Notes
1. Rawlings 1975; Ostwald 1988. [BACK]
2. Both Kagan (1969) and Ste. Croix (1972)—in studies more than four hundred pages long—take the origins of the Peloponnesian War as their main theme. Badian (1990, republished in Badian 1993) argues that Thucydides’ account is grossly biased, minimizing Athenian responsibility. [BACK]
3. See Wight 1978, 24–25 (quoting a 1947 speech by George C. Marshall on the relevance of Thucydides to contemporary affairs) and 138, where he speaks of Thucydides as “the prototype statement of how we usually express the causes of war”; and esp. Gilpin 1981, 211–230; Keohane (1986b, 143–144) refers to a “‘Thucydides-Gilpin theory’ in which war occurs when an equilibrium of power is disturbed”; for critiques of Gilpin’s use of Thucydides, see Garst 1989 and Johnson-Bagby 1994. [BACK]
4. Thus Kagan 1995 takes as its title “On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace” and begins with the Peloponnesian War; the phrases “origins of war” and “causes of war” form the titles of Howard 1983, Ferrill 1985, and Blainey 1988, for example. [BACK]
5. So Hornblower 1991, 65 (on Thuc. 1.23.6). [BACK]
6. The superlative is not a Thucydidean idiosyncracy: cf., for example, Hdt. 7.233, where both anankê and the “truest logos ”appear. [BACK]
7. Students of Thucydides influenced by political theory have been particularly sensitive to the many affinities between Perikles as statesman and Thucydides as historian: e.g., Strauss 1964, 226–230; Edmunds 1975a, 212–214; Euben 1990a, 192–193. [BACK]
8. Centuries of close study have turned up plenty of objections to Thucydides’ narrative, of which Badian, 1993 125–162, is a particularly strong example, in that it charges Thucydides with actively twisting the facts to exculpate Athens. [BACK]
9. Herodotus seems to state that the Spartan kings each have two votes (Hdt. 6.57.5), and he refers to the Pitanate company at 9.53.2. In neither case is Herodotus’s error quite as unambiguous as Thucydides makes it out: see Hornblower 1991 on 1.20.3. James Kennelly (“Thucydides’ Knowledge of Herodotus” [Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1994]) has argued, however, that Thucydides wrote without any knowledge of Herodotus. For a recent overview of the possible connections between the two authors, see Scanlon 1994. [BACK]
10. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and “Fenimore Cooper’s Further Literary Offenses” in Twain 1992. Of course, Twain’s wit is completely foreign to the humorless Thucydides, and, in this respect, the essays have a much greater affinity with Herodotus. Shi (1994, 107) describes Twain as “at best [a] truant member” of the realist “school,” but it is not fair to criticize Twain for not articulating “a concrete literary perspective” (so Shi) without a careful analysis of the Cooper essays. [BACK]
11. On Einstein and scientific realism, see Fine 1986. [BACK]
12. The classic example is Hdt. 3.38, where Dareios confronts Greeks, who burned their dead, with Indians, who supposedly ate theirs. Each side found the practice of the other abhorrent. For a balanced assessment of the importance of such external stimuli for the development of Greek thought, see Lloyd 1978, 236–239. [BACK]
13. For a survey of the main passages, see still Heinimann 1945. [BACK]
14. It is admittedly hard to gauge the extent to which Thucydides has thought through the implications of this (1.21.2). Edmunds (1993) and Loraux (1986b) have argued that Thucydides felt that writing could almost perfectly encode experience. I have elsewhere sought to qualify Thucydides’ assumptions and to suggest that they are not quite so strong: see “Thucydidean Claims of Authority” in Crane 1996a. [BACK]
15. The term gnômê is a major focus of Edmunds 1975a; Edmunds points out that Spartan gnômê tends to emphasize moral resolves, and Athenian gnômê has a strong intellectual dimension. Perikles combines the two. [BACK]
16. When Kleon seeks—without success—to make himself a second Perikles, he echoes Perikles’ claim to intellectual constancy (compare Kleon’s unchanging gnômê at 3.38.1 with Perikles’ at 1.140.1 and 2.61.2). [BACK]
