This article offers a new interpretation of the Athenian institution of ostracism and explores its significance for our understanding of democratic politics. A popular scholarly trend interprets ostracism as an instrument for pursuing conflict among aristocratic politicians, in accordance with a view of Athenian democracy as dominated by a restricted elite competing for power and prestige. This article aims to reassess this picture by investigating ostracism in the light of recent studies of honour, which have stressed honour's potential for balancing (...) competition and cooperation within communities. By using the ostracism of Themistocles as a case study, it argues that ostracism was a manifestation of an institutionalized concern for honour in Athenian democracy. On the one hand, ostracism could punish politically active citizens who, in excessively enhancing their own honour, failed to respect democratic equality. On the other, it could be employed for tackling shameful behaviour which placed the agent below the community's standards of honour. The article then sets ostracism against Athens’ broader institutional framework and argues that Athenian democracy was not so much concerned with policing intra-elite conflict as much as it was designed to foster a balance between competitive and cooperative values and ensure broad participation in the political domain. (shrink)

With the dawn of the day of the Battle of Salamis in ch. 83 of Book 8, Herodotus heightens the tone of his language. An unfortunate result of his more elaborately worked writing has been failure to understand his words, and hence much misplaced editorial intervention. In particular, the words at 8.83.1, προηγρενε εῢ Χοντα μν κ πντων Θεμιστοκλης, have regularly been mistranslated. Powell even wanted to rewrite the Greek here to read: γρευε μν πρó πντων Θεμιστοκλης . Few would (...) wish to follow such a drastic and arbitrary alteration of the transmitted text, but the conjectural emendation highlights the difficulty of understanding Herodotus' words at this point. (shrink)

This article focuses on the relationships between Themistocles and the lyric poets Simonides of Ceos and Timocreon of Rhodes in Plutarch's Life of Themistocles. It is argued that Plutarch expects the reader to connect explicit references to the poets and their works with stories located outside the narrative in the anecdotal biographic tradition. Through an implicit synkrisis with the protagonist, the poets' anecdotal personae create a narrative counterbalance that suggests a faultline in Themistocles' characterization that, in turn, (...) reflects the model of the "timocratic" man in Plato's Republic. (shrink)

The excursus of Thucydides on the last years of Pausanias and Themistocles is remarkable for its simple, rapid-flowing style, its storytelling tone, its wealth of personal ancedote, its marked deviation from his normally strict criteria of relevance. These characteristics, which give the excursus a Herodotean flavour, have often been noted by modern scholars, but until recently acceptance of its general credibility has been widespread, and indeed, with one important exception, which seems to have created very little impression almost unchallenged.

RÉSUMÉLe mot «migrants» n'existait pas dans la langue des Hellènes; ils étaient plus familiers avec le vocable de l'exil et de l'asile. D'ailleurs, l'exil ne saurait se penser sans son corollaire, l'asile, comme le citoyen antique sans le barbare et la démocratie sans la tyrannie. À travers une métaphore située au carrefour de la fiction historique, de la philosophie politique et de la psychanalyse, cet article propose une réflexion sur l'exil comme condition fondamentale du sujet. L'exil est d'origine, car la (...) langue de l'enfance, la langue dite maternelle est d'abord une langue étrangère. L'exil intime porte la marque d'une universalité qui fonde l'expérience subjective.ABSTRACTThe word ‘migrants’ did not exist in the language of the Hellenes; they were more familiar with the terms ‘exile’ and ‘political asylum.’ Indeed, exile cannot be thought of without its corollary, political asylum, as the Ancient citizen cannot be thought of without the barbarian, and democracy without tyranny. Through a metaphor located at the crossroads of historical fiction, political philosophy and psychoanalysis, this article offers a reflection on exile as a fundamental condition of the subject. Exile is originary because the language of childhood, the so-called mother tongue, is originally a foreign language. Intimate exile bears the mark of a universality that founds subjective experience. (shrink)

The “Themistoclean Wall” is a modern fiction. It corresponds neither to Thucydides’ text nor to the immediate post-war of the devastated city of Athens in the autumn of 479. The insertion of the remains of ruined buildings in the foundations of the new surrounding wall of the Acropolis is likely due to Cimon, who gave the sanctuary of Athena its definitive extension in the 460s.

