Abstract

The attention that Thucydides gives to piety and religious matters in his work is not accidental or quirky, but is due to his concern with the challenge posed to the life of reason or human inquiry by the claims of the pious. Those claims implicitly or explicitly deny the very possibility of genuine knowledge by denying the existence of permanent intelligible necessities. Thucydides attempts to answer those claims without assuming beforehand--as modern political philosophy did--the possibility and desirability of the life of reason. Instead of attempting to refute the claims of the pious, he leads his readers along the ground common to the pious and those who live by reason. That ground proves to be justice. ;After describing in the first chapter the interest that we and Thucydides have in the claims of the pious about divine intervention in human affairs, and reviewing the leading, contemporary schools of interpretation of Thucydides, I turn in chapter two to Thucydides' presentation, in his archeology, of the problem posed by the pious or "poetic" understanding of our world. The third chapter examines the speeches of the Corcyreans and Corinthians before the outbreak of the war. Those speeches establish that inevitable tension that exists between justice, or devotion to the common good, and the compulsion to pursue our own interest. The fourth chapter examines the Spartans' inability to face this very tension, as disclosed in their stances on the question of the justice of the war. The fifth chapter examines the Athenian critique of justice in the name of compelling interest, and how the policies of Pericles both presume that critique and represent an attempt to move the Athenians away from their ancestral piety toward a more rational politics. The sixth chapter shows how Thucydides leads us, by means of the speeches and deeds of that "first war", to a satisfactory resolution of the tension between piety and knowledge. The seventh chapter addresses the contrary claim that, through the Melian dialogue and Sicilian expedition, and especially his sympathetic portrayal of the pious Nicias, Thucydides has written a new, prosaic kind of tragedy