PHIL HOPKINSbe argued and how in given situations, for example, Thomas Cole and George
Kennedy, The Art of Persuasion in Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1963). For a more recent contribution to the debate along similar lines and one
armed with an admirable, if not fully persuasive, philological analysis of the
diffi cult language of 1.22, see Thomas Garrity, “Thucydides 1.22.1: Content
and Form in the Speeches,” American Journal of Philology 119 (1998): 361– 84.
A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography (Portland: Areopagitica,
1988), 11– 14, following closely the arguments of G. E. M. De Ste. Croix, The
Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), argues
with impressive evidence that verbatim speeches in classical history were not
only not a general practice (only Cato includes verbatim speeches and they are
his own), but not even an expectation. His interpretation of the programmatic
statement at 1.22 is that Thucydides claims only to capture the “general gist” of
what was actually said at the time, the equivalent of a thesis statement or sum-
mary. His interesting and unusual conclusion for the presence of so many long
speeches in the History is that they are there to perfect Thucydides’ intentional
rivalry with Homer, since speeches play a signifi cant role in the Iliad. As regards
the paired speeches in particular, there are those who take the speeches to
represent what Thucydides himself thought, in each pair, to be a correct and an
incorrect response to the situation; and those who take the speeches to show, in
the speech of the winning side, what the losing side overlooks or refuses to see,
acting out a kind of bad faith. But there are others, notably Connor, who fi nd in
the mechanism of the paired speeches something more complex that disallows
a clear verdict for one over the other.
- M. I. Finley, in the introduction to Rex Warner’s translation of the His-
tory of the Peloponnesian War (New York: Penguin Classics, 1972), 25. - See Paul Woodruff, On Justice, Power and Human Nature (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1993). - Indeed, the speeches through which these “sides” are related rarely
seem to convince those listening. Thucydides is careful to show that, most of-
ten, the decisions made after speeches urging a given action have already been
determined by the needs, desires, or fears of the actors. I am indebted on this
point and more broadly to Paul Woodruff, both from conversation and from his
paper “Eikos and Bad Faith in the Paired Speeches of Thucydides,” Proceedings
of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 10 (1994): 115–45. - Connor, Thucydides, 15. This is an apt observation with respect to Pla-
tonic dialogue as well. Thomas Szlezák in Reading Plato has likened the dia-
logues to a ladder that must eventually be discarded. - Connor, Thucydides, 17.
- The term safhv~ is commonly used to denote the plain, manifest, dis-
tinct reality. See Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. One fi nds it used
in this way in a number of the fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers. - Connor, Thucydides, emphasizes this aspect of the “Archaeology”; see
24ff. - Herodotus, The Histories, 1.171, 173; 3.12 2; 7.16 9 – 71.
- Thucydides expected his audience to be familiar with the growth of the