17. There are several variations on the Greek for this: Pappus Collectio 8.10.1060; Simpl. in Phys., Diehls p. 1110; Tzetz. Chil. II. Hist. 35, 130, Chil. III. Hist. 66, 62. On this saying, see Dijksterhuis 1987, 14–18. [BACK]
18. Hollingdale (1989, 64), for example, ranks Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss together. [BACK]
19. So Euben 1990b, 169–171; White 1984, 59–92; for White the collapse of Corcyraean society prefigures the extended decline of Athenian culture; I agree with White when he argues that the ambiguities of language that appear throughout Thucydides are “not incidental but structural” (p. 87). Thucydides, however, did his best to resolve such problems and to produce a single, unified account. [BACK]
20. Cochrane 1929, 166–167: “The scientific historian is left merely with the concept of a natural order of which man, like the environment, forms a part, and his problem is to exhibit the relationships which from time to time develop among men in contact with the environmental world. Such relationships being, ex hypothesi, uniform and regular, the study of them yields those generalizations about human action which constitute the usefulness of history and give to it the character of science.” [BACK]
21. Hunter 1973. [BACK]
22. Connor 1984, 12–19. [BACK]
23. “La vue d’en haut: Découverte des sciences de l’homme,” in de Romilly 1990, 105–141. [BACK]
24. So Stahl (1966, 88), who points out the great emphasis that Thucydides lays on this wind and on the chaos that it created (2.84.3). [BACK]
25. This was published after Parry’s death as Parry 1981; see esp. pp. 15–21. Thucydides’ appreciation for logoi and their significance is also one of the starting points for Cogan 1981a. [BACK]
26. There are relatively few traces of humor in Thucydides: Kleon’s embarrassment at 4.28 is probably the clearest. The strategem by which the people of Segesta tricked the Athenians into overestimating Segesta’s wealth has great comic potential, but it is not clear, given the grim outcome of the Sicilian expedition, whether Thucydides intends for us to find this story funny. [BACK]
27. Twain 1992, 184. [BACK]
28. Edward Everett, who, at a very young age, served as the first Eliot Professor of Greek at Harvard, and later became the most famous orator of his day, had Thucydides in mind when he delivered the “real” Gettysburg address. Lincoln had been invited to deliver a few remarks that would follow the featured speech by Everett. On the influence of the Athenian Funeral Oration in nineteenth-century America, see Wills 1992. [BACK]
29. For the controversy and demonstration that the speech is, indeed, probably by Demosthenes, see McCabe 1981. [BACK]
30. On Thucydides’ characterization of Athenian character, see Crane 1992a. [BACK]
31. Cf. Antiphon 1.1 (Stepmother), 5.1 (Herodes), 3.2.1–2 (Second Tetralogy); Lys. 12.3; for other examples, see Edwards and Usher 1985, 68. [BACK]
32. In particular, the restless and insatiably acquisitive character that Thucydides attributes to his Athenians (see esp. the Corinthian speech at 1.68–71 and Alkibiades’ speech at 6.16–18, with Crane 1992a) makes Athenian attempts at expansion inevitable and thus strengthens his judgment. [BACK]
33. On this, see especially Edmunds 1993, 831–852. [BACK]
34. Machiavelli, The Prince 15; translation by W. K. Marriott after Machiavelli 1911. [BACK]
35. This ideological realism in both Thucydides and Machiavelli is the subject of Forde 1992. [BACK]
36. See, for example, Nietzsche’s statement that Thucydides constitutes “my recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism” (The Twilight of the Idols, 106–107, quoted by Derian [1995b, 385]). [BACK]
37. The classic exposition remains Kuhn 1970; Boyd (1991, 12–14) briefly summarizes Kuhn while placing his work within the broader framework of the philosophy of science. Kuhn was criticized for using the term “paradigm” inconsistently, and he tried in later work to define this concept more narrowly, but many practicing historians of science (e.g., Cohen 1985, xvi-xvii) find the original exposition to be the most useful, perhaps because of its ambiguities and flexibility. [BACK]
38. Kuhn 1970, 15. [BACK]
39. So Flory 1980. [BACK]
40. Momigliano 1990, 29–53. [BACK]