There is a standard tradition in the ancient sources, which makes its first appearance at Thucydides 1.138.5, that, when Themistocles had fled into exile and been given the equivalent of political asylum by the Persian King Artaxerxes, he was ‘given’ the three Asiatic Greek cities of Magnesia, Myus and Lampsacus. There has been a fair amount of scholarly controversy over how the King could ‘give’ Themistocles Lampsacus, a city of great strategic importance on the Hellespont, which, by the (...) mid-460s, was almost certainly within the ambit of the Delian League, i.e. no longer his to give. My concern in this paper is not with that political problem, but rather with a different, though related, issue – whether valid conclusions can be drawn from the Thucydides passage and the subsequent tradition for the social and economic history of these three cities in the classical period. I suggest that they cannot. (shrink)

Ib. 8–16. ε δ&apos ον γ μν υγς… ο δ' χθρο ομο λαμπρο κα μέγα σχύοντες oi δ ταροι μες οὒτε ατΟθΙ οδαμο, δουλεία δ' ν τ μέσ παιδαρίων ρανν πολλν, λυναικν ρήμων τν μετέρων κα τ ς μ ς, γ ο ν έ ω ν [δ] κα πρεσβυτν κα πρεσβυτίδεν —ε τατα πάντα… καταλαμβάνοι κτ. ομο Hr: οχ ο P * οδαμο*: οδ' μο P τς μς, γονέων*: τν μν, νίων δ P.

Dr. Jameson's editio princeps of his major discovery at Troizen will long remain essential for the study of this document. The following jottings are largely footnotes to the rich material which he has collected. Their main preoccupation is linguistic, and I abstain from any attempt to fit the decree into its historical setting. The gap between 480 B.C. and our copy is so long that it is hardly to be expected that the authenticity of the decree will go unchallenged, and (...) this exploration of some points in the language may help towards a decision. (shrink)

The succeeding pages were destined, had matters gone otherwise, to form one section of a chapter devoted to the text of those deservedly neglected authors whom, after a mortal illness released Anton Westermann from the task, Rudolf Hercher marshalled between the two covers of the Didot Epistolographi. That chapter, in its turn, was to have been the last in a volume of Adversaria, and, if the truth is to be told, perhaps not the least important function of some of my (...) proposals was to supply a colourable pretext for dealing with passages of other writers whom I had not treated in the body of the book. (shrink)

The paper intends to study the possibility of evading the relativist dilemma: when you compare cultural forms belonging to different traditions, you either impose the result from outside, or you give up comparisons altogether as dependent on the arbiter’s parochial choices. In this paper one argues that, apart from this kind of comparison, which is called extrinsic, there is another type, called intrinsic, which is not dependent on arbiter’s choices. The essence of the intrinsic comparison is the role played by (...) the “second option” of the representatives of different traditions: it is decisive what these representatives prefer in the second place, when their first options have to be abandoned. Two old stories provide the historical paradigm of the intrinsic comparison: how Volga Khazarians are said to have converted to Judaism in the 8th century, and how the Athenian general Themistocles was voted the best general by the confederate Greek representatives. An example of contemporary intrinsic comparison between three contemporary trends – relativism, fundamentalism, rationalism – is also presented. Contrary to what Ernest Gellner believes, these trends are not incommensurable; rationalism takes precedence while being the second option of the other two trends, as soon as they want to enter a public debate. (shrink)

The study of bi- and multilingualism in the ancient Mediterranean has come into its own in recent decades. The evidence is far greater for the Hellenistic and Roman periods than the Classical, so naturally scholarly attention has focussed less on the earlier era. This has led to some enduring notions about bilingualism in the fifth centuryb.c.e.which are yet to be fully scrutinized, including the idea that a Greek's speaking another tongue was inherently transgressive. What did it mean for a Greek (...) to speak a second language? This article re-evaluates the evidence for individual bilingualism in Herodotus and Thucydides in their fifth-century context, focussed on our two best-documented examples of bilingual Greek individuals (Histiaeus of Miletus and Themistocles of Athens). Close reading of Herodotus and Thucydides suggests that not only does the notion of an inherently transgressive bilingualism hold little water for this period, but bilingualism may even be a sign ofμῆτις. (shrink)

The decree of Themistocles, discovered by M. H. Jameson and first published by him in 1960 has given rise to an intense debate centring on the question of the decree's authenticity. This debate has focused to an important extent on supposed archaisms or anachronisms in the text. If a word appears to be used in an ‘archaic’ manner, i.e., in this instance, one peculiar to the early fifth century, it may be an indication of the inscription's authenticity. Conversely, a (...) word employed in a manner proper to a later time may be an indication of the decree's actual period of origination. Thus an early and influential commentator, D. M. Lewis, argued for the decree's authenticity asserting: ‘I see no reason to suspect a forgery. There are too many traces of official and archaic language.’. (shrink)

