them (ὀλοφυρμός, οἰμωγή, δάκρυον,

ἐπιθειασμός, ἀντιβολία, 7.75).45 But within the temporal context of the scene, when no loved-one has yet been killed, these laments signal the spectators’ fears that lamentation will ultimately become necessary at some point in the uncertain future, when the sight of these men will have been lost forever. As vocalized incarnations of fear, the audience’s lamentation contrasts with the silencing of fear in the earlier assembly scene. In that way, the fear these lamenters betray points again toward the difficulty, even in such ideologically charged settings in the History, of entirely eradicating (or silencing) fear from the Athenians’ emotional experience.

Notably, Thucydides stresses the simultaneity of the Athenians’ hopes and fears: in the syntax of the passage, hope and lamentation are doubly bound, both by a τε/καί construction and by the adverb ἅμα. Moreover, the following μέν/δέ couplet reiterates the basic pairing between concurrent hope and fear by identifying the specific objects of each. The spectators’ hope, in the

μέν-clause, is that the expedition will successfully acquire (κτήσοιντο), the central aim of

Athenian imperialism throughout the History. However, their parallel fear (for which they already lament) in the δέ-clause is that the expedition will fail and they will never see these men again. Each verb is given in a future tense, confirming that, although both hopes and fears are voiced in the narrative present, their targeted objects—two alternative and competing results for

44 Similarly proleptic mourning occurs at Il. 6.500, when Andromache and other women in the house “bewail Hector, though he was still alive” (αἳ μὲν ἔτι ζωὸν γόον Ἕκτορα ᾧ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ). 45 Hornblower 2008, ad loc. Cf. Kirby 1983, 78; Jordan 2000, 77, noting that the wailing sounds of the departure scene resonate also with the auditory-affective character of the Great Harbor battle at 7.70-1.

183 the prospective expedition—lie still in the future.46 What the passage especially reveals, then, is how the uncertainty of that future invites, at once, both hope and fear to shape the Athenians’ collective perceptions of the prospective Sicilian campaign and the multiple possibilities it entails.47

The prevalence of emotion in the scene’s depiction of Athenian viewing is further emphasized, implicitly, by the continuing absence of cognitive evaluation among the historical actors. Like in his depiction of the assembly scene, Thucydides here too seems conscientiously to avoid introducing the sort of cognitive language we have seen deployed regularly in the passages examined in the previous chapters of this dissertation. Instead, in the current passage, he uses elliptical phrases, such as ‘the dangers dawned on them’ (αὐτοὺς ἐσῄει τὰ δεινὰ), to characterize the Athenians’ emergent awareness of the realities of the expedition. With this phrasing, he minimizes the presence of rational thought in the crowd of onlookers, characterizing their realization not as a thing deliberately sought out but as a passive experience that merely ‘comes to them’. Hence, when the Athenians consider the length of the voyage to Sicily, their reflections are not presented in the language of rational thought, such as, for example, the terms γιγνώσκω,

νομίζω, ἀξιόω, or οἴομαι. Rather than thinking rationally, the Athenians in the Piraeus are presented as feeling (ἐνθυμούμενοι) the judgments that come to them.48 The term ἐνθυμούμενοι recalls the exuberance of the assembly scene (ἐπιθυμοῦν, ἐπιθυμίαν) and mirrors the competitive zeal of the sailors readying their ships in the Piraeus (προθυμηθέντος, 6.31.3). This pattern of

46 Both hopes and fears are frequently expressed in the optative mood in Greek (i.e. clauses of wishing and of fearing: see Smyth 1956: §1814-19 and §2220-32, respectively). 47 Cf. Nussbaum 2001, 28: “What distinguishes fear from hope, fear from grief, love from hate - is not so much the identity of the object, which might not change, but the way in which the object is seen… Fear and hope can often involve the same set of facts, but differ in their focus—on the danger in the former case, on the possible good outcome in the latter.” 48 The term ἐνθυμουμένους appears in Pericles’ funeral oration at 2.43.1, alongside the language of non-rational emotion, ἔρως, and of non-rational viewing, θεάομαι. See my previous chapter for further discussion of this passage.

184 linguistic echoes, each term embedding the root θυμ-, stands out starkly against these passages’ marked effacement of the sorts of cognitive language we have seen Thucydides utilize elsewhere in the History.

It is no coincidence, then, that the Athenians’ visual experience in the Piraeus is characterized in the language of theatrical viewing (κατὰ θέαν, cognate with the verb θεάομαι) rather than by the sort of intellectually scrutinizing mode of examination prescribed by the text itself with the term σκοπέω, which we have seen so clearly emphasized in Thucydides’ methodological chapters. In Thucydides’ description, the Athenians have come down to the

Piraeus ‘for the show’ (cf. ἐπίδειξιν; ὄψεως λαμπρότητι, 6.31), not to reflect on the wisdom of their venture. This emphasis on visual spectacle, which Thucydides has implicitly juxtaposed in the scene with the critical gaze the Athenians seem to lack, is doubtless part of the historian’s broader program to underscore the lack of foresight preceding this venture. This embedded critique has regularly led scholars to identify the Sicilian expedition as the History’s paradigmatic example of Athenian demotic irrationality.49

But this blanket condemnation obscures a more complex dynamic at play in this scene, namely the distinct tension between the rational and irrational that finds its manifestation in precisely the interaction of hope and fear. In the earlier chapters of this study, we have seen demonstrated repeatedly how, in this text, feelings of fear, when combined with visual perception, invariably entail evaluative processes of thought.50 In both modern and ancient explanations of emotion, hope and fear have been conceived as feelings oriented around the

49 So, e.g., Stahl 2003, 191: “The final decision to go ahead with the military campaign… is characterized by a pervasive and uncontrolled irrational desire.” Similarly, Romilly 1963, 340: Athens, as “a prosperous city, drunk with sight of power, allows herself to be carried away and use her force incorrectly.” See further Balot 2001a, 170-2; Desmond 2006, 368-70; and interpreting the scene as an exemplum of visual speciousness: Green 1970, 129-33; Allison 1989, 9; Jordan 2000; Kallet 2001. 50 To cite one example, the scene at Plataea in book two makes this connection clear (see ch. 1 of this study).

