Essentialism, History, and Ideology in Thucydides

First, political realists, with their emphasis on the constants of human nature or society, have often had trouble accounting for major historical changes, since the emphasis on continuity and on common factors can, at the least, distract from the very real differences that appear as we move, either through time or space, from one cultural context to another.^[3] Early Greek thought, in fact, identified this general problem very early on when it wrestled with the issue of unity and change. The sixth-century Milesian intellectuals Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes had all struggled to reconcile diversity with similarity, postulating fundamental elements from which all things were fashioned. In the fifth century, Parmenides, Empedokles, Demokritos, and others developed this problem even further. Thucydides’ subject—human affairs—was both more complex and more manageable than these cosmological speculations. Rather than turn to water, “the infinite,” air, the four elements, or atoms, Thucydides based much of his historical method on a single fundamental assertion, that, in the end, there exists an unchanging human nature, an anthrôpeia phusis.^[4]

A constant human nature is hardly by itself a revolutionary concept in Thucydides—Herodotus uses the same phrase (Hdt. 3.65.3), and the traditional Greek exhortation that mortals should “think mortal thoughts” (thnêta phronein) assumes that all mortals, male and female, slave and free, Greek and non-Greek, share some broadly defined but single and unified position. The emphasis on cultural difference seems not to have developed until the fifth century, no doubt gaining particular impetus from the traumatic encounter in mainland Greece with the non-Greek Other, in large numbers, during Xerxes’ invasion.^[5] Thucydides himself prods his fellow Greeks, reminding them that the prized distinction between Greeks and non-Greeks was comparatively recent: he stresses that the term “barbarian” does not appear in Homer (Thuc. 1.3.3; cf. also 1.6.5–6).

But if the constancy of human nature was not an idea peculiar to Thucydides, Thucydides nevertheless exploited the principle with a consistency and brilliance unattested before and rarely equaled since. Thucydides felt that he could work with partial or conflicting sources precisely because a certain number of major trends—the constant pull of human ambition, the tendency of the powerful to dominate the weak, for example—shape human behavior, and the historian can turn to these constants in order to unmask hidden motives, fill in gaps, and push beyond the surface of the evidence. Thucydides used his analysis of the present to “predict” the past. It is easy to speak condescendingly of hidden or unexamined assumptions in authors, but Thucydides was often quite conscious of his own limitations and advertised them as dramatically as he could.

By opening the History with the Archaeology, his revisionist picture of the ancient past, Thucydides confronted his readers with the implications of a constant “human nature” by showing concretely how such an assumption could turn the past upside down. The Kretan ruler Minos—famous in mythology as an icon of tyranny, the man who handed the young people of Athens over to the Minotaur, and villain of Bacchylides 17—becomes an agent of civilization, able to bring order and tranquillity and to suppress piracy (Thuc. 1.4, 8.2–3). Thucydides represents the distinction between Greeks and foreigners—which Euripidean drama shows to have been a prominent part of popular culture^[6] —as a recent phenomenon, still irrelevant in the Homeric epics (1.3, 1.6). The Trojan War, far from being a major enterprise, was a primitive affair, hardly comparable to the events of the fifth century (1.10–11). Thucydides develops a fairly extensive argument that even Agamemnon based his power less upon the gratitude and honor of his allies than upon his overwhelming military power and the consequent intimidation (1.9). One particular configuration of forces drives the progress—and progress it clearly is as far as Thucydides is concerned—of human civilization: “The weak, hungering for profits (kerdê), endured slavery (douleia) to the powerful, while those with greater force, because they enjoyed a surplus of wealth, used to acquire weaker city-states as subjects” (1.8.3). The compulsive and unbounded quest for power and profit that Solon had described at the opening of the sixth century and of Athenian recorded history (frag. 13 West) becomes in Thucydides, almost two centuries later, a unifying force that drives the weak and the mighty alike.

