PHIL HOPKINSDo Plato’s characters argue against positions he himself fi nds cogent
or support positions Plato fi nds problematic? Are these tensions meant
to engage the reader in an inquiry that may lead to conclusions not
explicitly provided in the dramatic conversations he depicts? For that
matter, is what Plato’s characters say most important, or their process
of inquiry?^1
Wherever one stands with respect to these interpretive questions,
it is worth noting that they almost perfectly mirror the questions that
historians and classicists ask about Thucydides’ History.^2 Comparative
readings of these two authors should therefore illuminate these meth-
odological inquiries in both. This essay hopes to prompt fuller com-
parative readings by turning to the expositional and historiographical
practices of Plato’s near contemporary, the author of one of the most
important literary productions of the fi fth century.
When one asks about the causes of events, or the nature of human
motivations and fears, or the nature of justice and the best practices for
the soul, one fi nds oneself in the predicament Socrates formulates in the
Meno (86e) and Thucydides advances (1.20– 23) as the problem of his-
tory generally: that one must inquire into matters the natures of which
are not yet or fully known, but that stand as a goal for understanding
nonetheless. Thucydides and Plato not only recognized this problem;
both of them developed expositional strategies aimed at overcoming it,
in which the reader is not merely a passive recipient of propositions or
narrative depictions, but an agent in constructing and completing the
texts’ historical, moral, metaphysical, and epistemological insights.
Protagoras claims that “on every subject there are two logoi op-
posed to one another.”^3 Plato echoes this claim in the Phaedrus where
Socrates concludes: “We can therefore fi nd the practice of speaking on
opposite sides not only in the law courts and in the Assembly. Rather,
it seems that one single art... governs all speaking” (Phaedrus 261e).^4
The practice of antilogy, of “speaking on opposite sides,” is powerfully
employed in Thucydides and thoroughly investigated in the scholarship
on him.^5 I will juxtapose that practice against another famous aspect of
Thucydides’ text: its vividness. Plutarch voices the general consensus:
“In his writing, [Thucydides] is constantly striving for this vividness,
wanting to turn his readers into spectators, as it were, and to reproduce
in their minds the feelings of shock and disorientation which were ex-
perienced by those who actually viewed the events.”^6 I bring these two
aspects of Thucydides into closer relation and offer them as bearing, in
a general way, on the question of Plato’s expositional practices. I suggest
that the “vividness” that many fi nd at work in Thucydides involves, in