“TO SAY WHAT IS MOST NECESSARY”Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967);
the works of Jacqueline de Romilly generally; and H. P. Stahl, Thukydides: Die
Stellung des Menschen im geschichtlichen Prozess (Munich: Beck, 1966), on the His-
tory as an attempt to understand human nature.
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 9.51.
- Socrates most often uses the term ajntilogikov~ in its sophistic and techni-
cal sense as a kind of eristic, a merely semantic verbal opposition, as in Republic
454, Euthydemus 278a and 301b, Lysis 216a, and Theaetetus 164c. Other problems
arising in the use of oppositional speech noted by Socrates include the failure
to distinguish the hypothesis from its consequences, as in Phaedo 101e and Par-
menides 135 – 36, and the failure to properly perform diairevsi~, as in Philebus 17a
and Phaedrus 265e and 266a– b. I use the term in its more general sense of op-
posing arguments or accounts. Socrates recognized the value of such opposing
accounts. His concern was not with contradiction per se, but with the eristic use
to which contradiction may be put. - Many scholars have noted that both Thucydides and his audience were
clearly infl uenced by the sophists and by other developments of the fi fth cen-
tury’s “new learning.” Thucydides was variously reputed to be the student of
Antiphon, Anaxagoras, or Protagoras. He makes clear himself how much he
admired Antiphon at 8.68, and he seems to hold Pericles in unusually high
regard in the early part of the History, taking special care to assess and jus-
tify his character and actions. Pericles, as a student of Protagoras, was himself
deeply engaged in the “new learning.” There is a signifi cant amount of litera-
ture remarking the similarities of rhetorical technique in prose writers of the
fi fth century, particularly writers of epideictic and dicanic oratory; but for a
solid introduction to that discussion, see Thomas Cole, The Origins of Rhetoric
in Ancient Greece (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universit y Press, 1991); and, earlier,
J. H. Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides. More recent studies include Philip
Stadter, “The Form and Content of Thucydides’ Pentecontaetia (1.89– 117),”
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 34, no. 1 (1993): 35– 72; and Ian Plant, “The
Infl uence of Forensic Oratory on Thucydides’ Principles of Method,” Classical
Quarterly 49 (1999): 62– 73. - Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium, 3.346– 47.
- C onnor, Thucydides, in particular, notes and explores this expositional
tension; see 41ff. - Donald Kagan, “The Speeches in Thucydides and the Mytilene Debate,”
in Studies in the Greek Historians, Yale Classical Studies 24 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1975), 71. Kagan reviews the controversy between schol-
ars on whether Thucydides reports speeches accurately or makes them up for
his own purposes. There are a number of scholars who take the speeches in the
History to represent either what the speakers actually said, for example, Finley,
Kagan, and Marc Cogan, The Human Thing: The Speeches and Principles of Thucyd -
ides’ History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); what they needed
to say to get their point across and persuade an audience, for example, A. W.
Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K. J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); or models for orators on what should