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Vast Personal Forces: Thucydides, Populism, and the Liberty of the Ancients
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2023
Abstract
Modern discussions of freedom focus on negative liberty or nondomination. In his portrait of the Athenian democracy, Thucydides thematizes the psychology of ancient freedom. By focusing on the psychology of the demos, Thucydides shows how democratic imperialism unfolds from the experience of freedom as a kind of felt power. His analysis offers us a way to think about contemporary populism. In representative democracy, the connection between power and freedom has been severed by representation and the modern state, but an experience of power nonetheless remains part of what we mean by freedom today. Modern citizens frequently feel powerless and so unfree, ensnared by impersonal forces. One lure of populism is that it satisfies the longing for freedom as a form of felt power, for a measure of control over one's life.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame
References
1 Eliot, T. S., Notes toward the Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 88Google Scholar (emphasis in the original).
2 References to Thucydides are by book, chapter, and sentence. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own.
3 For Thucydides's account of the crowd or mob as well as a canvassing of the semantic terms, see Hunter, Virginia, “Thucydides and the Sociology of the Crowd,” Classical Journal 84, no. 1 (1988): 17–30Google Scholar; Hunter, “Thucydides, Gorgias, and Mass Psychology,” Hermes 114, no. 4 (1986): 412–29; and Saïd, Suzanne, “Thucydides and the Masses,” in Thucydides between History and Literature, ed. Tsakmakis, Antonis and Tamiolaki, Melina (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2103), 199–224Google Scholar.
4 Archē is the Greek term for the Athenian “empire.” It translates, literally, as a being first. The most recent treatment of freedom in the History is Nichols, Mary, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)Google Scholar, but it does not explore the cognitive links between freedom, power, and honor. The most important historical work is Raaflaub, Kurt, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, trans. Franciscono, Renate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)Google Scholar. This article offers a political psychological supplement to Raaflaub's historical treatment.
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16 The growth of the Athenian empire is a central Thucydidean theme, as even cursory readings of the prefatory Archaeology (1.1–23) and later Pentecontaetia (1.89–118) confirm. At 1.23.6, Thucydides ascribes the outbreak of war to Athenian power.
17 Galpin, Timothy J., “The Democratic Roots of Athenian Imperialism in the Fifth Century B.C.,” Classical Journal 79, no. 2 (1983–1984): 108Google Scholar.
18 For a comprehensive interpretation of this speech and the claim that it represents a Thucydidean introduction to the ideal typical characters of the Athenians and Spartans, see Jaffe, Thucydides on the Outbreak of War, 59–76. On Thucydides's uses of collectives—the Athenians, the Syracusans, etc.—see Maurice Pope, “Thucydides and Democracy,” Historia 37, no. 3 (1988): 277–82. Robert D. Luginbill, Thucydides on War and National Character (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999), 173–88, furnishes a useful meditation of the Syracusan tropos.
19 On the programmatic character of daring in the History, see Steven Forde, “Thucydides on the Causes of Athenian Imperialism,” 436–38; and Forde, The Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University press, 1989), 17–40.
20 See Herodotus's comment about how the establishment of the democracy at Athens remarkably unified the private and public interests of the Athenians. Herodotus, Histories, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5.78, 389.
21 Herodotus, Histories, 7.140–43, 515–17.
22 Forde, “Thucydides on the Causes of Athenian Imperialism,” 437.
23 On the arresting trope of the imperial/tyrant city, see Tuplin, Christopher, “Imperial Tyranny: Some Reflections on a Classical Greek Political Metaphor,” History of Political Thought 6, no. 1 (1985): 348–75Google Scholar; Hunter, Virginia, “Athens Tyrannis: A New Approach to Thucydides,” Classical Journal 69 (1973–1974): 120–26Google Scholar; for the demos as a domestic tyrant, see Lisa Kallet, “Demos Tyrannos: Wealth, Power, and Economic Patronage,” in Popular Tyranny: Sovereignty and Its Discontents in Ancient Greece, ed. Kathryn A. Morgan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 117–53.
24 Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 372e–374b.
25 On the Funeral Oration as a genre, see Loraux, Nicole, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Sheridan, Alan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Ziolkowski, John, Thucydides and the Tradition of Funeral Speeches at Athens (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1985)Google Scholar. On the didactic function of epideictic rhetoric, see Ryan Balot, “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Foundations of Politics,” Polis 30, no. 2 (2013): 274–304.
26 In the narrative prior to the Funeral Oration, the only mention of Athenian casualties occurs at 2.19.2 and 2.22.2. This does not mean that there were not more, merely that casualties are not emphasized, probably intentionally—for the dying of the plague follows hard upon this Periclean speech.
27 In Plato's Menexenus, Socrates offers a humorous comment revelatory of the effect of the Funeral Oration upon its Athenian hearers. “They even praise us, the living, such that I for my part, Menexenus, feel altogether elevated by their praises. Each time, as I listen and am charmed, I am altered, believing that I've become at that moment greater, more dignified, more beautiful.” Plato's “Menexenus” and Pericles’ Funeral Oration: Empire and the Ends of Politics, trans. Susan Collins and Devin Stauffer (Newburyport, MA: Hackett, 1999), 234b–c.
28 See Ober, Josiah, “The Original Meaning of ‘Democracy’: Capacity to Do Things, Not Majority Rule,” Constellations 15, no. 1 (2008): 3–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 A rejection of this view may be implied by Thucydides's reference to Marathon just before the Funeral Oration at 2.34.5, which hints that some praise is greater than others and some past honors worth more than present ones, precisely because the danger was greater or the cause nobler. (See also Pericles at 1.144.3.)