185 appraisal, or visualization, of possible future outcomes.51 As we have seen so far in this chapter, the Athenians’ predominating hope has been founded on just such an appraisal, namely the notion of easily attainable Sicilian conquest. The irruption of fear into the scene, revealed already by the Athenians’ preemptive lamentation, indicates that a second, alternative appraisal is dawning on the crowd now, as they gaze at the fleet itself. In this way, their fears of danger, though only just occurring to them, nevertheless signal the Athenians’ judgments about future possibility. Indeed, we cannot make sense of their fear in the scene without recognizing the evaluative processes that (tacitly, in this case) support it. Fear emerges as the symptom of these processes, discernible in the text even if the thought processes themselves have been minimized by the narrator in the interest of his critique of the venture and its conception. Thus, as the

Athenians consider the possibility of failure and loss, the visual spectacle of strength before them, by which they are encouraged (τῇ ὄψει ἀνεθάρσουν), competes with a mental image formulated around the possibility of defeat, an image which complicates the idealized picture of

Sicily that dominated their collective consciousness in the earlier assembly scene. For this reason, the visual spectacle on display in the Piraeus emerges as a locus for both hope and fear.

In the immediate context of the scene, the expedition stands as a powerful metaphor for possibility itself, a space of uncertain potential populated by the two competing feelings, hope and fear, which Thucydides has established as the fundamental psychological formation that gives life to Athenian pleonexia.

Viewed against the expedition’s disastrous telos, of which Thucydides has already informed us, fear is in fact the only ‘rational’ emotional response to the spectacle the Athenians see before them. And yet, fear remains the principal obstacle to the Athenians’ ideological

51 On the futurity of hope and fear in fourth century philosophy: Pl. Laches 198b, Prt. 358d, Phil. 39e, and cf. Laws 644c-d; Arist. De Mem. 449b26, Rh. 2.5, 1382a21-2. Cf. Ben Ze’ev 2000, 473-90; Nussbaum 2001, 19-88.

186 commitment to optimism. Thus, Thucydides has set up the tension between hope and fear in the

Piraeus scene not only as an ideological contest but as a confrontation between the rational and the irrational in the Athenians’ collective psyche. Furthermore, he has situated the ideal of the optimistic gaze firmly on the side of the irrational, based as it is on a fantasy mode of both seeing and knowing about Sicily. In direct opposition, then, fear occupies the side of the rational, which

Thucydides has clearly linked with a far more concrete mode of vision, one which targets objects of reality, as versus fantasy. As the first concrete object to reach the Athenians’ gaze in their fervor for Sicily, the fleet itself, though ostensibly a spectacle of strength, already begins to conjure fear and, in a sense, to jar the Athenians awake from the fantasy mode of viewing that has so far been imposed upon and embraced by them. The presence of fear therefore signals clearly the failure of the ideology of hope to fully guide the Athenians’ gaze. A hazy vision of disaster and loss seems to loom threateningly behind the fantasy of easy imperial conquest that has been conjured by both Alcibiades and Nicias, as well as by the Athenians themselves. Just as the reality of death existed in tension with the idealized citizens’ sacrifice in the funeral oration, so then in the Athenians’ imperial gaze an idealized image of safe, easy conquest and endless wealth struggles against the encroachment of the realities of this venture and the dangers and fears that invariably accompany it.

In this text which is so deeply committed to the epistemic primacy of sight and the ideal of visual evaluation, Thucydides seems to indicate that vision, even when commandeered by ideological demands, cannot be divorced from its basic epistemological function without complication and contestation. Although Thucydides highlights, throughout these early scenes, the Athenians’ desire to see the spectacle—the opsis, theoria, and thea—of their imperial power, rather than to understand its perilous significance, (re)cognition, it seems, cannot help but fill in

187 the mediating space between their collective vision and the fears they feel. In this way, the narrative of the Piraeus scene suggests that the tension between hope and fear it foregrounds stands as the consequence of an epistemic contest that is deeply imbued with ideological significance. In short, the Athenians’ ideologically determined optimism entails a mode of viewing that requires the denial of a set of historical realities outlined by the narrator himself. As soon as they are confronted with the first visible signs of the impending expedition, here in the

Piraeus, the Athenians struggle to deny the multifarious possibilities it embodies. In particular, their fear in the Piraeus foreshadows the fears that will become indelibly real and visible in the

Great Harbor battle at Syracuse, a scene whose visual spectacle and theatricality explicitly parallel Thucydides’ depiction of the departure here in the Piraeus.52 Furthermore, the often-cited agonistic motif that runs through the entirety of the Piraeus scene, as military men compete eagerly against one another for the most impressive appearance (τῶν περὶ τὸ σῶμα σκευῶν

μεγάλῃ σπουδῇ πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἁμιλληθέν, 6.31.3) and ships race each other out to Aegina

(ἅμιλλαν ἤδη μέχρι Αἰγίνης, 6.32.2), thus emerges as a visibly manifested analog for a psychological contest underway within the collective psyche of the Athenians, a contest which involves the ideological stakes of vision, cognition, and emotion.53 Even though the ideological demands of the Athenians’ hopeful gaze require a certain elision of the mediating element of cognition, Thucydides’ depiction of the scene seems to indicate that, in practice, rational thought maintains a certain tenacity in its attachment to vision.

