3 - Hellenic states redefine the community of Hellas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
It is a banal fact that political leaders of nations fighting wars habitually demonize the enemy in speeches and propaganda in order to strengthen the will and sense of purpose of their armies and civilian populations. In Thucydides' History, the political and military leaders who are made to address the necessities of their war use language which isolates and alienates the enemy and confirms the legitimacy and certain boundaries of their state or group which must be defended. Yet enmities in this Hellenic war had particular consequences which Thucydides brought to the surface in the text of speech and narrative. Hellenic speakers who strive to demonize and conceptually alienate other Hellenes are not reinforcing existing conceptual borders but making new ones; they are not sharpening the definition of the Other but creating one. When Thucydides' speakers affirm, as they frequently do, the existence of natural separations in the Hellenic world, they have found the necessary rhetoric for justifying the war; yet these formulae are not comfortable incantations of accepted truths but new, daring and – as Thucydides presents it – destructive redefinitions. Pious and confident assertions about fundamental differences in inherent natures and ethnic identities likewise represent an unusual and violent manner of expression, generated by the exigencies of the war.
The Peloponnesian and Athenian speeches reveal the same purpose of creating and isolating an enemy, but their strategies are so different as to require separate analysis.
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- Information
- Thucydides and Internal War , pp. 127 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001