Review of Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens.pdf

7KXF\GLGHV3HULFOHVDQGWKH,GHDRI$WKHQVLQWKH3HORSRQQHVLDQ:DU E\0DUWKD7D\ORU UHYLHZ )UDQFHV3RZQDOO 0RXVHLRQ-RXUQDORIWKH&ODVVLFDO$VVRFLDWLRQRI&DQDGD9ROXPH1XPEHU /,9³6HULHV,,,SS 5HYLHZ 3XEOLVKHGE\8QLYHUVLW\RI7RURQWR3UHVV '2,PRX )RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH Access provided by The University of Alberta (14 Jul 2016 17:35 GMT) Book Reviews/ Comptes Rendus Andrew Faulkner Department of Classical Studies University of Waterloo afaulkne@uwaterloo.ca References Clausen, W. 1970. “Catullus and Callimachus.” HSCPh 74: 85–94. Skinner, M. 2003. Catullus in Verona: a Reading of the Elegiac Libellus, Poems 65– 116. Columbus. Martha Taylor. Thucydides, Pericles, and the Idea of Athens in the Peloponnesian War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 311. US $85.00. ISBN 9780521765930. In this interesting and original book, Taylor argues that Thucydides ofers an extensive critique of Pericles’ “radical redeinition” of the city of Athens, by which she means his vision of the city as divorced from its physical entity and re-conceptualized as the empire, dependent on its leet. As she demonstrates, the ability to redeine the city was crucial to Pericles’ war strategy and was continued by his successors, but ultimately and inexorably resulted in the disastrous campaign in Sicily and left the Athenians vulnerable to stasis. In other words, the Athenians’ willingness to abandon their real city, the very strategy that had saved them during the Persian Wars, ultimately contributed to their downfall in the Peloponnesian War. Taylor develops this central idea in ive chapters. In the irst, she elucidates more precisely Pericles’ radical redeinition of the city. As she argues, Thucydides prepares the reader for Pericles’ re-conceptualization of the city, which he does not articulate until the end of book one, through the presentation of the intangible factors that make a city great in the Archaeology, a city’s self-destruction through stasis in the Epidamnus episode, the emphasis upon the Athenians’ distinctive character and restless nature in the speeches given at the Spartan congress in 432, and the demonstration of this very nature in the Pentekontaetia. Taylor demonstrates that Pericles’ vision of the city is particularly radical because he recognizes no diference between the traditional homeland in Attica and any other Athenian possessions, and efectually goes far beyond the abandonment of the city in 480, which was a temporary emergency measure with the ultimate goal of restoring the physical city itself. Thucydides, however, undercuts Pericles’ vision of Athens as an immaterial entity severed from its physical territory by emphasizing the Athenians’ reluctance to leave their homes and, through subtle subversion in Pericles’ funeral oration and the plague 445 Book Reviews/ Comptes Rendus narrative, hinting at its self-delusional unreality and possible invitation to destruction. In the subsequent four chapters, Taylor shows how Pericles’ redeinition of the city does in fact result in disaster for the Athenians, as their singleminded devotion to the pursuit of a naval empire abroad (according to Pericles, the city’s “real” territory) leads to both civil strife and the inability to focus upon their own home territory. She argues that Pericles’ successors continued to follow his policy even after his death, motivating the Athenian attack on Melos (Chapter 2) and the disastrous Sicilian expedition (Chapter 3). In the end, however, as Taylor correctly observes, it was not the Sicilian expedition that brought the city to its knees, but stasis, which she deines as “violent disagreement about conlicting ideas of the city” (189). In Chapter 4, Taylor discusses how the shift to oligarchy in 411 can be viewed as another redeinition of the city, as the rejection of the democracy, the (by now) traditional form of government in Athens. Here, she demonstrates how Thucydides ofers a more nuanced view of the oligarchical “coup” of 411 than has previously been recognized, by hinting at how little resistance there actually was to the change of government and underlining the weakness of the Athenian attachment to democracy. In the inal chapter, Taylor turns to the Athenians on Samos, who spearhead the return