Mister Freeze : Il est inscrit dans le marbre, sur le piédestal de cette statue de Thémistocle, et sur toutes ses copies dans les capitales du monde occidental, que ce général athénien est au point source de notre civilisation. Qu’en dites-vous chère amie ? Que c’est un culte de la personnalité immérité ? Miss Bazooka : Je laisse la critique idéologique pour un peu plus tard. La place des personnalités dans l’Histoire est un vieil enjeu, qu’on croyait disparu, qui réapparaît (...) sous les habits n.. (shrink)

Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic playwright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias — over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of ancestral, (...) divine law.While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers’works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Neither thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. (shrink)

Alors que Socrate avait été accusé de corrompre la jeunesse, Platon présente le philosophe comme le sauveur de la cité. On comprend ce que signifie « sauver » en examinant les décalages que les textes de Platon introduisent par rapports aux discours courants à leur époque, qu'ils soient littéraires (Homère, Sophocle), philosophiques (les Pythagoriciens), politiques (Thémistocle, Périclès, Conon), médicaux (collection hippocratique), ou religieux (Orphisme). S'il prend la place d'autres sauveurs de la cité, comme le militaire, le religieux ou le médecin, (...) le philosophe ne sauve pas en gouvernant mais en diffusant, dans le geste même de philosopher, une forme de vie spécifique, propre à faire régner l'harmonie. (shrink)

In this passage the Sausage-Seller is commenting disparagingly on the boast of Paphlagon/Cleon that he has done far more good for Athens than Themistocles ever did. In lines 814–16 the Sausage-Seller seems to allude to certain laudable actions on the part of Themistocles, which greatly benefitted the city, and in 817–18, by contrast, he sets against these an allegedly deleterious recent proposal/ activity of Paphlagon/Cleon.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical TraditionSarah B. PomeroyMadeleine M. Henry. Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. 201 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Pericles declared that the best women are those who are known neither for praise nor blame (Thuc. 2.45.2). Despite the invisibility of respectable women in fifth-century Athens, skeletal biographies including the names of (...) their fathers, husbands, sons, and, occasionally, daughters can be constructed. A vignette in Plutarch or a private oration may flesh out the story. Although etiquette discouraged giving the name of a respectable woman while she was alive, she is named in her epitaph. The historian can narrate the entire life of such a woman in a single paragraph.The most famous woman in classical Athens, the only one who rates an entry in the Oxford Classical Dictionary2 (Oxford, 1970) and could be the subject of a full-length biography, is the hetaira Aspasia. Yet even a book devoted to Aspasia who is named in multiple sources including comedy, philosophy, history, and biography fills only 130 pages of text, most of which treat post-classical traditions about Aspasia rather than the life of the woman herself.Chapter 1, a mere nine pages about “Aspasia in Greek History,” is the only part of this book that discusses Aspasia’s actual biography. Henry accepts P. J. Bicknell’s suggestion that Aspasia was an upper-class Milesian whose older sister was married to the Alcibiades who became the grandfather of the notorious Alcibiades (AC 51 [1982] 240–50). An orphan, when she was an adolescent Aspasia came to Athens with her sister and brother-in-law. If this reconstruction is accurate, we must wonder why her brother-in-law did not secure a proper marriage for his young sister-in-law, rather than permit her to become Pericles’ concubine, but perhaps an alliance with the first man in Athens was attractive to the elder Alcibiades. Furthermore he had no legal obligation to dower his sister-in-law. Estate planning and heirship strategies probably influenced Pericles, on his part (cf. Plut. Pericles 16.3–4), for he already had legitimate sons born from his first wife and had no need of another full-fledged marriage. Despite the affection with which Pericles treated Aspasia (Plut. Pericles 24.5–6), he does not seem to have made any arrangements for her future after his death. Lysicles, in turn, who is reported to have married Aspasia, probably regarded a connection with her as a “dynastic marriage” linking himself in this way with the deceased [End Page 648] Pericles. Aspasia made the best of her situation, attempting to bridge the gap between notoriety and respectability: she seems to have confined her attentions to only one man at a time and bore sons whose parentage was never doubted.The very existence of Poristes (“Provider”), the son of Aspasia and Lysicles, is questioned by Henry (43) who suggests that word was used of Aspasia herself. I think it is at least as likely that Lysicles chose his son’s name as his own epithet to refer to his fatherly concern for the Athenians, much the way that the names of Themistocles’ children testify to their father’s political interests. Furthermore, although Henry does not refer to the larger sweep of women’s history, Aspasia lived during the Peloponnesian War, a watershed in the history of Athenian women, when on account of the absence of men at war and the desertion of slaves, the luxury of secluding respectable women had to yield to harsh necessity (see Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves [New York, 1975] 66–67). Therefore the traditions that Aspasia lived in the same household with Pericles’ married sons and their wives and that she conversed with married women are believable.In chapter 2, “The Story Told by Comedy,” Henry rejects the testimony of the comic poets, found also in Plutarch (Pericles 24.5), that Aspasia ran a brothel. Yet since her concubinage is evidence of the lack of a dowry, it would have been advantageous for Aspasia to arrange... (shrink)