The belief in a stable and even transcendent human nature runs throughout the History.^[7] The speeches that Thucydides includes and that illustrate the very different subject positions of participants in the war return again and again to the universal laws that affect behavior.^[8] Thucydides’ Athenians, of course, appeal to a vision of natural law throughout. In their opening speech, they argue that no one should feel resentment (phthonos) against those who “make the best arrangements for themselves when it comes to the most serious risks” (Thuc. 1.75.5). The “Athenian thesis” articulated at 1.76 presupposes a constant human nature. If the Athenians have acquired an empire, they have only exhibited “human behavior” (1.76.2: anthrôpeios tropos), and no one has any right to quarrel with them on these grounds, least of all the Spartans, who follow the same principles of self-interest (1.76.1, 4). If Athens’s subjects feel resentment, this is also a natural but irrational phenomenon: if the Athenians ruled by pure force, their subjects would, we are told, feel less oppressed. The restraint of Athenian rule provokes paradoxically greater anger—but such anger, though paradoxical, is represented as predictable, a consequence of universal human psychology (1.77.2–4). In book 6, Euphemos portrays Athens as a tyrant city that, as such, must subordinate its affections to its interests (6.85). Circumstances, he argues a bit later at 6.87.2, force the Athenians to develop their empire: “We assert that we are rulers in Hellas in order not to be subjects; liberators in Sicily that we may not be harmed by the Sicilians; that we are compelled to interfere in many things, because we have many things to guard against.” The Syracusan leader Hermokrates, terrified at the threat of Athenian expansion in Sicily, nevertheless strikes a similarly dispassionate pose. He takes it for granted that human beings seek power and that they will pursue aggression to gain their ends (4.59.2). A few paragraphs later he remarks that “it is human nature (pephuke to anthrôpeion) to rule the one who yields and to defend onself against attack” (4.61.5).

According to Thucydides, Hermokrates and his fellow Syracusans are similar in nature to the Athenians (Thuc. 6.20.3, 7.55.2, 8.96.5), but such generalizing thought is not confined to the Athenians and those like them. Thucydides’ Peloponnesians are equally prone to such universalizing arguments. The Corinthians, arguing before the conservative Spartans, assert, for example, that “it is characteristic of the self-possessed (sôphrôn) to remain quiet unless they suffer injustice, and it is characteristic of the brave (agathoi) to exchange war for peace when they suffer injustice and then, when the chance presents itself, to replace war with a settlement” (1.120.3). The Corinthians do not problematize the complex terms sôphrôn and agathos but represent them as constant values from which predictable lessons may be drawn. Even Thucydides’ Spartans are prone to such universalizing reflections on human nature:^[9]

Indeed if great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be, not by the system of revenge and military success, and by forcing an opponent to swear to a treaty to his disadvantage, but when the more fortunate combatant waives these his privileges, to be guided by gentler feelings, conquers his rival in generosity, and accords peace on more moderate conditions than he expected. [3] From that moment, instead of the debt of revenge that violence must entail, his adversary owes a debt of generosity to be paid in kind and is inclined by honor to stand to his agreement.

The Spartans offer as universal a system in which gift demands countergift, and rivals compete in a theater of generosity. Although we may historicize the Spartan assertions and insist that such behavior is not universal, Thucydides’ Spartans offer no such conditions. Thucydides, of course, is deeply sensitive to the limits of megalophrosunê, “greatheartedness,” and, as argued above in chapter 7, the History provides ample material with which to critique the Spartan arguments, but the appeal to the universal—rather than the debatable content of this particular appeal—is ubiquitous in Thucydides. Gnomic wisdom and aphorisms are, of course, traditional in formal Greek speech, but Thucydides develops such generalizing maxims with an intensity surpassed by none of his contemporaries whose works have survived.

Not simply characteristics that Thucydides attributes to his speakers, references to human nature are a recurrent heuristic by which he shapes his own narrative. At 2.50.1, he remarks that the plague at Athens was “almost too harsh for human nature (hê anthrôpeia phusis)”. At 4.108.4, he sourly observes that the restive Athenian allies overemphasized Brasidas’s prospects, “for human beings (hoi anthrôpoi) are accustomed (eiôthotes) to entrust to an unexamined hope what they desire and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy.” At 5.68.2, he frets about a numerical estimate “because of the human tendency toward boastfulness (to anthrôpeion kompôdes) with regard to their own side.” His analysis of the effect of civil war on society at Corcyra is one of the most famous (if also one of the most complex) passages in the History. There, Thucydides makes explicit why his analysis of events on a particular island at a particular time is of transcendent importance:

The sufferings that revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of human beings (phusis anthrôpôn) remains the same.

The possibility of a change in human nature would seem, at best, remote in Thucydides’ relentless narrative of greed, fear, and warfare. He argues that human nature, at some level, remains unchanged and that there is, as we might now term it, an “essence” of common humanity that all biological human beings possess. This essential humanity allows Thucydides’ work to exert an appeal that transcends its particular time and origin. The stability of human nature lies behind and validates Thucydides’ famous claim that his work will be a ktêma es aiei, “a valuable possession for all time” (Thuc. 1.22.4).

Thucydides’ argument is a strong one. The rising cycle of brutalization that he explored at Corcyra seems grimly applicable to the savagery that has unfolded in the late twentieth century in Cambodia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Armenia, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and other places. Death squads and other mechanisms of internecine slaughter do indeed transcend any one culture, religion, or ethnic group—there are good reasons why Thucydides retains a foothold in many curricula as a kind of patron saint of power politics. Thucydides becomes the first surviving author in European literature who gave written expression to the world “as it really was” and made it possible for us to take human nature into proper account as we structure our dealings with one another.

