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CliffordOrwin
University of Toronto
STASIS
have come to be considered comradely courage, and caution bred of forethought an excuse for
cowardice, but that the first of these qualities might have come to be praised, and the third to be
blamed, under their usual names. This I find unpersuasive and unsupported by Thucydides'
elaboration of his meaning. Wilson, rejecting Hogan'ssuggestion, rejects also the usual render-
ing of this sentence as something like "words changed their meaning," which phrasing implies
precisely that irrational daring became a term of praise and prudent hesitation one of blame.
Whatever the proper meaning of "meaning," what scholars have meant and readers have read
by "words changed their meaning" is a change in "tbe denotations of words, their referents,"
and, as Thucydides proceeds to make clear, such is what in fact occurred-with some necessary
qualifications (cf. Strauss, 1964, p. 147, n. 8).
6For an opposing view see Muri (1969), who interprets Thucydides as decrying the manipu-
lation of words by leaders and cliques and likens the degradation of language described to that
of German under National Socialism. Certainly Thucydides does decry such manipulation (cf.
3 82.7, discussed below), but presents it as only one aspect of the problem, and not the main one.
Thucydides now proceeds to note in short order the collapse of the three
fundamental Greek institutions: kinship, human law, and divine law.
And so even the bond of kinship became more extraneous (alliotroteron) than that of
faction, because of the greater readiness of the latter to dare no matter what. For such asso-
ciations aimed not at advantage' within the established laws, but at self-aggrandizement in
defiance of them, and the faith of the members in one another drew its strength not so
much from the divine law [sc. of oaths] as from their common complicity in lawlessness.
Fair words on the part of opponents were greeted with precautionary deeds by those who
had the upper hand, rather than with magnanimity (gennaiotiti). To avenge oneself on
someone counted for more than to avoid harm to oneself in the first place. Oaths of recon-
ciliation, if any there were, were sworn by the two parties only because they were mo-
mentarily at a loss, and were otherwise powerless. When opportunity offered, he who first
made bold to seize it and to take his opponent off his guard held it sweeter thus to avenge
himself by imposing on the other's trust than to do so openly, calculating not only the
safety of this course, but that by prevailing through treachery he carried off the prize for
intelligence (3 82.6-7).
Reading, with Dionysius, Valla, Stahl, and Poppo, ophelidi (dative of purpose and so parallel
to pleonexidi at the end of the sentence) for ophelids (genitive) of the manuscript accepted by
Weil and Romilly.
the public realm, or, if one prefers, of the common good, where this notion is
seen for what it at least mostly is: something the nub of which consists not in
some lofty substantive good transcending those available to men privately,
but merely in keeping the struggle for private good within reasonable bounds.
By hedging these bounds with evils-the punishments that the laws inflict
upon transgressors-the common good enforces upon the citizens a salutary
(and shaky) moderation. By restricting the advantage of each the laws serve
that of all; the greatest good that laws do, they do simply by being laws. Unfor-
tunately this truth appears for all to see only with the breakdown of law.
And from human laws Thucydides proceeds to the divine. However nec-
essary to a decent society, piety, like kinship, figures here only as a promi-
nent victim of stasis, not as any sort of bulwark against it. In the stasis at
Kerkyra,piety very early comes to be perverted to factional ends (3 70.4-6),
after which we hear only of lying oaths and breaches of the right of asylum, to
say nothing of carnage in holy places. Politically piety mattered to the Greeks
above all as the foundation of oaths, so it is on the emptiness of all sworn
guarantees that Thucydides dwells here. In times of stasis, oaths are per-
verted and figure only as means of the very deceit against which they are
supposed to guard. Kinship, laws, piety: cities boast no peaks to which to
repair in times of stasis. This, not advice on staying high and dry, is the point
of Thucydides' treatment here.
In the course of expounding the weakness of oaths, Thucydides notes also
the ascendancy of considerations of revenge over those of safety. (A concern
with safety is one source of the power of oaths.) While men ran no risks for
the sake of noble generosity, they did run them for the sake of vengeance.