to democracy. While many commentators have found the Athenian democrats on Samos sympathetic (perhaps inluenced by the modern idealization of democracy?), she convincingly argues that they too redeine the traditional city, this time by political ailiation, and their zealous political partisanship is potentially just as dangerous as Pericles’ belief that the true city was Athens’ overseas empire. As she concludes, Thucydides’ “narrative underscores the beneits of political compromise and implies that compromise and reconciliation are only possible for Athens around the image of the traditional city in Attica” (224). As will be evident from this short synopsis, Taylor follows recent approaches to Thucydides that emphasize the internal allusions, signiicant repetitions, narrative patterning, and overall coherence of the work; that is, he wrote primarily for a reading audience. Taylor’s desire, however, to mine the text for “hidden thoughts,” following Nietzsche (cited at 5 and 222), leads her, in some cases, to read perhaps too much meaning into Thucydides’ choice of words (a possibility which, it should be noted, she does acknowledge on p. 6). For example, taking as a point of departure Tim Rood’s (1999) argument that the verb “to go on board ship” (εἰσβαίνω) is a “catch-phrase” designed to recall the events of 480, Taylor comes to the conclusion that Thucydides’ application of the verb particularly to the Athenians and Corcyraean democrats is suggestive of stasis. While it is true that the word does occur sometimes in stasis narratives (3.80.1; 3.81.2; 8.96.3), Thucydides also uses it in numerous other contexts and (as Taylor concedes, 132n. 119) applies it 446 Book Reviews/ Comptes Rendus to the Syracusans as well (4.25.4). It is not clear (to me, at least) why it is necessary to read any extra signiicance into a verb used in military contexts with its normal meaning, particularly when applied to the main naval powers in the Peloponnesian War. Similarly, Taylor goes well beyond Lisa Kallet’s (2001: 175) suggestion that Thucydides’ mention of the four shields’ worth of silver collected from the six thousand Athenians captured by the Syracusans (7.82.3) is designed to highlight (by contrast with the extravagance at the start of the expedition) the destruction of the city’s inancial resources, by arguing that the image of the four shields heaped with silver makes an ironic illusion to the collection of allied tribute in Athens, and thereby serves as a symbolic tribute payment to the Syracusans, completing “the transformation of the Athenians underscored by Thucydides’ evocation of the Persian Wars in his account of the Sicilian campaign” (183). This indeed seems a lot to read into the of-hand mention of what really amounted to nothing more than war booty. Despite the occasional tendency to read more into the text than is necessarily warranted, Taylor ofers a salutary challenge to common but often uncritically held assumptions, such as Thucydides’ favourable treatment of Pericles or the Athenian democrats on Samos, and the terror and propaganda frequently thought to be pervasive in his account of the oligarchic “coup” of 411. A serious drawback to this book (in my view) is its lack of a formal conclusion, which would have been instrumental in drawing together its various interpretive strands and linking the (often very speciic) arguments to broader general themes. For example, it would have been interesting to see how Taylor situated her convincing arguments that Thucydides depicted the Athenians as the new Persians and that the seeds of their destruction were present at the beginning of their empire in terms of the very similar themes in Herodotus’ narrative. Nevertheless, this book represents a useful addition to the generally excellent recent scholarship on Thucydides, and any attempt to unravel the diicult narrative of this complex but rewarding author is welcome indeed. Frances Pownall Department of History and Classics University of Alberta frances.pownall@ualberta.ca References Kallet, L. 2001. Money and the Corrosion of Power in Thucydides: The Sicilian Expedition and its Aftermath. Berkeley. Rood, T. 1999. “Thucydides’ Persian Wars,” in C.S. Kraus (ed.), The Limits of Historiography: Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts. Leiden. 141–168. 447