52 Many readers have noted the parallels: see n. 58 below. 53 Note too the emphasis on visual ‘splendor’ throughout chapter 6.31 (πολυτελεστάτη, εὐπρεπεστάτη, πολυτελέσι, εὐπρεπείᾳ). Jordan 2000, 65 links the agonistic motif of the scene to Alcibiades’ earlier boasts about his horse- racing victories at Olympia (6.16): “Two spectacular racing events, one with chariots, the other with warships, frame the theme of competition” that surrounds the expedition. See further Rood 1999, 153; Hornblower 2004, 336-42. Kallet 2001, 86-7 notes the parallel with Hdt. 7.44, where Xerxes stages a ship race for his viewing pleasure.

188 Nevertheless, while the incursion of fear into the collective awareness of the spectators exposes something of the instability of the Athenians’ optimistic gaze, the ideology of hope still retains noticeable force in the scene at the Piraeus, where, just like in the assembly, it seeks to suppress fear. The traces of this suppressive impulse appear clearly in Thucydides’ depiction of the prayers and paeans that accompany the fleet’s departure (6.32.1-2):

(1) Ἐπειδὴ δὲ αἱ νῆες πλήρεις ἦσαν καὶ ἐσέκειτο πάντα ἤδη ὅσα ἔχοντες ἔμελλον ἀνάξεσθαι, τῇ μὲν σάλπιγγι σιωπὴ ὑπεσημάνθη, εὐχὰς δὲ τὰς νομιζομένας πρὸ τῆς ἀναγωγῆς οὐ κατὰ ναῦν ἑκάστην, ξύμπαντες δὲ ὑπὸ κήρυκος ἐποιοῦντο, κρατῆράς τε κεράσαντες παρ' ἅπαν τὸ στράτευμα καὶ ἐκπώμασι χρυσοῖς τε καὶ ἀργυροῖς οἵ τε ἐπιβάται καὶ οἱ ἄρχοντες σπένδοντες. (2) ξυνεπηύχοντο δὲ καὶ ὁ ἄλλος ὅμιλος ὁ ἐκ τῆς γῆς τῶν τε πολιτῶν καὶ εἴ τις ἄλλος εὔνους παρῆν σφίσιν. παιανίσαντες δὲ καὶ τελεώσαντες τὰς σπονδὰς ἀνήγοντο, καὶ ἐπὶ κέρως τὸ πρῶτον ἐκπλεύσαντες ἅμιλλαν ἤδη μέχρι Αἰγίνης ἐποιοῦντο.

(1) When the ships were full and everything they now intended to set out with was loaded, silence was signaled with the trumpet, and not ship by ship, but altogether with the herald, they carried out the prayers customary before a voyage, marines and commanders both mixing the wine bowls throughout the army and pouring libations from gold and silver cups. (2) The rest of the crowd from the country, as well as the citizens and any other well- wisher present, joined together in prayer. And when they had sung out the paean and completed the libations, they put to sea, and having set out in column at first, they then raced as far as Aegina.

Although the passage highlights the affective dynamics of sound, it is not devoid of visual imagery: Thucydides emphasizes the presence of visible objects like wine bowls

(κρατῆρας) as well as the especially conspicuous spectacle of gold and silver goblets (ἐκπώμασι

χρυσοῖς τε καὶ ἀργυροῖς), from which libations are poured for all to see.54 The emphasis on such objects aligns with the Athenians’ interest in visual spectacle throughout the scene, an interest that has already inspired the soldier-sailors to compete with one another over the outward appearance of their bodies, as I noted above. These men compete with similar zeal over the

54 Thuc. repeats the description of gold and silver goblets almost verbatim in his account of the Egestaean deception at 6.46.3 (ἐκπώματα καὶ χρυσᾶ καὶ ἀργυρᾶ), another episode that thematizes the close connection between visual spectacle and emotion. See esp. the discussion of Kallet 2001, 77-8; cf. Erbse 1989, 43-4; Mader 1993; Rood 1998, 168 n. 43; Jordan 2000.

189 visual aspect of the armada itself, which they have been eager to adorn with, for example, ‘costly equipment and figure-heads’ (σημείοις καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι, 6.31.3). Within this markedly theatrical context, then, the performance of prayers and paeans, which enacts a dialogue between the viewing audience on shore and the campaign’s participants on the water, fits seamlessly into the broader spectacle Thucydides is describing.55

The religious sounds performed by the actors in the Piraeus fulfil an apotropaic function, traditional before military ventures, by invoking the protective deities who watch over the city and its occupants.56 They are, in that way, a vocalized invocation of the desire for asphaleia that we have seen running throughout these scenes and passages. In this way, these prayers and songs also serve as the ritualized mechanism for expressing the Athenians’ collective hopes, not only for safety and security, but for all they imagine a successful campaign to Sicily will entail.57

