PHIL HOPKINSother side. The further balancing of analysis in the “Archaeology” with
speeches that serve to reinforce that analysis, as well as those speeches
that call it into question, moves the reader beyond simple affi rmation
or rejection of propositions, and offers him the opportunity to see and
interpret the motivations of the actors in his attempt to make sense of
events. Indeed, Thucydides’ readers are carefully invited to balance not
only the speeches, nor even merely the speeches and analyses, nor even
analyses and fact, but also to balance an exercise of bad faith with the
exercise of careful judgment. This latter balancing particularly charac-
terizes Platonic dialogue.
Thucydides crafts levels of antilogy within and between all the ele-
ments of his text such that his readers are invited, as a kind of witness
both to the war and to human nature, to remain within the antilogy, to
learn what that balancing itself can teach. This is also in part the work
of ajporiva in the dialogues.^33 In the larger antilogy of the History, and in
Platonic dialogues, the reader is hindered from deciding which side is
right or should prevail. The placement and balancing of elements serves
to call each position into question and keeps the reader engaged in the
process of judgment rather than being swayed to one side or the other
and so brought, untimely, to a decision or conclusion. Thucydides asks
his readers to carefully investigate what lies behind analysis and speech.
In sifting through the alternative accounts such as he himself encoun-
tered, his readers are encouraged to recognize that, as he warned in
his programmatic statement, judgment is diffi cult, requires a sensitive
touch, and is never fi nal, univocal, or partisan.
This craft is all the more remarkable for being produced by some-
one who is biased and who recognizes that fact, as his caution at 1.22
makes clear.^34 One of the most important elements of the larger antilogy
of the History is that precisely because his readers know the outcome of
the war, and because this knowledge is skillfully woven into the complex
antilogy of the text, one is led to question the force of the words of all
the speakers, and not only those whose judgment Thucydides has openly
called into question. One is forced to question the words spoken by Ar-
chidamus and Pericles, and those offered by Thucydides himself.^35
In both Thucydides and Plato the reader is heavily coached, cer-
tainly. Much of the work has been done for him, so to speak. But the
tensions the texts produce are as much a part of the coaching as any of
the propositions used to produce them. As Socrates tells Polus in the
Gorgias (472c), only one witness matters, and for Plato and Thucydides
that witness is the reader, whom they bring into inquiry and judgment
by means of their expositional strategies. The reader’s assumptions, bi-
ases, and commitments are made to stand as antilogical elements in
balance with the text. Neither Thucydides nor Plato offers the banal