30 And yet if deeds are more important than speeches (and Thucydides's speech more important than that of his characters), the narrative itself has furnished the reader one Athenian exemplar from each of the generations praised: Theseus of the ancestors, who unified Attica (2.15.2); Themistocles of the fathers, who beat back the might of Persia (1.138.3); and Pericles of the present generation, who safeguarded and grew the city's power (2.65.5). Whereas the Thucydidean presentation highlights individual virtue, the Periclean one stresses common virtues.
31 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1252a1–6.
32 In contrast to the Funeral Oration, Pericles suggests in his final speech that necessity binds the Athenians to their empire, which it would be dangerous to abandon (2.63.2).
33 Clifford Orwin argues that the Funeral Oration portrays Athens and its empire as a freely chosen project, unextenuated by necessity. This is in contrast with the speech of the Athenian envoys at Sparta—to say nothing of Pericles's final speech—which claims that the establishment of the empire is the result of necessity, of fear, honor, and interest (cf. 1.75.3 and 1.76.2). Orwin, Clifford, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 15–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Raaflaub terms this absolute freedom and links it to Athenian power but explores the connection ideologically (Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, 181–93).
35 Given the speech's sophistication, especially its claims about psychology, commentators have plausibly suggested Diodotus may speak for Thucydides. See, for example, David Bolotin, “Thucydides,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 22; Orwin, Humanity of Thucydides, 162; de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 160; Stahl, H. P., Man's Place in History (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2002), 119Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 231Google Scholar.
36 Hermocrates makes a parallel point at 4.59.2.
37 Monoson, S. Sara, “Citizen as Erastes: Erotic Imagery and the Idea of Reciprocity in the Periclean Funeral Oration,” Political Theory 22, no. 2 (1994): 253–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the use of the metaphor suggests that the relationship between city and individual is strongly reciprocal.
38 See note 23 above.
39 The Greek is famously ambiguous as to whether Pericles is encouraging the Athenians to love the city or its power. On Periclean claims about Athenian power, compare 2.41.4 with 2.62.2 and 2.64.3. As Yunis astutely notes, “Thucydides has succeeded in creating an uncanny mixture of political instruction and mass persuasion”; also, “Pericles’ funeral oration represents formal epideictic rhetoric used for mass education in a marked political setting” (Taming Democracy, 81 and 82). My own emphasis is on the speech's courage-making purpose as it relates to this “marked political setting.”
40 The Acropolis furnishes visual reassurance in the face of fear. There is also a parallel between the spectacle of the Acropolis as a sign of Athenian power and the spectacular sight of the Athenian armada ready to sail for Sicily, which Thucydides describes as assuaging the people's fear (6.31.1). And yet, in the prefatory Archaeology, Thucydides stresses that one cannot—indeed should not—assess the power of a city by visual signs alone (cf. 1.10.2).
41 See Pericles's remark at 1.144.3 about the greatest glory arising from the greatest dangers. The references to erōs further corroborate this claim. On the level of the narrative itself the Funeral Oration brings all of the inhabitants of Athens together, citizen and foreigner alike, just as the launch of the later armada brings everyone down to the Piraeus (cf. 2.34 with 6.30).
42 Zacharias Rogkotis, “Thucydides and Herodotus: Aspects of their Intertextual Relationship,” in Brill's Companion to Thucydides, ed. A. Rengakos and A. Tsakmakis (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 57–86, explores the similarities between the Persian invasion of Greece as presented by Herodotus and the Athenian invasion of Sicily, partly by focusing on the repetition of the terms for Athenian desire. Connor, W. R., Thucydides (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 158–209Google Scholar, helpfully focuses on the mythical and tragic evocations. See also Kallet, Money and the Corrosion of Power, 85–120.
43 On the Sicilian expedition as a new beginning, see Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 300; H. R. Rawlings III, The Structure of Thucydides’ “History” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) offers the most ambitious claims about parallels between books 1 and 6.
44 When the Athenians form their original alliance with Corcyra, the location of the city along the coasting route to Italy and Sicily is mentioned by Thucydides as a motive for the alliance (1.44.3). Nicias also notes that the young Athenians are sick in their erotic desire (duserōtas) for the expedition (6.13.1)
45 Josiah Ober, “Thucydides on Athens’ Democratic Advantage in the Archidamian War,” in War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens, ed. David M. Pritchard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65–87.
46 De Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, 79–80.
47 For an innovative, new study exploring power as the representation of possibility, see Parietti, On the Concept of Power.
48 See, for example, the introduction by Mansfield and Winthrop to their translation of Democracy in America, where they write, “Americans suffer, consequently, from ‘individualism,’ a lamentable condition—which Tocqueville was the first to depict—in which democratic men and women are thrown on their own resources and consequently come to feel themselves overpowered by impersonal, external forces.” And later in the same introduction, “the self-isolation induced by the belief that an individual by himself can do nothing within a mass of people ruled by vast social forces.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xviii and xxxviii (emphasis mine).
49 See de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 482–84.
50 On associations, see ibid., 489–92; on the New England township, see 63–65.
51 On the importance of combined action in Tocqueville's republicanism with reference to our neo-Athenian theme, see Jech, Alexander, “What Has Athens to Do with Rome? Tocqueville and the New Republicanism,” American Political Thought 6, no. 4 (2017): 550–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 661–65.
53 For this formulation, see Canovan, Margaret, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47 (1999): 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Müller, Jan-Werner, What Is Populism? (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 101Google Scholar, also claims that populism “is the permanent shadow of representative politics.”
54 No one has argued more powerfully (or consistently) that ancient democracy can provide a model for modern democracy than Josiah Ober. For a recent attempt to look at the virtues of democracy as distinct from those of liberalism, see Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
55 For an exploration of the similarities and differences between Greek conceptions of the passions and our own with an emphasis on the cognitive, see Konstan, David, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.