However, such apotropaic measures as prayers and paeans are unnecessary if there does not remain, lurking behind the ‘greatest hope’ for the expedition, the specter of that same fear we have already encountered repeatedly. As Ian Rutherford points out, “Paeanic song-dance was perceived as promoting the safety and stability of the polis…. The security of the polis is always the ultimate consideration, whether the immediate function is galvanizing an army for battle [or] invoking divine help for healing or averting catastrophe…”58 In other words, the paean is a vocalized ritual performed in response to a perceived threat to the safety, stability, or security of the polis. Implicit, therefore, in the performance of these prayers and paeans at the Piraeus is

55 So, Jordan 2000, 68: “The visual and the acoustic are combined in the religious ceremony at the end of the scene when the herald’s trumpet silences the lamentations and other noises of the crowd, and the departing warriors, joined by the civilians, say their prayers and sing the paean (6.32.2).” See also Furley 2006, 436: “The departure, as Thucydides describes it, made a show of religious propriety.” 56 See Käppel 1992, 45-6; Rutherford 2001, 53 and 123; Pulleyn 1997, 182-3. 57 Hornblower 2008, 394 and Kallet 2001, 166-72 note the ironic answer to these prayers and paeans that we will encounter in the narrative of the Athenians’ desperate retreat from Syracuse at 7.75.7, where ‘instead of prayers and paeans’ (ἀντὶ δ’ εὐχῆς τε καὶ παιάνων) the sounds of dying soldiers fill the scene. 58 Rutherford 1994, 115-16. For further notes and discussion of the ritual paean, see chapter two of this study.

190 precisely that abiding fear we have already seen rear its head in the Athenian crowd of spectators. The prayers and paean are performed in response to the implicit fear of failure, defeat, and loss of life that circulates in parallel to the Athenians’ hope for wealth, power, and greater imperial conquest. As vocal indices of both hope and fear at once—vocalizations which are themselves integral parts of a broader spectacle—these ritualized sounds embody the dual emotionality of Athenian imperialism we have been tracking throughout these passages.

Moreover, in their function as performative reassurances and vocal expressions of

Athenian hope, the prayers and paean serve again to enforce the sense of optimism in the crowd of onlookers, aiming to quell fear by, as Rutherford observed, foregrounding notions of safety and security. In this way, they reenact the Athenians’ insistence on asphaleia in the earlier scene at 6.24, where the repeated assertions of safety and security seemed to expose the Athenians’ tacit doubts and fears over the venture. At the assembly, whoever harbored such fears and doubts—that is, whoever was κακόνους to the expedition—was cowed into silence and conformity with the crowd. This unnamed, ‘ill-disposed’ contingent has been wholly effaced from the scene in the Piraeus. Instead, only those with ‘good-will’ are vocal and visible in the ceremonies (εἴ τις ἄλλος εὔνους παρῆν). The term εὔνους clearly recalls its opposite κακόνους, a term already conspicuous for its status as a likely Thucydidean coinage, and the linguistic resonance encourages comparison between the two scenes. It is significant, then, that in the

Piraeus the ‘ill-disposed’ contingent whose opposition was silenced in the assembly has been displaced entirely from the viewing audience in the Piraeus. In his commentary on this passage,

Hornblower wonders aloud, “did the ill-disposed person, the κακόνους, stay away, or just pretend to be εὔνους?”59 Read against the normative pressure of hopefulness and optimism we

59 Hornblower 2008, 394.

191 witnessed in the earlier scene, we may suspect both possibilities. Either way, the point is that in

Thucydides’ depiction, hopefulness still retains a marked degree of normative force over the

Athenian crowd. Thus, the conditional particle εἴ in Thucydides’ expression is particularly forceful: if, and Thucydides implies only if, one is visibly and vocally ‘well-disposed’ to the expedition will s/he be granted recognition, and visibility, within the scene. Just as in the earlier assembly scene, then, the dominant ideology of hope works to suppress the dissenting feeling of fear.

Still, as we have now seen in both scenes, fear stubbornly resists complete silencing or effacement, tied as it is with the Athenians’ reluctant, but seemingly inescapable, recognition of the dangers of this imperialistic venture. Despite their apparently willing performance, and repeated enforcement, of the identity constructed for them by a number of speakers in the text, the Athenians’ enactment of an ideologically hopeful gaze struggles against the concretely visible display of their undertaking. This ideological tension manifests itself in a contest that is at once visual and affective, as the Athenians’ collective gaze struggles to consolidate two fundamentally irreconcilable images of the future, one a hopeful fantasy and the other an ever more fearsome and undeniably visible reality.

Conclusion: The End of the Expedition and the Collapse of an Ideology

By the time the Athenian navy reaches the Great Harbor at Syracuse in book seven (7.70-1), optimism will have lost its power to suppress fear, and the impossible illusion of Sicilian conquest will have been supplanted by an eminently visible and terrifying reality. In fact, as several scholars have observed, Thucydides closely links this vivid episode at the end of the

192 expedition with the spectacle at the Piraeus that marks its beginning.60 Both scenes thematize the emotional dynamics of an internal audience observing a visual ‘spectacle’ (τῆς θέας, 7.71.3).61

Unlike at the Piraeus, however, where the Athenians’ fears remained largely implicit throughout the scene, at the Great Harbor, the language of fear breaks into the narrative in force (ἔκπληξις,

7.70.6, 71.7; φόβος, δεδιότες, περιδεῶς, 71.1-3). Taken as a whole, the scene demonstrates a remarkably precise reversal of the optimistic mode of viewing the Athenians had cultivated in the early stages of the expedition. And indeed, by the episode’s conclusion, their hopeful identity itself has been thoroughly dismantled by the fearsome spectacle of defeat. In marked contrast to

Alcibiades’ earlier speech, which defined Athenian hopefulness against Spartan hopelessness, by battle’s end it is the Athenians who have become ‘without hope’ (ἀνέλπιστον, 7.71.7; cf.

