“More Just” Rather Than “Just”: Justice as a Zero-Sum Game

Once the Athenians have finished with the Persian Wars, they do move on to justify their current position, but it would overstate the case to say that “justice” plays in the second part the same central role as “power” does in the first.^[34] These Athenians do not celebrate justice like a Theseus or Demophon in the Theater of Dionysos. They demystify and subvert it, defining its limits rather than trumpeting its importance. The Athenians thus, in a sense, complete their inversion of the Herodotean perspective. Where Herodotus, in his introduction of Spartan preeminence, subordinates power to religious sanctions and the restraint of aggression, Thucydides’ Athenians move from the praise of power to weak praise for an optional justice that is a luxury of the strong. Their arguments do not depend upon any transcendent, generalized pattern of behavior. The Athenian speech, in fact, ignores any notion of isonomia, “equality before the law.” The Athenians certainly do not turn to the gods and heroes or seek legitimacy from any supposed service to a greater Hellas (as they do at Hdt. 8.143–144).^[35] Instead, they assume that the relative power of, and opportunities that present themselves to, an agent sets definite constraints on its behavior.

First, they did not seek archê but received it when the Spartans gave up the struggle and the allies personally sought Athenian help (Thuc. 1.75.2):^[36] “From this very material condition (ergon) we were compelled (katênankasthêmen, i.e., suffered anankê) at the start to convert this [i.e., rule, archê] into the present situation, most of all under the influence of fear, then also of honor (timê), and later also of advantage (ôphelia)” (1.75.3). Fear, presumably of Persia, was the initial cause for the Delian League. Then Athens felt a thirst for public respect, timê, and, in the end, a desire for some concrete advantage took over. Thucydides’ Athenians thus clearly distinguish between symbolic and material rewards for leadership and see the two as distinct stages (at least in the case of Athenian rule).^[37] Above all, they argue that their acquisitiveness is natural when human beings find themselves in a position such as that of Athens after the Persian Wars.

After having accounted for the historical development from the Persian Wars to the present, the Athenians move on to the second point. They claim now to be prisoners of history. They assert that no one can be reproached if “they maximize for themselves those things that are expedient concerning the most important risks” (Thuc. 1.75.4). Circumstances thus force the Athenians to maintain their empire. Some of the allies had already revolted and been brought under control by force. Virtually all of the allies hated the Athenians. The Spartans were no longer friendly but suspicious and quarrelsome, and those who revolted attempted to side with the Spartans. “It no longer,” the Athenians conclude, “seemed safe…to relax our grip and incur risk” (1.75.4).

The Athenians go on to set up two foils with which to put their own behavior into perspective. Ultimately, they develop a brilliantly unconventional case against their own allies’ thirst for freedom, but they first take aim at the Spartans themselves. The Athenians deny the Spartans a uniquely selfless position or superiority over the Athenians. They brush aside any fictions about Spartan hegemony and declare flatly: “You, at any rate, Lakedaimonians, exercise leadership, having organized the city-states in the Peloponnese in accordance with what is advantageous to you (to humin ôphelimon)” (Thuc. 1.76.1). The Spartans are no different than the Athenians and would, if they had retained their hêgemonia over the Greeks, have ultimately “been forced either to rule by means of superior force (archein enkratôs) or themselves to incur risk (kinduneuein)”—precisely the same dilemma that the Athenians now face.

The Athenians assert that behavior must be judged relative to the agent’s position and that no large, transcendent scheme of justice is immediately applicable: “We have done nothing shocking (thaumaston) or contrary to human character (ho anthrôpeios tropos)” (Thuc. 1.76.2). The Spartan foil serves to illustrate that Athenian behavior was natural and thus should not provoke outrage or shock—at least from the Spartans. Here, as later in this speech, the Athenians charge that no one can blame them, since they have not fallen below normal standards of human behavior. Unless their accusers can plausibly claim some distinct moral advantage, there are no grounds for complaint. Certainly, if the struggle is between Athens and Sparta, then the contest is pointless, because circumstances would ultimately force the Spartans to behave in the same way as the Athenians, and the Greeks would only replace one master with another.

The Athenians then move on to a third reason for their behavior, the standard Thucydidean principle that we have discussed so far and that the Athenians themselves cite:

We were not indeed the ones who were instigators of such behavior.^[38] Rather, it has always been the case that the weaker was constrained by the more powerful (dunatôteros, i.e., person with more dunamis).

