On Justice Power and Human Nature

One of Woodruff’s suggestions is to set any single position Thucydides seems to express against the work as a whole. Thucydides can best be understood, Woodruff suggests, by exploring the contrasts he sets up across his History. The four main events that Woodruff excerpts in this section—Pericles’s Funeral Oration, the plague in Athens, the Mytilenean dialogue, and Sparta’s destruction of Plataea—provide a condensed picture of how these contrasts expose human limitations and the fragility of human institutions.

Pericles’s Funeral Oration celebrates Athens’s institutions as manifestations of the city’s virtues. Its laws apply equally to all citizens, and its citizens “respect the law greatly and fear to violate it” (75). Its festivals honor the gods through competitions that reveal the city’s best (athletes, tragic and comic poets, etc.). Its citizens are so brave and innovative that the city can remain open, unafraid of being challenged. Athens will “be the admiration of people now and in the future” (78). It doesn’t need poets to praise it because the city’s institutions and the deeds of its citizens provide all the testimony required. Athens will indeed become a lesson for Greece—but not the lesson that Pericles intended.

Immediately following Pericles’s stirring encomium, the plague arrives to devastate Athens. In ancient Greek epic and tragedy, poor leadership precedes plague. Arguably the most well-known instance of this dynamic is at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad. Agamemnon refuses Chryses, a priest of Apollo, when he offers a ransom in exchange for the return of his daughter, and a plague descends on the Greek encampment. Sophocles’s Oedipus the King similarly features Oedipus’s disastrous leadership, fueled by his lack of awareness, preceding a plague outbreak in Thebes. Although Thucydides praises Pericles’s “incorruptible” character and “his prestige and his intelligence” (93), the sequence of events suggests a more complex reality about his leadership. His willingness to enter the war and his strategy to allow Sparta to raid the countryside led to the plague outbreak. While this doesn’t necessarily impugn Pericles’s character or intentions, it does reveal the limits of his knowledge. Thucydides doesn’t attribute human outcomes to the work of the immortals, but he does highlight the unpredictability of fortune—whether a weather event or a human response. When fortune puts humans under duress, their worst natures are exposed.

Hard times expose not only human nature’s weaknesses but also the fragility of human institutions and ideals, which are subject to crumble under stress. Athens calls killing the Spartan envoys “justice” because the Spartans did likewise, yet elsewhere the History equates justice with pursuing peaceful solutions through trusted third-party authority figures and upholding laws, customs, and agreements as a matter of principle, whether it benefits an individual or group in the moment. Rather than choosing justice in the face of Sparta’s injustice, Athens used Sparta’s injustice as an excuse for its own. Debating Cleon for the fate of Mytilene, Diodotus reminded the Athenians that “fortune [tuche] plays no less part in leading men on, since she can present herself unexpectedly and excite you to take a risk, even with inadequate resources” (109). His words of caution reached their audience, and Athens rescinded the order to kill all the Mytileneans. The Plataeans, however, weren’t successful in appealing to Sparta on similar grounds. They asked the Spartans to “[r]emember the uncertainty of life, how disaster can strike anyone, even undeservedly” (116). Disregarding their plea, Sparta chose to destroy Plataea out of self-interest—because the Spartans found Thebes a more useful ally.