41. For Thucydides’ virtual exclusion of religion, see Hornblower 1992. [BACK]
42. The decline in the role assigned to women as we move from Herodotus to Thucydides is astounding: women appear only about one-tenth as often in Thucydides as in Herodotus. Even then these few Thucydidean women appear mainly as victims or relatives, whereas Herodotus’s women play a far more active role. On Herodotean women, see Dewald 1981; on Thucydides’ treatment of women, see Schaps 1977; Wiedemann 1983; Harvey 1985; Loraux 1985; Cartledge 1993. I have explored these topics at length in Crane 1996a, where I point out that Thucydides excludes not only women, but all familial relationships—male and female alike. Thucydidean misogyny (if that is the correct term) contributes to the larger project of reducing the world to individuals and states. [BACK]
43. Tickner 1995. [BACK]
44. On the “failure and success of Herodotus,” see Lateiner 1989, 211–227. [BACK]
45. On Thucydides’ Archaeology, see chapters 5 and 6 below. [BACK]
46. This is the main theme of Stahl 1966; Edmunds (1975a) focuses on the unpredictability of events but gives greater emphasis to the power of rationality. [BACK]
47. Even here, Thucydides has enjoyed little success: the identification of the plague with a modern disease remains a perennial source for scholarly speculation, but no explanation has ever won wide support. [BACK]
48. Thuc. 1.122.1: ἥκιστα γὰρ πόλεμος ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς χωρεῖ, αὐτοῦ τὰ πολλὰ τεχνᾶται πρὸς τὸ παρατυγχάνον (“For war of all things proceeds least upon definite rules but draws principally upon itself for contrivances to meet an emergency”). [BACK]
49. A recent anthology of essays on essays about political realism (Derian 1995a) provides an excellent overview of the developing tradition of realist thought. [BACK]
50. See, for example, Shapiro and Wendt 1992; Wendt 1995. [BACK]
51. On the relationship between Hobbes’s thought and Thucydides, with particular emphasis on the differences that modern observers often overlook, see now Johnson 1993 and Johnson-Bagby 1994. [BACK]
52. On Richelieu, see Kissinger 1994, 58–59; Church 1973, 495–504; George Marshall explicitly pointed out the resemblance between the emerging cold war and the tensions between Athens and Sparta (see the speech he delivered at Princeton University on February 22, 1947: Dept. of State Bulletin, vol. 16, p. 391). His reading of Thucydides shaped his view of the contemporary affairs in which he exercised tremendous influence. [BACK]
53. Tucker (Osgood and Tucker 1967, 201) recalls Perikles at 1.140.4–5, when he insists that the real issue is not the Megarian dispute but Athenian independence: “Substitute the surrender of West Berlin for revoking the Megarian decree and Pericles’ words [at Thuc. 1.140.4–5] seem entirely analogous to the words of President Kennedy in the summer of 1961: ‘West Berlin is more than a showcase of liberty, a symbol, an isle of freedom in a communist sea…; above all it has now become, as never before, the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments…and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation.… If we do not meet our commitments to Berlin, where will we later stand? If we are not true to our word there, all that we have achieved will mean nothing’”(address to the nation, July 25, 1961, Dept. of State Bulletin, vol. 45, pp. 268, 273). [BACK]
54. Wight 1978, 138. [BACK]
55. Knutsen 1992, 32. [BACK]
56. Vasquez (1990, 3) stressed the influence of Thucydides and Machiavelli on realist thinking in the 1950s and 1960s until Vietnam drove many to focus again upon issues of morality. He includes the Hobbes translation of the Melian Dialogue (pp. 16–20) in his anthology of realist authors. Likewise, Votti and Kauppi 1987 opens its section on the intellectual precursors and influences on realism with Thucydides (pp. 34–36). Even Wayman and Diehl 1994, which concentrates on charts, tables, and heavy quantification rather than historical analysis, begins immediately with Thucydides (p. 5 to be precise). [BACK]
