We've paused for a little bit and I've called our headlong chronological rush.

But now we're going to go back into the events of the 5th century as they

unfolded. And as you'll see the pace picks up quite

a bit. When we talked about the so called

mid-century synthesis, that theory that was proposed by the editors of the

Athenian Tribute Lists. We saw how they combined evidence and

conjecture to come up with a sort of explanation for what might have happened,

what they think did happen at the midpoint of the century.

We're going to talk now very quickly about three things that we know to have

happened. First, in 451, presumably under the

sponsorship of Pericles, the Athenians tightened their citizenship requirements.

Up to this point it was enough for a young man to have a citizen father.

But from now on he had to have both a citizen father and a mother who was the

daughter of a citizen. Who carried, so to speak, the citizenship

gene. Why did this happen?

We're not sure, but it certainly was restriction.

It may have been because Athens was so prosperous that a lot of foreigners were

coming in. And were wanting to intermarry, something

like that. We're not quite sure, as I say.

But what it does mean is that the number of full Athenian citizens stays stable and

then, as the war begins and casualties mount, the number of Athenians drops.

Secondly, we know that in 445 the Athenians and the Spartans signed a 30

years peace. This is significant.

They have been at war in the so called first Peloponnesian war since about 460,

so about 15 years worth, and now with this peace.

It acknowledges Athens right to control her allies, and Sparta's right to dominate

the in the Peloponnese. What we're seeing here is what an older

scholar has called the politics of bipolarity.

That is Athens and Sparta now marked out as the two hegemonic states, very

different in ideology and in social practice.

And one always has to be very careful about notions of inevitability.

It's easy to think of something as inevitable if you look back at it after a

span of some time, say two and a half millennia.

But it is certainly the case that Athens and Sparta seemed to be heading toward

some kind of collision again. Although for the time being it is put off.

Then, as well, in 4421, the Athenians side with the Ionian polis of Myelitis.

In a quarrel that the Milesians were having with the island of Semos.

Both of these communities were tribute paying members of the Athenian

Confederacy. But the Athenians sided with Myelitis,

they sent a fairly large fleet of some 60 ships commanded by Pericles.

And the Semians were encircled, defeated, but the penalty that they suffered was

relatively mild. They were one of the last states that was

continuing to contribute ships annually instead of money.

That they had to change their contribution to cash thereby reducing their autonomy

significantly, they had to pay back the cost of the war, etcetera.

What's noteworthy about this is that there was one other allied state.

Who seems to have joined in the revolt, and that was Byzantium.

But there was no sort of general upheaval among the Allies, even when a state as

large as import, and as important as Semos rebelled.

So, at least for the time being, the allies weren't too restive, they were

perhaps accepting of Athenian domination. Our source for the history of this period

is the great Thucydides, we know a little bit about his biography.

He tells us a bit, we guess that he was born in around 460.

He was probably related to another Thucydides, the so called Thucydides the

son of Melesius or Melesias, sorry, who was the leader of a kind of moderate

opposition to Pericles and who was, thanks to Pericles ostracized in 443.

Nonetheless, Thucydides came from a very well to do family.

His father's name, we know, is Oloros. He tells us that he caught, and obviously

survived, the plague of Athens, which we will talk about soon, in 4298.

We know that he was a general in the north Agean.

In 424, he commanded troops in an area around the polis of Amphipolis, presumably

because his family had gold mining interests in the region.

He was defeated by the brilliant Spartan general Brasidas in a confrontation there.

And was sentenced to exile for 20-years which he says gave him the opportunity to

travel a great deal and to get information from the other side.

He returned to Athens after having worked on his history and he seems to have died

around the year 400. This is what we know as little enough,

what we know about his background. His personal background, his

autobiography. But what I'd like to talk about with you

for a little bit is the intellectual background, which is so important for him.

The influences that we can discern in his magnificent history of the Peloponnesian

war. One of them is sophistic thought.

For us, at least in English, Sophist has a very negative connotation.

It means someone who is tricky, logic chopping, sort of deceitful.

But initially, the Sophists were traveling teachers of rhetoric.

They were very important as questioning certain received ideas but also, as I say,

as professional teachers. Greek education was conducted on a family

basis. There's no such thing that we would think

of as state supported schools, and these teachers came in, Protagoras came from

Abdera in Thrace. Somewhere up in the north, and came to

Athens probably mid-century around 450. And that Protagoras famously said, that

man is the measure of all things, because one of the bases of sophistic thought was

a thoroughgoing relativism. And we can see here, I'll explain this in

a minute, but we can see here the importance again of persuasion, of the

ability to speak in such a way as to convince large numbers of people that your

opinion is correct. A later Sophist was Gorgias, from Sicily,

a town, polis called Leontina came to Athens in the 420s, and did a dazzling

display. We're told that on one day he gave a

powerful speech on one side of an issue. And on the following day gave an equally

powerful speech refuting what he had said the day before.

