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Some Habits of Thucydides when introducing Persons1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2013

G.T. Griffith
G.T. Griffith
Affiliation:
Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
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Extract

Altogether in his History Thucydides finds occasion to mention about 530 persons, of whom 496 are men, twenty-two are heroes, seven are gods and six are women. Most of these people are never introduced or described in any way, so that the mere presence of an introductory phrase or description in itself may be thought to have some significance. Especially, Thucydides is notoriously reticent about the private and personal affairs of his public characters; so that any exceptions to that rule ought to be interesting. Especially interesting, as I see it, is anything that he may see fit to tell us, that he evidently judges to be something we need to know about a man before he makes his first appearance, or before he begins the particular course of action that is just about to be described. That is the point of using the phrase ‘when introducing persons’ in the title of this paper.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society (Second Series) , Volume 7 , 1961 , pp. 21 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s). Published online by Cambridge University Press 1961

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References

page 21 note 2 I, 109.

page 21 note 3 I, 129, 1; II, 67, 1; I, 115, 4; VIII, 6, 1.

page 21 note 4 Excluding Book VIII and 1, 89–117, I find thirty-eight Athenian generals mentioned with P., as against sixteen named without P.

Contemporary inscriptions (e.g. records of payments from the Treasury of Athena) seem to show no regularity in this; the practice varying sometimes even in the same list of payments under the same year, e.g. I.G. I2, 302Google Scholar, ll. 17 f., 21 f. ( = Tod, G.H.I. no. 75). Votes of ostracism usually add P. but by no means always: see, in general, Hignett, , Hist. Ath. Const. p. 139Google Scholar.

page 22 note 1 II, 19, 1; 47, 2; 71, 1; III, 1, 1.

page 22 note 2 Thucydides himself comes to mind (also Sophocles). It is noteworthy that Thucydides adds P. to his own name only on the one occasion when he refers to himself in action as general (IV, 104, 4), and never on the fourteen occasions when he refers to himself as historian: at I, 1, 1 and V, 26, 1 he describes himself as , following Herodotus whether consciously or not (Hdt. 1, first words).

page 22 note 3 I, 100, 1.

page 22 note 4 Gomme, A. W., A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, commenting on II, 19Google Scholar, 1 (and 12, 1).

page 23 note 1 III, 41

page 23 note 2 III, 36, 6; IV, 21, 3.

page 23 note 3 P. is given, as well as to the great names mentioned often, occasionally to a name known for a single exploit or operation but that a notable one: such are Eurymachus of Thebes who commanded the force that broke into Plataea (II, 2, 3), Ammeas of Plataea who led the break-out by night (III, 22, 3), and the Spartan Epitadas who commanded the force on Sphacteria (IV, 8, 9).

page 23 note 4 VIII, 6, 1 (Kalligeitos and Timagoras); II, 102, 1; III, 103, 3; VIII, 38, 3.

page 24 note 1 See also below, pp. 31 ff.

page 24 note 2 III, 89, 1; IV, 2, 1; V, 54, 1; 57, 1; 83, 1; VII, 19, 1 (Agis): V, 43, 2; 52, 2; VI, 8, 2; 15, 2 (Alcibiades).

page 24 note 3 IV, 58; VI, 32, 3; 72, 2.

page 25 note 1 VIII, 65, 2. The Syracusan demagogue Athenagoras likewise fails to qualify for P. though he makes an important speech at VI, 35, 2ff., and is ‘introduced’ as .

page 25 note 2 VIII, 15, 1 (Strombichides, ); 74, 1 (Chaireas); 89, 2 (Aristocrates).

page 25 note 3 VIII, 5, 1 (Alkamenes: his father was Sthenelaidas); 28, 5 (Pedaritos); 39, 2 (Lichas).

page 25 note 4 VIII, 6, 1 (Pharnabazus, Cyzicene and Megarian); 35, 1 (Diagoras, Thurian, the senior, presumably, of the three commanders of the Thurian squadron).

page 25 note 5 Lichas son of Arkesilaos (VIII, 39, 2; cf. v, 50, 4; 76, 3): I hope to publish a note about him elsewhere.

page 25 note 6 I, 85, 3. Thucydides mentions merely that he was one of the ephors then in office.

page 26 note 1 VIII, 56, 3. Perhaps I should qualify ‘rather rare’. Thucydides uses this phrase (or ) not infrequently when he is referring to things remote in time, or to conjectural matters which obviously he cannot know quite exactly: e.g. (remote) 1, 3, 2 and 3; 9,1; 10,4; 93,7; (conjectural) II, 17, 2; VII, 87, 5; VIII, 64, 5. But in writing about the motives of a contemporary individual this instance of is unique so far as I have found except for one other, also inspired by the behaviour of Tissaphernes on another occasion (VIII, 87, 4); unless one takes the participle used in describing Archidamus (I, 79, 2) and Brasidas (IV, 81, 1) to mean ‘seeming to me in my judgement now’, and not ‘seeming to their contemporaries and associates at the time in the past that this reference to them applies to’—the second being the meaning that syntactically ought to be given to these participles, since they appear in sentences where the main verbs arc in past tenses. (At II, 18,3 and V, 46,4 the ‘past’ significance is quite clear.) The famous of I, 22, 1 conveys the same notion of probable truth arrived at by the use of judgement, this time in a multiplicity of cases, as is conveyed at VIII, 56, 3 and 87, 4 for the single case of Tissaphernes.

