The speeches in Thucydides and the Mytilene debate

Abstract

T here are few arguments of longer standing in the scholarship on Thucydides than the one concerning the speeches in his History , and none is more important for understanding it and its author. The main question is: did Thucydides try to reproduce the arguments put forward by the speakers on each occasion as accurately as he could, or did he feel free to invent arguments and even whole speeches? In spite of the long debate there is little agreement, yet we cannot understand Thucydides' ideas and purposes or the events he describes without answering that question. It is remarkable, therefore, that students of Thucydides and his History have found it possible to take up a position on the question without considering closely the arguments surrounding the interpretation of 1. 22 or even to take no clear position on the matter at all. Examples are legion, but two will suffice to make the point. A recent study of the funeral oration of Pericles coolly asserts that Thucydides' role in the speeches can go so far as ‘the invention of whole speeches or the concentration of several speeches into one’. The author makes no defense of that assertion, resting content with a reference to the work of Eduard Schwartz, among others. He takes no note of an article by A. W. Gomme, quite famous and over thirty years old, which confronts the arguments of Schwartz and those holding similar views and annihilates them.

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