“TO SAY WHAT IS MOST NECESSARY”part, the use of a broader antilogy than has been recognized, an op-
positional art importantly related to Platonic practice and the vividness
that practice also accomplishes.
In both authors, the vividness their works achieve is not primarily
the result of conventional dramatic techniques. Not all of Plato’s dia-
logues are expressed with the staging detail of the Phaedrus or the Sym-
posium. Thucydides himself warns his readers at 1.22 that they will be
disappointed if they expect dramatic storytelling (muqwvdh~) from him.
The vividness in both authors results primarily from the way their ex-
positional strategies draw readers into a process of carefully balancing
opposed accounts, but not merely those accounts explicitly formulated
as opposing. This process makes of the reader a peculiar kind of wit-
ness. The reader is invited to inhabit each alternative account to see the
world from its perspective, but is hindered from selecting one explana-
tion over another by a careful balancing of the compelling force of each
account. The dissonance created by this strategy plagues the reader as
she inhabits each account in turn such that, even while grasping the
manner in which each in turn serves to explain and make sense of the
world, she is called back into the balancing and is reengaged with the
complexities that prevent any one account from being suffi cient and
complete. Socrates frequently cautions his audience explicitly in this
regard: one must continually investigate the matter and previous agree-
ments, lest one unwittingly fall into the error of believing oneself to
know something one does not.
In this essay I build upon the foundation provided by scholars
of Thucydides by focusing on the anticipation of Athenian victory in
book 1 as an example of antilogy beyond the paired speeches, in which
speech and narrative account taken together “speak on both sides of
the argument” in ways that echo the pedagogical and epistemic trajec-
tories of the Platonic dialogues.^7 In book 1 of the History, as in Platonic
dialogue, there are many voices at work, each presenting an opinion or
perspective, at times dogmatically, that other voices take up and render
problematic. In both authors, the interplay of voices, balanced against
each other, brings the reader to a sharp crisis of judgment where new
understanding of the matter in question can begin. In both, some of the
most important voices are not explicitly present. They are the ejndovxa, to
borrow a term from Aristotle: what people say or think about the matter,
the biases and prejudices of the reader. My reading involves thinking
through a particular tension not explicitly voiced, as so often is the case
in Plato, around which almost all of the explicit elements of book 1 can
be seen to revolve.