PHIL HOPKINStions (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1993); Kenneth Sayre, Plato’s Literary
Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1995); R. B. Rutherford, The Art of Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1995); Francisco Gonzalez, ed., The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic
Studies (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1995); Charles Kahn, Plato and the
Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Thomas Szlezák, Reading Plato (New York: Routledge,
1999); Jill Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure
in Plato’s Dialogues (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999);
Gerald Press, ed., Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefi eld, 2000); Harold Tarrant, Plato’s First Interpreters (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2000); Diskin Clay, Platonic Questions: Dialogues with the
Silent Philosopher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000);
Ann N. Michelini, ed., Plato as Author: The Rhetoric of Philosophy (Cincinnati:
E. J. Brill, 2002); and Ruby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogue
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984),
opened the door to more philosophical engagement with Thucydides in recent
years. Peter Kosso’s conceptual analysis, “Historical Evidence and Epistemic
Justifi cation: Thucydides as a Case Study,” History and Theory 32 (1993): 1– 12,
argues that historical evidence in general serves as an appeal to coherence and
uses Thucydides to make the point that the most credible historical evidence
is that evidence which has passed a number of potentially eliminative tests—
a claim about evidence that strongly evokes Socratic elenchus. Cynthia Farrar,
The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), offers a thorough treatment of Thucydides as a political philosopher.
Touching on the philosophical questions of the relation of form and content,
see J. L. Moles, “Truth and Untruth in Herodotus and Thucydides,” in Lies and
Fiction in the Ancient World, ed. C. Gill and T. P. Wiseman (Austin: University of
Tex a s P r e s s , 19 9 3), 8 8 – 121; and Michael C. Leff, “Agency, Performance, and
Interpretation in Thucydides’ Account of the Mytilene Debate,” in Theory, Text,
Context (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 87– 96. Leff, fol-
lowing Gomme, fi nds the Mytilene debate to be in part a subtle and critically
refl ective commentary on the very process of rhetorical debate (89). Indeed,
quite interestingly for our purposes here, his analysis, following Andrewes and
Farrar and contrary to Kagan, interprets Cleon’s speech as directly violating its
own maxims and advice, thus serving Thucydides’ larger didactic purposes. See
also Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998); Mar y F. Williams, Ethics in Thucydides (Lanham: Univer-
sity Press of America, 1998); and especially Timothy Rood, Thucydides: Narrative
and Explanation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). However, questions
concerning the philosophical infl uence and import of Thucydides’ text predate
Connor’s work. See W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 3 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), on the phusis-nomos controversy;
Friedrich Solmsen, Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment (Princeton:
Pr inceton Universit y Press, 1975), on t he import of t he “new lear ning”; and J. H.