ἀνέλπιστοι, 6.17.8). In both scenes, the Piraeus and the Great Harbor, the Athenians get the opsis and theoria they crave. But with vision’s removal from fantasy, its ideological attachment to hope repeatedly breaks down, and the fears that had been silenced in 6.24 break through with increasing urgency until, finally, they replace hope altogether.

It is no coincidence, then, that with the emergence of fear the language of gnome and skopeo, so noticeably suppressed from the earlier passages, reenters Thucydides’ narrative.62

Gazing at the unfolding battle (σκοπούντων, 7.71.1), the Athenians’ are able finally to fully

60 See Kallet 2001, 163-6; Jordan 2000, 76-9. See further the discussions of Romilly 1967, 161-5; Walker 1993; Bakker 1997, 40-8; Hornblower 2004, 342-6; Greenwood 2006, 35-40; and Hornblower 2008, 693-5, with further references. The Great Harbor episode was famous for its vividness in antiquity: Plutarch cites it as his exemplum of Thucydidean enargeia (Plut. de Glor. Ath. 347a). The episode has occasionally been criticized in modern times. See Ferguson 1927, 308 on Thuc.’s neglect “even to suggest the factors that determined the outcome” of the battle. Cf., however, Connor’s 1984, 196 n.32 response in defense of the passage’s thematic importance. 61 The term θέα occurs in only one other place in the Hist.: Cleon’s gaze at Amphipolis, the site of his death, is described with θέα (5.7-10). Greenwood 2006, 26-30 argues Thucydides uses the term here to contrast Cleon’s “shoddy reconnaissance and his failure to discern the enemy’s tactics” with Brasidas’ expert manipulation of the optics of their confrontation (quotation from pg. 28). The Great Harbor episode contains a concentration of other visual terminology as well: ὄψις, ἔποψις, σκοπέω, διασκοπέω, ὁράω, ἀφοράω, βλέπω, φαίνομαι. 62 Cf. Kallet 2001, 165: “when the results of their lack of judgment become overwhelmingly clear to the eye, Thucydides inserts words of judgment into the narrative, linking them alternately to vision and the body. The effect is to intensify the sense of reality, not illusion, as in 6.31. The Athenians are now able to observe and comprehend.”

193 discern, and comprehend, the dangers of this venture that had, in the earlier sequence, been repeatedly suppressed, denied, and effaced from the idealized fantasy. Hence, the immediate visibility of the spectacle in the Great Harbor at Syracuse generates for the Athenians a ‘conflict of judgment’ (ξύστασιν τῆς γνώμης, 7.71.1), both between hopes and fears and, more broadly, between the unrealistic expectations with which they set out and the scene playing out before them.63 Faced now with a concrete, rather than an idealizing, vision of Sicilian conquest, the

Athenians cannot help but recognize and understand, albeit too late, the terrifying truth of their imperialist venture.64 As such clear-sighted judgment returns, then, the Athenians are struck with a fear that is, in some ways, the most rational emotional response yet attributed to them in the

Sicilian narrative. Although they were able to foresee something of this reality, and the fears it contained, already in the Piraeus scene, its remoteness in both time and space encouraged them to overlook these early fears and, instead, to focus their gaze on the hopeful fantasy. And yet, the inescapable reality the Athenians face in the Great Harbor has consigned their discerning gaze to use as a tool in their desperate search for escape and salvation (ὅπῃ σωθήσονται διεσκόπουν,

7.71.6)—precisely the use it ought to have served, but from which it was expressly shut out, in the deliberative stages of this expedition early in book six.

However, in the concluding sequence of the Sicilian narrative, perhaps most telling of the thorough collapse of the hopeful gaze is how, in Thucydides’ depiction, fear has permeated even the ‘unseen’ future, the very space upon which, as we have seen, the ideology of the hopeful gaze has been made to depend. Even as the outcome of the Great Harbor battle still hangs in the balance, the viewing audience has begun to ‘fear on behalf of the future’ (ὅ τε φόβος ἦν ὑπὲρ τοῦ

63 γνώμη appears again at 7.71.3, where Thuc. describes its relationship with vision as one of ‘enslavement’ (ἀπὸ τῶν δρωμένων τῆς ὄψεως καὶ τὴν γνώμην... ἐδουλοῦντο). 64 Cf. Kallet 2001, 169: Thuc. “shows ironically that now opsis and gnome are, finally, in conjunction. The Athenians now, unlike in 415, correctly interpret opsis.”

194 μέλλοντος), afraid it might contain sufferings ‘even worse than those of the present’ (δεδιότες…

μὴ τῶν παρόντων ἔτι χείρω πράξωσιν, 7.71.1). And by the time of the Athenian retreat from

Syracuse at 7.75, this pervasive fear will have penetrated into the same ‘unseen’ space previously inhabited by hope alone (περὶ τῶν ἐν ἀφανεῖ δεδιότας μὴ πάθωσιν, ‘fearing lest they suffer in the unseen future’, 75.4). Vision in this later scene brings only fear and grief, and ‘instead of the great hope’ (ἀντὶ μεγάλης ἐλπίδος, 7.75.2) and the sense of security which that hope erroneously insisted upon, the Athenians, Thucydides indicates, are left with a visual realization (ἐφαίνετο) of danger and risk (μεγέθους… κινδύνου, 7.75.7) no longer deniable by any means, ideological or otherwise.

The future is bleak at 7.75, but there is, at least, still a future available for fear to inhabit.

