Thucydides Roundtable, Addendum: Cleon Revisited
Juries in Athens were made up of at least a hundred and one dikastai, chosen by lot from volunteers who had to be Athenian citizens over thirty years old. The speaker had to try to persuade the majority of these jurors to vote in his favour, whether because of the strength of his case or by appealing to their sentiments. Certainly he would not want to alienate too many people by expressing unpopular views; Mantitheus must therefore have assumed that his description of Cleon as a famous Athenian leader would be accepted by many among his audience. Yet such a positive assessment is likely to come as a surprise to most students of Athenian history, especially those familiar with Thucydides’ account of the part played by Cleon in the course of the PeloponnesianWar.
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Koit Rikson:
November 4th, 2016 at 1:50 pm
It is a fair point, but one should keep in mind that our point of view is likely to differ radically from the Athenians’. As ‘blood-thirsty’ as Cleon was (or was portrayed to be), he still brought about one of the greater Athenian victories of the war, and I would argue, would therefore be remembered positively, especially as he died for Athens fighting one of the most notable [Spartan] enemies it faced.
T. Greer:
November 5th, 2016 at 3:51 pm
Morely’s article si great.
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The Zuckerberg article he references at the beginning, in contrast, is possibly the most vomit-inducing thing I have had the misfortune to read in months.
Graham:
November 7th, 2016 at 5:04 pm
I just read that Zuckerberg piece. That took a lot of effort to unpack at times.
I was most struck by a couple of noteworthy tangents- one being her reference to Alcibiades and the Sicilian expedition. Alcibiades lives most strongly in my head in Steven Pressfield’s characterization, so I guess my impression needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, with that in mind I think it a partial insult to Alcibiades to implicitly compare Trump to him. I mean, I do see it, but Alcibiades was so much more impressive a man. On the other hand, I wonder how useful Sicily is to understanding Trump’s significance. Of the two major candidates, is Trump really the more likely to put America into the 21st century equivalent of the Sicilian expedition?
Perhaps Trump is the more likely to clumsily stumble into it, but Clinton the more likely to do it on purpose.
That and the throwaway inclusion of a link to Black Athena with the suggestion this proposition remains debatable. Is that rubbish still alive on campus? I remember that from my day. I thought by now we had a rough idea that Egyptians were probably a mix of returning West Eurasian diaspora with elements of the northern, ‘Libyan’ fringe of Berbers and ancestors of, perhaps, some of the current East African peoples. Or something along those lines. I’m largely relying on Razib Khan to report breaking news on these matters.
By the time I reached the end it had dissolved into that progressive jargon that tends to obfuscate meaning and I couldn’t really see how her recommended approach to classical analogy differed all that much, save from the clickbait model.