The Athenians are the first speakers to introduce this principle into a debate, and they develop it in their first speech to a unique degree. Because they have acted in accordance with this principle, they can claim that they had only “followed their human nature (hê anthrôpeia phusis)” (Thuc. 1.76.3).

Not content with describing what would have happened if Sparta had remained as leader of the Greeks, the Athenians shift their attention to a putative future when Sparta would replace Athens. “Others would, we think, best demonstrate by taking over our position whether we show restraint,” they sourly remark at Thucydides 1.76.4. A few sentences later, they move from barbed suggestion to direct attack:

If you were to succeed in overthrowing us and exercise rule (archê), you would speedily lose the goodwill (eunoia) that fear (deos) of us has given you, if your policy of today is at all to tally with the sample that you gave of it during the brief period of your leadership against the Persians. Not only is your life at home regulated by customs (nomima) incompatible (ameikta) with those of others, but your citizens abroad act neither on these customs nor on those that are recognized by the rest of Hellas.

This criticism attacks the Spartans on several points. As often, Thucydides only introduces a positive emotion so that he can draw an overall negative conclusion.^[39] His Athenians grudgingly acknowledge the eunoia, that goodwill that the Spartans enjoy, and even then do so only because they wish to discredit it. The goodwill toward Sparta has no solid foundation but results from a negative quality, deos, the fear that the Greeks have of Athens. There is thus no positive basis for this eunoia or for Sparta’s leadership in Greece. The rest of the paragraph goes on to develop this notion: Sparta had already made itself unpopular even during its brief leadership during the Persian Wars, and it is likely that the Spartans would be as unsuccessful in the future. The Athenians base this observation on a double critique that strikes at two of Sparta’s most prized qualities.

First, the Spartans were renowned for their unique lifestyle and customs, but this lifestyle enjoyed its prestige because it refined and extended values that all Greeks shared. The “Spartan mirage,” as it has been called, exerted its hold on the Greek imagination because many wanted to believe in tough, fearless Greeks for whom physical pleasures and material considerations were unimportant. People admired the Spartans on the grounds that they were different—but different only in the degree to which they supposedly put common values into practice, not in kind. The Spartans were not foreign, but champions of Hellenic values.

The Athenians, however, simply describe the Spartan customs as ameikta tois allois, literally, “not susceptible to being mixed with others.” The Spartans are not the truest exponents of Hellas. They are simply incompatible with their fellows. They are not purified exemplars of the familiar. They are simply “other.” This seems to have been traditionally a sore point. According to Herodotus, the Spartans had, in fact, once been “poor at mixing with outsiders” (Hdt. 1.65.2: xeinoisi aprosmiktoi), a term that contains the same verbal root as ameikta. Herodotus, however, pointedly assigns this quality to Sparta’s benighted past. His praise of the current Sparta contains the prescriptive assumption that the Spartans are now different and able to interact with other Greeks. This praise is thus not just a statement of “fact,” but a condition for Spartan prestige.^[40] The Athenians play to the same weakness and deny this prop to Spartan prestige.

Second, consistency of behavior is one of the primary elements that Archidamos stresses in his own praise of the Spartan character. The Spartans operate according to their own rules (Thuc. 1.84). Neither flattery nor scorn can affect the Spartans’ judgment (1.84.2). Their self-control (sôphrosunê) is responsible for their military prowess (1.84.3). Thus Thucydides’ Athenians charge that the Spartans lack consistency. Any Spartan who leaves his country begins to behave in a bizarre fashion that follows no established custom, whether of Sparta or anywhere else in Greece. Consistency is a central virtue in the History: Thucydides’ Perikles bases part of his moral authority on the fact that his resolve is unchanging (1.140.1)—a feature that Kleon attempts to emulate (3.38.1). When the Athenians sneeringly suggest that the Spartans change their behavior as soon as they leave their homeland, they deny them their absolute self-possession and refuse to accept a fundamental element of the Spartan mystique.

If the Athenians disdain to assert any grandiose moral standing, they have caustic things to say about the virtue of the allies, their supposed victims. The Athenians make no attempt to say that the existence of their empire is just, but they do take care to argue that the allies, by traditional standards, are deficient. They turn two principles against their allies: the love of honor and advantage, and the rule of the strong. The Athenians are not Herodotean imperialists, intoxicated by a thirst for expansion. Instead, it is the allies whom love of honor has carried away and who have formed too high an estimate of their position. They resented Athenian rule, even though the Athenians showed restraint and did not rule as harshly as their position would have allowed. They had grown accustomed to dealing with the Athenians on an equal basis (Thuc. 1.77.3: apo tou isou). They did not feel charis for the moderation that the Athenians conferred upon them as a kind of gift-by-restraint. If the Athenians had exercised their greed, then “in that case not even they [i.e., the allies] would have argued that it was not right for the weaker to give way to the strong.” The Athenians bracket this section by repeating their general charge: the allies are angry because they have accepted the illusion that they should deal with the Athenians apo tou isou, “on the basis of equality” (1.77.4).