57. Contributions by these authors are collected in Derian 1995a; to evaluate some of the developments under way, compare this collection (which includes pieces by Hans Morgenthau and Robert Keohane) with Keohane 1986a, where Ashley’s contribution plays a far more marginal role. Realism has come under increasing attack: a director of one major university press informed me that it had considered three separate manuscripts critiquing realism in a three-month period in early 1995. [BACK]
58. E.g., Elshtain 1995, 345–346, stressing “texts as contested terrain”; Derian 1995b, 382–385 [BACK]
59. Johnson (1993) begins from the observation that political theorists often link Thucydides and Hobbes without giving due weight to the differences between the two; she summarizes her model of Thucydides as a realist at pp. 203–229; she restates many of her main points also in Johnson-Bagby 1994; on Thucydides as a realist, see also Garst 1989, Doyle 1990, Forde 1992, Clark 1993, and Derian 1995b, 382–285. [BACK]
60. See, for example, Johnson 1993, 3; Keohane 1986a, 7. For a synopsis of different sets, see “Core Propositions of Realist Theory,” in Wayman and Diehl 1994, 8–13; for a feminist revision of realist assumptions, see Tickner 1995, 66–67. [BACK]
61. E.g., Gilpin 1981, 211–230; Gilpin 1986, 306; Keohane 1986a, 7; Wayman and Diehl 1994, 5. [BACK]
62. For a recent attempt to render this outlook more sophisticated, see Wendt 1995. [BACK]
63. Few students of Thucydides, whether from the field of classics, political philosophy, or international relations, would deny that Thucydides, despite his pose as a detached observer, structured his narrative in such a way as to provoke our horror at the extremes of power politics: e.g. (from among nonclassicists writing on Thucydides), Johnson 1993, 219–220; the title of Orwin 1994, The Humanity of Thucydides, boldly asserts its view: this book takes as one of its main themes the attempt in Thucydides to transcend the limits of the Athenian thesis. [BACK]
64. Hornblower (1987, 178–180) objects to any Hobbesian distinction between civil morality and interstate lawlessness, primarily because the most eloquent expositions of this perspective appear in Athenian speeches, which do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the historian. In this context, see, however, the Archaeology, where Thucydides is explicitly offering his own conclusions. The Archaeology introduces us to the historian’s general methodology and attitudes. See Thuc. 1.8.3, where the desire for profit (kerdos) leads the weak to endure the “slavery” (douleia) of the powerful. Note that in this passage, Thucydides blurs the distinction between individual and state, setting as parallel individuals who seek the patronage of the powerful, and rich states that convert the smaller into their clients (hupêkooi). The classic passage is 1.9, in which Thucydides rejects the traditional view, that loyalty to an oath and charis (the formal demands of gratitude) led Greeks to join Agamemnon in the expedition against Troy. Instead, Thucydides argues at some length that others served Agamemnon because he was “preeminent in force” (1.9.1) and that terror (phobos) was at least as important as charis (1.9.3). [BACK]
65. Cartledge 1979, 255; see also Ste. Croix 1972, 5–34. [BACK]
66. Forde (1992) traces in Thucydides the tension between the morality between states and within states. [BACK]
67. E.g., Keohane 1986a, 198–199. [BACK]
68. In the preface to the second edition of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, E. H. Carr, for example, regrets that his book “too readily and too complacently accepts the nation state, large or small, as the unit of international society” (Carr 1949, viii). See also Gilpin 1986, 313–318; Gilpin 1981, 18; Herz 1951, 29; Wendt 1995, 163–164, Elshtain 1995, 350–351. [BACK]
69. Parry 1972. [BACK]
70. See Howe 1994. [BACK]
71. So, for example, Gilpin 1981, 226. [BACK]
72. On this, see chapter 5 below. [BACK]
73. Tickner 1995. [BACK]
74. Thucydides: 34 instances; Herodotus: 373. When the differing sizes of the works of these two authors are considered, the main word for woman (gunê) shows up nine times more often in Herodotus than in Thucydides; for references to discussions of this phenomenon, see above, note 42. [BACK]
75. Crane 1996a. [BACK]