Under stasis, the very narrowing of the focus of life to the demands of pre-
serving it from one moment to the next involves men in an endless spiral of
bloodshed, in which all other appetites cede to a thirst for vengeance, prefer-
ably vengeance preceded by reconciliation.8For intelligence having emanci-
pated itself from decency, nothing gains such a reputation for the one as a
deed which in normal times would have shocked the other. Even ordinarily,
Thucydides suggests, men tend to cherish cleverness to the detriment of vir-
tue (3 82.7); amid stasis, the foulest murder impresses merely as the neatest
and sweetest.
All of which enables us to state the cardinal calamity of stasis: trust disap-
pears from society, and with it society itself. Stasis destroys nothing less than
the infrastructure of civil trust. Seem as it might that trust among citizens
must depend upon their treating one another decently, in fact it is rather
their decent behavior which proves to turn upon their mutual trust. This is
8Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6: ". . . Sudden Dejection is the passion that causeth WEEP-
ING; and is caused by such accidents, as suddenly take away some vehement hope, or some
prop of their power .... Therefore some Weep for the losse of Friends; Others for their un-
kindnesse; others for the sudden stop made to their thoughts of revenge, by Reconciliation."
not to deny that the truly virtuous would trust each other, or that virtue is
the only sound basis for trust. It is only to say that in actual cities the basis for
trust is much shakier. What passes for virtue depends upon trust, which in
turn depends upon mutual interests which as such give rise to mutual re-
straint. It is not decency which holds most men in check, but rather such
ulterior constraints as make decency pay.
After having expounded at length the manifold horrors of stasis, Thucydi-
des offers the briefest of statements as to its basis in human nature: "To
blame for all of which was the pursuit of rule out of greed and ambition, from
which arose the zeal of those once embroiled in contention" (3 82.8). After
what has preceded this statement may seem both bald and trite. It is not.
Thucydides here anticipates the claim of this or that stasis-monger to have
acted zealously for the public good-which he had loved not wisely but
too well.
The leading men in the cities on both sides, each with fine-sounding names, the one
extolling political equality for the multitude and the other moderation through the rule of
the best, made prizes of those common concerns which they served in speech, and stop-
ping at nothing in their contest to overreach one another, they dared the most terrible
things, and pushed their revenges further still, not respecting the bounds of what was just
and in the interest of the city, but on both sides restraining themselves no further than
pleased them at the moment. Thus neither side set any store by piety, but the use of fair
words to accomplish some malicious deed was much applauded. As for the citizens caught
in the middle, they perished, either becaue they would not join the fray or from envy lest
they be spared (3 82.8).
9For such an interpretation of the stasis passage, see Cogan (1981, pp. 149-54), who ascribes
the extremism of the partisans to "the abstractness of [their] ideological orientation."
lasting security was to be expected, rather than bring themselves to trust others did what
they could to protect themselves. And it was the meaner minds who were most likely to
prevail, for fearing their own deficiencies and the wits of their adversaries (lest they be
overmatched in argument and the others in the resourcefulness of their wits contrive to
pre-empt them), they boldly resorted to deeds. Their opponents, on the other hand, in
their contemptuous confidence that they would anticipate them and that they themselves
had no need to obtain by deed what was theirs for the taking by wit, were likely to be
caught off guard and destroyed (3 83).
Stasis is a war of all against all, in which no one can trust anyone, the pre-
emptive strike is de rigueur, and those who might seem superior to others
fare if anything even worse than they. All these aspects of Thucydides' ac-
count resurface in Hobbes's state of nature. This warrants a closer compari-
son of the two, with an eye to clarifying the distinctiveness of Thucydides'
approach.
Hobbes argues for what we may fairly describe as a negative political ori-
entation. We ought to take our political bearings not by what attracts us as
best, but by what repels us as worst. What is worst is no government, and so
we should confess that all government, as the negation of no government, is
good government. For Hobbes that than which nothing is worse is the state
of nature or of anarchy; in this he and Thucydides are at one. Yet Hobbes's
political counsels are much the more dogmatic of the two, in part because his
orientation is much more dogmatically negative. This will appear from com-
paring their presentations of anarchy itself.