The Athenians, although untraditional in some respects, nevertheless skillfully exploit traditional prejudices. They obliquely link the discontent of the allies to a typical human failing:

At the hands of the Persians, the allies had endured suffering much more terrible conditions than the present, but our rule (archê) seems to them too harsh. So one would expect (eikotôs): the present (to paron) is always hard on those who are subject (hupêkooi).

The allies are, in fact, better off now than they had been under the Persians, but they are unable to appreciate their true situation, because they have fallen into a moral trap. They “long for what they do not have”—a conventional moral weakness that is often cited in archaic Greek literature^[41] and that will, in fact, drive the Athenians on to the disastrous invasion of Sicily. The allies do not appreciate the favor that the Athenians have shown them, and refuse to return Athenian consideration with the charis that it deserves (Thuc. 1.77.3). They have an unbalanced view of their situation, because, the Athenians remark, “they have become accustomed to associating with us on the basis of equality,” whereas the Athenians are in fact far superior to them. In the Mytilenean debate, Kleon picks up on this theme, asserting that favorable Athenian treatment had driven the Mytileneans into hubris (3.39.4, 5). The Athenians at Sparta disdain any such explicitly negative terminology (as they disdain references to their own aretê), but they implicitly attribute hubris to the allies all the same. The allies are morally deficient because they fall into the common trap of misrecognizing the present and longing for what they cannot have. The Athenian argument is a daring mixture of old and new, brilliantly twisting a traditional notion to attack the credibility of their accusers.

The broad material determinism, denial of special qualities to the Spartans, and dismissal of allied moral authority combine to make one central—if obliquely expressed—point. Interstate relations in the archaic world had, as I argued earlier, laid great stress upon the obfuscation of power relations, had emphasized hegemony rather than domination, and had provided a framework in which each state could make the strongest possible claim that it was free and independent. The weak and the strong cooperated to blur the hierarchical relationships that did exist. In this their first speech, the Athenians construct a vision of the world where such polite fictions are impossible.

When the Athenians argue that they have treated their subject allies too well, they impudently apologize for having acted deceptively. They apologize because they have not more fully exploited their disproportionate strength. The Athenians submit themselves to the same rule of law that they impose upon the allies (Thuc. 1.77.1), but this common submission to law confuses the allies and obscures the issue. On the contrary, so the Athenians claim (1.77.2), those who simply base their rule upon the application of violence (biazesthai) have no need of legal proceedings (dikazesthai) and incur less criticism. If the Athenians were to “put aside custom (nomos)” and “openly pursue their greed,” then even the allies would have to agree that the weak must give way to the strong (1.77.3). The outrage that the allies feel is an effect of good treatment by the Athenians, and this present discontent illustrates a general rule of human behavior:

Human beings, it seems, become more angry when they suffer legal wrong (adikoumenoi) than when they are the victims of superior force (biazomenoi). The first looks like the pursuit of greed (to pleonekteisthai) in a relationship of equality (apo tou isou), the second like the application of necessity (anankê) by one more powerful.

The Athenians are so committed to law and so disinclined to base their dealings on the application of force that their allies completely misinterpret their situation. The Athenian empire thus mistakenly allows its allies to think that they are Athens’s equals. If, on the other hand, the Athenians exerted their full force, then the allies would not object, because they would acknowledge the natural rule of the strong.

This is an extraordinary argument. It turns the fictions of the archaic world upside down. The hundreds of jealous, quarrelsome city-states had done everything that they could to maintain their at least putative freedom and autonomy—thus providing a standard according to which the great and the small could be equal. A greater portion of the Greek world had united against Xerxes than at any time since the Trojan War so that the Greeks might preserve this fragmented freedom.