Once the Athenian captives have arrived in the Syracusan quarries at 7.87, the last scene of the

Sicilian narrative, both fear and hope have disappeared altogether from the narrative, as the

Athenian prisoners are left only to the ongoing misery of their day-to-day sensory experiences.

As we might expect, along with hope and fear, all sense of futurity has also receded from

Thucydides’ depiction of these last days of the expedition. Subjected to a spectrum of sensory distress, the Athenians see and feel the heat of day and cold of night (πνῖγος; ψυχραί), they smell the ‘unbearable odors’ of the dead and dying around them (ὀσμαὶ ἦσαν οὐκ ἀνεκτοί), and they are ‘pressed with hunger and thirst’ (λιμῷ ἅμα καὶ δίψῃ ἐπιέζοντο). But this prolonged sensory experience (seventy days, according to Thucydides) is devoid of both thought for the future and, consequently, either fear or hope. The idealizing fantasy of Sicilian conquest, the object whose visibility allowed for the construction of the Athenians’ optimistic gaze, has disappeared entirely

195 from view, supplanted by an indelible reality that is at once both hopeless and fearless.65 The expedition, an embodiment of Athenian pleonexia and an enduring symbol for possibility itself, has been consigned, in the end, to an inescapable present.

Throughout the Sicilian expedition, reality tries repeatedly to break through to the Athenians, but, in Thucydides’ telling, the constructed, ideological edifice of hope and optimism repels it at every step. Thucydides characterizes the Athenians’ optimistic gaze as a mode of looking whose purpose is, in part, to efface the realities of Sicilian conquest the Athenians ought otherwise to have been able to see. Ideology, in the case of the Sicilian narrative, thus takes up a position that, for Thucydides, is hostile to historical truth. Moreover, just as he does by placing the plague episode adjacent to Pericles’ funeral oration, so in the Sicilian narrative Thucydides shows the construction of an ideology only to show its insufficiency when confronted with the eminently visible indications of historical reality, which in both cases turns out to be a place of risk, danger, and fear. Josiah Ober characterizes this conflict between ideal and reality in terms of the logos/ergon antithesis that is so prevalent throughout the text.66 Read in this way, the fantasy of

Sicily is a construction of logos, both literally, as in Alcibiades’ speech, and figuratively, insofar as it represents an essentially specious bit of belief unmoored from ‘the erga themselves’ of history (τὰ δ' ἔργα τῶν πραχθέντων, 1.22.2). As I discussed in the first two chapters of this study, vision, for Thucydides, is the principal medium for accessing such facts: the ‘clear truth’ is an eminently visible one (τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν, 1.22.4). By contrast, as we have seen in the last two chapters, ideological structures have been shown to work actively to suppress this most

65 Cf. Ben Ze’ev 2000, 476-9: “When it is certain that the desired situation either will not be achieved or will be achieved, there is no place for hope… I cannot hope for something when I know for certain that it will not be fulfilled.” 66 Ober 1998, 113-21. See Parry 1981 on the logos/ergon antithesis.

196 fundamental (epistemological) function of vision by fashioning fantasies and ideals, products of logos, which conflict with the erga that stand on the side of reality. The History makes a case that such ideological constructions are fragile, tenuous, and unstable when they attempt to obscure visible reality and convince subjects they are seeing things that they do not actually see

(or vice versa). In that way, ideology emerges as a force that works actively against Thucydidean historiography, with its commitment to a clearly visible truth unobscured by the misleading structures of logos.

This is not to say that the (historical) world can only be the sort of terrifying place the

Athenians encounter during the plague episode or, later, on the island of Sicily. Rather, as

Thucydides’ narrative of the Sicilian expedition reveals, it is a place where fears and hopes temper one another, shaping and inhabiting our gaze backward into history as well as our gaze into a future whose events, Thucydides affirms, will resemble those that came before.

197

Conclusion

“The knowledge of history is the awareness of the domination of the irrational.” (Connor 1984, 243)

“The perfectly rational actor is a convenient methodological fiction.” (Ober 2008, 10)

In this dissertation, I have tried to explore sense perception and emotional psychology in

Thucydides’ History from several angles. My primary sensory focus throughout has been the visual, while the principal emotion I have examined has been fear. Vision, as W. R. Connor noted, is “the privileged sense” in the History, just as fear is the text’s most pervasive and most frequently cited emotion.67 Still, this study has demonstrated that vision is not isolated from the other senses, nor is fear from other seemingly discrete—or antithetical—emotions. Rather, we have seen that in the historical world Thucydides fashions, multiple senses and emotions consistently exhibit interactive and even complementary relationships with one another. And as each chapter of this study has emphasized, both the senses and the emotions depicted in

Thucydides’ text are consistently entwined with cognitive processes, both in the narrative and in the recorded speeches.

The first half of the study sought to use the historian’s narrative depictions of battle to draw certain metatextual conclusions about the work and our approach to it as readers. I argued that by looking closely at the sensory and psychological processes that Thucydides attributes to

67 Connor 1985, 10. See esp. Desmond 2006 on the ubiquity of fear in Thuc.

198 the agents of history, we are able to gain certain insights into the historian’s narrative self- positioning as well as into aspects of the intellectual and emotional utility he claims for his text.

In both chapters, I posited a reading audience styled after the historical actors themselves, who are regularly shown perceiving, thinking, and feeling in ways carefully delineated by the author.

These two chapters suggested that if, as Thucydides states, the depictions of human behavior within the text are meant to illustrate universal human truths, then we are justified in considering the implications of those universals for the readership outside the text.