For Hobbes the crowning horror of the war of all against all is that with
which it threatens all, a violent death at the hands of others. This threat is
the great equalizer; in particular it levels those who pretend to some politi-
cally relevant superiority to others. Since all men are in fact equally capable
of inflicting this greatest evil on another, "and they are equals who can do
equal things to each other" (De Cive, 1.3), those who pretend to some natu-
ral title to rule are not in fact better entitled than others. As equal (and there-
fore as impotent) by nature as you or I (and all the more vulnerable by virtue
of their foolish vainglory), those who fancy themselves nature's anointed are
in for a thundering comeuppance. Needless to say, their fall will not pain the
rest of us. What angers or touches us in Hobbes's account is rather the fate of
the humble and harmless, trapped in the crossfire of contending ambitions.
Now this negative orientation owes something to Thucydides, whom
Hobbes so admired. He too shows that the chasms that yawn beneath us in
politics are deeper than the peaks that beckon us are high. Such, for ex-
ample, is the basis of his sympathy for Sparta, a regime which aimed less at
achieving the political best than at avoiding the political worst-vulnerabil-
ity to the threat posed by its Helots (4 80; cf. 8 24 with 8 40). The passage on
stasis confirms, I think, better than any other in the work, how deeply mind-
ful is Thucydides of the benefits of Spartan sobriety. He notes that stasis con-
vulsed "so to speak"all of Hellas; in fact it engulfed Athens but not Sparta(cf.
PLAGUE
The plague of Athens descended on the city in the second spring of the
war and raged unabated for two years. Having discussed the obscurity of its
origins, the course of its symptoms (his description of which is deservedly
famous for its clinical precision), and the susceptibility of scavengers to it
(2 47-50), Thucydides turns to its effects on the private lives of the various
classes of those touched by it (2 47-51). The plague strips most citizens of all
concerns in common with their fellows: like stasis, it assaults even the fam-
ily, but from the opposite direction. It reduces men to solitary wretches,
alone in their prostration before calamity and indifferent alike to kinsmen,
party, and city.
Thucydides next discusses the consequences for the plague of the current
political situation, and finally those of the plague for it. The most lethal as-
pect of that situation was the overcrowding of the city due to the wartime
influx from the countryside (2 52). Because of this the mortality raged uncon-
trollably, and the public places of the city, both profane and sacred, were
strewn with heaps of the homeless unattended dead and dying. It was from
this in turn that the laws of the city were first disturbed (2 52.4), these being
to begin with the sacred laws of burial, which the survivors, overwhelmed by
the calamity, could or would no longer observe. Thucydides begins his dis-
cussion of lawlessness, then, with those laws the flouting of which followed
most directly from the specific character of the disaster; it may also matter
that these were sacred laws.
There follows an account of the more general lawlessness bred by the
plague.
And moreover it was the plague which first fostered greater lawlessness in the city in
other respects. For people now blithely ventured what before they would have done
covertly and not just as they pleased, seeing the sudden changes and how, some rich per-
son dying suddenly, another man who before possessed nothing now straightway owned
what had been the other's. And so they decided to spend quickly and for the sake of enjoy-
ment, holding their bodies and their wealth to be alike but things of a day. And no one was
keen to persevere in what had been reputed noble [or honorable, kalon],holding it un-
certain whether they would survive to achieve it. But instead the pleasurable and what-
ever procured it, these were established as both noble and useful. Fear of gods and law of
men deterred no one, for as to the former, people judged it all the same whether they
revered [the gods] or not, seeing that all died regardless, and as for crimes none expected
to stay alive long enough to come to trial or pay the penalty, but held rather that a much
heavier sentence had been decreed against them, and that before it fell, it was only fair
that they enjoy life a little (2 53).
malfeasance that Thucydides notes is one that was clearly not on the statute
tablets: the unseemly use that desperate people made of their own lawful
property. Here, as throughout his account of the plague, Thucydides looks
back to Perikles' famous funeral oration, which immediately precedes it.
