Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: Political Rhetoric in Book I: Truth or Action?
For Plato especially, dialogue contra the Sophists, became not about deliberation to make a decision (his dialogues often frustratingly have no closure in that respect) , but as a mode of self-reflection in the pursuit of knowledge and truth. With the exception of Reagan’s speech, the other speeches that we remember as a part of our political or personal life, those that resonate still, are not speeches that necessarily are aimed at action – except indirectly. They are speeches that ask us to reflect on our sense of self (both individual and communal), that ask us to think about who we are and we want to be, very often in moral terms. Most of these timeless speeches (judgement reserved for Michelle Obama as it is too soon) still have resonance because they connect to some aspect of the human condition, to our political life both in this moment and across time and are aspirational in some way. They ask or challenge us to look beyond the current moment and decision/action cycle to something else – to truth and knowledge.
As we continue through Thucydides, I ask you to watch for this dynamic in the speeches. What is the intent and effect of the speeches?
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zen:
October 22nd, 2016 at 2:45 am
You have tested my memory with this one as my reading of Aristotle and some of Plato was quite some time ago. That said, there is much here that is contextually very important to understanding the politics of the events Thucydides described.
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Pericles was not a sophist but he had constructed a regime with an ethos – a democratic regime that uplifted and celebrated the demos, a democratic regime with an aristocratic-heroic face as it were. Thetes with collective arête might be a way to describe it. It was a political ideology that was carved into the marble reliefs that decorated the Parthenon for all with eyes to see and one that rejected oligarchy, the old domineering aristocracy of the Aeropaegi and tyranny alike. The political message could hardly have been lost on Sparta or Sparta’s upper class Athenian sympathizers and it was directly tied to Pericles military strategy. In persuading the Athenians to eschew the traditional phalanx battle with Sparta in favor of a naval strategy, he was severely diminishing the political and military importance of the middle and upper class dominated hoplites in favor of the fleets dominated by the thetes at the oar bench.
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If democratic -thete -naval Athens bested oligarchic-hoplite Sparta, what political message would that say to the Hellenic world?
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Rhetoric indeed mattered.
Neville Morley:
October 24th, 2016 at 9:57 am
Really interesting and important point, that could be pushed further; the modern tendency to understand speeches as self-reflective is echoed in modern readings of Thucydides’ speeches that understand them as revealing his own ideas or theories and/or the state of mind of the people to whom they’re addressed – which may be true, and useful, but isn’t the whole story.
I also wonder about the modern tendency to regard all (or almost all) rhetoric with suspicion, as attempted manipulation (again, a very Platonic attitude). Of course all rhetoric is an attempt at persuasion, but we tend to give a few speeches a free pass (Gettysburg Address, for example) as simply reflecting truth (whereas, like Pericles’ Funeral Oration, it could equally be seen as manipulative) while rejecting anything else that looks too rhetorical. Other than the Platonic school, is there a case that the Greeks were more willing to recognise rhetoric and yet accept that it has a necessary place in processes of deliberation?