In chapter one, I imagined a broad audience of readers, whose intellectual engagement with the text is shaped in part by the illustrations of intellectual engagement we encounter within the narrative, such as those in the Plataea episode in book two. This is a readership fashioned after the author himself, who uses his text both to interpret and explicate historical events, and to train his reader how to interpret events for him/herself. In chapter two, I argued that Thucydides’ contrasting depictions of visual and auditory perception, in the Sphacteria and Epipolae episodes, serve to underscore the author’s fundamental concern with the accuracy of historical knowledge.

I suggested that Thucydides uses such episodes of historical narrative to demonstrate aspects of his own historiographical method. The pitfalls of hearsay information, and the emotional attachments such reports entail, are put on vivid display within the narrative in both these episodes.

The second half of the study engaged with both rhetorical and narrative passages in order to examine the visual, epistemological, and emotional dynamics at play in two particularly ideologically charged moments within the History. I began by offering a reading of the funeral oration of Pericles that tracked the related roles of vision, knowledge, and fear in the highly prescriptive world the speech constructs. I argued that never far from the surface of Pericles’

199 idealizing rhetoric of Athenian courage was the lurking presence of fear, an emotion Pericles sought to minimize in the ideal of the citizen-soldier even while aiming to exploit it in his citizen audience. The final chapter, on the Sicilian expedition, served in many ways as a point of comparison with the rhetoric of the funeral oration. Like Pericles, the speakers advocating for and against the expedition attempt in different ways to build an image of the world and convince their audience of its veracity. While Nicias attempts to imbue his image with fear, Alcibiades’ image is defined by its hopeful optimism. Although a distinct ideology of hope emerges in the early stages of the expedition, Thucydides demonstrates clearly the limits of this ideology when it is confronted with the fearsome realities of the expedition. The fact that in the end the ideology of hope fails to maintain its grasp on the Athenians’ collective psyche, I suggested, points toward a failure of ideological structures more generally. Thucydides shows that such structures tend to fall short of the demands they prescribe when they become subjected to the exigencies of the historical world. In the end, both the idealized fearlessness of the funeral oration and the ideologically driven hope of Athenian imperialism struggle to sustain themselves against the realities of the Sicilian expedition.

In the remainder of this concluding chapter, I want briefly to draw out and articulate a certain thread that has run through each case study in this dissertation, namely the role of cognition as the regular mediating function standing between sense perception and emotion in the episodes we have explored. Critics have often applied a dichotomy of ‘rational/irrational’ to the psychological processes described in Thucydides’ narrative. In this dichotomy, the

‘irrational’ is often associated with emotion, particularly that of the Athenian demos.68 However,

68 Thuc. occasionally uses at least one set of terms to signify ‘irrationality’, namely derivations of ἄλογος/ἀλόγιστος. However, these terms appear very rarely (nine times total, by my count) and are usually deployed as criticism by public speakers, rather than as narratorial judgments. More often than not, Thuc.’s technique is to demonstrate irrationality at work in history rather than to explicitly label it as such.

200 my study has shown that emotions in this text are regularly tied to rational cognition, particularly when visual perception is involved. Thus, the divide between reason and emotion is far from a clean one, as these two aspects of human psychology tend instead to be deeply interwoven.

Yet, it is clear that one of Thucydides’ principal themes in his account of the war is the problematic relationship between popular feeling and popular wisdom.69 The Athenian demos regularly makes its decisions based on what Thucydides depicts as a combination of emotion and imperfect understanding. This has led Josiah Ober, for one, to assert that in Thucydides’ judgment democratic knowledge is “not entirely rational in its workings,” insofar as “erroneous beliefs will lead to making practical errors in the real world if they are employed in decision- making.”70 Clifford Orwin extends Thucydides’ critique of democratic practices to encompass humanity in general, for whom, he argues, the historian sees the possibility for rational action as extremely limited.71 Moreover, the rational/irrational dichotomy tends to be value-laden, the label of ‘irrational’ strongly pejorative both for these critics and, implicitly in their readings, for

Thucydides as well.

The example from the History most frequently cited in such assessments is the Athenian decision to go to Sicily in book six, which, as we saw in chapter four, Thucydides presents as the paradigmatic tragedy of Athenian irrationality and greed.72 On the one hand, to label the venture as ‘irrational’ undoubtedly identifies one of Thucydides’ most important themes, namely the fraught relationship between demotic knowledge and demotic emotionality in the Athenian democracy. On the other hand, to judge a contemporary decision and action as objectively

69 For the notion of popular wisdom, see Ober’s (1993) concept of “democratic knowledge.” 70 Ober 1998, 36 and 58 (resp.). His phrase ‘democratic knowledge’ refers to the body of beliefs and understanding that constitute what the voters in the Athenian democracy ‘know’ about their world: see id. 1993. 71 Orwin 1994, 201. Similarly Luginbill 1999; Connor 1984, 243: “The knowledge of history is the awareness of the domination of the irrational.” 72 Stahl 2003, 191 is representative: “The final decision to go ahead with the military campaign… is characterized by a pervasive and uncontrolled irrational desire.”