The Athenians, however, blithely state that the appearance of equality causes, rather than solves, problems. The illusion of equality is a “false consciousness” that allows Athens’s subjects to level unjustified criticisms. Of course, Athens is a dominant force—the Athenians have the power to exert control, and, by an almost Newtonian law, their power achieves equilibrium by exerting control over the weak. The over-generous behavior of the Athenians obscures this truth. The best way to win the willing acquiescence of one’s subjects is to be ruthless and always to apply overwhelming force.

But, of course, the Athenians do not pursue this logical course, and, in the end, they establish their own peculiar claim to moral authority. They exploit an old topos about wealth and power. “We received this archê not by force,” they say at Thucydides 1.75.2, “but because you were not willing to remain through the end against the remaining forces of the foreigners and because the allies came to us and themselves asked us to be their hêgemones.” A few sentences later, they conclude this section of their argument by declaring that they had done nothing surprising or unnatural “if we accepted archê that was given to us (didomenê)” (Thuc. 1.76.2).^[42] Already in Hesiod, we find the distinction between that which is acquired as a gift and the product of violence: “A gift (dôs) is a good thing, what is taken is evil—a giver (doteira) of death” (WD 356). Solon prays for wealth, but not if it is acquired unjustly (frag. 13.7–8). Only wealth freely given by the gods rests upon a sure foundation (9–10). That which mortals acquire through hubris follows unwillingly. Thucydides’ Athenians, in their secular and devious way, play upon this idea. Their rule was a gift, not the product of conquest or theft. They must hedge a bit about their subsequent behavior and explain why they would not return the gift, but gift it was at the start, and this lends a measure of traditional legitimacy to their possession.

The Athenians fashion for themselves a justification that can be paralleled in the epinician poets—whose mystifications for power these Athenians resolutely avoid. The concept of phthonos, “jealous ill will,” is central to epinician poetry.^[43] The victor incurs the enmity and ill will of his small-minded neighbors because of his great good fortune, and the poet attempts to assuage such jealous feelings (thus by begging off resentment the poet simultaneously dramatizes the good fortune that incurs this resentment). Phthonos is not a particularly prominent concept in Thucydides as a whole, but the Athenians cite it twice. They open the justification of their present position by stating that they do not “warrant the phthonos ”that they have acquired (Thuc. 1.75.1: expressed rather torturously by making the adjective epiphthonos part of a rhetorical question). A few sentences later (1.75.5), they turn to the same concept again: minimizing the most important dangers is natural and “does not warrant phthonos ”(anepiphthonos). Phthonos is a small-minded, negative quality. In the ideology of the archaic and classical elite, the great suffer envy and slanders from their inferiors but are expected themselves to be immune to such pusillanimous feelings.^[44] In attributing phthonos to their critics they simultaneously accuse them of pettiness. The idea that external circumstances determine human behavior was popular among the sophists (who could use it to justify almost anything—including Helen of Troy), but Thucydides’ Athenians frame this sophistic argument within the traditional rhetoric about phthonos.

Finally, the Athenians do make their own peculiar claim to moral authority. The Athenians portray a world in which certain principles (avoiding dangers, the rule of the powerful) dictate the general outlines of human behavior. But these general outlines still leave a limited space for individual action. Having established this space, the Athenians then make their own peculiar claim to moral authority:

Praise (epainos) is due to all who, following their human nature (anthropeia phusis) to exercise rule (archê) over others, yet are more just (dikaioteroi) than is in accordance with the power (dunamis) at their disposal. Others, we suppose, would, if they took over our position, best demonstrate whether we are showing any moderation (ti metriazomen). Instead, an evil reputation (adoxia) rather than praise (epainos) has accrued to us even from our sense of fairness (to epieikes)—and this is not reasonable (ouk eikotôs).

The Athenians have the dunamis to exert far greater control than they do. They can, so they claim, rule by means of violence, but their sense of fairness or equity (to epieikes) restrains them. They forgo a measure of their power, and this forbearance constitutes a net “gift,” but the Athenians also demand in return to receive corresponding epainos, “praise,” as a countergift. The Athenians do not discard the logic of reciprocity so much as the fictions of equality. Significantly, they do not claim to be “just,” for, in their view, absolute justice is unrealistic. The Athenians claim instead to be “more just” (dikaioteroi) than they need, because they have deviated from a natural course and not allowed their power to reach its natural equilibrium (which would reduce Athens’s allies to a much more abject state). Within this scheme, the Athenians can claim to “exercise moderation” (metriazomen) like the most austere Spartan. They are moderate toward their allies (Thuc. 1.77.2), and if the allies do not recognize this, it is because they fail to make the proper comparisons with other imperial powers.

