“TO SAY WHAT IS MOST NECESSARY”happened, he could have related as much in briefer compass and more
direct fashion. Instead, he draws the reader toward this interpretation
despite the likelihood that the reader comes to the text thinking just
the opposite.
Both authors’ methods invite the reader to inhabit the perspec-
tives and prejudices of the participants—to “see” at fi rst hand the fear
of imperialism as the “true cause” of the hostilities or the perplexity
the interlocutors experience as they seek to understand the matter they
question. The reader of the History is invited to discover the conception
of power the participants in the confl ict perceived; and is invited to wit-
ness, as it were, the complex motivations bound up in those perceptions,
to live inside them and explore their impact. Thucydides makes it clear
that it was power as it existed not only in fact, but in the perceptions of
the participants, that was the power that compelled Sparta to war.
Such power is not readily apprehended in propositions concerning
either its nature or its component elements, any more than the nature
of justice or piety is apprehended in universal defi nitions. Thucydides
could have stated straightforwardly that Sparta and Corinth held certain
perceptions of Athens and her abilities, and that these induced them to
fear her power and imperialistic tendencies; but such an account would
fall far short of the kind of illuminating and compelling insight into the
war and into human nature that most commentators have depicted as
the remarkable power of Thucydides’ History, and which he states as its
aim. No amount of supporting detail or argument provided to augment
those straightforward propositions would suffi ce to accomplish the vivid-
ness which Plutarch remarks upon, let alone the value for the ages that
Thucydides promises.
Antilogical Insight
One might suggest that drama in general offers these benefi ts, and that
the similarities between Thucydides and Plato are similarities in dra-
matic style; but the dramatic similarities are limited, and much more
than drama connects these authors. The vividness of the History, as of
Plato’s dialogues, is primarily created by means of antilogy, accounts
opposed and presented as exclusive but which, when engaged carefully,
lead, like Platonic dialectic, beyond the antitheses of the original pair-
ing into deeper understanding. The paired speeches call on us to think
carefully about the details of the growth of Athenian power offered
by one side of the discussion and then refuted or reinterpreted by the