201 irrational in the light of historical hindsight is to privilege a teleological, over an experiential, view of the situations and processes Thucydides presents us with, and to further impute such a viewpoint as normative for this text.73 In a work whose narrative style is so vividly experiential and immersive as Thucydides’—a quality noted already in antiquity by Plutarch—it is worth thinking further about the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ qualities of human thought and emotion in the light of the immediacy of the actors’ historical present.74

Edith Foster provides some useful perspective. The cognitive assessments Thucydides depicts, she says,

are spoken by historical characters who do not see the future, and cannot see themselves as agents of a process that reflects human nature, but who are instead enmeshed in the politics and passions that characterize their particular situation.75

She goes on to explain that characters’ assessments, when taken within their historical and literary context in the narrative, are therefore often rational insofar as they are based firmly on their own structures of understanding and belief. Throughout this study I have frequently deployed the terms ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ to describe the emotions of historical agents, and my interest has been primarily in the epistemological content of the various emotions ascribed to characters and collectives, that is, how firmly a given emotion is grounded epistemologically.76

As we have seen demonstrated in each chapter, emotions are regularly tied to information acquired through the senses. The Plataeans’ fear and confidence in the scene in book two, for instance, are based on their evolving visual relation with their surroundings, and the emotional

73 See Ober 2008, 6-12, acknowledging that “the perfectly rational actor is a convenient methodological fiction” in theories of rational decision making (10). On the distinction between the teleological and the experiential modes of historiography, see esp. Grethlein 2013a, and cf. Koselleck 2004; Fludernik 2010 74 See Plut. De Glor. Ath. 347a, with discussion in chapter one of this study. 75 Foster 2010, 120-1. 76 Thus, I do not use the term ‘irrational’ in the way of Oost 1975, whose interest is in the “divine, or supernatural, or ‘irrational’ interventions in human affairs” in Thuc.’s work (quotation from pg. 186).

202 swings they undergo are the direct results of the changing information they are able to glean in the darkness. Their feelings, in other words, are consistently tied to what they think they know.

We saw a similar relationship between the senses, knowledge, and emotion at Sphacteria and again at Epipolae, where characters’ emotions shifted in direct relation to the knowledge they were able to gather—or were excluded from gathering—about their environments. Likewise, I have argued that one of Pericles’ primary goals in the funeral oration was to establish and regulate the connection between vision and understanding, on the one hand, and emotional responses on the other.

Even the decision to launch the offensive against Sicily, disastrous as it turned out in the end, is, as we saw in chapter four, based on a set of clearly formulated calculations of risk and reward. Thucydides articulates this set of beliefs most explicitly at 6.24. The demos believe there is a reasonable chance of acquiring the objects of its desire from this expedition, and it is only from the view afforded by historical hindsight (the view adopted by the author himself) that these desires emerge as irrational. Thus, by juxtaposing the characters’ viewpoints with the narrator’s retrospective viewpoint, the text offers two different standards of knowledge by which to judge the rationality of any given emotional disposition or political decision. Although in such instances as the Sicilian narrative Thucydides clearly emphasizes a seemingly pathological lack of knowledge on the part of historical actors, in so doing he reveals the fundamental impossibility of perfect understanding in the historical present. By aiming his critical eye at what he depicts as the ignorance of the Athenian masses, Thucydides identifies the epistemic limits imposed on the agents of history by their own present moment, limits which do not apply to the panoptic gaze of the narrator himself. I have argued that this disparity is literalized in scenes like that at Plataea in book two or at Epipolae in book seven, where historical agents become literally

203 blind to the realities of their world—realities that the Thucydidean narrator sees and understands with an unmatchable clarity.77

There are exceptions: Pericles, for example, is explicitly ascribed a sort of foresight and understanding that aligns with the narrator’s retrospective gaze. Nicias too is implicitly attributed with a similar foresight in the Sicilian expedition: the venture unfolds much as he had predicted.

But these two characters are in many ways the exceptions who prove the rule: ‘rationality’ is a sliding scale in the History. Its limits are defined by the narrator alone, and the characters of the narrative are for the most part subject to those limits.

This is not to say that scholars are wrong to emphasize the imperfect knowledge and consequent imperfect rationality Thucydides regularly criticizes in his historical agents. It is rather to point out that Thucydides is not entirely fair in casting such judgments. A decision in the historical present can only ever be imperfectly rational when it is judged against an unknowable outcome. Actors enmeshed in the processes of history, though their actions may be rationally calculated from available knowledge, cannot match the absolute rationality provided by hindsight and assumed by Thucydides alone. In short, an action, decision, or emotion can satisfy one standard of rationality while falling short of the other.

What we are left with is thus a necessarily ambivalent sense of the rational and irrational in history. However, this ambivalence points toward one of the main elements of the text’s utility: to help the reader learn to make sense of his/her contemporary world, which, as the

History makes clear, is itself only imperfectly rational in its operation.78 Recreating in vivid detail the sensory and psychological experience of historical agents, Thucydides provides snap

77 See Greenwood 2006 on the knowledge disparity, inherent to the historiographical genre, between the character and writer of history. 78 See Kallet 2006 for further on this point. Compare Connor 1985; Grethlein 2013b.

204 shots of human thinking and feeling in the moment. By juxtaposing these contemporary perceptions, thoughts, and feelings with historical outcomes, he offers case studies in understanding history and human nature whose relevance, as Thucydides avows, stretches into the reader’s own present moment (τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ

παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, 1.22.4). Like the characters of the narrative, our vision in the present is only partial. The History aims, in part, to expand our partial vision by providing us with the interpretive tools to see the world with the clarity and fullness of Thucydides’ own vantage. I argued in chapter one that such a perspective allows the present and future of the reader’s world to become more readily understandable and therefore less daunting. But if our fears are not entirely allayed, we may at least take solace in the fact that the text—which often presents a fearsome vision of humanity—has demonstrated a way to view those fears in the light of historical context and, thereby, to rationally understand them.

205

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