At the beginning of their speech (Thuc. 1.73.1), the Athenians had declared that they would “show that what we have acquired we do not possess without good reason (apeikotôs),” and the importance of this appeal to reason now becomes clear in the latter portion of the speech. If material conditions dominate human decisions and if there is thus no universal standard of justice, then if justice can be said to exist at all, it constitutes at best a relative concept, a deviation from “natural” behavior (i.e., the tendency of force to dominate weakness). Each action must be evaluated according to the situation and the ordinary limitations of human behavior. Neither the allies nor the Spartans have any claim to special moral authority—their “subject positions,” to use a now popular term, simply differ from that of Athens. The Athenians already lay claim to a degree of “justice” greater than that which they attribute to their opponents. Since the Athenians are already moral equals if not superiors, neither the allies nor the Spartans have any right to criticize the Athenians or to demand more from them.

The Athenian speech thus sketches for justice and moderation an outline that takes into consideration the selfishness inherent in human behavior. There are no heroic standards such as “Greece,” “justice,” or “honor” that are so important that they are worth the highest sacrifice. All agents pursue their interests and avoid catastrophe. But within this framework, the Athenians become again a paradigm of moderation. The Athenians fail to euphemize their position or to make it possible for the allies to accept their situation. The fault, however, lies not with Athenian high-handedness, but with the small-mindedness of the allies. Ideological mystification does not work, but instead of stressing the bluntness of Athenian rule, this speech gives the Athenians credit for sustaining the fictions of equality with their allies even as the Athenians disdain the high rhetoric of other sources. Thucydides systematically takes to pieces the Athens of Theseus and of Demophon that we find in Euripides—there is no charis, no aretê, no grand, unselfish gesture on behalf of Hellas. But Thucydides’ Athenians nevertheless erect from the rubble an empire that is more just than it needs to be. In this world of limited moral expectations, the Athenian empire proves an ongoing theater of Athenian generosity lavished upon unworthy allies.

The Athenian speech at Sparta allows Thucydides to rewrite, in a comparably programmatic section of his own history, several of the major themes in the Kroisos logos that opens Herodotus’s work. First, I have already suggested that Thucydides’ Athenians invert the norms by which Herodotus shapes his account of Spartan power in book 1. Second, in subordinating human behavior to external forces, Thucydides’ Athenians approach a central idea of the Herodotean Solon: “A human being is entirely a product of outside forces” (Thuc. 1.32.4: pan esti anthrôpos sumphorê). Third, this subordination to larger forces in both cases demands that human beings show consideration and understanding for one another, basing their judgments not on some impersonal principle but on the fact that today’s judges may in the future find themselves in a similar position. Thucydides’ Athenians, as we noted above, make constant reference to such “humanist” logic. Likewise, when Kyros learned from Kroisos what Solon had said, he “changed his mind and recognized that he, being also himself a human being, was burning alive another human being who had been no inferior to him in good fortune. He ordered that the fire that was now beginning to burn be extinguished and Kroisos as well as those with Kroisos be brought down from the pyre” (Hdt. 1.86.6).

Herodotus’s Kroisos had, however, played counterpoint to the Kroisos of Bacchylides and to that poet’s positive representation of material wealth.^[45] Thucydides’ Athenians, on the other hand, reverse this slant. Herodotus had explicitly condemned Kroisos as an imperialist who imposed tribute on the Greeks (Hdt. 1.6). The Herodotean Kroisos was a straw man, who naively equated “prosperity” and material wealth. Not only was Kroisos unable to answer Solon; he did not even appreciate the crushing rhetorical defeat that he had suffered—until the flames licking at the pyre recall Solon’s words to his mind. The Athenians extracted tribute from the same Greeks, but they are unabashed imperialists, who defend their position with vigor. They avoid the boorish shortsightedness of the Herodotean Kroisos, who naively equated wealth with good fortune, but they also do away with the elegant and skillful postures that the epinician poets fashioned for people such as the Syracusan tyrant Hieron. At the same time, Thucydides’ Athenians extend a process that began in Herodotus. Apollo whisks Bacchylides’ Kroisos off to his eternal paradise among the Hyperboreans. The gods still take an active role in Herodotus (Hdt. 1.87.2, 91.2), but Kroisos’s fate is secular: he lives on as a wise man at the Persian court. Thucydides’ Athenians, however, have no interest in divine intervention at all. Theirs is a world in which humans confront an impersonal and almost Newtonian system of behavior.