A variant is used also of events of the remote past (I, 24, 4; 132, 5, cf. 134, 1; 138,4 ; II, 102, 5; VI, 2, 1), but sometimes too of events of ‘the War’ (I, 118, 3; II, 18, 5; 20, 1; III, 79, 3; IV, 104, 2; VII, 86, 4 and VIII, 50, 3 ; VIII, 87, 2). It is natural to think that Thucydides did not regard these ‘accounts’ as establishing the truth (at VIII, 87, 2 this is self-evident), whereas means that he thinks he has arrived at the probable truth. Yet at II, 20, 5 he seems to accept the ‘account’ () of ibid. 20, 1 as established. See further, in general, Pearson, L., T.A.Ph.A. LXXVIII (1941), 37–60Google Scholar, ‘Thucydides as reporter and critic’.

page 26 note 2 II, 29,1.

page 26 note 3 VII, 39, 2.

page 27 note 1 VIII, 73, 5.

page 27 note 2 I, 60, 2; VI, 35, 2.

page 27 note 3 VIII, 73, 3 (Hyperbolus); 65, 2 (Androcles); 68, 1 (Peisander); 73, 4ff. (Thrasylus, Leon, Diomedon); 90, 1 (Aristarchus).

page 27 note 4 I, 79, 2 (Archidamus); 127, 3 and 139, 4 (Pericles); IV, 81, 1 (Brasidas); V, 16, 1 (Nicias).

page 27 note 5 See L. Pearson, art. cit. at note 1, p. 26, n. 1.

page 28 note 1 VIII, 68, 1f.

page 28 note 2 V, 43, 2; VI, 15, 2f. (cf. 16, 1 f.).

page 28 note 3 See, most recently, Woodhead, A. G., Mnemosyne (1960), pp. 289–317Google Scholar, ‘Thucydides' portrait of Cleon’.

page 28 note 4 V, 43, 2; VI, 15, 2 f.

page 28 note 5 See below, and n. 7.

page 28 note 6 III, 36, 6—

IV, 21, 3—. It is significant perhaps that occurs here too, in the very next sentence.

page 28 note 7 I, 127, 3; 139, 4.

page 29 note 1 This impression is reinforced by the other instances of in the History, at I, 92, 1; 95; 7; IV, 12, 3; 21,3, where this meaning is quite plain: at VIII, 86, 5 occurs with a different sense, equivalent to or something like it.

page 29 note 2 IV, 81, 1 ff.

page 30 note 1

The awkwardness is the aorist participle , aorist being the right tense for it in relation to the time when Thucydides wrote it, after the Sicilian expedition (?); but the wrong tense for it in relation to the time to which the main verb refers: in relation to , ought to be not aorist but future. This difficulty has always been noticed (see e.g. Gomme, op. cit., ad. loc.), but it has never been thought very serious (nor is it serious, I am sure): it is explained as a loose participial construction which is made here to do the work of a finite verb, and parallels for it are produced without difficulty. I would think, though, that a possible reason for it here is that an original or earlier version may have contained merely the very short introductory remark about Brasidas and nothing else—namely, merely then at some time late in the war Thucydides saw the value of commenting on Brasidas' value to Sparta even after his death, and he added the rest of chapter 81, making the join by introducing the ‘at home and abroad’ antithesis, inserting and continuing the participial construction of , putting in the tense natural to him then, writing after 413.

page 32 note 1 See above, pp. 24 f.

page 32 note 2 Cratippus F. 1 (F. Jacoby, F. Gr. Hist. no. 64), ap. Hal, Dion.. de Thuc. 16Google Scholar. Personally I take Cratippus to be a younger contemporary of Thucydides, and not a late-Hellenistic practical joker.

page 32 note 3 See p. 28.

page 33 note 1 VIII, 12, 2; 45, 1.

page 33 note 2 Addendum on patronymics: The accepted view, deriving from Körte, A., Ath. Mitth. 47 (1922), p. 6Google Scholar, that P. belonged properly to , is in no way impaired by Thucydides' practice. Herodotus too, on a cursory inspection, seems to me to conform. Xenophon in Anabasis uses P. very rarely, ethnic habitually. In Hellenica, of the 17 occurrences of P. that I have noticed, 8 are in Bk 1, and 4 in II; 9 of the 17 names are of Athenians (Callias is duplicated), 4 of them seem to owe their P. as much to moral as to social worth (one is Socrates). Of 7 Athenian ambassadors at VI, 3, 2, the first 3 get P., the other 4 not, yet Demostratos' (P.—son of Aristophon) claim to be seems doubtful, whereas Melanopos' claim (son of Laches, but no P. here) is clear. Xenophon may have favoured with P. some of his own friends (e.g. Socrates, Callias).

‘Kleon the son of Kleainetos’ and ‘Socrates the son of Sophroniskos’ are perhaps acts of nomenclature more deliberately striking than we immediately realize.