Perikles had praised the Athenians for eschewing conspicuous consumption,
and for instead regarding their considerable wealth as a resource for public
action (2 40.1). Indeed a recurrent theme of his speech was the ultimate indif-
ference of the true Athenian to private wealth in favor of dedication to the
city and the endless glory that Athens in her transcendent uniqueness con-
ferred in return (2 42.4, 43.5, 44.4). Under the rude impact of the plague,
the Athenians indeed demonstrate a certain indifference to wealth, one which
mocks, however, that graceful restraint so praised by their leader. Indiffer-
ent indeed to amassing riches, but equally so to employing them for any pub-
lic, seemly, or distant object, their sole and obsessive concern is to spend it
before death wrenches it from them (or, more accurately, them from it).
The transition from this reckless squandering of one's own to criminality
in the usual sense occurs by way of a sentence on the kalon, the honorable,
noble or fine. "Fine things are hard," notes Glaucon to Socrates (Republic
435c), and what is hard requires perseverance, which as such makes sense
only for the sake of its goal. Even in their desperation, however, men do not
simply abandon the noble in favor of the pleasant, with the former ceasing to
exert any hold over them. Instead they assimilate the two, and here the
noble shares the fate of the useful, another (if grayer) barrier to losing oneself
in present pleasures. As the useful (chrisimon) shrinks to immediate gratifica-
tion and whatever procures it, so does the noble, so that what before appeared
merely pleasant or a means to pleasure now seems shining or honorable as
well. Moderation, severed from any prospect of reaping the anticipated
benefits, appears the part of a fool, a slavish bondage to outworn constraints.
The appeal of (and to) the noble thus persists, but to the confusion of all
decency and above all of the proud self-restraint which in better times ex-
presses nobility of soul.
Lastly Thucydides records the crime wave for which the collapse of the
noble into the pleasant would naturally pave the way. Absent fear of dis-
grace, the restraints of last resort are fear of gods and law of men, but these
now avail nothing. If the gods cannot or will not protect their worshippers,
why think that they would punish transgressors? Law of men fails because
law is law (that is to say is effective as law) only when it commands and not
merely counsels, and it commands only where it can punish. Where there is
no fear of punishment there is then no law; relieved of this fear by their fear
of the plague, men take whatever they can grab. What is more, they believe
that they have it coming to them. Sentence having been pronounced on
them prior to the offense, they balk at perishing with their books unbalanced
and without even a crime to fit the punishment (cf. Xenophon's Apology of
CONCLUSION
found apathy towards everything but scratching the itches of their bodies.
Yet here too the consequence is paradoxical:men both live for their bodies
and act as if they were free of them; it is because hopelessness frees them of
anxiety for their bodies that they are so free to indulge them. Stasis and plague
concur in suggesting that there can be no greater political misfortune for men
than to be free from the constraints normally posed for them by their bodies.
From which we may conclude that both plague and stasis comment on the
Funeral Oration, that noblest of all visions of political life to be found in the
pages of Thucydides. Perikles eulogizes citizens who, while retaining their
individuality or fundamental self-concern, have emancipated these from
their bodies, and live in anticipation of a glorious immortality for which as it
were they exchange their bodies in their boundless devotion to Athens their
city (2 43.2-3). Perikles does not go so far as to forbid the Athenians to hope
for the survival of their bodies (2 43.1), or even to hope to acquire the means
of their comfort and delectation (2 42.4). He does insist of them, however,
that when vengeance on the city's enemies beckons, they resolutely set all
other hopes aside (ibid.); care for the body is licit only to the extent that one
will lay it down for the city. Not that Perikles can or does forbid the Athe-
nians all attachment to flesh of their flesh. He does insist, however, that they
regard their children primarily as a resource for the city (2 44). Erotic rela-
tions he plays down entirely, while urging the citizens to enter into one with
the city (2 43.1). Beautiful or mad as this may sound, Thucydides knows of
cases of the realization of this dream of liberation from the constraints of the
body-two such cases.