So this is likely to make traditionalist very uneasy.

The, the Sophist investigated in a very serious way certain common places certain

pairs that are called Antitheses. Among the most important of them are Nomos

and Physis, that is law and human nature. We've seen how Herodotus is very

interested in the different customs, the different nomoi of different cultures in

societies that he encounters. For the Sophists, law is not something

that is divinely handed down but instead is a convention.

And it is a convention agreed on in a community that controls a human nature

that is thought to be fundamentally self-seeking.

And at base violent, we'll see this working itself out as well.

They were also very interested in the connection between speech and action,

Logos and Ergon, how speech can be used to influence action.

And how some sort of correct argument or at least persuasive argument can be used

to draw people into behaving the way that you would like them to.

And the other great sophistic antithesis is between justice and advantage, or

expediency. Again, there is no, the sophists reject

the idea of some sort of transcendent justice, just as there is no transcendent

law. Instead it's a sort of case by case

instance where you make the best case you can.

The sophists can, or sophistic thought can lead to a kind of nihilism.

A notion that might makes right. But it's also a very, very serious

investigation of the relation between thought and action.

Between individual speech and persuasion. And we'll see that Thucydides himself

addresses this as part of this method. Another important element in Thucydides

is, or influencing Thucydides, is that of Hippocratic medicine.

There are a number of writings that have been collected under the name of

Hippocraties. He was a real doctor.

He was a physician. But the principles of Hippocratic medicine

are scientific and rational. That is to say it depends on empirical

observation, comparison, diagnosis and then prediction or prescription.

This is not, as at the beginning of the Iliad, the God Apollo coming down and

raining plague. This is rationalist and humanistic and it

is also based on the idea that health within a body depends on balance of

opposite forces. Say hot and cold, moist and dry, and that

illness comes when these forces go out of balance.

Hippocratic medicine is a very important intellectual leap, again you can see how

things are picking up, how fast things are going.

And then another great influence on Thucydides is Athenian tragedy where 2

antagonists come together in a climactic contest that perhaps only one of them can

win. Or perhaps both of them will lose.

But for Thucydides the Athenian, these are all influences in the way that he sees

history. The other great influence, unmistakably,

is, of course, Herodotus. I'm showing you here a picture of a

wonderful double headed bust. With Herodotus on the left and Thucydides

on the right, and they really are quite joined.

But Thucydides distinguishes himself. He's now writing in a tradition, which

Herodotus was not. Herodotus, as we said, was sort of the

first to try to undertake this massive, complex narrative.

And Thucydides has Herodotus before him. A contemporary literary scholar has talked

about the anxiety of influence where one writer will be writing against a great

predecessor. And we can certainly see that in

Thucydides. So that, for example, he says that his

history is contemporary whereas Herodotus was looking back.

His history, according to Thucydides, will not have those elements of the mythic, or

the romantic that might make for a pleasant read, and they most certainly

don't. Thucydides history is monographic, that is

his, he concentrates on the war between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her

allies. As opposed to Herodotus' much more

expansive understanding of how cultures interact.

As a result, Thucydides history doesn't have room for things that we find in

Herodotus. Notably religion or women or cultural

practices, except to the extent that they somehow influence the war, and that is to

say almost never. Moreover, Thucydides claims for himself a

special kind of accuracy. He's much more self-conscious about

method, or at least expressive of his method, than Herodotus had been.

He distinguishes, for example, between ostensible and superficial causes and the

underlying cause. He also talks very precisely about his own

reporting methods about the difference between his account of events where he

says you can't just accept the first eye witness account because everybody has a

different view. And he says he had to talk with numbers of

different participants to try to get a sense of what actually happened.

And then the speeches which he says will stay as closely as possible to what was

actually said given the circumstances and the character of the speaker.

And here you can see that sophistic influence that passion to understand the

relation between speech and action. Moreover, Thucydides is objective, or so

it seems. We've seen how Herodotus keeps popping up

in his own narrative. Thucydides almost never does, and in one

of the great climatic episodes in his own life when he is defeated by Brasidas up

north, he talks about himself in the third person.

Thucydides the Athenian. So with Thucydides the Athenian, we have

another great history. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote up the war

of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians as they fought against each other.

He began to write as soon as the war was afoot, with the expectation that it would

turn out to be a great one. And that more than all earlier wars, take

that Herodotus, this one would deserve to be recorded.

He made this prediction because both side were at their peak in every sort of

preparation for war. And also because he saw the rest of the

Greek world taking one side or the other, some right away, others planning to do so.

There you have Thucydides announcement, it's identification of himself of course,

by Paolus, as an Athenian. And setting out the scope of his own

undertaking. What Thucydides then we enter the fray.

We're going to see for the next lectures, what happens as the Athenians and their

allies, and the Spartans and the, their allies begin the war against one another.

"Thucydides the Athenian Wrote the War"

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