In Aeschines' dialogue Alcibiades, Socrates sees his brilliant young partner's haughty attitude towards the great Themistocles. Thereupon he gives an encomium of Themistocles, a man whose wisdom and arete, great as they were, could not save him from ostracism by his own people. This encomium has an extraordinary effect on Alcibiades: he cries and in his despair places his head upon Socrates' knee, realizing that he is nowhere near as good a man as Themistocles . Aeschines later (...) has Socrates say that he would have been foolish to think he could have helped Alcibiades by virtue of any art or knowledge, but nonetheless by some divine dispensation he has, in virtue of the eros he felt for the youth, been allowed to make him better. (shrink)

I argue that Cephalus introduces the argumentative paradigm of the entire Republic, the Challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus, through his comments on wealth and his story about Themistocles.

Thucydides and Aristophanes, austere historian and ribald comic playwright, lived in an Athens that had, since Themistocles, been moving from a regime of ancestral piety towards a secular empire. Thucydides suggests an agreement between his understanding and that of the pious Nicias — over and against this move. Aristophanes too is a vigorous proponent of peace, and the conclusions of many of his plays appear to suggest or encourage a conservative disposition towards ancestral piety or the rule of ancestral, (...) divine law.While these first impressions are not entirely misleading, a careful examination of the two thinkers’works, with attention to Nicias and the question of the gods, suggests a more complicated and revealing picture. Neither thinker is in agreement with Nicias, who proves to be representative of a fundamental human delusion. Each, however, sees that delusion as inescapable for political life, and so makes his appeal to more serious readers inconspicuously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides and the Philosophic Origins of HistoryPaula DebnarDarien Shanske. Thucydides and the Philosophic Origins of History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xii + 268 pp. Cloth, $85.The overarching goal of this book is to "restore the wonder of Thucydides" (1), that is, to show how Thucydides constructs—or in the author's parlance, "founds"—a world so original and compelling that it lures readers of the History into accepting it (...) as their own. The metaphor Shanske borrows to explain the position of Thucydides' readers is Wittgenstein's fly in the inverted bottle: attracted by sweetness at the bottle's mouth, the fly enters, is trapped, and comes to think of the bottle as its entire world. The analogy, as Shanske observes, is not entirely apt. "Sweetness" is hardly Thucydides' bait, and unlike Wittgenstein's fly, readers of the History can retrace their steps and perceive how they were lured in the first place—presumably with the help of books like this one. And the trip into Thucydides' bottle turns out to be salutary, not fatal.In chapter 1, "Thucydides' Vision," Shanske identifies six features of the History that help to construct this bottle and attract readers. Thanks to its (1) density (amount of significant detail), (2) consistency (ideas encountered throughout the work in different contexts), (3) ubiquity (the relentless presentation of key ideas), and (4) open-endedness (puzzles posed; answers suggested, but not given), when readers reach the revolt of Chios in Book 8 (the episode with which Shanske opens his book), their (5) familiarity with Thucydides' vision allows them to understand the Chians' reasoning and its consequences. In this sense the narrative has (6) significance: the fate of the Chians matters.In the remainder of the chapter, keeping these six features in mind, Shanske revisits the beginning of Book 1 (1.1–23). I encountered stimulating insights throughout. His interpretation of axiologo\taton is astute, as is his claim that "the most revealing pretext (ale\thestate\ prophasis), though the one least manifest in logos," was the assumption that war was inevitable; because cities acted upon this assumption, they also brought about the war (39). "The prophasis," he concludes, "is a logos whose power stretches backward and forward in time; even more extraordinary, it is self-fulfilling even as it is dubious, and it is hidden, requiring patient rereading by the wise" (40). This backward and forward movement, Shanske contends, is characteristic of the History as a whole; in his analysis of the Archaeology he shows that by arguing both against and in terms of Homer, Thucydides links his work with his predecessors' (again, the History's familiarity) while radically breaking from them to "found" a new world (25–26). Thucydides' vision of his contemporary world, that is, also revises the past.Next, in "The Case of Pericles," Shanske exposes the view from within the [End Page 593] bottle. Here he develops the notion of "seeing" introduced in his first chapter. For Thucydides, clear vision is temporal and requires perceiving "kinds." Much as we are able to recognize the face of an old friend in a stranger (Shanske nods again to Wittgenstein), the History allows us to see the past in the present. This kind of seeing is both limited and open-ended: after we