The Funeral Oration, despite or because of its genre, consistently ab-
stracts from death and the body. The plague, by contrast, brings home to
both the Athenians and the reader the primacy and frailtyof the body (Strauss,
1964, pp. 194-95, 229 n. 92) and the extent to which politics as usual, to say
nothing of the great politics urged by Perikles, depends on forgetfulness of
these. The plague displays the abyss that yawns when men can no longer see
the city for their bodies. The prospect of imminent death spurs men to live
in and for the moment; but the moment inevitably eclipses the city.
Political life depends on hopes and fears for the future, and therefore on
the expectation of one. In particular the quests for honor and safety animate
men's behavior in society: we act so as to deserve the praise and avert the
anger of our fellows. (Utility too, to the extent that it shapes political life is
preeminently a future utility.) The city both coaxes and coerces a certain in-
difference to the pleasures and pains, the gains and losses of the moment, by
parading greater and worse ones in the future. The plague pre-empts these
blandishments and so stifles political life. With nothing either to hope or fear
from their fellow citizens, men immerse themselves in such pleasures as de-
pend only on themselves, but on themselves as transformed by their indif-
ference to the future, and the godlike (if fleeting) impunity which this con-
fers. Society proves to depend more fundamentally on men's hopes and fears
for their bodies than (as Perikles would appear to wish) on their capacity to
overcome these. In fact men cease to fear for their bodies only when they
lose all hope for them, as in the case of the plague, and there the conse-
quence of their ceasing to fear for them is a headlong rush to indulge them.
The situation under stasis is different: there men continue to fear but despair
of any solid security. The consequences are similar, however. In an ugly par-
ody of the course commended by Perikles to the Athenians in their dealings
with foreign enemies (2 42.4), the various parties, not out of free and noble
choice but swept away by the torrent of violence, come to prefer vengeance
upon their fellow citizens to their own safety.
Society then owes its stability largely to the ballast provided by our every-
day concerns for the body and our ability to satisfy them, and most of all to
our fear of death, coupled with the hope of postponing it. Thus far, at least,
Thucydides corrects the funeral oration and anticipates a more moderate
position. Not Hobbes's position, however, for Thucydides knows better than
to anticipate Hobbes in hoping for too much from fear. He knows that men
are readier to hope than to fear, and that we promptly forget even our best
founded fears at the beckoning of groundless hopes. Hobbes's protoliberal
solution to the political problem requires us to place our reason squarely in
the service of our fears; Thucydides insists that reason tends to be dazzled
and corrupted by our hopes. Men and even more so cities can never be
counted upon to act on even the most reasonable fears: although fear may
compel those whom it seizes, its grip is fickle and unpredictable, in particu-
lar its grip upon reason (cf. 3 45; 4 61-63; 4 108.4; 5 102-103). Nor, as we
have noted, has Thucydides any faith in "development": prosperous cities
(and citizens) are not a whit less likely to go awry than poor ones.
Like Hobbes, then, Thucydides stresses the depths into which fear may
prevent us from sinking, without however offering Hobbes's hopes of effec-
tively actualizing its benefits. He knows of only two cities that have suc-
ceeded in acting more or less consistently on reasonable fears: Sparta and
Chios (cf. 8 24 with 8 40). In both of these. cases the ineluctable persistence
of a pressing danger has inspired a regime of steady habits of collectively self-
protective virtue. If Hobbes stresses the solidity, Thucydides underscores
the fragility of the floor furnished by fear, which is necessary but by no
means sufficient for ensuring decent political restraint. And of the Spartans
at least we must add that their habits are in fact too fearful:moderate in pros-
perity, they are too readily dejected in adversity (cf. 1 84.2 and 4 18.4 with 1
70.3, 4 15-20, 4 55-56). They lack, moreover, the decisiveness and daring
needed for success in both diplomacy and war (8 96). Besides which their
fearfulness is incompatible with magnanimity in their dealings with others;
they are always looking anxiously over their shoulders and so see only to
their safety and interests (5 105- 109; cf. 3 68).
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