But nothing is ever simple in Thucydides. Different readers have established very different visions of Thucydides—Der Derian, surveying realist thought, refers to “the eternal return of the ghost of Thucydides” ^[10] —but almost all of those who have studied him closely have sensed in his text dramatic and unresolved tensions. As Peter Pouncey put it, “The real difficulty in locating the whole of Thucydides lies in the fact that there is genuine ambivalence in the man, especially on questions connected with the pursuit of power, and the abuses to which its exercise can lead. Reticent but also self-aware, he makes room in his history for arguments that speak to each side of this ambivalence. But I do not believe that he ever fully resolved it, and the interpreter must resist the inclination to impose solutions on him.” ^[11] Sophokles, by contrast, seems to have thrived on ambiguity—his plays glory in their lack of closure, their resistance to any fixed or stable reading. Thucydides, on the other hand, concentrated the full power of his mind on the problem of establishing a settled account, a transparent window onto what really happened, and a history that answered more questions than it raised. And yet Thucydides never came close to such a goal. Not only did he leave his work only three-quarters complete (the narrative breaks off in 411), but his model of history implied that Athens, not Sparta, should have won the war.

Even the essentialism that shapes Thucydides’ History—the assumption that human nature was stable and historical inquiry thus possible—is problematic. Immediately after his reference to “the nature of human beings” at 3.82.2 (quoted above), Thucydides qualifies this remark:

[Human nature] is sometimes more [harsh] and at other times more peaceful and distinct in its manifestations (eidê, pl. of eidos), depending upon how all the vicissitudes of events bear upon it. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master that brings most people’s characters to a level with their fortunes.

Thucydides thus appeals to the stability of human nature as a necessary tool with which to tell his story—and yet the theme of his story is not stability but change. He describes not only the battles, the victories, the shifts in advantage, and other events of the war but also the qualitative impact that these events had upon human life. The Corcyraean civil war is important because its effects upon Corcyraean society were devastating. The murderous power struggles there shattered the assumptions and bonds that had previously maintained stable human relations.

Thucydides describes the plague at Athens not only because such a disease—whatever it was—might strike again but because he wanted to show how the terrible sufferings—“almost too harsh for human nature (anthrôpeia phusis)” (Thuc. 2.50.1)—broke down the restraints imposed by society and devastated the moral behavior of Athenian citizens. Athens itself fell in the end because, after Perikles’ death, it could no longer find leaders who had the intellectual power or moral vision to lead the city (2.65). Thucydides does not tell the story of traditional values validated. The assumptions of his class—the international Greek elite, with its supranational loyalties, countless and overlapping personal alliances, its conventions of what constituted appropriate behavior—all seemed to have collapsed around him, and Thucydides wanted to understand how this had happened. If Thucydides posited an essential, transhistorical human nature, this was not an easy, conventional idea, but a bold and determined assertion that flew against many of the experiences through which he felt that he had lived.

The tension between change and continuity runs throughout the History. The apocalyptic description of plague at Athens gives way to a narrative that, after Perikles’ final response, resumes its course and makes surprisingly few references to the ongoing devastation in the city.^[12] The Athenians act brutally at Melos, but the logic of their reasoning remains consistent with that which they express at the prewar conference at Sparta. Although Thucydides constantly uses a timeless human nature to explicate events, both past and present, he uses this timeless human nature to explain why human society had so radically changed. Of course, one can argue that human nature and human society are distinct, but, in practice, Thucydides treats both as if they were orthogonal. Like a Renaissance painter who represents children as different in size but not in kind from adults, Thucydides conflates psychology and sociology.^[13]

Thucydides’ History relates two simultaneous stories. First, warfare, civil strife, and plague had shattered human society. Second, things had always been pretty much the same: thus even Agamemnon, when he mustered the Greek expedition upon Troy, really depended upon intimidation rather than loyalty (Thuc. 1.9). The entire Archaeology proceeds from the assumption that Thucydides can apply the same heuristics to ancient times as to the present. Thucydides thus describes history as a process of dramatic, often corrosive change, but he does so by assuming that human beings think and react much the same way at all times and in all places. If history charts a consistent process in which humans rise from squalor into ever larger and more secure groups (like Minos and the Athenian empire), then why did this natural process miscarry, brutalizing Greek society and handing victory to Sparta? Although we can, of course, develop arguments to reconcile this tension between change and stability, Thucydides did not. This unresolved conflict between the two tendencies that Thucydides observed contributes much to the tension and nagging lack of closure that have struck so many readers of the History.