recognize the old friend we cannot unrecognize him; yet we can also see several connections at once. So, too, it requires training, precisely what Thucydides offers. Using Pericles as his test case, Shanske shows how Thucydides trains his readers to recognize "Pericles" in an array of figures that includes Cleon, Diodotus, Alcibiades, Hermocrates, Themistocles, and even Thucydides. In turn, readers learn to use Periclean "kinds" to reassess Pericles himself.Tragedy is central to Shanske's understanding of Thucydides. In chapter 3, by focusing on what is deinon (unfortunately translated as "dreadable"), which he identifies as a key notion in both the History and tragedy, Shanske tries to show that the History is both continuous with (again, familiarity) and goes further than tragedy. Although he associates deinon with transgression and excess, he also recognizes (pace Oudemans and Lardinois) that, as in Sophocles' "Ode to Man," its power is ambiguous: it builds... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric by David SansoneJon P. HeskDavid Sansone, Greek Drama and the Invention of Rhetoric. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xi + 258 pp. Cloth $99.95.The central claim of this book is that the development of the art of rhetoric in fifth-century Greece was directly inspired by the revolutionary new genre of tragic drama. This entails a radical departure from what Sansone calls the (...) “standard view” of the origins of Greek rhetoric. As Ruth Scodel has recently and quite rightly pointed out, however, it would be more accurate to call it the “traditional view” (Scodel, Bryn Mawr Classcial Review 2013.06.16). The “standard” view of most of us is to be agnostic about the alleged Sicilian “origins” of rhetorical education and “handbooks” which we find in various ancient sources.Sansone’s thesis, while undoubtedly bold and original, is not completely unexpected. It was only a matter of time before the tragedians became “first inventors” of rhetoric given that some scholars now argue that Tisias and Corax probably did not even exist and that the output of Gorgias and Antiphon is best described as “pre-disciplinary” rather than an instantiation of the discipline of “rhetoric” itself. In other words, Sansone’s argument dovetails nicely with the long-held view, particularly associated with the work of Thomas Cole and Edward Schiappa, that proper rhetoric does not really exist before it is given its name (rhētorikē) in the fourth century.How could tragedy possibly beget rhetoric? Sansone’s answer is ingenious. Because drama presents embodied characters before the eyes of its audience, it is radically different from narrative forms such as epic poetry or lyric. In the latter format, only one character can speak at any one time. In tragedy, the audience also pays attention to the characters on stage who are present but not speaking. This focus on interlocutors’ simultaneous reactions as well as the speaker himself is dubbed “the counterpoint.” For Sansone, this innovation goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Greek texts nearly always describe the audience of narrative forms as “hearers” while the audience of drama are spectators or “viewers.” Sansone gives a good account of the way in which the tragedians can be felt to play with audience expectations through drama’s capacity to direct their focus towards silent or expressive reactions which are simultaneous with another character’s speech. He also writes well on the way in which tragedy entails the dimunition of a Muse-inspired authorial “poet’s voice” in favour of a plurality of characters’ viewpoints. The upshot here is that the playwright is required to compose speeches for characters who are often in a state of conflict, to use in interaction with one another, and before an audience in the theater. For Sansone, this fresh [End Page 155] dynamic is “sufficient to account for the self-conscious theorizing about forms of argumentation that is the essential feature of formal rhetoric” (x).It seems silly to deny some credence to this thesis. Sansone does not discuss the early tragedians’ possible interactions with other elite communicators beyond the thought that Gorgias and his predecessors may have had direct exposure to Aeschylus in Sicily. But one can imagine that politician-orators like Cimon, Themistocles, and Pericles or litigants and intellectuals who predated Antiphon were interested in, and influenced by, the tragedians’ discipline of writing arguments in the voice of a character, not to mention the related requirement to imagine what another character or internal audience of characters might say in reply. There must have been some early discussions in which these people talked about techniques of delivery, persuasion, and argumentation at some level of general principle, self-consciousness, and in relation to shared imperatives between their respective fields. As Sansone shows well, Aeschylus Suppliants 191–203 betrays some self-awareness of the playwright’s ethopoetic mission. This speech from Danaus can also be seen as a moment of quasi-rhetorical instruction.But there is an unassailable problem with the idea that tragedy’s basic formal properties and dynamics constituted the sole driving force behind the invention of rhetorical discourse. Aside from... (shrink)