Thucydides Flashcards
Thucydides and Rationality
- people are likely to accept the first story they hear and accept the broad facts over researching thoroughly
- BUT its safe to accept his broad facts, because he has done the research for you
- thinks lowly of poets and the epic tales and the truth within them
Thucydides and Speeches
-“Of the various speeches made either when war was imminent or in the course of the war itself, it has been hard to reproduce the exact words used either when I heard them myself or when they were reported from other sources. My method in this book has been to make each speaker say broadly what I supposed would have been needed on any given occasion, while keeping as closely as I could to the overall intent of what was actually said. In recording the events of the war my principle has been not to rely on casual information or my own suppositions, but to apply the greatest possible rigour in pursuing every detail both of what I saw myself and what I heard from others. It was laborious research, as eyewitnesses on each occasion would give different accounts of the same event, depending on their individual loyalties of memories. It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear: but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those who will want to have a clear understanding of what – and, such is the human condition, will happen again at some time in the same or a similar pattern. It was composed as a permanent legacy, not a showpiece for a single hearing.”
Rulers and Tyranny
- “The empire you possess is by now like a tyranny- perhaps wrong to acquire it, but certainly dangerous to let it go.”
- “What was happening was democracy in name, but in fact the domination of the leading man.”
- “You do not reflect that your empire is a tyranny, exercised over unwilling subjects who will conspire against you. Their obedience is not won by concessions, made to your own detriment, but by a domination based in force rather than popularity.”
- “We believe it of the gods, and know it for sure of men, that under some permanent compulsion of nature wherever they can rule, they will. We did not make this law; it was already laid down, and we are not the first to follow it; we inherited it as a fact, and we shall pass it on as a fact to remain true forever; and we will follow it in the knowledge that you and anyone else given the same power as us would do the same.”
- “The reason for this was that Pericles, because of his position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he who lef them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering them: in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw they were going too far in a moon of over-confidence, he would bring back to them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen.”