Plato then has a new character break into the conversation and present
a logos that engages Socrates and Diotima, as well as all the other speakers, in
a stunning disquisition on opposition itself, and which offers Socrates as the
quintessential “in-between” character who combines in himself almost all the
extremes opposed to each other throughout the dialogue.
Along these lines, Connor, Thucydides, 233, has this comment to offer:
We can even suspect that Thucydides was sometimes inviting challenge and
reassessment, a historical rereading of his text in which details and reactions
postponed or minimized in his narrative are given a second look and then
seen in a new relationship, with a new weighting. Certainly he knew that
his treatment of almost every major fi gure, Pericles, Cleon, Demosthenes,
Nicias, Alcibiades, would in his own day be controversial and would cut
against conventional wisdom and judgments. His is sometimes a revisionist,
often a polemical work, designed to provoke rather than suppress dissent.
Ironically, in the same passage Thucydides also claims that the truth
of what happened in the past beyond immediate recall is impossible, or at least
very diffi cult, to determine.
Aristotle, Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, 9.1. See also Plant, “Infl uence of Fo-
rensic Oratory,” 67– 71.
